The idea of using CRISPR/Cas to detect tumor-specific mutations that aren't necessarily oncogenic and then kill the cell is not a new one [0, 1, 2]. However, previous studies used Cas9, which just damages the DNA at the target site; this uses Cas12a2, which is far more destructive because it shreds the chromatin in the cell once activated by detecting the target sequence.
As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein).
evolution isnt about generating a response to a challenge, its about differential success.
those cells [oncocytes] that have properties conferring resistance carry it as un-utilized baggage, those without said properties make a living without that fetter.
the selective factor comes into play when payloaded LNP [in this case] facillitates destruction of "nonresistant" oncocytes and spare the "resistant"
the resistance is not generated in response to the challenge, it is already present, and confers survivorship in the face of the administration of the drug.
But cancer isn't an organism. Cancer cells in any specific individual may evolve that way, but "human cancers" as a group will not. (The only way they could is by evolving human DNA, but "survival of the fittest" pushes the opposite direction for that.)
Indeed, there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts" the way there is with bacteria or a virus. It's not like the flu where we need a new shot every winter because every winter is a new flu.
Once we solve the cancers we know about, they're solved forever, with the one caveat that more people will live longer, so that will increase the window for eventually still ending up dying to one of the cancers that happens to have a non-evolved built in resistance to this or that treatment. Which is a great deal of course, especially if it's a treatment that sounds way less destructive of QoL than chemo, radiation, etc.
>there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts"
No, but there is "be a better/stronger cancer cell and don't succumb to whatever therapy is killing its neighboring cells." It's exactly akin to how dosing isolated populations of bacteria with antibiotics selects for individual cells that are resistant, which then multiply and dominate [0], just like a tumor.
Right, but that's within a single host isn't it? Like patient A gets that mutation and succumbs, that sucks, but the stronger cancer cells don't them jump to patient B the way antibiotic-resistant bacteria do.
(barring the transmissible cancers article that your sibling comment linked to, but that's not the common case)
Sure, but my point is that convergent selective pressure across different individuals' tumors is strong enough that they independently arrive on the same resistance mechanisms to a given therapy, e.g. [0]. Just like if you performed the same bacterial antibiotic resistance experiment [1] across multiple independent trials, you'd repeatedly get the same result.
It's not very relevant here, but curiously some cancers are, in fact, contagious organisms. The most famous example is the devil facial tumour disease. Luckily cases of transmissible cancer in humans are extremely rare (if you count only transmission of cancer itself and not the cancerogenic agents).
Another curious case of "cancer being an organism" is the HeLa line derived from cervical cancer cells taken from a woman called Henrietta Lacks.
Nonetheless, we see the exact same resistance mechanisms to the same therapies recur across individuals, e.g. [0]. Convergent evolution is a harsh mistress.
There are some ideas about making it triggerable. So first you load the cells with a protein that is ready to start shredding but is inactive. Then you trigger it with a second compound.
This would shorten the timeframe for cells to mutate and acquire resistance mechanisms, but would not address the issue of cells with preexisting (epi)genetic resistance mechanisms that would then be promptly selected for.
Yes, and if you shorten the timeframe enough, there's a chance that it can clear all the cancerous cells. You also ideally would use multiple variations of the therapy to further reduce the chance of a pre-existing escape mutation.
That's how we deal with HIV. No single HIV therapy (so far) is effective enough to suppress the virus all by itself, but a combination of them provides a barrier that is too high for mutations to jump.
Agreed. Assuming it's ultimately proven to work in vivo, I think the endgame of this therapy is multiple guides targeting multiple mutations along with multiple delivery mechanisms (a formulation-diverse cocktail of LNPs + eVLPs [0]?). Sure, tech like [0] is futuristic and fanciful, but so is the tech of the OP, and both will probably reach in vivo maturity around the same time.
This will also cause problems because too many cells die at once. See the comments in other threads; killing the entire cancer at once is very hard on the body.
In practice, you’d use multiple guides targeting multiple mutations, so that the probability of having/acquiring multiple resistance mutations abrogating every guide from binding would be infinitesimal.
LNPs have limited capacity, and if the CRISPR/Cas system they’re using requires an exact match, then any additional point mutation or insertion or deletion in the segment being matched would allow the cell to survive. I suppose that approximately 3n extra guide RNAs (where n is the length of the matched sequence) could be added, but that seems a bit messy.
Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells? Like, it stops surfacing some cholesterol receptor because the drug is being delivered by LNPs that target that receptor, and now the cell is starved for cholesterol?
I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
>Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells?
Yes, if the LNP could be engineered to target an essential surface receptor, which is still a very tough problem. It would also not solve the issue of the payload successfully entering the cell but being subsequently degraded.
>I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
This is essentially how treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia happens (hence why it's called "chronic"). People with CLL can stay on BTK inhibitors for decades, often until they die of other natural causes.
Another question: how does this approach compare to trying to repair the pathogenic variants in the cancer? I asked here about that approach recently and the response was mainly about delivery difficulties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285386
Even with 100% delivery efficacy, editing efficacy is nowhere near 100%. CRISPR/Cas editors will reliably detect the target sequence but will not reliably edit it in order to repair the mutant allele, whereas CRISPR/Cas12a2 will activate and destroy chromatin ~100% of the time when it detects the target.
As is often the case, it's a lot easier to indiscriminately destroy than precisely (re)build.
>would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells?<
this is the concept of genetic baggage, and metabolic budget.
there is only so much energy to a cell, and scant amounts to "waste" on preservation of something that is not used. in the long term, carrying unused properties are disadvantageous, and reduce reproductive output [replication]
the result is "unfettered" oncocytes outgrow those with baggage, and occlude access to resource. if there is no challange that reduces population of nonresistant cells, the resistance will be minimized and extinct in the face of large disparity of success.
This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more.
Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.
If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87.
Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to.
What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.
In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty
"Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible."
Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.
>the highest birth rates globally occur...
Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.
>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.
I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.
Not to repeat myself too much here, but Japan also handling housing very well for two reasons: (1) NIMBYism does not exist by law (and practice) and (2) there is almost zero protected homes for historical/architectural reasons. As a result, you can build and build and build in Japan. There are few limitations except a uniform national building code. Tear down and rebuild (bigger) is constant in big cities in Japan.
Exponential decay isn't impossible to manage if the exponent is reasonable (i.e. closer to 1, i.e. if the average number of children per woman was closer to 2.1). It's just going down too fast.
My understanding of Singapore work culture though is it's intense and competitive. Yes the housing is cheaper and more accessible but it's the same age to get there (maybe a bit earlier). You aren't "economically secure" earlier in life than in Western countries. I don't know enough Vienna's system to speak for it.
Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.
Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.
Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.
We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.
Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.
People have been having children later since about the 1930s. The change has been gradual, so it's only really hitting hard now because they've not had any children during the years when it's relatively easy, and now some can't. That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.
Coincidently though, this aligns pretty much perfectly to people's stability also shifting to happen later in life. Specifically the economic stability to raise a family on a single income. That's not really possible any more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't do it.
Just to add a little factual data to this point, the fertility rate in England and Wales has been below two children per woman since the 1970s.
The impact of the new TV programming in rural India has been profound—and very positive, say Jensen and Oster. Their interviews revealed that when the new TV services arrived, women’s autonomy increased while fertility and the acceptability of domestic violence toward women significantly decreased."
How can you tell that tech is the cause of people not having children, and not just what they're doing because they don't have children to fill their time?
I don't think you can point to the rise of tech as a casual just because it's popular. If people aren't having children they'll do something else instead. To say what that is you need more evidence that what people are doing.
I was thinking more along the lines of "I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?"
How can you tell that isn't what's happened from looking at the rise of tech?
The wealthy demographics aren't having kids either, and the decline correlates with each inflection point in the rise of pleasure and mental stimulation technology.
Sub-Saharan birthrates are starting to decline just as they're gaining access to smartphones.
All of the countries where women have fewer rights are also experiencing decline in birthrates. They have ~10-30% smartphone penetration.
"Having a child seems fun" is dopamine opportunity cost as much as a financial one. People have always been poorer, but they've never been so endlessly stimulated.
> I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?
Replace this with, "I'm bored. What's on TV / YouTube?" Everything else is unnecessary complication.
People from the 70s are in their 50s today. Approaching retirement age, but most still able and employed. Things will get interesting in those countries as they hit old age and quit the workforce in a large wave.
>Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet
Childbirth has been collapsing for decades before Mark had launched "thefacebook.com". Japan's TFR cratered in 1960 and never recovered. Did Japan have smartphones in 1960?
Vienna massively depopulated in the mid-20th century, so it had a large excess of underused real estate. Vienna is only now starting to come back to its former population. It is like making the observation that housing is cheap in Detroit.
We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.
> We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.
This will require incredible subsidies both to build and maintain, which I fully support, but I think is politically untenable due to everyone’s unwillingness for taxes to go up while the developed world already carries enormous sovereign debt loads (>100% GDP).
We ate the seed corn, broadly speaking, to maximize the gains for some at the expense of the young and the future. Hopefully I’m wrong, and both taxes go up and the bond market will support more borrowing in the near term for spending that actually delivers value.
large parts of vienna have also been destroyed in the wars, for example 80000 apartments were destroyed or unusable. so it's not underused real estate but more like empty space in the city to develop from scratch. any other city that is not densely packed can have that. new development currently happens on empty space that was never developed before.
Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.
Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Now THAT problem will reduce or go away. You take 20 years to debate a new garbage disposal facility and overcome NIMBY brigades? no issues! The population stays same when you stop arguing and get it done.
> Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.
Err...My point being that it's not like Biharis who move to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are welcomed with open arms. West Bengal itself is a masterclass in what happens when you dont industrialise and implement birth control policies.
> Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
If USA's quality of life reduces people can still expect to live better lives than they do in India.
>IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Do you think China and Singapore just build like that? If you do you're kinda wrong. A LOT of time is put into planning and gaining consensus. Yes, the means aren't the same as India or USA, but Singapore for instance regularly holds ground level consultation with many people from different walks of life. Strong manning things leads to worse outcomes and both China and Singapore know this and only exercise it when absolutely necessary. The real issue is competent leadership. In most parts of the world only the most undesirable enter politics. It seems like the take away Indians and Americans have at looking at Singapore and China is StrongMan=Good without realising that it was a democracy that placed man on the moon, invented computing and more. The success of China and Singapore is predicated on their leadership and excellent civil service.
You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment. What usually happens is some authorities float a project idea on the news. At this point the idea would be toyed with. Depending on feedback gathered via academic studies and social media responses, if the project is seen as controversial the projects scope will be adjusted to some common ground that works well enough for most of the identified stakeholders involved - this is what the civil servants are paid to do. In china this usually is an ongoing dialog between local and central government. In Singapore this usually means focus groups and discussion. Neither countries really want to deal with angry citizens (but will do so extremely harshly when the need arises).
This is in stark contrast to a place like India where pulling up bulldozers to solve problems is becoming increasingly common. Politicians will command building of infrastructure just to satisfy voters without thinking through long term consequences. Often you get projects which exist just to check of the fact that they have built something even if that thing is utterly useless once complete.
> You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment.
Followed by:
> This is in stark contrast to a place like India
First: Do I need to have lived in China to have an opinion about anything in China?
Second: Apply your same silly "lived in" rule to your comment about India. The hard part about building in India: It is a democracy with a (somewhat) functional court system and (somewhat) free media, so you cannot steal/take people's property without just compensation. In China? Forget it. The govt does whatever it wants.
: Apply your same silly "lived in" rule to your comment about India. The hard part about building in India: It is a democracy with a (somewhat) functional court system and (somewhat) free media, so you cannot steal/take people's property without just compensation. In China? Forget it. The govt does whatever it wants.
Im of Indian origin, I have lived in India. I also have lived in both China and now call SG home.
Re your point about "somewhat functional court system" and government land acquisition.
In Singapore when the government wants to acquire private estates a vote is held locally against an offer. The offers are extremely generous and hence it is rare for votes not to fall through. The government is also able to actually pay its citizens.
In India we had local political goons threaten to come in and takeover my relative's home since it was not occupied. We could open a court case, but when will it be heard? 50 years from now? Yes the home was in a tier 3 city but still, which is more fair/democratic?
I think he's mixing up bureaucratic competence (and lack of corruption within bureaucracy and political class) with democratic consensus.
Yes, Singapore will never have a boondoggle like California or UK HSR. But the two are not comparable precisely because of all the problems that come with democracy. You just can't see them building a "bat tunnel" for $200m.
India is just a poorer version of UK/USA. China is a bigger version of Singapore. Not just that some things are worse. You can file a lawsuit and keep things on hold for 20 years. The "bulldozing" that happens is mostly local, low level stuff like some mafia or criminal thug getting punished outside of the court system often because that is exactly what the voters demand.
That problem won't go away because India is not at 80 - 95% urbanized like the west. There are still ~50% in villages, who will continue to migrate to cities.
The problem is India only has a few metros. India should be building 100+ new cities and rapidly urbanize. Cities are engines of growth. The slow migration from villages to legacy metros amplifies the infrastructure problems.
Yes. Actually it'll make sense to build new cities instead of pumping billions paying inflated land cost to build roads, rail etc. and metro systems that only pull even more crowds. Let the main cities rot, be replaced over time by new ones. Most empires did that, globally.
The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too.
if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?
Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.
The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.
if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
> Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.
The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD
> heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work
Subsidies only come into affect after you have children. They can not work alone society has a much greater affect. They work wonders at making parenting possible while being part of the work force. You only get the subsidies when you have children, the question is how you are supposed to feel secure enough to have children.
One thing to remember is that “heavily pushing subsidies” needs to be more comprehensive than it tends to be when you look at the details: people decide to delay kids for many reasons and societies often fail to address all of them – e.g. if you subsidize childcare but still have a work culture which expects long hours or sidelines mothers, the existence of the subsidy lessens the impact but probably doesn’t get too many people to change their answer. It’s fairly common to find reports of gaps in the supports for even the more generous societies which lead to people stopping at 1-2 kids when they might otherwise have wanted more.
These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.
In the US at least, we've gotten to the point that kids under 10 are rarely trusted to be alone and parents risk neglect charges by leaving them. Even the 10-13 range could be a risk. The problem is if someone calls the cops or social services, enough of those departments will take it seriously that as a parent, you really don't want to risk it.
It's a problem, because it's raised the bar for expected supervision effort, likely far beyond what is really needed.
Then pass Karen's Law and start fining the people making those calls if made without good reason to believe of imminent or reasonable danger to the child. It not only screws up society, but is a complete waste of resources.
Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.
The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.
And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.
This is definitely not true. As recently as the 50s the cost of a 2/2 house was about 14% of a single median personal income per month. [1] In contemporary times median personal income is about $45k, so that'd be about $525 per month. And they paid lower taxes as well. In contemporary times people pay dramatically more for housing without getting much of anything more in return. People often claim overall housing size has increased which is true, but lot sizes have slightly decreased. So all that means is in the 1950s you also had a much bigger yard instead of walk-in closets or whatever.
> Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.
>Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.
Yeah, exactly that. Most friends I have in Canada only started to have families once they were able to secure appropriate-sized dwelling. Which didn’t happen until late 30s. And current generations possibly cannot afford it at all in many jurisdictions. And stories I read from back in the day were “a factory worker and a teacher bought and paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in 3 years” are just insane. If I had that kind of purchasing power today I’d have more kids for sure.
No disrespect, but historical evidence does not support this argument. I've seen similar claims made in other threads.
Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc.
The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals.
My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.
You are missing a major driver of this. The main reason fertility rates have been decreasing is because of decreasing infant mortality. The number of children surviving to adulthood has been relatively stable until recently.
And more specifically there is a delay between when technology lowers the infant mortality rate and it becomes culturally normal to have the smaller number of children leading to the same number of adult descendants, so you typically get 1-2 generations with way higher populations than preceding generations and then the rest after that is just this large initial population having a normal number of kids. This means you get massive populations and intense crowding decades after the fact.
It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.
Will we discover life extension technology before we stop having children and humanity simply dies off? Between Altered Carbon and Children of Men, I feel like that's a book and a blockbuster movie waiting to be written.
If conscious machines are even 80% as smart as us and 1) never die and 2) can replicate memories, why would anyone have children again? I'd imagine we'd desperately try to build brain uploads or be intolerably jealous of our eternal life robot kin.
We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.
If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.
Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:
1) We can't afford it.
2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore.
3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Right. Kids cost time and money. So the lifestyle you can afford _with_ kids is slightly lesser than _without_ kids. But this is true at all income levels below the richest 1% or so.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.
Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.
Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.
I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.
Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.
Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
My point is only that we can see the value capture of the housing shortage by looking at the delta of housing development COGS and housing prices. I generally agree with you that there is plenty of room for profit margin, but when we see housing prices diverging significantly from lowest-cost construction prices, then we can measure our shortage.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
> We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it.
Much easier to have a reserve of X, if X can be put in a warehouse and transported later.
After reading comments here, I think that US has plenty of cheap housing… but… cheap housing is in places where people don’t want to live. (Demand is low, price is low)
If you actually plan to use your own money to build a reserve of housing, better double-tripple check if anybodyz will want to live there.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it misses that abundance means abundance. Consumer staples should cost near the price of production, and where margins are out of control, the government should step in and end the rent-seeking... that is what abundance is. If we live in a society where there is no price appreciation in owning an apartment to rent because another apartment can be build next door, then we live in a society where your dollar goes further, and cannot be captured by the wealthy cornering the market.
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
> we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
I think there should be a relatively simple solution. Tax the homeowners proportional to their homes' market value. Either you get enough tax revenue to build more houses, or the tax burden is too high for those NIMBY to remain at their beautiful suburban homes, and their houses will be back on the market.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
Most states (and other countries) do tax the homeowners proportional to their homes’ market value. California with its tax proportional to value at purchase is the outlier.
I think it’s largely just that people just don’t want to live near poor people, because they think they have bad culture/values/behavior, and will be risky to live near.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
Yeah, no argument. I think many in the US want the bar to be higher, though - many want expensive single family housing to be the minimum in their area, apartments would be too affordable, even unsubsidized.
Be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good (abundant, cheaper housing in this case) rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing (existing house value, amongst many other things, in this case).
I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income.
I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.
When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.
Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
> I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.
>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.
Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.
Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.
Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).
A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments".
But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem.
And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff.
And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths.
I don't buy any economic arguments.
That baby boom was an echo of the first post-war baby boom and fueled by a record 274k newly built apartments in 1979 - a culmination of a decade of ramping up construction when Edward Gierek took over and started borrowing money on a massive scale[0].
As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:
-Companies insist every employee works full time.
-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.
-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.
-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.
Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.
My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.
[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential
> If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30.
I’m 24 and have enough money.
I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.
Pairing seems to be the primary issue. The old social technology we had to increase the amounts of intersexual cooperation have for various reasons been discarded, but they have not been replaced with anything.
At no point in history did we have economic security at child bearing age and the assumption that it has a correlation with number of children seems to go against the data.
Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.
Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.
No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!).
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
You clearly did not read the book or understand the message. I say this as someone who thinks we need a wealth tax (or at least a tax on unrealized semi-liquid capital gains).
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
We are letting developers dictate what housing gets built?
Are you a parody account?
Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc.
I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!
Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.
incidentally a few years ago china banned tutoring, but to my understanding it was mainly because most tutoring places were scams, and maybe also because mostly rich parents would spend the money, thus giving them an advantage.
And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).
I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about postponing children. People back then probably would think delaying it was unnatural and this really wasn't that long ago.
You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.
In 1970 minimum wage was $1.60/hour, equating to about $3.3k a year. A typical mortgage was about $126/month. Car payment, around $100. You weren't raising a family and saving on minimum. Median income was about 3x that for a family, so you could definitely raise a family and save at the median. Note, these come from querying AI, but they match my recollections as a child a few years later.
Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.
In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.
The 1970s had a whole different level of poverty than we have in 2026. As in, the normal poverty of the 1970s largely doesn't even exist today in the US. The poor today would have been middle class back then, ignoring differences in technology. The standard of living is not comparable.
A single minimum wage was definitely a poverty wage in the 1970s even at the 1970s standard of living. I have no idea where you would get the idea you could raise a family on that.
> In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.
My memory seems to think that wasn't true.
However, there were a ton of manufacturing and manual labor jobs that were capable of supporting a small family and they didn't need a college degree.
So, you had most young people earning positive money for four years at a very biologically fertile age rather than going into soul crushing debt at that age.
Then I got Mary pregnant
And, man, that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
Bruce Springsteen -- "The River" -- which was apparently a fictionalization of his brother-in-law
as professional with a professional salary, wages are not enough. we need abundant housing. Imagine taking a year or two dedicate to helping your mate through pregnancy and early childcare? Or, taking a year or two get your dating life in order. This second one might be important in city with bad traffic or for demanding jobs. This is not possible right now for 99% of people because housing is too expensive.
My parents married in 1972 at age 18. Rust belt. Both worked. While comfortable, we were always worried about money and layoffs.
Friends whose parents didn't do as well as mine or who were single income households fared far worse. Definitely didn't end up with saved "extra" money.
Birth control was illegal in the USA until the late 1960s (other than condoms, which is what sailors used with prostitutes). It takes a while for changes to propagate through society.
Also, consumer credit was illegal until the same time period, and only legalized for people with vaginas in the mid-1970s. That alone might have made all the difference with marriage and fertility (which after all are only mildly related).
Imagine how your choices would expand if unlike your mother, you did not need to become Mrs. John Doe to be able to move out of your father's house.
So you're saying that the median marriage was forced back then? I don't see why the same reasoning wouldn't apply to men as well or who was forcing people into marriages besides some vague idea about "the patriarchy or something".
I was responding to OP's point about how our bodies are better suited to have children when we're younger. I think that's scientifically supported. My main belief would be that having children when you have peak fertility probably goes hand in hand. Birth control is a good hypothesis, you could say it broke this link.
This is a real thought process people are contending with. There's also just the simple fact that kids are liabilities more so than assets. That's not been the case through most of human civilization.
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.
An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.
Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.
Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
Same. I contended with having children at all because I enjoyed my freedom. As much as I enjoy it and find it inspiring and rewarding, there’s a part of me that’s counting down to independence again. I was fortunate enough economically it doesn’t require sacrifices but I still see the tally and it’s enormous. When I see median numbers on common stats like home prices, incomes, groceries, etc. there’s no way I would have taken it on if that was my reality.
I disagree on some cases. If I want my child to have roots, same community, same friends, same school, etc. then I can’t move around. That’s not an economic decision.
Likewise, sure things like nannies can be hired to increase my flexibility. But, there’s a noneconomic factor of me just not wanting my kids to be raised by nannies. This requires my presence and engagement.
These are part of a noneconomic value system. In fact, many values like these are at odds with economics. Parents choose to place their values over economics. This might look like passing on a job/promotion that would require a relocation. If you are self aware enough to realize you have these values, you can estimate how becoming a parent will impact your life and choose how important creating a family is to you and if you want to ensure the consequences.
Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
> Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
Get poorer, or get in a better location. Preschool is covered free here, with a pittance for after-school care (which is covered if your income is below something like 3x the poverty line).
Having kids is wildly subsidized for the poor - plot all the bennies available to a family at 2x the poverty line.
Jesus Christ! I don't have children, but if that is what it would cost, then I would definitely never have a child. It would feel like sacrificing my entire life, just to produce another generation. No, then I'd much rather just enjoy life, and melancholically look at the families who have to struggle every day to make ends meet due to their children. It is really quite sad. But I guess nature in its wisdom, transforms a person who has a child, so that that child becomes the only meaning in life for that person. If not, there simply would be no children and we would not be able to write this.
Well put. Adding that for those who are looking to have kids, there are generational considerations. It's not only the parents wanting the middle-class life for themselves, but it's also understanding that raising a child with that level of access to resources is what ideally sets the child up for a better life onward. The impact is exponential down the line, and no one wants to be responsible for a move in the opposite direction generationally.
I think the "entitlement" argument can be easily refuted by telling your interlocutor they're not entitled to you having children, and if they want America to have a million more children they should have them themselves.
This ties into my own theory about all this: for the first time in history, it's so socially okay to be child free.
At any other time, it was assumed that if you got to a certain age and didn't have, it was a problem. We've finally mostly gotten over that hurdle (at a high level, not necessarily within close-knit groups and families), and people act surprised that many of us never wanted them to begin with.
If you are referring to the US in your unsupported decline assertion the numbers don't support what you are saying (I disagree the US is more in decline than it was in the 70s/80s. It has different structural problems today, like housing and wealth concentration, but that isn't the same thing).
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
Why start out pointlessly hostile in your first sentence like this? I can't engage with this. If saying anything without linking a study makes a person some kind of asshole, even smart, honest people couldn't communicate.
People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security; this used to be done by the parents rejecting marriages that didn't bring enough dowry and extreme punishment for extra-marital relationships.
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
> People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
The framing as such makes a systemic issue into an individual one. If you can't afford children don't have one... until everyone can't afford them at the same time, then there are none and that civilization dies out.
(Even when it's not affecting everyone at the same time, isn't it a form of eugenics? Who decides which individuals can afford children? It's not the individuals.)
A 60 year old man can reliably have children. It is essentially impossible for a 60 year old woman to have children. The risk of defects from poor sperm increase from about 2% in your twenties to 4% in your sixties.
However, men do have a biological clock and that clock is simply that they are proxied to women's clocks. Mick Jagger can get a young girlfriend and have babies in his old age because he is famous with lots of money. The typical man cannot do this and should not plan on being able to do this. The data tells us that if a man reaches 45 without children, it is extremely unlikely that he will ever have kids, even if his sperm tests perfectly in the lab.
True - but, honest question that I've always wondered: Do we know the degree of this problem as it relates to whether or not people have kids? I.e. yes, it takes longer to get pregnant, but how much less likely does it become to get pregnant at all?
So even if it takes a year instead of one night to get pregnant, which wouldn't really affect long-scale statistics that much, more pregnancies fail, and more people may choose not to try at all because of the risks. That makes sense.
Yes it would, because if you don't start until you are 30, you've "lost" a decade of childbearing. That's a pretty serious reduction in the maximum number of children you are likely to produce.
How many do you want? 2 is quite normal, are you saying you'd only be able to have 3 maximum (but 2 in reality) instead of 12 maximum (but 2 in reality) or what?
That or go "one and done" after having enough fun with:
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time
- Stress of fertility treatments, if needed
- Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth
- Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
It's got an effect but agreed it's not the biggest effect given what else is going on. I think time might be the bigger factor here when simply discussing biology. If you have kids every ~3 years and don't start until you're 35, you have maybe 1.75 years of kids left in you before it starts getting tenuous. (ie, before the woman is over 40) That same math works out differently if your first kid is at 20.
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
Your source doesn't contradict the fact that women's fertility has a sharper and earlier cliff than men's. It doesn't even use the same age brackets for men and women. It compares men age over 45 against men age under 25, whereas for women the study compared those age > 35 vs age < 25.
Gender does matter though. Men can sire offspring into their 60s, women have marked decline in fertility starting from 32 and hit an absolute wall (menopause) by their fifties.
Men offspring-ing in their 60's and dying 10 years later is perfect way to build a society where kids get to grow up without their fathers when they need them the most
> Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
I think the real interesting question isn't "why don't people have children" but more "why do those who have one or two kids not have more?" It seems everyone around came from a family of 6+ or knew those who did, yet everyone has 1 or 2 kids, three if the first two were both the same sex.
I didn't choose to have kids, but I have a friend who prioritized doing so, and she talked about hoping to have a larger family. She got married and had her first child not long after graduating from college. So biologically a very healthy age.
She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.
In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.
Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.
The familial support really is key - it is possible to have a large family "on your own" but it's significantly harder than if you have cooperative family in the area, or are already in multi-generational living situations.
In the U.S., birth rates fell pretty much continuously for at least 150 years until WWII and the Baby Boom. Now they are slightly declining again. Many industrialized nations have a similar graph.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
We're also teaching the younger generation imminent climate apocalypse is coming, and therefore bringing kids into this dying world would be cruel, or at best contributing to the problem.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
actually we've been closer to WW3 in the past. Remember that Russian false sensor that almost caused them to launch a nuclear first strike but the guy whose finger was on the button felt something was off?
There is the idea floating around in Europe, to nullify people’s student debts if they have children.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
In Germany the government pays your university time. You get about 800€ per month for housing and basic needs. At least if your family is not too well off.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
but this is support for living expenses, not tuition. if you are frugal you can get by not spending all of it. that's what i did. when it was time to pay, i was able to pay off all of it at once which afforded me another discount.
Hungary spent 5%(!) of its GDP on direct child benefits and instituted a lifelong tax exemption for women with 3 or more children and the birth rate rose by... ~0.15 for a few years and then dropped again.
For comparison I assume you're German given the username, here this would amount to 300 billion per year, which is about 100x what the government spends on BAföG (the mentioned federal student aid). I genuinely wonder how much countries will have to spend until people realize that this has quite literally nothing to do with money.
I expect it has to do with money but is much more complicated than simply allocating a small yearly amount. By way of related analogy consider housing. If you provide a subsidy but the market is primarily constrained by an inelastic supply then all you will accomplish is raising rents. I assume that there are many such nuanced factors that all contribute to the birth rate.
Hungary might also have a problem with too many young Hungarian women living abroad. It is hard to raise fertility if your locally present fertile population has already tanked.
> was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
>When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
It’s still pretty normal for public sector positions to have this discussions behind closed doors.
Once you have the job, it’s hard to fire you. So it’s a reoccurring pattern that people apply, work for the minimum needed time to get paid parental leave and then start to implement their family plans.
That is completely within their legal rights and for society as a whole it’s a good thing to have more kids.
At the same time it’s also bad for everyone else in the same team.
Men can happily wait till their 80s to have three children.
We need to get over the fantasy that biology doesn't drive survival.
If anyone is upset by that please help fund artificial womb research. There isn't nearly enough money in the space for the sole thing that can prevent human extinction at worst or soylent green at best.
Take an average 22-year old. Tell them they just won the lottery, and never have to worry about money ever again. Do you think they'll be interested in starting a family?
This routinely happens for professional athletes. Don't have any stats, but American professional athletes seem well known for having many children (with many people).
Yup. People want a bit of hedonism. Who doesn't really? And society paints engaging in hedonism as fine in your 20s and evil for parents. Have kids? Goodbye partying. Goodbye hobbies. Goodbye a sense of agency. It doesn't have to be this way, but this is how it is framed both internally and externally.
This absolutely would have sealed it for me. It would still seal it for me now.
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
There are studies on this in both Sweden and the US. Young men who win the lottery have children at higher rates than the control group. Young women who in the lottery have children at equal or lower rates than the control group.
So I think you're right, but my diagnosis of the problem is a little different.
As in:
_why_ does everyone want a middle class life?
_why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?
I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.
Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.
Could it be that the "stories" we consume (books, movies, TV, games) fill our heads (as in, focus our attention) with ideas that don't overlap much with family life? It's all about single people doing cool or fun stuff, with the occasional tired parents.
I wonder how hard it would be to give credibility to the hypothesis (yeah, "verifying" it would be much harder). What's the correlation between "percentage of time spent on non family focused stories" and "children per woman born in the following 5 years"? Sounds like a super noisy signal. Maybe averaging by country or even city could strengthen the data.
That seems like unnecessary complexity (and also doesn't match my own observations). You're replying here to a theory that it seems to me is sufficient on its own to explain the phenomenon, unless you see some issue with it? I'm not certain the theory is correct but I think it's entirely plausible and more importantly I've yet to encounter a better one.
This is talked about all the time in the US as a huge impending problem with articles about all the time. You have segment of population with higher education and higher wealth that are having fewer children and later in life as it takes more time to get secured financially and also children are very expensive in terms of maintaining what used to be a middle class life style.
I agree. It comes down to the opportunity cost for women to have babies.
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
The implication of "and it turns out..." is that all else is equal, but clearly it's not. Would women still choose to have babies if they didn't have to work also? I admit that it's basically moot - we can't seem to figure out how to have a society where both members of a couple are free to choose whether or not to work. I'm only pointing out that this trend doesn't mean what you're implying about women's desires.
If you don't think child rearing is work then you won't understand why women choose not to have kids in the first place. You cannot be a parent and choose not to work, period. Just because you're not getting paid and ordered around by an adult boss doesn't mean being a trad wife is magically somehow not work. In fact, at least with a regular 9-5 you get PTO and time off.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.
Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc.
both parents having to work fulltime, and the severe hit to your career if you pause working while the children are young is the primary hindrance in my view.
Yeah the career thing is huge, and also just a general lack of flexibility at a lot of companies. Expectations to be in-office, butt in chair for 8 hours a day, etc.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
they didn't just happen, they were expected and demanded. there was social pressure to have children. that's still true in china today. some not yet grandparents put a lot of pressure on their children to give them grandchildren (sometimes very violently too), and i remember a comment in an earlier thread where someone told about the experience of their parents or grandparents where the local pastor was having a concerned talk with a childless couple.
Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
> Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
Because it will be very messy and involve a lot of suffering if unmanaged.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
> like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
the reason we have been fighting teen pregnancy is because as a society we decided not to support young parents, and because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing. i believe historically this comes from the fact that mothers used to stay at home, so as soon as you had a child you would not go to school anymore.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
> because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing
Usually disappeared. Once DNA tests were invented, it became straighforward to go after them. Underrated breakthrough to support children and single mothers.
In the US, there is ~$115 billion worth of child support debt outstanding. Even with DNA testing, we’re not going after the folks who aren’t supporting their offspring, mostly because they are low income and have nothing to take to satisfy these debts.
> Yet, 2020–2022 data in the KIDS COUNT® Data Center reveal that just 23% of U.S. female-headed families reported receiving any amount of child support during the previous year (down from 26% in 2018–2020). Female-headed families refer to unmarried women living with one or more of their own children under age 18, which may include stepchildren and adopted children.
> One in three kids — nearly 24 million kids total — lives with a single parent, mostly single moms. In fact, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, of the 10.9 million one-parent families with children under age 18, 80% were headed by a mother. This makes women the more frequent custodial parent and the majority of those who need child support.
While fertility rates are down, roughly 40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute). There is still much work to do to drive down the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
yes, but what would be the point? they are still in school too, have no work and no income, so they are not going to pay child support either. the girl is better off without such a guy.
my point is to support couples who actually want to be together to build a family. getting pregnant from a guy you messed around with is not a family. the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making it easier to have wanted ones in a supportive environment. hunting down a guy who didn't mean to get you pregnant after it happens unintentionally doesn't accomplish that.
In some tribal societies, everyone fucks everyone, whatever children are born are born, and since nobody knows who the father is they all care for all of them collectively.
Is it possible this is actually a better model than the nuclear family?
Even if it is, there's never any guarantee that something which works at the scale of a tribe can be transplanted to a nation of millions.
To a limited extent, the school system itself is how we collectively care for the next generation. How far can it be pushed in the direction you ask about?
one idea is multi family homes. the idea is that instead if each family having having all their own space for themselves, you have a lot of shared spaces. consider that you need to be private, that's your bedroom and a bathroom. but you can share the kitchen, the living room, a play room, a reading room, a tv room. you don't have to share everything. there is a lot of flexibility in how you arrange the space, but the overall idea is that you have multiple families together, and because you share some things you also get to know each other better and kids can run around and feel at home everywhere. if you need a babysitter because you want to go out, you can simply check in with one of the other families if they are at home, and ask if it is ok if you go out.
the two main benefits are that parents get to know each other better, just like they would in a village, instead of being anonymous like we are most of the time, barely knowing who our neighbors are. and the sharing of resources. my dad loved books and music. i basically grew up in a library. it was nice when i had to make a school report that required some research, but it would not have hurt if those books would have been shared with a lot more people. ok, we have public libraries too, but you get the idea. by sharing resources you are able to get a lot more things that you would not be able to get if you lived alone.
I've lived in a few things such as you describe and… it's variable. We kinda need a culture that fits them, as people right now are all over the place in terms of responsibility for shared spaces.
Not saying it can't be done, only that this is harder than the Nike slogan (just do it).
you won't get an argument on that from me. it certainly takes work, good will and a desire for harmony. it takes a close community. that's why my life focus is on community building.
can you share more about the spaces where you lived?
> can you share more about the spaces where you lived?
The first few places were all at university: shared kitchen, shared laundry facilities, etc. and most had shared showers.
After I graduated, one of my partners was living in a HMO, I can't find any pics, but if you imagine a dozen big private rooms surrounding a central living area, a bunch of normal sized shower rooms also attached to it, and also a big communal kitchen with enough cupboard space for everyone to have their own.
More recently, though still 8 years ago, an older family member got Alzheimer's and both I and my brother wanted to help look after her, which ended up overcrowding the place with a normal UK semi-detached home having me, them, and my brother's whole family living in it while the builders slowly converted the garage into a granny annex for her, with its own min-kitchen and bathroom; by the time the annex was ready, we were all too stressed out and I made the move to Germany that I'd delayed in order to help look after her.
> saluton... ;-)
Ankaŭ Saluton! Mi ĝojas, ke iu legas mian uzantoprofilon ^_^;
Yes I wonder why. Teen pregnancy sounds so amazing and inconsequential for individuals and societies alike that teens should just be inoculated as a rite of passage or something...
compared to the alternative, it definitely is. The problems with it are mostly artificial ones our society created. If you were God and redesigned human society from scratch, why wouldn't you have them procreate in their most healthy, fertile, and horny years?
Because teenagers are not known for having the best judgement? Because parenting comes with commitments and obligations that, early in life, conflict with other things that are seen as desirable for a well functioning society (education, equality, opportunities)? Having more experience in life generally makes you a better/better-prepared parent?
Don't read me wrong, I'm not stating that the current economic/social pressure is good at producing healthy/happy parents/families, it just doesn't seem good either to turn teenagers into parents. The "sweet spot" probably lies in between, and what you say is very much an appeal to extremes.
Why did people want to have them in the past, and what shifts do you think could undo industrialization enough to return to that?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
Hard wired to want children and hard wired to want sex are two very different things.
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
I think just about everyone wants more sex than children. That said, many people would love the responsibility of raising a child but don't feel like they can afford it.
I don't mean it as a cost benefit thing, but people thinking that family is important, that they want and need family there for them in their old age, and so on.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
how about making your pension depend on the number of kids? take an average pension now: X=100%, take half of it as a base, and then add a quarter or one fifth per child. so a childless person gets half the current pension, 1 child gives you 75% or 70%, 2 children 100% or 90%, 3 children 125% or 110%, etc...
Sounds good, until you start arbitrarily punishing people who, for one reason or another, just can't have kids (reasons can be many, for one, biology is a bitch).
that's a defeatist attitude. it's not like we can't make exceptions. or arrange for other ways to earn your pension. besides, if you don't have children you get more time to work, so you pay more, which means, the benefit for parents is actually offsetting lost work time.
which is another approach. how about for each child you get automatically accounted a number of years of payments as if you had earned money. if it takes 30 years of work to earn enough for a decent pension, and every child counts for 5 years then 3 children would allow you to get the same pension with only 15 years of work. how is that?
btw, the global infertility rate is 5%. the global disability rate is 10%. those people are also affected by not being able to work. in other words, 15% of the population are unable to fully contribute to pension funds. where a full contribution means work and having children. but making children a pension contribution actually helps a number of disabled who are still able to have children. so now they are able to contribute more than they would if we ignored children as a contribution.
seriously, this constant shooting down of ideas just because it appears that one group is disadvantaged is tiring. try thinking a bit more creatively and help come up with a solution.
in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough.
well, i did say it's not enough, but i disagree, if you assume free childcare, then the real cost according to statistics is not much higher than that because the bulk of the cost in those statistics comes from expensive childcare, yet, even free childcare does not help to motivate people to have more children.
Even wealthy nepo people wait until then to have kids. A big part of it is also societal expectations. Going out every weekend clubbing is seen as fine in your 20s. Even if that specifically isn't your thing, you probably are filling your time with something personally gratifying.
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial support. Add that into your observation that the world is more fun and selfish and it multiplies.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
I love how the original post says this happens across vastly different societies regardless of all these different variables people are offering as possible explanations. For example, in India (which this article is about), women have a much lower rate of workforce participation than other industrialized countries. I think a lot of people who are replying are men and don't understand how physically tasking and painful pregnancy is. It seems like most women are fine having two if there's a high chance they'll make it to adulthood and they have access to family planning/contraceptives. That makes sense to me. Not sure why this is so confounding to people. Not much more of an explanation needed than that lol
I agree that women's employment is the common factor in all societies with reduced birth rates.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
> A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate
This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.
Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.
> Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies
If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas that remain high cost.
The Venn diagram of "people that want traditional small town life" and "people that currently live in a small town" has a smaller overlap than you'd think.
The small towns in my area are desirable not just because they're small, but because they're small and have the same amenities as a bigger town. These towns are also increasingly relying on debt to fund decades of deferred maintenance just to keep the amenities they already have alive.
This would become dire if (for example) property values fell, as residential real estate taxes make up the majority of tax revenue. This might happen if demand for the town fell (perhaps due to fewer people), which would quickly become a catastrophic cycle (revenues fall, roads and schools deteriorate, which makes the town less desirable, repeat ad infinitum).
This is oft repeated, though examining the small town budget (though perhaps I'm not in a "small" town at 10k residents) shows that the vast majority of the property tax goes to the schools, roads et al are a rounding error.
In a future with few or no kids, schools won't be needed.
I bet the set of people seeking out “small town life” are more likely to have children than the average city dweller. If so, the funding problem gets worse over time for small towns. More kids with fewer adults funding schools.
The balance here is that good schools are one of the amenities that keep property values high and they have pretty high fixed costs.
So you lose some economy of scale when enrollment drops, you have to cut school funding, which makes the schools worse, which makes the town less desirable, which drops real estate prices, etc.
There's some evidence that mobile phone access is one of the biggest drivers in this. This talks about teen fertility but I'd imagine it's similar in other age categories as well.
Phone + PC/TV probably takes an hour or two of people their day on average. If they didn't have access to it I assume they'd be meeting up with other people out of boredom and that'd lead to sex, doesn't seem too strange.
i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
A lot of people think they need to do this but it's really not true. You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids. And in terms of avoiding complications and having energy, 18-25 years old is probably the best time.
In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it.
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
Daycare used to be essentially free when I was growing up. Some workplaces had a little daycare wing. Gyms had them. So many adult sort of third places just had a place to plop your kids with a smattering of toys. Now people are paying $3000 a month so they can go to a spin class.
And yet I bet there are thousands of young people in Seattle having kids. These limits are all about what kind of life you want for yourself, and not about what is possible.
The parents at my kid’s daycare were in their late twenties / early thirties, had professional degrees (lawyers, physicians, tech) and only one kid in the daycare.
[edit to add this: I am talking from experience, it seems you are talking from hearsay]
It's possible, but if you do it in a developed country they'd take you to jail. Just like the law imposed a minimum wage, it also imposed a mandatory minimum standard of living.
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
but this comes from parents being expected to have their life figured out and not giving them any help. if we accept as normal that young parents will not have their life figured out then we will also make sure that we don't leave them alone but actually support them.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
I think you are correct, but not in a manner likely to happen.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
ouch, i can't imagine the stress your parents must have been under that they lost control like that, or the pain you had to experience. i can somewhat sympathize. my dad had a rough temper too at times, but nowhere near what you describe. and we lived in germany where we got financial support from the government. not being able to pay rent is not a thing there. if that was all it took to set your parents off then this totally could have been prevented with a better welfare system.
You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
> You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
And according to your article, this is almost exclusively a problem with the elderly:
> Those aged 85 and older die from malnutrition at a rate about 60 times higher than the rest of the American population, with deaths in that group increasing about twice as fast.
(Of course, I'd expect those aged over 85 to be dying at a much higher rate from _most_ causes.)
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
How strange. My experiences when I was young mean way more to me, than say, a trip to the US now. Now it's just boring routine, back then, everything was new and fresh.
You must have had a very boring time when you were young. It is very sad.
Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.
Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.
Natural selection does not care one bit about the individual, to the question is completely meaningless. Add to that, that we share 99.9% of our DNA, so you passing it on, means I'm passing it on for free, while you sit there with all the cost. Who's the fool now?! ;)
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
Respectfully, you don't know why you put off children. You may tell yourself a story of why you have, but for example if there was an environmental contaminant shaping population level stats on endocrines and hormones that reduced human sex drive and desire for children, you wouldn't necessarily be conscious of that.
People are very conscious that a child costs a lot to raise and the reality is usually worse than their estimates. They know children will impact their career and promotion opportunities, so a lower expected income just when they need it more. They know they no longer live next to their parents so the support structure they have in place is flimsy.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!
Eh, that argument works on any claim and is nonfalsifiable-ish, so I think it can be ignored.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
We know some of the pharmaceutical residues in our sewage turn frogs gay (that really happened, that wasn't AJ making something up). We know pharmaceuticals can greatly affect people's sex drive, general mood, and other psychological factors. It's definitely not a stretch to guess we might be doing it to ourselves.
both points are fair, but operate at different levels. the former: willpower. the latter: constraints.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
Super happy I had so much life experience, not wanting to go out and party etc.
Trying to keep up with her snowboarding and biking and climbing and hiking and all the rest through her teen years is going to be a great motivator to stay fit and strong.
It’s a valid theory, and I certainly think it’s a contributor, but I would also argue that the “boom” years of fertility in modernity have been tied to periods of widespread benefit for most, if not all. When prospective parents and grandparents see the potential for a brighter future, there’s more societal pressure to have kids because their success will naturally boost your own. Then when the vice starts tightening, the idea is that having more kids improves your own prospects of survival and comfort in old age.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
"But we gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them and it didn't measurably affect their marginal propensity to have children at all! Extractive economics couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fertility crisis!"
I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.
The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction.
As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack.
What’s going to happen over the next few decades is that a few variants here and there are going to spread throughout the population that actually lead to more kids, not just through desire for sex. It will be a population crash, followed by a recovery.
Last month, the US Census Bureau released their 2025 population estimates. In the ~5 years from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025, it estimates Kiryas Joel's population grew from 32,956 to 47,147 – a 43.1% increase. [0] That's not spectacular in the figures themselves–you'll see bigger bumps when new suburbs are established–but it is spectacular in being almost all due to natural increase instead of migration.
Evolution is still working, if we understand it as having both biological and cultural components. Give it a few centuries, and secular people will be outnumbered by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Amish, and radtrad Catholics, and Mormon polygamists, and so on. That's the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? – and I believe, on the whole, he's right.
> but a lot of these ultra religious groups have high attrition.
Many of them actually don’t. How could Kiryas Joel be growing so fast if it did?
80-90% of children stay in the faith, and when 6 kids is considered a small family, and families with >10 kids are common - losing 10-20% in each generation doesn’t prevent exponential growth
The other factor - a constant defection rate combined with exponential growth in the underlying population produces exponential growth in absolute number of defectors - it is easy for outside observers to misread that defector boom (e.g. the “off the derech”/OTD phenomenon) as a sign the sect is in trouble
> In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.
Why would biological evolution “have to” if cultural evolution is doing the job for it? Of course, the two work in tandem, but the biological contribution may turn out to be an increase in frequency of alleles that make people happy in high demand sects, rather than direct desire for children
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.
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).
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.
I've heard a lot of vox pops in recent years on the subject of why young couples where I live are not starting families, and by far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable. It's not a yearning for hedonism that's dissuading them, it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
>[B]y far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
The incentives you mentioned are meek, the opposite of aggressive.
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US:
1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
How aggressive are those incentives really, compared to cost of childcare? Do they fully cover the cost of daycare and education for the kids for 18 years, alongside paying for a larger home?
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
Funny enough I know lots of millennials without children with horrible sleep patterns and habits.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
Children surely help you get your shit together. Otoh if you don't have your shit together, adding children into the mix is a little unfair to the children.
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so.
- chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
Happiness is the emotional reward for eudaimonia. Since I mostly reject eudaimonia as people and genes offering you carrots for doing what they want, not what you want, I naturally don't feel happiness like someone who's like "I'm winning, life is meaningful, others think well of me". I seek out hedonic pleasure because I think it's more real than happiness.
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.
Why do you think people have children then? Is that not (perhaps a bad) attempt at hedonism? I've heard (esp women) say "I can't be happy unless I have children". Then they have children, and... it often turns into "why isn't the father helping more".
Having children is profoundly more fulfilling and pleasurable than the surface-level pleasures you listed. "hedonism" doesn't create a lack of children, if anything people are not hedonistic enough, but for economic reasons pursue cheap low-quality pleasure over high-quality pleasure.
> Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing...
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
> refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
I’m not the one claiming having children is noble, parent was claiming that people are forgoing having children as a noble act.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.
I would argue it is due to nuclearisation of families, that has always accompanied industrialisation. See my other comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416228
Fascinating hypothesis. I wonder if technological and economic progress makes "nuclearisation" inevitable, i.e. people can just move wherever the best money is at.
I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
Part of it is activities but I think the majority is that if you want a good living, you have to work in cities. But cities are very expensive to live in due to unaffordable housing. Not to mention people don’t feel secured when employment is so unstable. People don’t want to take the risk to have kids if they can’t afford a permanent home and stable employment.
This is likely a very significant factor as urbanization has been extremely rapid, and historically cities kept their populations afloat by a constant influx of people from rural areas.
I grew up blue collar and pitched in with my father's work from a very young age. As a child I was able to balance out the time and expense of raising me by contributing back to the household. I have children and they just cannot contribute to my white collar job. They can participate in some chores, but they are essentially a massive money pit. Daycare is more than my mortgage. Public school gets out at like 2:30. It's just so exhausting sometimes.
For this theory to be plausible we need to imagine that hedonistic creatures couldn't find anything more hedonistic than caring for multiple kids before industrialization. It doesn't sound realistic, mildly speaking. The modern culture simply doesn't oblige you to marry, and procreate the way it did 1-2 (depending on where you are) generations before. In the times of my mother's youth not marrying before 25-26, and not having at least one kid before 30 could really negatively affect someone's social standing. There are segments of modern West where culture still prioritizes procreation (like Orthodox Jews you mention, or old school Catholics) and they do procreate successfully despite being the same creatures as everyone else. Preferred hedonism is in culture, not nature.
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.
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.
I agree a lot with your hypothesis. Most people in my demographic (mid 30s American) that aren't having kids are choosing not to primarily because they don't want to really interfere with their current lifestyle. Money seems to be a part of it, but secondary to the high opportunity cost of children.
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
[*] All parts of the Israeli population have high birth rates, even the secular Jews. I find it misleading to single out Orthodox Jews as the main contributor. You don't do that to Evangelical Christians or Mormons, or some other groups in US.
University students are predominantly female in Israel as in North America, so female education isn't a differentiator for fertility rate.
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
The OPs (incorrect in this very minor detail) point was that fertility is below replacement everywhere except Israel, where the only reason it wasn't below replacement was Orthodox religious members of society. That's just wrong. Fertility in Israel, across every single group except for one in your own data, is above replacement. Orthodox are the highest, and bringing the overall number up, but if you removed them, fertility in Israel would still be comfortably above replacement.
So no, their characterization was not correct, since the point was that, absent a particular group, fertility would be, like in almost every other OECD (and many non OECD) countries, below replacement.
The massive change is the transformation of women's role in society and education.
Essentially for pregnancies at 25 years old or later there are no number changes. Women of that age have as many kids as they ever had.
But, pregnancies for very young women and teenagers has virtually disappeared. As women start having children much later, they simply have much less.
As a millennial in southern Europe, the average age of our mothers in early 20s.
35 years later, the average age of first time mothers in my group is 33+.
The article you're commenting points it out as well:
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions.
And this is terrific news for the future. A nation of our size just cannot afford to have more than ~400 million people without severe issues causing extremely poor quality of life. We are already bursting at the seams at 1.5 billion and will be suffering deeply when it reaches 1.8 billion. (Also, the current adult population is higher than the official figures)
We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".
For the first time ever people can finally choose not to have kids.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
The way I understand it, the modern sentiment is to have children meaningfully, raising them being a project parents actively invest into. Contraception brought choice, choice brought up consideration and planning. This all opened the can of "what are we doing" and "why do we do it" and "how do we do it right", that tended to be ignored in previous eras (where having or not having children was not exactly a real choice).
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
As a dad of (soon) 3, I would say that social media/etc have raised the expectations of parenting. Keep in mind that the kids aren't the only ones growing up and learning - the parents are too. And hopefully learning from their parents too.
"Being ready" to have a child is an impossibility so you have to embrace the unknown and be ok with mistakes. Kids are resilient, and many millions have had to do with less.
I understand about the impossibility of being ready. No one is ever ready for something they do for the first time. As any complex and long project, there's theoretical preparation and there's practice with its constant ongoing course correction when (not "if") something doesn't go as planned. It's not an immediate issue or reason, at least not for me.
And another thing I understand is that some people actively want to raise children. You surely do. But I simply don't feel that way. Like, there's no inner sense of calling, or desire, or any moving thought or similar emotion or drive. Nothing like "yes, I want to do it".
And doing this not because I want it, but for the society's sake? It is an idea that makes sense, but but knowing the difficulties and stakes involved, a "why not" is pretty obvious to me. I most certainly don't want to spend significant resources of my lifespan on raising a kid I didn't even want. And thus I'm really glad that it's an option.
1. Climate change is most certainly not an extinction level event.
2. I spend many days with kids. They are great. I suggest you do the same and experience the human experience. Someone had to deal with the piece of crap you were when you were 2 years old, after all.
3. You'll stop praising the lack of children when you are 80 and nobody young wants to take care of you. You will have a lonely, lonely existence.
> You'll stop praising the lack of children when you are 80 and nobody young wants to take care of you. You will have a lonely, lonely existence.
I have always considered this to be a selfish sentiment. Wanting children so that you yourself are less lonely. That isn't to say it's a bad thing, mind you.
Yep, difficult to imagine a more egoistic personality. I'm afraid to be alone when I'm old, so I'll create little slaves to take care of me. I don't know how many families I know where the children live on other continents and the parents live by themselves, and see them once a year.
So you'd better brush up on your social skills, having children is no guarantee that someone will take care of you when you are old.
Why do people have such emotional reactions to peoples' preferences? Some of us get along perfectly well without kids, legacy, etc and aren't lonely at all. Feels like projection. Climate change need not be existential, being horrible is enough to ward most people off the notion and I'm certainly not interested in subjecting a kid to this mess.
Yeah, I don't agree with the guy you're answering. I know plenty of great people who just don't want kids and don't find time with them to be rewarding or gratifying, and there's nothing wrong with that. Having kids most definitely doesn't guarantee that old age will be any better either. Even if it did, it's not worth decades of labor and costs that you don't want. Saving for retirement/end of life care is much easier when you don't have kids, too. If you don't want kids, more power to you.
My love for my daughter and my wife enrich my life and contribute more to my happiness than anything else, by far. As you wrote, the majority of the very, very hard work has fallen to my wife. I wouldn't fault any woman, or man, for not wanting it.
Still, my wife and I both feel that parenting is the best thing we've ever done or will ever do. It's everything I hoped it would be -- and much more besides. The benefits are innumerable for us.
Agreed. Another comment in the thread describes the author's horrible, abuse-filled upbringing as the child of young parents who both weren't prepared for children and, in at least one case, didn't want them and blamed him for their circumstances. I can't fathom any of that and my heart breaks for the guy and the kid he used to be.
It's really unfortunate that people who are likeliest to make terrible choices are probably also likely to make the choice to have kids. A lot of people who choose not to have kids generally know themselves well enough to make the right choice, which also means that they'd probably be better parents than a lot of the clueless people who wind up with kids they never should have had.
I’d argue that most of those support and incentives are barely enough in modern societies.
In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.
So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.
And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.
All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.
That one ranks high on my list. If you're a farmer in the countryside children are an economic asset. They can feed the animals, plant, weed the crops, maintain fencing, etc. Once you move to the city, whatever else they are in terms of fulfillment, they're an economic liability.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
Yes, because you can let your kids use the machines at ages that would scandalize the urbanites (check the laws for your state, you find things like "twelve year olds can operate farm machinery incidentally on a road or highway").
Not as much, but once you start mechanized farming you don't need many people in agriculture. There are few enough farmers in industrialized countries that they don't affect demographics much.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
> more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
"Hedonism" seems like an interesting term for a straightforward personal choice.
I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.
It seems like the right word. Hedonism doesn’t imply debauchery. It’s just prioritizing pleasure.
It’s a hedonistic choice to forgo children in order to enjoy the pleasures of an unencumbered lifestyle. It’s also a personal choice (though I would not say it’s straightforward for most).
It's always invoked as if that makes life shallow - if avoiding pain (raising kids) is hedonism, then yeah I'm a hedonist. I'm not going to self-flagellate to appease society's desire for workers. Bad assumptions about demographics aren't a good reason for people to procreate, just to prolong a scheme that can't hold.
Does "coping" in this situation mean having 75% of any western countries young population foreign born and erasing thousands of years of culture and history?
Now in addition to preserving the economic order, people are responsible for preserving culture and history? That's too much to ask for. Cultures evolve. Our children might not choose to follow our culture. Even within any given western country, people disagree on what the indigenous culture consists of. My country has been described as being in the midst of a culture war.
I think this is close but misses the only thing that really matters: birth control makes it a choice. We are just 3 generations into being able to decide whether or not sex means kids. And making that positive choice takes a lot of energy.
Even with extensive support and subsidies from the state, having children is an economic loss for the individual in today's society. Back in agricultural society, having children was an economic gain, because you could put them to do work for you.
Now if the state wants children it would need to pay both for the missed fun times and also the missed career opportunities that come from having children.
> 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.
Or, as societies industrialize, life becomes more complex, time-consuming, and tiring than the simpler ways of life people were used to and able to manage...
>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.
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
That's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain why nearby/culturally related countries like South Korea and Taiwan have similar or even lower fertility rates, despite never having a one child policy.
And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.
How people feel about having kids doesn't seem to be a uniform thing. The majority of parents certainly seem to love their children, but I do see a lot of mixed opinions about whether they love being parents.
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
It’s not that complicated. As soon as women are educated and have a choice of supporting themselves the birth rate drops. If you want a higher birth rate, stop educating women and disempower them. This is something republicans in the US intimately understand.
My theory is different.
Decades of officials telling people that the world was overpopulated. That global warming was going to kill us all and any children born would be subjected to horrific conditions.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to. Let me break that norm for a second.
So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
> but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
I've noticed it in my friend group. My friends will freely talk about parenting and how great it is until one of the childless (by choice) friends show up. It's like we don't want them to feel bad or make it seem like we're criticizing their choice.
Also, I've definitely seen pro-parenthood posts be downvoted on Reddit. I don't mean anything obnoxious, just literally people talking about how they like parenting or how rewarding it is when it's relevant to the conversation. Obviously that's a super liberal group and that's where we see almost all of the decline, though.
I don’t buy that having children is the only really rewarding thing you could do as a human.
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
I didn't say it was the only rewarding thing you can do, but it's probably the most rewarding thing that is attainable for most people.
Don't get me wrong, I think the problem is multifaceted, but don't you think it's odd that in very disparate cultures they're practically all having the same issue, but only in places that have first world-type amenities? Yes, there are odd groups here and there that don't conform, but the trend to that affect is worldwide. And again, this is when we know our hormones are definitely getting disrupted.
"Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one."
I don't understand that. Why? If anything I've heard the opposite most of my life, where men are afraid to have kids for child support reasons.
In surveys, Orthodox Jewish women rate their happiness with life higher than secular women. You could argue that this is subjective, but I think you would find the same if you look at other derived markers, like substance abuse, suicide, etc.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
> the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the “soyboy” type of person
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
While this is generally true, the first derivative of the baby bust curve is far from uniform across the planet. Indian fertility drop has been very sharp and who knows where it will end.
People who have children often report it being the most fulfilling thing they ever did, while other pleasures are temporary. So I don't know if I can buy this argument.
I know the "bring them into this world" thing is overdone, but a big part of me feels it to my core.
I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical.
How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
Many people think a well manicured lawn sprayed with pesticides is preferable to local wildflowers and shrubs.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
SamPatt, it isn't necessarily individuals making individual decisions. Yeah, very few supervillains.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
People shutting down efforts to transition from fossil fuels because they can make more money from fossil fuels and will be dead before they experience any of the consequences are the typical example.
We have billionaries and LLCs, supervillains whose superpowers are based on being rich, don't worrying about the future much beyond the next quarter, and pretending personhood to hold rights like people, but without the possibility of getting arrested.
I hate to say it, but I have been feeling the same way recently. I just don't see humanity being sustainable on this planet if we are relying on constantly producing more and more people. There has to be an equilibrium of some kind.
I doubt anybody wants to produce more and more people. Most predictions for total population size I have seen are rather asymptotic.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
You reworded what I said and changed the context greatly.
Our economic system is a pyramid of consumption, wealth gets concentrated up and relies on an ever increasing lower strata to maintain the status quo. When the lower section stops increasing, it breaks down. I barely want to live in a world of constant harassment by middle men.
I don't want a child to be a pawn in the greater "Population decline!!!!" propaganda mill, where the threat and fault of the failing pyramid scheme is placed on the lower strata rather than the doomsday-bunker class.
>Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?
More sweeping current problems under the future generation's rug. We could solve many of these problems today, but the causes of the problems are protected by the state.
An odd example, as fireflies are still pretty big in the places they have always been, aren't they? I know when I get to visit my childhood states, they are still there. Similar for cicadas and other bugs of my youth that I didn't realize were far more local than I expected.
It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
One could make the point this is less about industrialization causing a change in behavior, and more chemical pollution destroying fertility. Of which we have plenty of concrete evidence.
Except evidence does not show that there are many more people trying and failing for kids as in past decades, so much as more people are delaying partnering up and having kids till later and later, along with many opting to be childless.
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
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.
Except in [0] the birth rate is relatively flat between 1950-1970 and then suddenly starts a rapid reduction. Developed countries have already been industrialized for 100 years by that point. The modern work day and access to many modern fun and rewarding activitys have been available for literal decades. Mass urbanization already occurred. Many of the modern household appliances have been in use for decades. Antibiotics, vaccines, and childhood mortality had already been dramatically reduced to within the vicinity of modern norms. In developed countrys female workforce participation, education, and political activity were material with no clear fundamental shift in those metrics in the 1960s-1970s.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
I think that is it. We have somewhat of a confirmation with Romania and Decree 770, which led to an increase in children (though that might have been temporary I'm not well versed in the history). I think there is no inherent desire to have children or if there is, it is far weaker than a lot of people think. And it makes sense, evolutionary. If you have a desire for self-preservation, a desire for the preservation of those close to you, a desire to nurture the young (once they are there, which also shows in seeing 'cuteness') and a desire for sex, then you don't really 'need' a desire for children directly, because the children will naturally follow from that chain of desires. It just fits with how evolution seems to works (I think at least), which often causes these daisy chains of things that work intermittently to cause something else.
Thinking along those lines, a desire to "have children" may have even been bad - no built in stopping point. New child every year, resources overwhelmed...
There was a science fiction story I read about that once, an alien species that would die if they didn't give birth every year. I think they tried everything from hormone modification to mass baby dump pits but they couldn't maintain a stable society for longer than about fifty years when overpopulation killed everyone, so thrt just gave up.
Actually more than one, because I also read one about scientists deciphering messages from aliens who used the word for "baby eater" to mean "good"
The first one sounded familiar and I've definitely read the plot summary of this before, but not the book so I don't know if the rest of that description applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye
> if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
Well yes, trivially: it's kinda difficult to engage in behaviour that can get someone on birth control pregnant. The first behaviour pretty much has to be "stop using the birth control".
When I was a teenage boy and learning about periods and the pill for the first time, I thought it obvious that women would choose the pill to stop having periods: they sound awful.
Took a decade or so before I learned that some women actually have much worse experiences on the pill than off. This is presumably why mooncups are really popular. And presumably those also have issues, otherwise I'd have stopped seeing tampons for sale.
I can't tell by your username if you're a woman with the lived experience of what you're stating is the cause of lower birth rates, or one of the many guys like me who just assumed the pill would solve a lot of the problems women talk about?
it’s funny how much mental gymnastics people will do to avoid this obvious answer
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
A modern take on Matthias Wandel's classic [0], which has you guess a variety of geometric attributes (e.g. angle bisection, centroid locating, shape regularization), not just simple partitioning of a line.
idk, it only took me one click to figure out what the goal was and how I was being judged (beat the average). I feel like that's part of the puzzle. Sort of similar to Baba is You. Figuring out the goal is part of the puzzle.
Just want to say thank you for sharing your project. Very fun, and I wouldn't know about Matthias Wandel's version if not for yours!
Also, both of these tickled my brain in a great way. I think a potentially fun continuation would be to "eyeball" physics. For example, throw a ball and pause the physics before it hits something (ground, object, who knows?) and guess the location. Or show two objects about to collide with certain shapes and masses and guess what one of them will hit first and where.
I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?
The argument (which may or may not be valid, just explaining it) is that companies do not lease space (or take any action), people do. And the same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate; even if the company doesn’t benefit from maintaining an expensive office, the C suite might; and if so, then of course that’s the decision that will be made.
>[T]he same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate
But those individuals are much bigger shareholders in the company they work for. Downsizing the office footprint of a single company has a tiny marginal effect on the overall real estate market, but can incur enormous savings for the company, and enormous personal rewards to the people making the decision to downsize and save money.
Individuals are notoriously bad at considering collective externalities. If a CFO realizes that they could save tens of millions of dollars per year on real estate by switching to remote-only, they’re not going to then think “but if everyone did this, it would hurt the commercial real estate holdings I have in my portfolio.” No, the CFO is thinking “announcing that we’re saving 8 figures per annum on real estate is going to pop the share price of my company (and thus my equity holdings), and likely net me a really fat cash bonus.” By similar logic, CTOs, who likely have considerable technology investments, would want to needlessly maximize tech spend. Instead, they get lauded for cutting IT costs.
One of my favorite details of this movie is that the semi-antagonistic ENCOM executive Dillinger uses emacs [0], while Flynn uses vi. Clearly, the VFX artist who made the film's UNIX shells had a preference!
(Dillinger is also shown running "ENCOM Linux" -- is the VFX artist a BSD user? As he cycles through his buffers, we see a split second of `hanoi-unix`; definitely not the type to pay attention during boring board meetings!)
The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog. A few more details were shared at a talk at an HN meetup several years ago.
> The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog
I don't see any details about setting up a dichotomy in that article (just that the author was a happy Emacs user). Or maybe that was in that HN meetup you mention?
and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas
Almost. The explanation there is that effectively jtnimoy did the terminal user equivalent of motion capture. Xe ran some shell sessions, which were recorded, and the animators took them and reconstructed them in Adobe and Cinema 4D.
Just so long as it's just a seductive mirage to the Oracles, Microsofts, Metas, and Googles as well as your friendly neighbourhood unpaid overworked open-source developer.
Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.
Or that the notion of "Imaginary Property" was a seductive mirage to copyleft folks, many of whom have since realized that they do, in fact, value intellectual property rights in the wake of AI companies' free (as in freedom) use of other people's IP.
I stand somewhere in the middle: while our IP laws are far too restrictive, the folly of abolishing IP altogether has been effectively laid bare by AI companies.
>There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
I think his bigger point is that it seems to always go this way. About two weeks ago there was a panic about helium and chipmaking and the crisis that the strait would cause. One that didn't even bother to look into where helium is sourced.
I think the world is much, much more varied and complex than these "this is the one true doom" mindsets can fathom. It's a constructed theory that makes perfect sense until it meets the real world.
The simpler explanation is that an industry insider who can publish a piece saying “helium shortage will mean the end of chip making as we know it” can get a lot more views and clicks than one who published “chip making will get mildly more expensive because one of the key ingredients is going to need to be sourced from farther away or from more expensive suppliers”. There is always an angle, whether it is clout, pumping the market, selling you something, etc. and when you are not an industry insider there is little you can do to understand where else you can buy the particular ingredient from so it sounds plausible.
Synthetic quartz can already be produced at 5N with high consistency. It's also rapidly decreasing in price. China has been investing a lot in it. I don't think we're at all far away from price parity between synthetic and mined quartz
>Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.
Sorry, do you have any examples? His views that I've read [0, 1] are scientifically rigorous and terminologically precise, deftly navigating the politics that some consider extremely controversial. To wit, one of my favorite passages from [1], which deals specifically with terminology:
But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which is mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.
This particular passage is on p. 253 of [1], but everything in Chapter 11 ("The Genomics of Race and Identity," pp. 247-273) is well worth the read.
It's unfortunate that the URL happens to be buzzfeed, but there was an open letter to Reich by other academics about his terminology in the book you're quoting [0]. The short of it is that social categorizations we believe in like race intersect with genetics in a very complicated way. Reich is a world-class expert in genetics. He simply commits the same error as many other other experts in discounting the complexity of subjects he's adjacent to, but not directly an expert in.
I get that this is a high standard to hold him to (and I sure as heck don't meet it myself), but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
The crux of that letter is the "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true. However, this does not mean that there aren't also meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation that do stratify according to ancestry (not race!). The letter tries to handwave this away, claiming that "[f]or several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference." This is simply not true, as studies like the subject of this discussion demonstrate.
The letter also states that "[t]he public should not cede the power to define race to scientists who themselves are not trained to understand the social contexts that shape the formation of this fraught category." Also true! This is exactly why Reich explicitly avoids discussing "races" but rather populations and ancestries, which are rigorously defined strictly in terms of genetics. With respect to population structures and ancestry, Reich is indeed an expert.
I'll add that very few of the signatories of that letter have any experience, let alone expertise in genetics. Here are the first few:
Jonathan Kahn, James E. Kelley Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Columbia University; President, Social Science Research Council
Joseph L. Graves Jr., Associate Dean for Research & Professor of Biological Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section G: Biological Sciences, Joint School of Nanoscience & Nanoengineering, North Carolina A&T State University, UNC Greensboro
Sarah Abel, Postdoc, Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland
Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Princeton University
Sarah Blacker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Catherine Bliss, Associate Professor, Social and Behavioral Sciences, UC San Francisco
Out of the 67 signatories, I counted approximately 5 who might have sufficient genetics expertise to offer a meaningful scientific counterpoint to Reich's work (this is being charitable, as I included titles like "Professor of Biological Sciences," which is no guarantee.) The rest were in fields like anthropology, sociology, law, and history.
Yes, because it's not an argument the letter is making. Everyone can name a meaningful genetic patterns of genetic variation that follow ancestry like lactase persistence. The argument is in the second paragraph:
But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.
It's not an argument that Reich gets the science wrong, so other geneticists being on the list is neither here nor there. When he says things like:
But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
in NYT opinion pieces, it's that he's not understanding how terminology interacts with public discourse. The next paragraph goes on to use the unclear term "west african", not exactly a great example of careful language either.
The list is mainly people in fields that deal with these things, as you'd expect.
>Yes, because it's not an argument the letter is making.
It literally is though. The full quote from the Buzzfeed piece is:
Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.
>The argument is in the second paragraph:
But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.
Reich never purports to make cultural or political arguments, just biological ones.
>When he says things like:
But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
Note that he put "races" in quotes. The point he was making here is that sometimes genetic ancestries can intersect quite well with traditional notions of "race" [0]. But often times they do not, especially in the case of admixed populations [1].
I know, but we both see how a random member of the public could easily read it. My argument, after all, is that the way he communicates is sloppier than it should be for the subject matter and prone to public misunderstandings.
> "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true.
There's an implicit assertion in that statement, that we're currently not recognizing that meaningful patterns and variation exists. But that's nonsense. We are all perfectly aware that some groups digest lactose better, some are less vulnerable to skin cancer, some drop like flies to common tropical diseases, some completely dominate long distance running competition etc.
So there's got to be some particular differences he's referring to that he thinks are papered over. He should spell out which.
The biggest complication is that the current notion of human race is largely based on skin color (with a few adjacent physical traits), which has very little to do with population genetics. In particular, black skin color is a dominant genetic trait, meaning that you can easily have individuals and even entire subpopulations that are black skinned, but have much more genetic similarity to traditionally white skinned populations (being descendents of a few black skinned individuals who married into a larger white skinned population) - while they would still be categorized as "black" in terms of race. Conversely, genetically isolated black skinned populations are also often lumped together as "the black race".
Another major complexity is that some races are defined more by genealogic ancestry than by genetic ancestry or easily identifiable physical characteristics. For example, people are normally considered Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. This leads to many genetically disparate subpopulations being lumped together as a Jewish race.
> but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
Why? He presented real verified science. Anyone who is offended or does not like it ... well, too bad... the world does not care. Facts are facts. He does not owe you or anyone else comfort. He presents cold hard truth, and sometimes truth hurts. Tough.
I haven't read much from Reich, so I don't know his position. But I've understood that the current best practice in human genetics is to explicitly justify the population descriptors chosen for each study, rather than using any fixed set of descriptors given from the outside.
There are two main types of genetic descriptors: those based on genetic similarity and those based on ancestry groups. Genetic similarity is quantitative, and individual samples often have multiple labels attached to them. Ancestry groups are discrete categories based on quantitative measures. If it's appropriate to use descriptors based on genetic ancestry groups in a study, it's usually also appropriate to drop samples that don't fit neatly in any single group.
Sometimes it's more appropriate to use descriptors based on environmental factors, such as ethnicity or geography. Environmental descriptors tend to be correlated with genetic descriptors, but they are not the same.
People currently assume AI will be an accelerant of inequality because all currently useful models (i.e. those potentially capable of mass labor disruption) are only able to run in multibillion dollar datacenters, with all returns accruing disproportionately to the oligarchs who own said datacenters.
I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
> Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest. There will be violence, but not because AI is supposedly a catalyst of inequality. It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
>It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.
> It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
There's been ongoing class warfare happening for centuries, but only the rich side is firing the bullets. The rest of us are just standing in the front lines getting shot. AI is just another type of gun for their army.
I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement.
Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Would anyone watch these robots in competition? I doubt it. We watch Bolt, Biles, and Bonaly compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. It is a celebration of human achievement, even though that achievement objectively pales in comparison to what our machines can accomplish.
I think the same is true for other aspects of human creativity and labor. As we are able to automate more and more, we will place increasing importance on what inherently cannot be automated: celebration of our fellow humanity. Another poster wrote that "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact [1]. I am inclined to agree.
> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly.
Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.
> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?
I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.
So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.
> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"
No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.
"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.
When chess engines started becoming really good, some people worried that competitive chess would die. Today, grandmasters stand no chance against a smartphone, and yet, chess popularity is at an all time high.
Chess is an unusually poor example. When computers took over Chess, we didn't have something stupid like 30% of employment relying on playing Chess to eat and pay rent.
The analogy only makes sense if you're already convinced that we won't lose the majority of white-collar work to computers.
To those who are not convinced that we are looking at making 50% of the workforce redundant, Chess is an analogy that makes no sense.
It only makes sense if you're already a true believer.
I respectfully disagree with this statement in the sense that if the whole world ends up becoming like a chess tournament. It would become insanely more harder for us to live our lives peacefully. The life of a chess player is filled with stress.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587863) A comment I had written sometime ago. Aside from a very few at the top, I have seen some chess players regret in a very nostalgic way.
The chess industry continues to allege against each other and we lost a star (Rest in peace, Daniel Naroditsky) because of it. The current world champion himself is struggling from all the pressure put on a 19 year old boy.
We enjoy playing against each other but man it is competitive if you wish to feed families.
Most of us play chess out of leisure. I am unsure how a world where everyone does something akin to chess competitively (ie. for money, as we wish to feed our children and ourselves) would look like.
One can say something similar to UBI might be needed and then we all play chess in leisure, but I don't think that is what most people propose when they mention the example of chess.
I'm not really into either F1 or Nascar, but my impression from the outside is that those sports are still primarily about the drivers
F1 is somewhat about which company can build a better car. But any real improvements seem to invariably lead to a rule change that bans that improvement in future seasons. So you are back to drivers being the most visible differentiator
I'd say JS Bach was one of the fruits of our labor, so were Newton, Einstein and van Gogh.
Olympic Athletes are a combination of luck in the genetics department and a lot of effort, but ultimately do not seem to be sufficient to help the athletes themselves.
As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein).
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28575452/
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30205-2
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18875-x
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