alt Hacker NewsI went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.
This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.
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YouTube short of the space: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gww1RtyEwww
I keep marveling at art's capacity to elicit deep thoughts and feelings, universally
Babies have always been expensive. The expense just happened to not be fully accounted for until recently.
Although, perhaps it could be better framed as the short term expense was not accounted for, whereas now, the long term expense is not accounted for.
Short term being less than a few decades and long term being more than a few decades.
There is also a collective vs individual expense aspect.
> "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts."
One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.
The econtalk podcast did a deep dive into the fertility crisis recently, and later on I dug deeper into the topic with claude in research mode. I had always thought people were having less children because they value them more in modern times (“children are precious”), but this doesn’t match the data in recent times. You often hear dropping male fertility as the cause but this also doesn’t match the data all that strongly. You also hear that people can’t afford children anymore and while there is some truth to that, you also see the fertility drop in places where this isn’t the case.
What does match is people partnering later and less often (the loneliness epidemic) and thereby delaying children. Once a woman starts she follows the same path as before for their age bracket, but starting later runs out the clock on their fertility. We went from 3 as the standard to 2 as the standard, and more women ending up with one or none, making 1.4 the new “default” total fertility rate. There are many theories for the causes of the global trend, and some cultures buck the trend (the Amish are on course to become a powerful voting block in a few decades), but there seems to be no theory that the data is a strong fit for.
All attempts so far by governments to reverse the trend have failed. Some countries spent multiple gdp points on fertility, and only saw minor gains.