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Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations. Now that children are leaving the house in those countries, the growth rate is decreasing. I doubt living with parents is affecting reproduction.

People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.

bryanrasmussen 405 days ago

>Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations.

which has a different culture than the West.

Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)

Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.

Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.

> Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages

Yes, arranged marriages played a big role in getting people to form families. It has many disadvantages in terms of personal freedom, but it seems to be effective for population growth.

Couples also need to have children in such cultures unless they want to be ostracized from society.

The birth rate issue could very well be cultural instead of a financial one.

const_cast 403 days ago

> People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.

It's the liberation of women, we can all stop now guys it's directly correlated with women's rights.

Turns out if you just give women more of a choice over having kids then a lot of them say "uh... no thanks".

>Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations.

That's comparing apples to oranges. People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries who rose to be developing countries, no? Then there's also completely different cultural norms and expectations between India and western nations and how multi generational families interact.

I had a similar discussion with someone form Africa who was shocked to hear that in some rich European countries you could have a full time job and still be homeless due to scarce housing and crazy rents. And then he replied "what's the point of a country being rich if the people are poor?". Good question mate. It's because the point of rich countries is to be tax havens and economic zones where worldwide money is funneled to the top 1% and the workers who enable that have to fight for the scraps while those who can't, get left behind for the welfare state to pick up or fall through the holes in the safety net and end up on the street.

>People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.

The reasons have been written in this thread. If you don't like them or don't resonate with you, doesn't mean they're mysterious and undiscovered. Just go on the street and ask 100 random people, they'll tell you the same.

> People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries

Most parents want their children to live a good life, whether they're from poor country or not. Besides, people used to have more sex in the past when life seemed much more hopeless than it is now. Granted, condoms didn't exist but these days, people aren't even dating anyway.

> The reasons have been written in this thread

It's all speculation at this point. If we knew the reasons, we'd solve the problem. Like the meaning of life, there are some things we can't know.

pjc50 405 days ago

You can just ask people! You can ask women why they're not having children!

Well, not on HN, but in general.

Asking people will give you a "faster horses" kind of answer.

I don't think "what you want from a horse" and "what you want from life" are comparable questions.

>Most parents want their children to live a good life, whether they're from poor country or not.

And if the country is not providing a better future for the kids than the parents, why are you surprised they're not breeding? You're also ignoring the differences in standards. For some countries, a good future might be not dying of dysentery, for others is having a single family home.

>If we knew the reasons, we'd solve the problem.

You're talking like a true politician here. "Ah geez, if only we knew why people are getting depressed, poorer and not breeding, we'd totally fix it, but as we have no clue, I guess our hands are tied, oh geez. It's totally not our immigration, zoning and financial policies that have made wages stagnate and housing more expensive and of poorer quality for your kids, no, it's the fault of video games, dating apps, avocado toast and hookup culture."

What about countries like Japan then? It's a great country where any children born would live a long and healthy life. Sure beats being born in Mogadishu. But forget about having children, Japanese people aren't even dating.

More money can't solve the problem. People could live in cardboard boxes and still reproduce if they want. The reason is multifaceted.

>Japanese people aren't even dating.

Why would you bother with the extra effort of dating if your life sucks? Just sit at home or in an internet cafe and watch streamers and play videogames. Much easier.

There's a lot of effort in dating. You gotta groom, you gotta stay fit, and you gotta go out and mingle. But when are you gonna do all that if you finish work at 9pm and need to wake up at 7am as do a lot of japanese?

>More money can't solve the problem.

More money means needling less time spent working and more time for dating/hobbies.

markus_zhang 405 days ago

Not surprised. Housing went up a lot in recent years and it is not affordable for most young people. And if you have to rent, why not rent your parent's?

formerly_proven 405 days ago

Housing in the West was basically turned into another pillar of retiree funding. Old people extract tremendous financial gains from younger generations by either a) selling them decrepit real estate at extremely high prices or b) collecting very high rents on buildings that are even older than themselves (even in the US, which is the king of corporate landlording, they are a small minority; most landlords are natural persons, mostly retirees or near-retirees).

It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible.

(Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)

rightbyte 405 days ago

No matter the system you'd end up with the working age population tending for the children and elderly. I don't think that in it self is a problem. You could argue around implementation details though ...

formerly_proven 405 days ago

(Near-)retirees are typically the largest voting bloc and usually the only one experiencing any growth in most of the West. It is unsurprising that they get to set policies that solely benefit them at the expense of everyone else, including those that are yet to be born and those who will never be born because of those policies. And why would they care about the future? Retirees, by revealed preference, don't, and why would they? It's not their future they're destroying. Indeed, they're making quite a nice (short) future for themselves by bleeding societies dry.

rightbyte 405 days ago

My experience joining a political party as 3X yo is that the (near)retirees are eager to throw mandates at you because you are young.

The early 20s and 5X+ are the ones that have more time for politics. I would not read some inter-generational class warfare into that.

I wouldn't broadly blame generations for things. It is like that silly Karen meme service workers have. We are part of the problem too.

jplrssn 405 days ago

Young people may be checking out of that system but BlackRock and others are doing the opposite.

Why wouldn’t they, when government policy has made it an asset class that can never fall in value?