Dating apps are a problem, too. 80% of the women go for the same 20% of guys (6ft, 6 pack, 6 figures). In the end, many men have given up on dating.
On the flipside, these 20% of men will not commit and then women remain childless.
I keep hearing this. Sure it's true in some cases, but when I go out I see attractive women with average guys all the time. So riddle me that. Maybe it's more that many single people are actually looking for love, which is more complex?
I come from a small European country where the men are becoming quite notorious for not wanting to settle down. They want 3 rotating part-time girlfriends and an easy, low paying job that supports that lifestyle. Many of my female friends have given up on the idea of a relationship and just live their life, work and do their hobbies. So many of these men about - most of them barely hold down a job and they increasingly don't work in sectors which produce material goods, but instead are in the service sector as baristas, or personal trainers, or influencers. Men from the US do sound a bit better, in that they seem not to have given up on the idea of having well paid jobs, getting married and supporting their families.
I wonder how many women are waking up to the facts of what a risk having children is. Not only to your own body - grade 3 and 4 tears can cause lifelong pain, incontinence and disability - but the risk of being left a single mother with little or no support from an absent father is quite high. Thats a difficult sort of life to live. I have a couple of female friends - one a doctor and one a lawyer - who had to pay their boyfriends to leave their homes, because it was cheaper than going through a legal dispute. They were not married and did not have children. Even if those guys were not going to win that legal dispute, they knew it would cost money and time to defend it. Increasingly, men seem only to want to get married to women with more money than them. I'm generalising hugely. But actually not that much in my social circle.
A lot of these men are evolutionary dead ends. Their idea of "dating" is to send nudes of their private parts to women they have exchange a few online messages with, or to invite strangers to their homes to sleep with them. Then they complain that women only want to date 20% of men, or similar. We actually have a big problem with men being caught with illegal images of children on their phones - I will not go into more detail - but a lot of these men are into little boys, not adult women.
I'm married, but personally I think a lot of men live in the past, where they were the only ones who could earn money so they could get away with cheating, beating up their wives and the women had little choice but to stay with them and have their kids. You see all these men with these women from poor countries, like The Filippines, Malaysia, Thailand, parts of India - and even the women who get with the white men are the most desperate and poor from those countries - because those poor women have no choice. And they want a visa out of poverty, so they become quite good at convincing that they love these guys long time. They are only after the money and lifestyle of course but the guy gets a free maid for a few years minimum out of it.
So theres 3 choices as far as I see it:
1 - population decline - maybe no bad thing but who is going to look after all those single people in their old age?
2 - men start being nicer to women, women who have children have more security, there are consequences for men who walk out on their kids and real jail time for not paying their share of the costs of raising them, but overall treating women with more respect for the fact that they can have children
3 - society somehow forces women to have children they don't want in large numbers - cf the Handmaid's Tale, etc. In a way, some US states are already doing this, with banning abortion, even for under-age children and rap*e victims. Forced childbirth is abhorant.
Within the U.S., the rural vs. urban split is significant but doesn't account for the U.S. falling well under the replacement level, as even in rural areas, fertility is under 2.
"The total fertility rate was 1,950 births per 1,000 women in rural counties in 2017, compared with 1,778 in small or medium metro counties and 1,712 in large metro counties, according to the CDC. The age at which women became mothers also rose during the last decade, though gaps remain between rural and urban areas"
By 2070 there will be 120 retirees for every 100 workers in South Korea.
South Korea is not an outlier. They’re just a decade or so ahead of the curve.
An innovative way to address this would be to end the war with North Korea and build senior living quarters in Pyongyang. It would provide economic stimulus to the North Korean economy and interconnect their economies leading to peaceful relations between the two countries. And for North Koreans, it would be better than being sent to Siberia to cut trees or to Ukraine to act as cannon fodder.
How does this work for Spain and Italy though - they’re not far behind?
Dating apps are a problem, too. 80% of the women go for the same 20% of guys (6ft, 6 pack, 6 figures). In the end, many men have given up on dating.
On the flipside, these 20% of men will not commit and then women remain childless.
I keep hearing this. Sure it's true in some cases, but when I go out I see attractive women with average guys all the time. So riddle me that. Maybe it's more that many single people are actually looking for love, which is more complex?
Yeah it’s not true you can look at the data. Young people are having less sex than before. There’s maybe a few % living the hookup life in big cities.
It’s just cope from young people being too shy to date. Not that all dating moving online is good - it’s just not some weird manosphere “chads taking all the women” thing. (If you still legitimately feel this is the case, you should go get a college degree. That’s the strongest correlate with getting happily married right now)
An innovative way to address this would be to end the war with North Korea and build senior living quarters in Pyongyang. It would provide economic stimulus to the North Korean economy and interconnect their economies leading to peaceful relations between the two countries. And for North Koreans, it would be better than being sent to Siberia to cut trees or to Ukraine to act as cannon fodder.
How does this work for Spain and Italy though - they’re not far behind?
Italians live in their parent’s house anyhow. Spaniards could always send grandma across the Med to Africa or to some Eastern European country.
Show your math at what date you think we will hit 70% retired population.
By 2070 there will be 120 retirees for every 100 workers in South Korea.
South Korea is not an outlier. They’re just a decade or so ahead of the curve.
That is no where near 70%. 2070 is 45 years from now. Do you doubt AI and automation will be significantly advanced by then? 45 years ago people were using rotary dial on their landline phones and smoking on airplanes.
Keep in mind that there are 1 million abortions per year in the USA... 20-25% of all pregnancies. Then consider the various forms of female birth control. And for males, vasectomies.
And then women are being taught that they need to choose higher education and good jobs over family life. Next thing they know, they are approaching 40 and unmarried with zero kids.
And men often give up on finding a good wife. By the time a women is 25, her "number" is in the dozens. Men don't want that. So instead, they focus on money and power.
Almost every major religion teaches us that the problems I just described are tragic at best. We tend to look for our answers in the present and the future. And we tend to look outward. Instead of looking forward and outward, maybe it is time to reconsider the wisdom of the ancients and look inside ourselves at our own souls.
I was in California a few weeks ago. Went to the pier early in the morning. Dozens of surfers out there waiting for the perfect wave. Pretty much all of them in their 40's and 50's. Aging population isn't just a European and Asian problem, we have it in the US, too. It's just masked by millions of new immigrants every year.
Millennials and zoomers aren't interested in surfing. They are even losing interest in skating.
They are mostly interested in cell phones and inventing new genders. They don't exercise for the most part.
The OP did not cite source references, but I’ve seen plenty of similar stat figures to not dispute the decline rates themselves. There are some considerations about the accuracy of these studies because many of them are fraught with problematic Gaussian statistical assumptions and their use is widespread by researchers so a consensus would fail to suggest growth rate. Having said that I am inclined to believe that global population growth is declining despite some limitations in mathematical modeling and overconfidence by demographers.
If the figures have any veracity, they show a good thing. More than maybe a couple children per family in the world is too expensive and in the aggregate is too straining on global non renewable resources. All the old reasons for needing many children in a family are no longer relevant. You don’t need twelve kids working the family farm anywhere in practically any part of the world. The decline suggests that the global population cap is around 8 billion and that accelerations towards that number will immediately cause a reverse shift towards humans choosing to have less or no children.
I was in California a few weeks ago. Went to the pier early in the morning. Dozens of surfers out there waiting for the perfect wave. Pretty much all of them in their 40's and 50's. Aging population isn't just a European and Asian problem, we have it in the US, too. It's just masked by millions of new immigrants every year.
Millennials and zoomers aren't interested in surfing. They are even losing interest in skating.
They are mostly interested in cell phones and inventing new genders. They don't exercise for the most part.
I don’t see that though. I see young people skating and biking in every town.
Keep in mind that there are 1 million abortions per year in the USA... 20-25% of all pregnancies. Then consider the various forms of female birth control. And for males, vasectomies.
And then women are being taught that they need to choose higher education and good jobs over family life. Next thing they know, they are approaching 40 and unmarried with zero kids.
And men often give up on finding a good wife. By the time a women is 25, her "number" is in the dozens. Men don't want that. So instead, they focus on money and power.
Almost every major religion teaches us that the problems I just described are tragic at best. We tend to look for our answers in the present and the future. And we tend to look outward. Instead of looking forward and outward, maybe it is time to reconsider the wisdom of the ancients and look inside ourselves at our own souls.
Right, so your solution is that people should have kids they either don't want or haven't planned for.
I'm sure they'll be no unintended consequences from this idea.
By 2070 there will be 120 retirees for every 100 workers in South Korea.
South Korea is not an outlier. They’re just a decade or so ahead of the curve.
That is no where near 70%. 2070 is 45 years from now. Do you doubt AI and automation will be significantly advanced by then? 45 years ago people were using rotary dial on their landline phones and smoking on airplanes.
It would only be a temporary 70% anyway. The percentage of retirees will decline quickly with deaths and with less and less people to replenish the retiree pool due to declining birth rates. So a graph would show a downward sloped line illustrating an inverse relationship between birthrates (declining) and total number of retirees supported by remaining working taxpayers.
My wife and I bought or house in 2010 for $290,000. A typical household with typical careers could afford this house while having kids.
Our house right now is valued at a little over $650,000. You need to be pulling in a household income of $150K + to qualify. That is without kids.
Almost need to decide in our neck of the woods on having kids and live in an apartment or no kids and you can buy a house.
Exactly my point. It’s too expensive and the cost structures for housing and other luxury goods as you and your wife climb the income ladder are such that it provides almost a kind of negative incentive to have children. Why work hard your whole careers to be able to finally afford an over half a million dollar home when if you make the choice to have children, you can no longer afford the home? It’s the no-win that a lot of couples find themselves in. If they want the same 650 grand house and children together there’s two ways: increase income even more or the cost of the same 650 grand house must decrease. Both are difficult outcomes and may lay beyond control.
What could be changed? Perhaps some kind of legislation to cap progressive housing prices. 290 grand to 650 grand is an over 100% price hike? Why!!!? There’s no way the price is actually that much more expensive in real terms. The realty company and the contractors can charge that much because nobody is stopping them! It’s unmitigated greed at the expense of a high income couple who wants to start a family.
Some may accuse you and your wife of being shallow, but that isn’t the case. Let’s say you both work in medicine or law and laying down 80 hour weeks in high stress environments paying outrageous interest rates on student loans. You deserve that 650 grand house. You shouldn’t have to live in some shabby apartment with the newborn crying because of noise from the drug bust next door! It’s an unfair system that punishes hard work and success!
