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MontyCarloHall 1 hours ago [-]
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/>1 child 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.
This seems like the obvious explanation, though I think your use of the term "hedonism" is distracting. People are inherently selfish (how could any entity not be "self"-ish to some degree?). The bottom line is that we do things because we want to. Even selfless activities feel good. That's fine, honestly. But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from.
MontyCarloHall 21 minutes ago [-]
Agreed with everything you wrote. I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which judging by the other replies was a mistake on my part.
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
mekdoonggi 1 hours ago [-]
Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community?
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
MontyCarloHall 1 hours ago [-]
I'd call it hedonism if a couple wants to be able to go out on a date on a whim, easily take a vacation, watch adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room, maintain good sleep/health habits, keep a flexible schedule unconstrained by school pickups/staying home with a sick kid, etc.
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
happytoexplain 1 hours ago [-]
It's unclear what you're saying. Obviously it's not hedonistic to "want" those things, as you say. You might use the term if they try to have their cake and eat it too, irresponsibly.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
MontyCarloHall 4 minutes ago [-]
As I wrote in another reply, I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which was a mistake on my part. My general point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) yield more individual pleasure than having children.
mekdoonggi 60 minutes ago [-]
And do you think this is bad?
MontyCarloHall 23 minutes ago [-]
I never made any value judgment on whether it’s bad or good. “Hedonism” is simply the focus of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, and everything I listed is an example of things that lead to individual happiness that are antithetical to having many children.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
The degeneracy of these millennials who want to maintain healthy sleep habits...
alsetmusic 54 minutes ago [-]
Which is not a bad thing. We have limited resources. It’s not a bad thing to slow down. Even if we’re having fewer babies, we’re far from endangered, despite some (dishonest, IMO) narratives.
mywittyname 2 hours ago [-]
> 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).
red-iron-pine 11 minutes ago [-]
> Sex is a boredom activity
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
when there is a power outage it is most likely that the cell towers are down, too
kuhsaft 1 hours ago [-]
Cell phone towers and communication systems have backup power for emergency communication during power outages.
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
btilly 1 hours ago [-]
Most power outages are local, not regional. And cellphone towers will work at a surprising distance.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
fhdkweig 2 hours ago [-]
In the US, cell towers have battery backups so emergency calls can still go through. I imagine most countries do too.
ssl-3 1 hours ago [-]
My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
i_idiot 2 hours ago [-]
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.
vachina 2 hours ago [-]
The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.
theflyinghorse 1 hours ago [-]
Top 1% are too divorced from the real world to have ever seen a cog.
OutOfHere 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't that what AI and robots are intended to be for? As for the customers, B2B could still work.
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
If the "cogs of the machine" freeze up and economy tanks the top 1% will be fine. You might not be.
btilly 1 hours ago [-]
The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
toomuchtodo 1 hours ago [-]
This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
btilly 1 hours ago [-]
I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear.
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
toomuchtodo 1 hours ago [-]
Europe has done fairly well imho balancing socialism with capitalism and free market mechanisms, good patterns exist today I argue, even if they need tweaks and improvement. Importantly, these demographic curves are locked in for decades into the future, so might as well get comfortable with forward curve of change, we aren't going back to the historical demographic growth curve in anyone's lifetime, if ever. Plan, forecast, and model accordingly.
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
ianm218 33 minutes ago [-]
What is your case at all? AI could usher in a post scarcity world so why not have more humans who can enjoy better lives?
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
red-iron-pine 9 minutes ago [-]
it could. but it won't.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
calepayson 1 hours ago [-]
Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.
happytoexplain 1 hours ago [-]
>a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
boelboel 56 minutes ago [-]
There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
btilly 52 minutes ago [-]
Here is what it actually means.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
calepayson 1 hours ago [-]
Honestly great question. I think of it as:
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
tavavex 33 minutes ago [-]
But isn't this just a more abstract example of the 'circular explanations' thing that OP mentioned? The reason why we need compound interest on our savings accounts instead of just being able to put away some money every year is a product of having to counteract inflation, which is the result of policies trying to induce growth by making saving less appealing than putting the money into more companies making more things for more profit. We need infinite growth because everything around us is designed to expect infinite growth. But what happens as we start running out of headroom? Is there really no other way at all?
throwaway613746 1 hours ago [-]
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marcuskaz 2 hours ago [-]
The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available.
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
arbll 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 hours ago [-]
Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.
Ajedi32 2 hours ago [-]
Well, in the extreme case, human extinction seems like a pretty bad thing.
kranke155 2 hours ago [-]
a large organism (human populaton on earth) reaching equilibrium and ceasing to grow does not equal to human extinction... it far more likely is just a temporary contraction that will then reverse when the conditions are set for it.
btilly 1 hours ago [-]
Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
> They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
kranke155 53 minutes ago [-]
Has any organism ever extinguished itself as you describe ? This whole human extinction thing… isn’t that catastrophising? We are a 7-8 billion individuals away from extinction.
Ajedi32 17 minutes ago [-]
All plausible theories I've heard for the cause of humanity's unprecedented, historically low birth rates are things that could not occur in less intelligent species. (Birth control, women's rights, hedonism enabled by modern technology, etc.)
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
kranke155 2 minutes ago [-]
Neither the fall in birth rates nor its rise is intentional. I struggle to understand why people think a mega fauna of 7-8 billion people takes intentional decisions. An individual takes intentional decisions. Humanity … not so much I think.
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
Ajedi32 12 minutes ago [-]
Lack of personal space is certainly not the cause of our declining birth rates. People in wealthy countries with lots of personal space actually tend to have lower birth rates than poorer countries with less. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.
kranke155 54 minutes ago [-]
How can you say it’s not temporary if it’s just started?
Ajedi32 6 minutes ago [-]
Because all plausible theorized causes (birth control, global reduction in poverty enabled by technology, women's rights) are not temporary conditions. (Or at least we better hope they aren't.)
kranke155 1 minutes ago [-]
Those are just hypothesis. Here’s ankther likely hypothesis - isn’t this is a mega fauna arriving at capacity?
phendrenad2 53 minutes ago [-]
That's... not how equilibrium works. A self-balancing segway or robot doesn't reach the balance point and then freeze in place. There are oscillations. And it isn't a pretty sine wave either. Considering the massive number of factors that go into something like "global population growth", expect a VERY chaotic graph indeed, like the stock market, but worse.
kranke155 54 seconds ago [-]
Yeah fair so what.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
calepayson 1 hours ago [-]
Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)
kranke155 1 hours ago [-]
its unlikely that will happen. If you read Arrighi, his hegemonic cycle narrative says that the interregnum between two hegemons is decades of chaos as the system reorganises. We seem to be heading for a US to China transition.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
calepayson 1 hours ago [-]
Yay.
AndrewKemendo 1 hours ago [-]
I mean you can always be a farrier, lineman, septic sumper, cobbler etc…
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
calepayson 59 minutes ago [-]
I feel like this is a joke but honest answer: I worked ocean rescue for 4 years then lived with some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary.
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
liglam 1 hours ago [-]
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saulpw 1 hours ago [-]
Humans are the second most populous animal on the planet. We are in no danger of extinction.
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
BrainInAJar 2 hours ago [-]
human extinction is far more likely if we keep reproducing than if we slow down. See: climate change etc
ndiddy 1 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't if the population gradually shrinks, it's if there's an uncontrolled downward spiral in fertility. If the birthrate gets below a certain point, then most people won't have any experience whatsoever interacting with babies or young children in their day-to-day life, and cultural norms will shift to make childlessness the default option. This marginalizes people who choose to have children, which pushes the birthrate down even further. This has happened in South Korea, where children are barred from many public places and it's hard to find housing in urban areas if you have children because the noise they make will piss off the neighbors. The birthrate is currently ~0.7 births per woman, meaning that every 100 South Koreans will have around 12 grandchildren. Here's a good article if you're interested: https://archive.ph/bM4Ff
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
That's the same question I have as well. We're a cancer that's spreading on the earth and we're worrying we aren't spreading fast enough. Yeah, I get that we want to support the aging population, but at this point we're doing it at the expense of humanity as a whole.
phendrenad2 57 minutes ago [-]
People are replying that it'll lead to uncontrolled population collapse, and it'll disproportionately affect the poor. But the alternative is to keep growing the population until we run into a much harder problem to solve (water, food, climate) and then collapse. And won't that disproportionately affect the poor? And won't it be much worse, because the population will be much larger then?
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 hours ago [-]
>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
zkmon 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
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.
arbll 2 hours ago [-]
There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
triceratops 1 hours ago [-]
> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
RickJWagner 44 minutes ago [-]
That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year? Better to spend it while it’s whole.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
triceratops 38 minutes ago [-]
> That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year?
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
thrance 8 minutes ago [-]
> Better to spend it while it’s whole.
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
jorblumesea 1 hours ago [-]
most retirement systems assume at least stable population growth. if the system can't sustain itself, debt borrowing can be done but eventually creditors will come calling.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
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hilariously 2 hours ago [-]
What indicators do we have that we care enough to solve the problem? It may be doomer to think we must slow down, but "the other side" just hand waves all the problems and says we'll magically fix them with future technology magic - its not reassuring.
chipsrafferty 2 hours ago [-]
Ah yes let's "make progress" on a planet where people refuse to consume less and we have finite resources.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
More zero sum thinking.
pelagicAustral 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
calepayson 1 hours ago [-]
> Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
What about the pain from overpopulation and a glut of uneducated labour? Doesn't that shit roll downhill, too?
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
wg0 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mekdoonggi 1 hours ago [-]
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...
voxleone 2 hours ago [-]
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).
boelboel 1 minutes ago [-]
Brazil is under 1.5 at this point and not nearly the worst of, thailand has a tfr of about 0.7 this year.
mekdoonggi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
exitb 1 hours ago [-]
Rising kids also has a time, effort and opportunity costs which are not easily offset with money. I don’t think there’s a way to frame modern parenting in a way where it „pays off” in the same sense as it did in the past. As of now, it’s essentially a hobby.
vkou 58 minutes ago [-]
There's no amount of money (that society could ever afford to pay) that could convince my wife to have children.
mekdoonggi 51 minutes ago [-]
Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice. Similarly, my wife wanted children, and there's no amount of money that could replace the joy of having our child.
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
liglam 50 minutes ago [-]
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xaxaxb 1 hours ago [-]
"It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile." Yes, good to know the "rich places" are not alone.
> 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]
1 hours ago [-]
miroljub 2 hours ago [-]
> I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men revealing recessive neanderthal genes, that will say that this is a bad thing, but I'm afraid those genes seem to have skipped me.
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
hilariously 1 hours ago [-]
If you think that was a comment on indian genes, take a step back and read it again. Its a farcical comment about how men do not treat women equally and those who don't are recessive morons.
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
kaan0200 1 hours ago [-]
I think he's making a sarcastic statement about the revealing of sexist men, who think that, "because they are men, they are superior" when reality is just balancing out the ingrained sexism in all of our societies.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago [-]
Racist? I agree that it's not a particularly nice thing to say, and I'll change it, to avoid triggering people, but this is a new definition of the word "racist." Thanks for educating me.
chipsrafferty 1 hours ago [-]
It's racist to say that people who don't believe women should have equal rights and opportunities and are equally capable as men - are neanderthals?
ChrisMarshallNY 1 hours ago [-]
You're right. It insults neanderthals, who we are learning were surprisingly advanced.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
ggm 2 hours ago [-]
... as predicted by demographers for the last ?10? Years? Longer?
H8crilA 2 hours ago [-]
Every single population goes through a baby bust when a certain level of development is achieved - women education seems to be a particularly strongly correlated sub-component.
kakacik 2 hours ago [-]
Could be easily verified in wealthy societies where women are still delegated into mostly keeping household & raise kids roles (I don't think I need to name few samples).
polski-g 2 hours ago [-]
They've tried nothing and it didn't work!
fred_is_fred 1 hours ago [-]
Every single population growth and peak chart for the last 10 years (and maybe 20) has been wrong with growth slowing much faster than expected. It's basically the opposite of all the solar power growth predictions. I predict this article is wrong too and the growth continues to fall. Just wait until no kids becomes the norm for couples in their 30s in India like it is here in the US.
theturtle 14 minutes ago [-]
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cboyardee 2 hours ago [-]
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simbosambo 1 hours ago [-]
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davidedwardc 2 hours ago [-]
Will this result in Indian immigration slowing into western countries?
wg0 2 hours ago [-]
No. Immigrants are brave people. Whole of the human history is full of people leaving their known circumstances towards unknown circumstances with hopes for a better outcome.
vachina 51 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if this is satire. Economic migrants aren’t brave they’re here to suck off any excess job market liquidity.
wg0 6 minutes ago [-]
Brave up, get skilled there's plenty of game out there.
2 hours ago [-]
sleepyguy 2 hours ago [-]
Doubtful, they have been exporting their poverty for the last 100 years. The next phase will be Global warming. They have destroyed their natural environment and made parts of India uninhabitable. I predict this will cause more migration.
vachina 2 hours ago [-]
They’re already in your country. Initiating baby production sequence.
staminade 2 hours ago [-]
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.
9cb14c1ec0 2 hours ago [-]
> We need universal childcare services
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
win311fwg 1 hours ago [-]
> It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
kakacik 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I am not sure I will call that plumber or electrician which only works from home... some folks really live in bubbles, big or small
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/>1 child 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/
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
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).
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
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.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
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.
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...
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]
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
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.
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.
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.