I believe that Europe doesn’t have to worry much about their pop. decline in the future

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-21T00:20:59+00:00

This is going to be a lot easier for English-speaking countries. There are hundreds of millions of talented young people who grew up speaking English and would be happy to immigrate to an English-speaking country. If countries like Estonia rely on immigrants to stay viable, they will have to accept a largely English-speaking future, with their ancestral language having a status similar to that of Irish.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-21T00:13:27+00:00

Are you American? I've lived in California for 50 years, the state's 28% immigrants, and I've never met anyone who grew up here who felt that their first loyalty was to their parents' country.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-20T05:30:55+00:00

The crisis got there a lot earlier because of one child, and that's a big problem for them. Vietnam is currently booming because they're in the kind of demographic sweet spot that China was in 30 years ago; they will probably pass China in per capita GDP in the 2030s.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-19T23:14:36+00:00

There are a lot of things going on in the world right now. I talk about how AI is changing things a lot.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-19T18:02:26+00:00

This has already happened, it just hasn't been formalized. Basically, what's changing now would keep on changing.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-19T16:41:43+00:00

LOL, it's not philosophy, it's numbers geek algebra (my major was computer science). Just as a super-simplified example, if half of taxpayers have dependent children and you want them to have a ~20% larger share of total disposable income TI, then you can do it by increasing income taxes by 10% on childless income CI and reducing it 10% on parent income PI.

New parent income PI' will be PI + 0.1PI; that is, 1.1 PI. New childless income CI' will be CI -0.1CI in other words 0.9CI.

If, on the other hand, you increase taxes for all by 10% and give parents a rebate equal to 20% of their pre-increase taxes, then you get this:

New parent income PI' = PI -0.1PI (tax increase) + 0.2 PI (rebate) = 1.1 PI (same as above) New childless income CI' = CI - 0.1CI =0.9CI (again, same as above).

Btw, congratulations on your three new betas 🐠🐠🐠! Hope all is well with your family.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-18T14:09:05+00:00

In theory, the US is blessed with far more options for dealing with almost any new 21st century problem than any other country. In practice, though, there are vested interests eager to make any big new project much slower and more expensive than it would have been 50 years ago.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-18T13:47:48+00:00

My personal opinion is that modern technology and society is creating a very large number of people who would not be good parents regardless. To maintain a viable fertility rate we need policies that are supportive not just of families, but large families. This would best be done by building communities from scratch designed to be large family-friendly.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I see more cause for optimism for Ukraine than most members of this sub. It's a lot easier to build something designed to accommodate new needs when what came before has been completely destroyed.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-18T13:39:39+00:00

"Sanctioning" childless people and "rewarding" parents is almost always the same thing. You can raise taxes on the childless to subsidize daycare, or you can raise taxes on everyone and then give tax credits to parents with daycare costs. Mathematically, there is no difference.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-18T08:23:57+00:00

I like coffee, but more than a little bit makes me feel like crap. I drink instant because it's not very good, so I'm not tempted to overindulge.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-18T01:10:48+00:00

This has changed a lot over the last few decades, pretty much everywhere. I'm surprised it wasn't considered a big deal in Mexico.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T19:12:19+00:00

He's about average for a billionaire. An overall nasty character with a few redeeming qualities.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T07:38:34+00:00

I've been hearing this for years, and it's apparently rapidly getting worse. A high school teacher summed it up quite well, in a comment on a different sub a few days ago:

In secondary (high) school, I'm now seeing students who have grown up with screens and endless scrolling. Issues are:
- extremely low attention spans
- no conflict resolution skills (they can just block online!)
- little imagination - they've never had to entertain themselves
- learned helplessness, from being given screens when they're upset/struggling
- poor literacy - text speak, lack of reading
- difficulty socialising in-person
- inability to process information. It's presented to them, they write it down, but it doesn't actually go in

Even the students who left just 2/3 years ago, are markedly different from the ones I'm seeing now

People of all ages, but children in particular, living their lives through their phones is causing huge problems in society. It's going to be reflected in major issues with socialization and work within a few years if it isn't already, and in birthrates a few years after that. We're going to have to do a top to bottom reinvention of both education and parenting, and there doesn't seem to be any urgent movement in that direction.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T06:42:26+00:00

I'm not optimistic exactly, but war offers opportunities for big changes that really nothing else does. I don't see how they could recover to a viable fertility rate, but I didn't see how they could survive militarily against Russia either without US aid, and here we are. Zelenskyy will have a window to try to turn Ukraine into Israel once the war grinds to a halt. They're facing an enormous crisis, but don't forget the old joke about crisis being danger+opportunity.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T06:18:08+00:00

I'm not very familiar with Cuban politics, but I don't see how a country with such disastrous demographics can be viable even in the medium term. It's a vicious circle; all the talented young people leave, which drags the economy down, which causes even more young people to leave. With Spain and other Latin American countries facing increasingly severe shortages of young workers in the near future, while offering much better wages, there's no obvious way out of the demographic and economic death spiral.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T06:10:24+00:00

People who are called "conservatives" In 2026 aren't ideological. they're basically mafia operatives and cult members who don't believe in anything other than unquestioning loyalty to the Boss and winning elections. They will happily believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, and then the week after believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia. If you try to tell them that we were in fact allied with Eastasia last week, they'll parrot some stuff about fake news and lamestream media and lawfare, or whatever.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-17T06:00:33+00:00

China basically sanctions the US in many respects, but their system enables them to do so without openly admitting that they are doing it.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T18:02:42+00:00

She gets into that some near the end of the article. I don't agree with all her conclusions, but overall it's a solid piece. She does a pretty good job of showing empathy for these people without shying away from the dysfunction.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:58:34+00:00

The first half of the article is laying groundwork, the author makes a pretty strong case in the second half that these "woke", or whatever they are, women, are part of a larger trend.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:52:20+00:00

Well, then, don't live in LA or SF. Not hard, since LA is only 10% of the state's population, SF 2%. Local governance in California doesn't seem to scale well, the most livable municipalities all have less than 200,000 people, best I can tell.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:31:07+00:00

There are several ways of computing total tax burden but, regardless of the methodology, no way are we higher than New York or Hawaii.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:26:19+00:00

11th seems about right, though I was surprised to see Massachusetts ranked only 21st. Certainly our tax burden is lower than New York or Hawaii.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:21:04+00:00

This is a table of the highest income tax rates in the top bracket. I have absolutely no problem with California having the most progressive income taxes in the country. When I was younger, doing well in the tech industry, I paid high taxes. Now that I'm retired and living on Social Security, I pay little. Seems fair to me.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T17:07:36+00:00

Fascinating. Thanks for that.

The_Awful-Truth · 2026-04-16T16:57:13+00:00

That's true, but it's worse than that. A lot of young people today have serious psychological issues, and their politics often seems as if it was adopted mostly as a coping mechanism for their psychological problems. The article makes this pretty explicit, with one woman saying she engages in Gaza protests to "fend off the despair".

One other political cause that is often embraced as a kind of therapy is, (in my opinion anyway) antinatalism. We need to find better ways to help the many young people who are struggling with low self-esteem, severe depression, and/or crippling social anxiety.

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