The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
It's not necessary to pay for other peoples housing, all that is necessary is to repeal absurd zoning laws and ridiculous bureaucracy that makes building such things 100x more expensive (if it's even possible) than they need to be.
That's land owners "paying for it" in a decrease to the price of their assets. I'm all for that, but it involves one group of people benefiting from the loss to another group of people.
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
> This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false.
Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.
>>Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?
>This implies that more people make society poorer.
Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.
It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.
> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more
This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.
There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.
> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?
Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.
Fish, livestock, forests, land are all finite and we're already consuming them at such rate that by the end of the century our planet will become a desert. Adding a few more billions people won't help the matter. Solar ans other clean energy won't create more food and land. What would help is a drastic novel method of resources management.
Oh.. just that problem about our space ship not having infinite resources.. looking into the past won't help for seeing the rebound of the sigmoid curve..
Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty.
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
Housing and infrastructure? We even have bigger problems, and even if economists claim endless growth it is clear that our population, unless we grow into space, cannot grow forever.
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
> Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity
As soon as you switch from the pyramid to the fat belly curve (of population vs age) you gain workforce with respect to burden and thus productivity as a country, as soon as it becomes top heavy you're screwed. Maybe it's something else but the baby boom after ww2 and impulses in the 50's 60's will become the baby burden quite soon (and has already started to be).
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
Children can live in their parents' homes, or parents can live in their childrens' homes.
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)
There’s a really fundamental socio-economic change that nobody has touched upon here yet, as it’s such a slow one with such inertia it’s barely noticeable from the ground.
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
> Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
> Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
I get what you're saying, but I mean nowadays it's not like they grow up as a purely sunk cost... A fairly-average-in-all-industrious-matters child will get a job and make an income, and there's a good chance the child will produce more than the input cost. It's up to the family if they're going to share that total wealth with each other though.
In fact, compared to before, there might be even more opportunities for children to increase that "return on investment", if you really want to think that way.
>This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
Economic conditions (real and imagined) in urban and suburban areas not unlike those seen in 1920 (automation resulted in massive economic gains capture) have caused total replacement fertility to drop in those areas to rates similar to 1920 (total TFR 2.3 at 50% rural -> likely urban TFR much lower).
This isn't so much as "long term trend" as it is "returning to the post-industrial baseline"; doomerism doesn't help, but their choice to not reproduce will improve the climate and resources available to my children so I find it rather difficult to see this as a problem.
* (sociologic) fear of climate change (will the world still be habitable in 20 years' time) or commitment to make a small positive impact on climate change by not having kids
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
It's not about whether your kids will cause climate change. It's about creating children just in time for them to suffer through the collapse of civilisation.
For most people who say this, it’s just a rationalization.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
This is one the factors as to why my partner and I have decided against having children. Not because we think it'll make the situation worse, but because we believe they shouldn't have to deal with the significant fallout from resource contention, climate migration etc. that is more than likely on the horizon when they had no hand in creating the problem
If we're talking about mortality salience, then there's quite a lot of evidence that mortality salience predicts a greater desire to have children, which is the opposite to what you're suggesting.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
> I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change")
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.
I generally agree with you and while reading that line made me laugh, I think you are misunderstanding the statement.
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008.
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
Increased/unlimited immigration seems like their preferred solution to the labor shortage problem. So what if a country's population are refusing to work, just bring in people who are used to worse and pay them less than those pesky citizens.
We can either automate production or import workers.
Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).
BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.
don't forget education is expensive, and quite a few have received funding in predatory lending ways where the debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy without even receiving the degree.
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
I am an engineer as well, in western Europe with kids. But I regularly see people committing code at 9pm or commenting on docs at 11pm or see their testing traces (logs) at 1am and on weekends.
I can't compete with them in any way. "Don't work hard, work smarter" doesn't apply here, because I am surrounded by smart people, who also do smart work, when baseline is same, you just need to work more.
Guess who will be liked/praised more and have less chances to be laid off when conditions get worse?
I am lucky though, its not easy to fire people here, can't imagine what's happening in US
I have worked 10-12 hours a day throughout all of my working career (from 19yo onwards). This is in central Europe, and I'm not even the hardest worker around.
* (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workplace
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed.
I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this.
As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family.
But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with.
I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
> * (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
They (conservative ones) seem to want to force births (against abortion & in some extreme cases, even contraception). But the followup on supporting kids is, like you said, not there.
I feel like real estate prices outweigh a lot of other factors entirely because real estate costs in places people would prefer to live are an order of magnitude higher than they were even a generation ago after accounting for inflation, and where people live determines an immense number of other factors.
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
These statistics [1] would suggest that sociological factors are in play, especially if you look at the graphs for young people. The number of young men not having sex is at record numbers.
As the sibling post noted, most of the positive natality in Western Europe is due to immigrant mothers. And since the US has quite a strong barrier to entry for immigration they don't benefit from this effect.
[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).
there are couple of differences between EU and US which can introduce confusion:
1. EU countries sees a lot immigration from Middle East and Africa, who has more kids and there is still a cultural difference towards having kids, give some time to those people to notice the environment and you see similar trend
2. but also EU countries have stronger labor policies which impacts birth rate. Not easy to fire, even when they don't have a job, they get support from government, cheap healthcare (I pay ~250-300 EUR/month for a family, no payment for kids), free dentist until 18 years for kids.
It doesn't cancel what I have said about the impact and reasons, if same conditions exist in EU countries as well, you would see similar decline, which also means this is a political and economical issue
Would there also be effect that long term relationships are hard and pairing up has been disturbed by dating apps. If you aren't living together with regular partner taking next step of getting kid rarely happens.
> If you aren't living together with regular partner taking next step of getting kid rarely happens.
Hard to live together with your partner if you're living with roommates (or worse, parents) because you can't make rent or can barely afford a 20 m² micro apartment.
There's a comical Jurassic Park "life finds a way" outcome lurking... those reproductively restricted by these ideas gradually will be replaced by those who are not so inhibited.
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
Indeed. There's been decades of "TEENAGERS: DO NOT HAVE SEX AND IF YOU DO ESPECIALLY DO NOT GET PREGNANT, PREGNANCY AND LABOUR ARE DANGEROUS AND UNCOMFORTABLE" messaging, and now we're surprised that it's working?
I think your last two points make up most of the drivers. Particularly now many people are in an un-breakable relationship with their smartphones.
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
* (policy) - If things don't work out, your wife will divorce you, take half of what you have and enslave you to pay her support for the next 15 years. Actually, she might do that just because she needs more passion while you are hard at work.
Whenever I hear "wedding" I wonder why the male is going for that risk. The obvious unfairness and non-equality during a divorce is the main reason why I never would get married. Its just illogical to put yourself that much at risk.
> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline.
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.
You don't necessarily need to own a home, but I think we'd agree most want to be in a good place financially before raising kids. Having a foot on the property ladder and living somewhere you can raise a family over the long-term is clearly part of this for most people.
You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
It's a slightly bizarre and under-discussed aspect of British culture. There's a widespread cultural belief that you have to own a house and "get on the property ladder" before you start a family or really consider yourself a proper adult. The ladder is a reference to the assumption that house prices only ever go up so it's free money to own one, which you can then invest in another more expensive house and so on.
Here's another possible cause that I don't see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it's really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.
I honestly don't get it, but I'm not an economist so I may be wrong.
Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare.
The UK's government is, frankly, gone nuts. They complain about no one picking fruits from fields and empty supermarket shelves, they don't want immigration, they don't want population growth, and they don't want imports from the EU.
All of that doesn't add up even in the slightest to anything that makes sense.
> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved.
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.
That's what 2,000 people tell Paul Krugman every time he tells them 'the economy is fine' in his New York Times column.
It's quite entertaining to watch, altough troubling. He's smart, he gets a lot of direct feedback, and yet he doesn't understand it at all.
Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations.
Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid:
"You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid"
That this analysis tries to claim this doesn't correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say "the economy recovered" we don't mean anything that's meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the "real economy" and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore "distributional outcomes" and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a "recovery" or really even "the economy" has less and less to do with the majority of people's real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs.
“””
> in the United States during 2018-2020 (average), the highest fertility rates per 1,000 women were to women ages 20-29 (80.1), followed by women ages 30-39 (75.3) [...]
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.
Readit News
The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
By all means build but you also need laws to prevent houses from being snapped up by those who don't intend to live them.
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.
>This implies that more people make society poorer.
Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.
It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.
This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.
There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.
Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?
Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.
Not at all, people don't create resources, we consume resources.
> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down.
As long as we believe in infinite exponential growth. Instead we are starting to hit the wall and it time to stop dreaming.
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.
I see no mystery here.
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
As soon as you switch from the pyramid to the fat belly curve (of population vs age) you gain workforce with respect to burden and thus productivity as a country, as soon as it becomes top heavy you're screwed. Maybe it's something else but the baby boom after ww2 and impulses in the 50's 60's will become the baby burden quite soon (and has already started to be).
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
I disagree with this statement.
Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids?
* (economic) difficult to manage finances
* (economic) can't buy house, too expensive
* (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off.
* (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks
* (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
> Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
I get what you're saying, but I mean nowadays it's not like they grow up as a purely sunk cost... A fairly-average-in-all-industrious-matters child will get a job and make an income, and there's a good chance the child will produce more than the input cost. It's up to the family if they're going to share that total wealth with each other though.
In fact, compared to before, there might be even more opportunities for children to increase that "return on investment", if you really want to think that way.
Economic conditions (real and imagined) in urban and suburban areas not unlike those seen in 1920 (automation resulted in massive economic gains capture) have caused total replacement fertility to drop in those areas to rates similar to 1920 (total TFR 2.3 at 50% rural -> likely urban TFR much lower).
This isn't so much as "long term trend" as it is "returning to the post-industrial baseline"; doomerism doesn't help, but their choice to not reproduce will improve the climate and resources available to my children so I find it rather difficult to see this as a problem.
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
And dont get me wrong - we arent climate change deniers, just... pick your battles
Why waste your life worrying about something you have tiny impact on?
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).
BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
I can't even imagine working a minute longer than 8 hours per day, and 12+ hours is woow. Is this common in US?
I work 8 hours my whole career (IT). My wife works 6 hours per day. (central Europe)
I can't compete with them in any way. "Don't work hard, work smarter" doesn't apply here, because I am surrounded by smart people, who also do smart work, when baseline is same, you just need to work more.
Guess who will be liked/praised more and have less chances to be laid off when conditions get worse?
I am lucky though, its not easy to fire people here, can't imagine what's happening in US
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this.
As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family.
But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with.
I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
They (conservative ones) seem to want to force births (against abortion & in some extreme cases, even contraception). But the followup on supporting kids is, like you said, not there.
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US tracks this. Average weekly hours worked as of April of this year is 34.4, or 6.9 hours a day: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/199958/number-of-green-c...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Seems pretty unique to US.
Thus I conclude that most of the speculation in this thread is not backed by the facts.
1. EU countries sees a lot immigration from Middle East and Africa, who has more kids and there is still a cultural difference towards having kids, give some time to those people to notice the environment and you see similar trend
2. but also EU countries have stronger labor policies which impacts birth rate. Not easy to fire, even when they don't have a job, they get support from government, cheap healthcare (I pay ~250-300 EUR/month for a family, no payment for kids), free dentist until 18 years for kids.
It doesn't cancel what I have said about the impact and reasons, if same conditions exist in EU countries as well, you would see similar decline, which also means this is a political and economical issue
Dead Comment
Hard to live together with your partner if you're living with roommates (or worse, parents) because you can't make rent or can barely afford a 20 m² micro apartment.
Yeah what the hell, of course it can. How blind do you have to be to write something like that?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
Indeed. There's been decades of "TEENAGERS: DO NOT HAVE SEX AND IF YOU DO ESPECIALLY DO NOT GET PREGNANT, PREGNANCY AND LABOUR ARE DANGEROUS AND UNCOMFORTABLE" messaging, and now we're surprised that it's working?
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the...
Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people.
Anecdotal evidence, I'm in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.
Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare.
But as I said, not an economist.
All of that doesn't add up even in the slightest to anything that makes sense.
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations.
Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid: "You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid"
See: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negativ...
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “””
Will have to check back on this in a few years.
Source: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+r...
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.