Tracking types of non-parents in the United States

I think people fixate on the directionality too much, at this point it is a self-reinforcing cycle. I don't know how to break it, but I'm not optimistic about the half-hearted attempts of some countries to address it via subsidies and tax breaks.

> I know very few parents that would rather work than hang out with their kids.

Work being a proxy for resources, most people want both. The value shift I mentioned earlier affects the extent to which we prioritize one or the other. Given the same economic environment, a society where family is viewed as more important than material comfort would have more families sacrificing income rather than just talking about it.

>know very few parents that would rather work than hang out with their kids.

But they would work to increase the odds of securing a house in a more expensive neighborhood to increase the odds their kid is surrounded by more well heeled children for myriad reasons which then results in higher chances of getting into the best schools to increase the odds they are able to earn a high income due to possessing the right signals and knowledge.

And they would reduce the number of children they have to maximize the odds for the one or two they do have.

as someone who squarely falls into the “probably don’t want kids because of overpopulation” category —

i get the irony you’re trying to point out. but global overpopulation is not the same as national overpopulation.

at some point we’re gonna run out of fucking food as a species. *

the sooner we can get our heads out of our arses and past the primitive tribalism of “we need to have more than the other lot” as a species, the better.

i squarely fall into the “migration is the solution, not the problem” camp too [0]. exactly because of that global perspective.

plenty of people in the world. maybe it’s time we learned to share as a species? although fuck all chance of that happening any time soon in the current political climate.

* someone usually attempts a retort about “technology will magically save all of us” to this point. which is just kicking the can down the road.

[0]: edit to note that the problem i’m referring to here is national underpopulation specifically

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich has turned out to be almost exactly wrong.

Here's a good pod on the subject:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Lk2wsYafTyoPA2hrNVN8e?si=L...

For some strange reason this line of thinking had tremendous influence on the left, at least in the West, despite the fact that there has always been a huge undercurrent of racism in overpopulation discourse. This pod does a decent job calling that out. I remember watching an overpopulation alarmist documentary as a teenager and thinking -- without any prompting -- that the whole thing came off as super racist. Any time they wanted to show the looming population catastrophe they always showed hordes of people with dark skin.

Ehrlich continues to be treated like an economist -- meaning, given intellectual credibility despite a track record of having been consistently wrong.

This doesn't mean I buy into underpopulation hysteria either. I see them making the same mistake: assuming that current trends will continue indefinitely.

It's entirely possible that things like the childfree movement will cause a population rebound. How? By selecting out of the gene pool whatever traits make people more reluctant to reproduce. Until recently reproduction was pretty automatic, allowing those traits to persist, but after a few more generations of reproduction being solidly optional we could end up with a population composed of almost 100% people with intense "biological clocks" and a strong urge to have babies. The present decline in fertility could be like a "bear trap" on a bull market stock graph.

I don't see the humor you're seeing, there's no hypocrisy because the two messages are coming from two very different groups with very different values and motivations.

The "we need more people" stuff is coming from the capital class and their sycophants. They want more people so they can have more laborers to drive down the cost of labor, and more consumers to buy more product, and more renters to drive up the price of rent. They want population number to go up because they are invested and committed to the numbers go up game. As long as more people means more numbers go up, that's what they'll keep demanding. The UK has more people than ever before, it's steadily climbing but they always want even more. Unbounded growth.

The "I don't want kids because this place is crowded" and "kids are too expensive" messages are coming from members of the general public who are dealing with the ramifications of the policies of the first group. Their rent is high, their towns and cities growing, traffic is getting worse, city buses are packed, there's lots of things they want to buy but the value of their labor isn't keeping pace. Birth rate falls in response to these pressures, so the capital class tries to import new labor from poor parts of the world, knowing those new laborers will feel relatively happy to live 10 people to an apartment working for piss poor pay, because those conditions are still an improvement over where they are coming from.

not sure how thats relevant. planet is still overpopulated. Its not like someone polluting the planet in uk will only pollute uk. we all share the same global atmosphere.

This is definitely a belief system isolated to certain social classes. Lots of other classes of people thinking having children is great, love going to children's birthday parties, get excited when a relative is expecting a baby, and so forth.

By the way people respond you'd think that the mainstream thinks natalism is the ultimate squick.

What was the large family policy? I know about the one-child policy, but I don't think people needed a policy to have large families, it used to be the norm back then even outside of China.

And now smarter smarter people realize they are facing a major problem from the one child policy.

> Even in India, there are more and more who choose to have fewer, and sometimes no children.

thank god!! its suffocating over here.

curious why do you think women have gained economic and social freedom in india?

The actual existential threat to my own country has little to do with how many children people have or what their personal tax burden is.

God forbid we relax immigration laws

You might not like the culture of the kids raised by moms specifically incentivized by money to have kids, who may or may not be interested or able to raise the kids well.

It has always been trivial to pay a woman to give birth. Incentivizing the creation of productive families with well raised children is the difficult part.