India's surprise baby bust

toomuchtodo

https://archive.today/ZDxIe https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...

ggm

... as predicted by demographers for the last ?10? Years? Longer?

davidedwardc

Will this result in Indian immigration slowing into western countries?

hedora

What’s the problem? We’re committed to destroying livable human habitat for 100M’s to 1B’s of people via global warming. That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.

zkmon

This has a religious angle. Some religions believe in having as many babies as possible. Other religions are seeing the effect and realizing their mistake.

i_idiot

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

staminade

Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high. We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children. These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.

ChrisMarshallNY

> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed. I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women. I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong). I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again. [EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]

wg0

Maybe economic struggle is not letting people take such a delicate and demanding responsibility. It's getting very difficult everywhere. It's not that just cost of living or housing affordability is a Western problem.

mywittyname

> One study showed how the arrival of cable television in Indian villages in the 2000s led to a moderate fall in fertility. Soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families may have changed norms (though some wonder whether people were just watching TV rather than having sex). The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).

pelagicAustral

> But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free. Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably. Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.

voxleone

Other Global South countries show the same trend. At roughly 1.6, Brazil is now in a similar range to countries such as the United States (slightly below replacement).

NoMoreNicksLeft

>But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few. The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.

xaxaxb

"It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile." Yes, good to know the "rich places" are not alone.

fred_is_fred

Every single population growth and peak chart for the last 10 years (and maybe 20) has been wrong with growth slowing much faster than expected. It's basically the opposite of all the solar power growth predictions. I predict this article is wrong too and the growth continues to fall. Just wait until no kids becomes the norm for couples in their 30s in India like it is here in the US.

mekdoonggi

If they have the freedom to choose otherwise, they will. The global fertility "crisis" is simply individuals exercising their choices. Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.

MontyCarloHall

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. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate [1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/

mekdoonggi

Infinite economic growth depends on women having babies above replacement. Therefore, the economic value of a woman having three babies is virtually unlimited, and the economic destruction of a woman having less is also unlimited (when projecting far enough into the future). It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...

eudamoniac

The desire to procreate above replacement levels is probably heritable, so it will all work itself out naturally.

porridgeraisin

I have written about this before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098431 BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare. The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2. Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)