Housing is obscenely expensive for young couples in most major metros. Most places don’t pay well enough to afford daycare. Women want careers too. Few countries have comprehensive parental leave.
Can’t complain about less kids and have policies which make raising kids a risky financial and life decision.
We gotta do a better job at providing for the kids we already have.
Housing is artificially expensive: zoning limits the construction of denser housing thus leading to a supply shortage and high prices. Most of America is under-built and the housing problem would go away if American cities were upzoned to a gentle six-story, mixed-use density.
Your points about how we must do better to make having kids less financially risky are excellent however. Better parental leave and tax incentives would help.
House prices in the USA have less impact on the total world population than you might think. Similarly, the number of people living in a situation where having children is a smart financial decision for the future is a lot larger than you might think.
Remember this [1] picture?
Related: the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to explode further. Average age there is, according to the google infobox [2], 18.8.
In other words: US-internal policies are not going to move the needle on world population much.
Housing is a non-sequitur. Looking at where children are born across the globe, those places have very high housing prices for the local wages, minimal government safety nets and higher poverty rates.
Main reason seems to be that young people in advanced societies simply don't want children because the alternate childless lifestyle seems very appealing in 20s and 30s, costs of raising kids are privatized while benefits are socialized (welfare programs funded by taxes on the working generation).
> if American cities were upzoned to a gentle six-story, mixed-use density
This will not work for as long as we keep building neighborhoods that require the use of cars or make biking/walking unsafe. America also lacks a comprehensive public transportation system.
Yeah. All the productivity gains in the last 40 years have been going towards the side of capital while workers are left in the side of the road. The absurdly rich become richer while the middle-class shrinks.
But yeah, the problem is that some people want to live in their houses with a backyard, those evil villains that don't see the advantage of living in a pigeon home for further capitalistic enhancement of the lives of fat-cat developers.
Everything that exists deserves to perish. The capitalistic leviathan can never be stopped, neither questioned. What do those small folks in the path of progress think they are?
Many Americans have no desire to live in a 6 story hell scapes. The idea is revolting to me personally. IMO Housing issues in America at this time are directly tied to the dominance of the fix and flip industry, corporations holding SFR and Mfr properties, high interest rates, and job inflexibility.
Tax incentives help, but where Americans need federal assistance is in paid time off, college tuition assistance (self and children) , and retirement. I'm not talking about social security when I say retirement. What I mean is there needs to be incentives for companies to do better than just 401ks. Public sectors are still enjoying pensions, perhaps a tax incentive would help, but I do not necessarily have a solution there. Only a very subjective view of the problems from my perspective.
> Most places don’t pay well enough to afford daycare.
I wish the problem was money. We have been looking for a kindergarten for our daughter (~5 years old) for 2.5 years now in southwestern Germany. At one point we sued the local district as children are legally entitled to a place in kindergarten. We settled out of court and the district now pays us ~300 EUR/month for a nanny who sometimes watches her together with 5 other kids (very unreliable, and the children are all under 3 years old, so hardly suitable playing partners). Winning the case wouldn't have made any difference, there simply aren't enough kindergarten teachers available. In our suburb, there are around 120 children in kindergarten age, and the waiting list has over 50 children on it. She has been on this waiting list since March 2021. She also has no chance of getting a place in a neighboring city / suburb, because local residents are always preferred. We often joke that it was easier to buy a car in East Germany than to get a kindergarten place here. We have pretty much given up at this point, and my wife had to stop working. Ironically, she is a social education worker, so exactly the profession that is in very short supply.
I’m curious, in the US - k-12 educators are not known to be paid well. In many cases they simply can not afford market rate housing in 2023. Assuredly this contributes to the high cost of childcare in the US.
Is the situation similar in Germany? It strikes me that if a teacher can’t afford a reasonable life with their own family, then it’s unlikely the education system is sustainable.
I think the flaw with this explanation is that lots of children are un/under planned. Talk to a teacher at a metropolitan public school sometime in the US for example and ask them how many students are from low income areas, it's going to be a lot. So it follows that either everyone is overdramatizing how much it costs to raise a child or that concerns about the cost aren't what's stopping people from having them and by extension it's sure not access to daycare.
It’s technically possible to raise kids on almost nothing, but whether or not doing that is a good idea or desirable is another matter.
Certainly having children on a shoestring budget involves a lot more struggle than most care to risk, and if someone is thoughtful enough to hold off on having kids until they feel they’re financially ready they probably want their kids to have a rich childhood.
So more accurately, what’s unaffordable is the ability to eliminate economical risk while providing for children to the desired degree. People don’t want to be one disaster away from being out on the street and/or to be giving their kids a barebones childhood.
that is not the logical conclusion; all it needs is people above some wealth line to be the ones who have the means and wherewithal to decide against, and it is their perceived cost of guaranteeing a good childhood home being input to the decision, not the minimum cost necessary to maintain a life.
Lots of kids grow up sitting alone with the TV and eating bologna. Lots of parents want tutors and sports equipment and musical instruments, and crucially: free time to spend with their kids.
They also want to minimize the impact of that on their other dreams, and if the impact is too high, they'll at least try to wait.
People who are responsible aren't having kids because its too expensive. People who are irresponsible probably aren't calculating the costs..or they don't care.
>Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs.
And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.
I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points).
I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots?
This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies.
I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change.
What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.
Finland, like all developed countries over the last decade+ (Canada, Australia, Netherlands, UK, France, Sweden, etc) also has a big housing affordability problem.
Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it.
When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation.
The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.
Finland may feel ok right now, but Finland seems like its going downhill pretty fast. Tax payers are declining. Having kids is seeing more PITA as people want to be young forever, or people are afraid of becoming single fathers/mothers, and the country doesnt support child families enough. The numbers dont look very good. Many of the nordic wellbeing country pillar stones come from high taxes, and once that money stops, the pillar stones have to be cut one by one. Not to add, finland has problem with employment, more than the neighbour countries.
Ding ding ding. This seems to be the dominant factor when looking at countries with the lowest fertility.
Diving deeper into the birthrates of "developed" countries, it seems a big chunk of babies are born to immigrants. Germany - 25% [1], USA - 26% of kids under 18 have at least 1 immigrant parent[2]
I wrote off the notion of ever having kids in my early 20s in large part because of how expensive it is (and thus what it would mean for my lifestyle.)
The funny thing is that thanks to a somewhat successful career in tech, I could afford them more than the average family in my area can. But that doesn’t matter - I’ve conditioned myself to not want them, and I don’t regret not having them one tiny bit.
Your story is probably very common. The social media narrative (Reddit, Twitter, HN, etc) around children is hilariously detached from reality at times. It’s bizarre as a parent to read 20-something childless people speak so confidently about what it’s like to have children.
I participated in a mentoring program where I worked with younger people entering tech careers. It was mind blowing to hear them talk about children as being impossibly expensive while we had just discussed negotiation of their six-figure offer letter a few days prior. It’s like the reality of having kids got distorted and twisted and exaggerated so much on sites like Reddit that they all lost touch with reality and instead cemented the idea that kids were impossible for them.
If you’ve “conditioned yourself to not want them” then that’s a really weird place to be. That implies that you did maybe want them at some point and overrode that via “conditioning” based on facts that turned out to be untrue (that you couldn’t afford them). If I was in your shoes, I’d be taking a long, hard look at what other life assumptions you’ve been “conditioned” out of from exposure to false narratives and internet exaggerations.
Maybe kids are not for you, but I’ve seen enough very happy parents into even their 40s who started out thinking they never wanted kids until they finally re-evaluated how they arrived at that conclusion and realized it was the result of bad inputs. If you know the key inputs were false, maybe re-run that whole decision process again with a clean slate and some accurate facts. You might be surprised.
I think in general we should try to re-assess decision taken early in life. Some of them work some not. I say this from a personal perspective where it took me years to undo some decisions I took early and they were so hard established that it was a long process to unlearn/undo them.
I quite like the idea that when it is about vision or meaning of life we should carefully make the learning or setting in stone kind of process harder. I think when young we are very biased to see the world in some way as we are biased to see it in some other way at 50.
Not trying to convince you to revisit specifically the decision about children. Just sharing my own learning
A lot of young people have done exactly that because a childless lifestyle seems much more appealing. Particularly for women who have to sacrifice their careers as well.
My theory is we've become sufficiently entertained that we could easily envision never becoming truly bored of our lives. There's a constant flow of social media, games, content to stream, etc. If you feel a void in your life, a lack of purpose, you may choose to invest in a child. But, it's a very expensive hobby which requires a ton of time and dedication. Like all long-term investments, there's no reasonable way to know if your ROI will be above your desired threshold when you made the investment.
I'm in my 40's and when I was born my parents had newspapers, radio and 3 channels on the TV. The channels stopped airing content after midnight. They'd have been bored to death if they didn't have kids.
> Housing is obscenely expensive for young couples in most major metros
This will probably be an unpopular comment, but I think this is true for every generation, and is a simple byproduct of having young people earning comparatively low salaries compared to people who have been working for a decade or two already.
I'm in my 40s now, and while I'd have loved to buy a house in my 20s, I couldn't afford it until my 30s. At the time, I thought it was very unfair that all the housing I wanted was priced just out of reach of the maximum mortgage I could get, but a decade of pay rises later, and I could just afford to get on the property ladder but I had no spare money left over each month, and another decade later my mortgage costs were a relatively small fraction of my income and I have a comfortable lifestyle now.
I think the only difference with the current generation of youngsters is that they are far more vocal about it, whereas my generation just accepted it as part of life and quietly put up with it.
It's pretty much the same that every generation of teenagers believes their parents couldn't possibly understand how unfair life is, until a decade or so later, when they've grown up a bit more and realise that they've become the same as their parents after all.
After ww2 lots more women didn't work and so could provide childcare.
The problem today is a 2 full-time salaried income is required to be able to afford a decent standard of living for a family, whereas even as late as the 80s it was feasibly to raise a family on a single median income.
Housing is a function of what buyers can afford. The move from single to dual earning households now necessitates a dual income family. We’d actually be in a better position (childcare wise) if we stuck to only one parent working.
Do you want a workplace with women in it? You have to subsidize workplaces giving huge benefits to them if/when they decide to have kids, to the degree that you essentially fire a money cannon at the gender pay gap.
Do you want a birth rate that exceeds the replacement rate? You have to subsidize people trying to get pregnant, people who are pregnant, and people who have kids. Welcome to dropping (more) money bombs on the health care sector and the child care sector.
This is the bare minimum. You also generally need regulations to force businesses to give adequate leave and flex policies, health care benefits (many plans don't cover pregnancy/birth, believe it or not), etc. You also have a huge labor problem when it comes to day care and schooling. You also have a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing for families near any kind of job at all.
Housing is quite affordable for young couples in most US minor metros. Trying to squeeze into a few major metros is a terrible choice for young people who want a decent life.
This has not been true for a while. All the people leaving big cities for cheaper metros have now also made those metros expensive as well since it doesn’t take that many people to tighten up supply.
Living in a big city offers big opportunities too though. In my city I have access to a lot of clubs for the niche interests I have. And there is always something new to discover.
I used to live in a small provincial "city" of 150.000, 250km from the country's only big city. People often mocked it was the graveyard of ambition. But to me it really felt like that. I hated living there so much.
You're right, but I see the signs are on the walls for a reversal already. If I see how desperate recruiting efforts get _everywhere_, despite a not-yet-recovered economic situation, that's just a first flavor of what's to come demographically.
A new generation can already choose from way too many offers, which will be even more expanding as the larger generation ages out and needs more care.
Continuing the trend, junior educated talent will be in such demand that economically, I see no choice than rising prices for their service. Which will in turn triggering inflation and devaluation of existing assets. Additionally, remote work options (held in place by the shortage for talent) will continue to significantly eat into ever increasing city density, and the population plateau — which in developed countries already is a decline — will empty many apartments as well.
The only effect left is rising inequality through inheritance. Slap a hard 90% inheritance tax on any "set for life" money above 2 million USD to finance the rest of society and you're fine.
To add to this, if you do make enough to overcome said hurdles - you are likely in a hyper competitive job. Two great incomes don’t help much if both parties have to regularly put in more than 40 hours/week.
So is literally everything else
https://religiopoliticaltalk.com/thomas-sowell-on-government...
Virtually anything can be made more affordable in isolation, simply by transferring resources to it from elsewhere in the economy, and having most of the costs absorbed by the U. S. Treasury.
The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury.
Of course it might be nice to be sitting at the wheel of a Rolls Royce, but we might be sitting there in rags and tatters, and gaunt with hunger, after having squandered enormous amounts of labor, capital, and costly materials that could have been put to better use elsewhere. That doesn’t happen in a market economy because most of us take one look at the price tag on a Rolls Royce and decide that it is time for another Toyota.
The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.
Reality doesn’t change when the government changes price tags. Talk about “bringing down health care costs” is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them.
Hidden costs continue to take their toll— and it is often a higher toll than when these costs are freely transmitted through the marketplace.
I was thinking about this recently, and I think the primary issue is capitalism. In particular, how it's completely taken over society and how we view worth and value.
Capitalism doesn't care about families. The only thing capitalism cares about is consumption. So it doesn't really matter if you have 10 kids or no kids, as long as you're consuming, the system is happy. This is of course great if you're the kind of person who never wanted kids to begin with.
The problem however is that Capitalism is short-sighted. It doesn't care about future consumption, just consumption right now in the moment. So inevitably capitalism face issues sustaining itself when there are less people around in the future to consume, as well as sustain all existing debts.
Capitalism wants not just consumption but increasing consumption. In that vein, a decreasing or stagnating population is bad for capitalism. Capitalism wants the pie to keep getting bigger.
Look at countries where population growth is negative. The economies have stagnated.
Even if granting you are correct in your identification of the problem, you offer no explanation of how an alternative system would work any differently.
I guess feudalism would increase fertility given that feudal lords need more serfs to tend their land.
I would argue that corporations in capitalism want and need the immigrants and babies to keep a steady customer base and consumption of their products.
There are nevertheless vast differences between demographic developments in different parts of the world. Many wealthy countries will see their population decline - unless they manage to compensate the same with drastically increased levels of immigration. It would take a complete reversal of policy to allow for this to happen in traditionally immigration-sceptic cultures like Japan or South Korea.
Immigration from other cultures brings its own set of problems of course and may lead to major social and economic issues in these countries. Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce. It may take at least one generation or more to overcome this at great economic cost.
But then there are also completely speculative developments that might happen as a society’s population retracts. Property ownership is poised to be more easily attainable for average-income people. As a result, there may be an increase in single-earner families, where the spouse can devote her (or his) time to looking after the children. Which in turn may increase the average number of children that families can afford to have. Again, that’s entirely hypothetical, just one scenario that could result from all this.
Japan's an interesting case, as they're absolutely open to immigration, especially from closer countries (Philipines, Thailand etc.) to work in human intensive fields (e.g. assistance to elderly people) but don't want them to stay and build a life, so in these fields working visas are super easy to get but crazy hard to renew, and near impossible to convert to generic visas.
Basically it's the classic have your cake and eat it too.
A nitpick:
> Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce.
They'll often be highly qualified, though not proficient in the host culture. That's how you see so many Pilipino in the medical field. Or Indian people in IT etc.
> Property ownership is poised to be more easily attainable
It usually doesn't happen: general property value drops down, but as the population decreases the cities are restructured, and some portions of the land are completely abandonned. As a result, the amount of actually valuable property that are near active businesses in easy to live areas doesn't change much (or even decreases, as there's fewer working people)
> They'll often be highly qualified, though not proficient in the host culture. That's how you see so many Pilipino in the medical field. Or Indian people in IT etc.
Immigrants with a certain heritage (MENAPT) are on average unqualified and are a burden on the host social system their whole life[1]. It's certainly what I can witness in Germany as well, however we actively seek to suppress any studies that could show this. Up until 2017 we had at least criminal statistics that showed that it's also a broader problem regarding crime[2], but we axed these statistics of course.
> especially from closer countries (Philipines, Thailand etc.)
This is akin to grouping Mexico with other Latin American countries when discussing American immigration. The situation is fundamentally on a country by country basis, rather than geographical proximity.
What struck out to me is mentioning Thailand. There is literally 9x Vietnamese immigrants in Japan than Thai.
Even Nepal is twice as many Thai. Then there’s Brazil. Meanwhile, Taiwan, despite having the proximity and cultural/social/political ties to Japan (I was at a Japanese island where I can literally see Taiwan’s mountain) is only the 10th. It’s not a matter of difference in socioeconomic development either. The top two immigrant countries to Japan is Korea and China.
Proximity is a weak correlation. The commonality here is that these are Asian countries.
Why have your cake and eat it? It gives more people from poor countries to experience Japan and earn money there. Then they come back and have money to open businesses and more knowledge and exposure to first world practices. It also distribute the opportunity between more people rather than giving everything to few lucky ones while the rest don't get any opportunity to improve their lives. It also prevents all the obvious problems of integration and fractured society which affects second generation immigrants in many western countries. It's a win win situation for everybody.
Immigration is a poor substitute for having families, and mass migration is a guaranteed headache. A host population can absorb a trickle, it cannot absorb a deluge, in which case, what's the point? You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers. "Before we go, here's how you operate the light switches..." And even then, that assumes that the replacement population won't absorb the same self-destructive features of the host culture that produced the demographic decline in the first place.
Where consumerism is high, procreation is low, as children and parenthood are antithetical to the ethos of consumption. This ethos infects and corrupts every domain of the culture and conspires against families by creating a mutually enabling thicket of disincentives, consumerizing and commoditizing everything, including sexual intercourse and sexual relations, in general. Contraception and sterile "sex" are paradigmatic of consumerism. Perhaps it is not an accident that Dante places the practitioners of such a lifestyle in the same circle of Hell as usurers: the former take something fecund and renders it sterile, while the latter take something sterile and pretend to render it fecund.
> Where consumerism is high, procreation is low, as children and parenthood are antithetical to the ethos of consumption. This ethos infects and corrupts every domain of the culture and conspires against families by creating a mutually enabling thicket of disincentives, consumerizing and commoditizing everything, including sexual intercourse and sexual relations, in general. Contraception and sterile "sex" are paradigmatic of consumerism.
I have to disagree here. Having more money to spend on consumer items is not the only reason to not want kids.
For me it's not about money but about time. I don't want to waste time raising kids that I could have used pursuing interesting opportunities to enrich myself. Which are usually not things that make me financially richer either. And also, I just don't want them. There is no attraction to fatherhood for me.
But I would not call myself consumerist at all. I don't buy that much stuff, don't have a car, only a $100 second-hand TV, buy a new phone once every 4 years or so... But I do have a really interesting life. I learn new things every day, constantly move my horizons. I couldn't do that if I were tied down with a family. Many of my friends do have them but if we want to go on a weekend away we have to plan it months in advance because they have to find a common path between all the birthday parties, judo competitions and dance performances of their offspring. I can just do whatever I want on a whim.
And once people become parents their sex life becomes pretty much null and void too.
There is definitely a correlation between high standards of living and smaller families yes. But I don't think this is because people want to spend more. It's just that they don't really need a big family for "pension" reasons, don't usually care about religious directives anymore (think the big catholic labourer families of old) and want their life to be more than about having kids. Women don't just want to be a baby machine anymore. It takes a toll on their bodies too.
And I think it's good. For environmental reasons our population should be stable, not growing rapidly. 2 children per couple is perfect.
I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question. The point, always, is to provide the best possible life to the greatest number of people, without regard to where those people come from. My goal in life is to maximize human happiness, I do not care what nation a person is from. Unless I'm misreading your words, or you chose your words clumsily, you seem to want a system that works for some set of people but not another set of people. But I'm curious, one what basis would you chose one set of people, and then why would you care about them at all, rather than care about some other group? If you're not going to care about the happiness of all people, then it seems to me you should be consistent and not care about anyone's happiness. But if you honestly care about one group, but not some other group, I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?
"You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers"
I think you meant to write "One generation has apparently found it is possible to maximize their happiness without having children, and now gratefully receives help from new arrivals so as to take care of them during old age, as they have no children to care for them."
I wonder if in-country population redistribution would counteract any alleviation of realestate prices.
The US has many landlocked, east coast, and great lakes city outflows where you can buy property inexpensively. But people tend to not want to raise families or retire needing medical care in declining areas given the choice to leave.
New York city Manhattan has 600k fewer people than 100 years ago and property price to average salary keeps climbing.
I don’t know what the magic is that to expand property ownership. You see cities with thousands of blighted homes and new build suburbs developing 30-90 min away at prices that are a stretch for even well paid middle class jobs.
I think affordable home building and financing could happen somehow but the trend is not going in that direction.
Do you mean Manhattan is a "declining area" because of century-long demographic changes? (If they've lost population, I'm guessing it's very poor, high-density housing. Millionaires and billionaires don't want to live 1 family per bedroom.
> Immigration from other cultures brings its own set of problems of course and may lead to major social and economic issues in these countries. Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce. It may take at least one generation or more to overcome this at great economic cost.
As far as I know, that's false:
The economic cost I'm pretty sure of: Research has shown (but I won't pretend I can cite it) that immigrants are net contributors. One (admittedly completely conjectured) explanation: Anyone motivated and healthy enough to travel to another country, where there's another language, with nothing but their shirt, is going to be very productive. Few people I know would do that.
A good friend's ancestor escaped a prison camp (political prisoner), traveled across a continent, and found their way here. They did very well - they didn't find the obstacles people face in a free, wealthy country to be especially challenging!
Finally, even highly skilled workforces are mostly not high-skilled. Most jobs are otherwise.
> The economic cost I'm pretty sure of: Research has shown (but I won't pretend I can cite it) that immigrants are net contributors.
That very much depends on immigration policies and the way a welfare state is setup.
I am sure that countries with strict policies that mainly allow people to immigrate that a country can be sure these people can contribute to the economy, in such cases sure.
But some countries have very lax policies and (in the name of humanitarian aid) allow many people in from poor areas of the world. At the same time some of these countries might have a large welfare state, with benefits like free or cheap healthcare, schooling, state pensions, medical benefits either free or heavily subsidized, unemployment benefits, etcetera.
For those countries immigration is a huge cost. Many immigrants moving to such countries will never (be able to) work. But they will use a large amount of resources from the welfare state. And perhaps such countries hope children of these kinds of immigrants will be a net benefit, but only time will tell.
Because one additional hurdle is that for many of such countries it’s not expected (and there is little push) for immigrants to integrate into society.
For these countries unrestricted mass immigration will mean the dismantling of the welfare state. As there are too many users of welfare services and not enough people paying taxes to finance the welfare state.
Many Northern European countries fall onto this group.
Obviously immigration does have negatives. Look at the violence in Sweden. Housing prices in Canada. And why is the mayor of New York City, a self-proclaimed sanctuary city, saying they cant handle more immigrants?
Seems ridiculous to say its “false” that there are complications then offer some vague reference to research that indicates its not a problem in a particular way.
>One (admittedly completely conjectured) explanation: Anyone motivated and healthy enough to travel to another country, where there's another language, with nothing but their shirt, is going to be very productive.
Supposing that this is true, what happens in poor countries when they selectively lose their healthiest and most productive people to emigration?
Japan's immigration policies are actually pretty welcoming to educated foreigners. They publish all the rules, if you meet the criteria (basically getting any white collar job here will do the trick) then you can get a work visa, and there is a well-documented and formulaic long-term path to getting permanent residence (which is very fast if you meet the highly skilled professional criteria, which actually aren't a very high bar; you can get most of the way there by having a college degree, reasonable pay and not being old).
The problem is more that they speak a language that people do not want to spend time learning, do not have a particularly dynamic economy, and have issues with work culture, gender inequality, and so on that turns off many foreigners from making the jump.
If that were true birth rates in places like Japan, with chronically depressed real estate values, would be skyrocketing over time. But it doesn't seem to be the case: more educated people appear to be less apt to have children.
The birthrate in most of the third world is also declining, fwiw, and most of these countries are becoming richer. Immigration is a good solution if you have a low-context, high-income country, that poor or chaotic neighbors want to live in, but that's not a given and won't work everywhere forever
why though? Why not just figure out how to sustain your population? There may be a period of time where there aren't enough people but that could be a beneficial time where salaries increase, technology improves, etc.
People are not having kids in the west because we’ve made life/kids to expensive- immigration is just a way to keep enriching the rich and suppressing wages
Is the problem in the west due to westerners prefer to not have any children and enjoy their riches or is it because the society is very top heavy and that the a lot of financially challenged westerners opt not to have children? It's both in my opinion but with a heavier weight for financial struggle. I'm an immigrant and other immigrants from my generation are having less children than their parents and are not doing as well financially (includes housing, Canaduh). Immigration does not answer the question of why people are not having more children.
My spouse and I struggled with whether it was ethical to have children. It was a financial burden of course but one we felt capable of meeting.
I don't think it's really a question of "enjoy your riches," because no matter what your status, nobody can "afford" children, not even the ultra high net worth individuals. It's a burden regardless.
But I think therein lies the answer. There was a time not all that long ago that not having children was a burden. Who was going to bring in the harvest, or at the very least supervise bringing in the harvest? Who could you really trust to take care of you properly when you got old? And of course, there's a biological compulsion as well, but that's much easier to sidestep only in the last couple generations.
I think there are a number of factors at play here. I think a large part of it is that having children is extremely expensive. You need a bigger house, a bigger car, need to buy more food and then pay for their entire life for about 20 years or so. Given the cost to just sustain one’s self these days I think it is not a surprise that many people opt to have fewer children or none at all.
I think that also there is a culture shift that has taken place, there is less pressure to create a traditional family unit. More virtue is given to autonomy and following your dreams than settling down. In addition to this, contraceptives such as IUDs have become much more socially accepted, so less people are getting pregnant. Naturally all of this adds up to a drastically lower average fertility rate than a few decades ago.
In summary, it’s a bit of culture shift, economics and science which has led us to where we are today. The result is that in the next few decades we will either have to start having more children again, or rework the way our economies are structured to account for less growth in exchange for a focus on sustainability and providing a livable wage for all people. Its likely that if we keep with the status quo, quality of life will keep going down until we hit a breaking point.
It's essentially because of western individualism, de-emphasizing the family unit and prioritizing individual fulfilment. Especially with women, if you believe the doctrine of female choice operates in the world.
Second generation and later of immigrants very rapidly adopt the social customs of the country they live in. This is seen everywhere. Vietnamese to Australia. Filipinas to the US. Congolese to Nigeria. Marocs to Spain.
For me it's definitely about the money. It's not that I can't afford children, it's that I can't afford them AND also do things like stop working while giving my family the lifestyle I want. Ultimately, it boils down to financials. Boomer parents aren't willing to help either nor have they asked for grandchildren. Seems to be working out alright for now.
> Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce
I think this is overblown and repeated gospel.
People in factories are trained to work the tools and machines they work. What's the barrier for an immigrant besides language?
Shop clerk? Farm worker? Baker? Cleaner? Butcher? Driver? I have an infinite list of jobs that do not require much education and even a longer one of jobs that require it, but only on the resume.
Also, are you assuming immigrants at home don't study, nobody of them is a mechanic or electrician or plumber or carpenter?
Let's be honest: immigrants aren't less educated for western societies. It's us who have went through 20 years of studies to center forms in a web page or work as secretaries or scrum masters or bank clerks.
Math, low skilled immigrants often lacks basic education and can't properly read numbers. That makes them unfit even for most jobs we nowaday call "unskilled" like shop clerk etc. There are billions of such people in the world and when they immigrate there isn't much you can do to get them a job.
There is a reason why most unskilled jobs today require high school, because without basic math you can't do much at all. Immigrants with high school equivalent education or higher can integrate just fine, immigrants with lower level than that are hard to deal with so most countries refuse to take them in but those are the majority of people in low income countries.
In Sweden they are trying to teach these immigrants math etc, but it is hard since they both needs to learn a new language and math and all those standard things as an adult. And after that they have to compete with "unskilled" locals who learned those things as kids.
As a slight counterpoint to this, there is a lot of implicit knowledge and group cohesion in most workplaces that immigrants can have a very hard time picking up on and integrating into. When I moved to another country I thought I fit in well with my coworkers, but it turned out that my style of conflict resolution was absolutely incompatible with theirs, and I had to relearn how to communicate with my boss, despite the boss being fluent in English. This cultural misfit set me up to be manipulated into the position of group enemy by one of the more socially savvy and manipulative coworkers.
More generally, the challenges in communication are a well known barrier to outsourcing knowledge work.
It's also just false based off of the numbers. In the US at least immigrants are more likely to open businesses and less likely to commit crimes. Immigrants are just as likely to have bachelors or post grad degrees than non immigrants, and are more likely to get associates degrees. Children of immigrants are more likely to get degrees than the average population. Immigration is a net positive economically speaking for developed countries.
Human population will also change a lot. Subpopulations with very high fertility (like fundamentalist Christians or hassidic Jews or the population of Chad) will be a much larger proportion of the population while groups like the South Koreans decline.
I expect this to have pretty large effects,though predicting what those will be seems difficult.
The problem with those high-fertility groups is that they usually come with a lot of baggage - specifically they require belief in the made-up nonsense that tends to fade away as the demographic shift advances. So, they may maintain higher fertility rates, but I'd wager more and more of their kids will break away from a religion/belief system that appears increasingly absurd and stifling as the rest of the world moves on.
>> I'd wager more and more of their kids will break away from a religion/belief system that appears increasingly absurd and stifling as the rest of the world moves on.
In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. This is still a notable shift in religious demographic, just not the kind your portraying.
Further, outside the west, much of the world has kept or has increased their religiosity as they modernized. The belief that modernism produces secularism was abandoned by sociologists of religion some time ago after it was evidentially false (E.g. India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state).
The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
> The problem with those high-fertility groups is that they usually come with a lot of baggage - specifically they require belief in the made-up nonsense that tends to fade away as the demographic shift advances. So, they may maintain higher fertility rates, but I'd wager more and more of their kids will break away from a religion/belief system that appears increasingly absurd and stifling as the rest of the world moves on.
Honestly... I've simply not seen this. There are many religious people in prominent positions, you just don't know about it. In my fairly traditional catholic parish, we have families where mom and dad are catholic, their five kids are catholic, and their 40 + grandchildren are as well (some are now adults and having kids of their own). And all successful, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. The idea that religious == stupid or baggage or whatever is simply at odds with history. You're conflating the Duggars with otherwise normal people that just have different views.
Early life indoctrination is working and will keep working, especially with such an established institutions as world religions. Don't try to fool yourself.
I think these religions and belief systems are adapting to a more sensible take, but I think the dogma demanding children will be scuttled. The humanist/Jesus/profit teachings will become rectified against human experience and philosophies of consciousness and drift toward core messages of peace and community while the dogma and rhetoric of pulpit interpretations of sin and judgement should subside.
I think the identity will remain but the substance will change.
There are some really cool discussions on YouTube about the definition of God and the nature of consciousness that are quite compelling and unifying.
Islam is especially potent on the fertility front because marriage and having children are considered a central moral obligation: https://www.alislam.org/book/pathway-to-paradise/islamic-mar.... Even among relatively secular muslims, the concept of “child free” would be something you wouldn’t say out loud.
The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution explores the possible consequences in great detail. It's happened many times before, though never on this scale.
Those religious populations have always had high fertility, and also always had high rates of departure from the religious communities. I wouldn’t make any bets on their worldviews suddenly dominating the world anew
Conservative Judaism is essentially replacing liberal/secular Judaism in both the us and Israel while the population is still growing. So at least in the near term this is a real thing.
Religious populations out reproducing non religious is a real thing.
I think the influence of religion is people who are religious have lower expectations for life and think having kids is enough. Most secular people think they ought to be rich first and then have kids.
I've had similar thoughts, and I think that we're gearing up to see a showdown between the populations you describe and the populations that embrace things like embryo selection, artificial wombs, and vaccines.
What's going to be really interesting are the intersection between these two populations -- At some point some heavy breeding religious people are going to realize that as good as their heavy birthrate strategy is a heavy birthrate strategy combined with the technological advances I describe above is even better.
Imagine a near future where some ambitious and forward thinking Mennonites/Hutterites/Doukhobors/Amish are pumping out legions of productive, obedient and consistent workers in rural North America while urban and educated urban dwellers waste their time and economic opportunities away while being terminally online and outraged to the point that the economic and political balance of power shifts to these rural groups.
It's not (just) the actual carrying of the children that people are rejecting. It's parenthood. It's the idea of committing to someone unconditionally for at least 18 years, but really for their whole life.
Artificial wombs don't change this. Embryo selection doesn't change this. Vaccines will increase the chances that whatever children are produced survive to adulthood, but childhood mortality from vaccine-preventable illness isn't high enough to compensate for a worldview that doesn't want to have children.
If you believe you're part of something much more significant than yourself, dedicating your life to moving it forward by producing other people who will outlive you and do the same makes sense. But if you're all that matters? If your scorecard is measures in dollars or followers or something else that dies with you? You don't have kids even if you do have access to artificial wombs.
On the one hand, humans are absolute dogshit at predicting the future. I mean, the year 2100? Give me a fucking break. On the other hand, the demographic shift is as convincing and well-supported as any theory in all of social science.
I imagine advances in fertility technology will change the landscape of procreation in ways we cannot yet predict. It's also possible that major catastrophes could change population dynamics, not necessarily by mass deaths, but by driving some populations back along the demographic transition where having many children is once again the best strategy.
I agree, these predictions are usually just statistical inferences without any believable model. Models expect everything continuing like it is and not having any discontinuities.
I personally predict that we will fuck things up and end up with huge population decline because of raising fossil fuel costs, climate change, ecosystem destabilizaion and wars. Even feedin 8 billion people is a huge ask in this declining world.
What is the track record of demographers predicting 75 years into the future?
I guess these models assume that neither human cloning nor interstellar space travel will take off in this century. Models in 1923 probably didn't expect another world war, birth control, or the crazy levels of agriculture we see filling up our satellite pictures. How does one sanely account for such changes in these long-term models?
How exactly would human cloning affect world population to any significant level? You still need someone to be pregnant for about nine months to give birth to a clone, why does it matter if they give birth to a clone or a normal child?
Or do you mean human "printing", some machine that can carry a pregnancy instead of a human doing it? I don't think there is even a glimmer of such technology on the horizon. Then again, you seem to also think that there is some imaginable chance that we'll discover interstellar travel in the next 75 years, so maybe that doesn't stop you?
It is indeed quite a stretch to see how this could affect world population in the next few years, but I have read about people going through crazier developments over the course of a lifetime.
One example scenario would require some narcissistic billionaire women to start producing their personal cloning machines. Production could go up to, say, an extra one of them (except for the billionaire part) each year. If that catches on, in a similar fashion to plastic surgery, we could see global fertility rates revert to Catholic levels. It also helps to think in terms of identical twins, triplets, and beyond.
Having a lot of children is now mostly limited by raising of said kids to require a lot of effort and money. It does not seem like a stretch to assume that robots could lend a hand here, at least on the 75 year horizon.
Once the birth rate for a particular year is set, you can’t exactly go back in time and change it. So you don’t need to be a trained demographer to see that we are on a crashing trajectory.
Beyond that, perhaps the models do assume that future birth rates don’t wildly depart from historical ranges. Seems a reasonable assumption to me.
But sure we could somehow get artificial wombs and an interest in using them, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Seems unlikely though.
Despite a several decades long decline in total fertility rate, most demographic models I have seen assume that lifetime fertility will magically bounce back to replacement level.
Underpants gnomes models. Bounce-back could happen, but there is no understanding in governments of why the decline is occurring, nor what it takes to reverse it,* so it is unlikely.
* Exhorting people to return to traditional family values, as the new PM of Italy does, is likely to crash fertility faster.
Maybe this isnt fair but we had demographers hired by our school district who could not reliably predict student population 2 years out. I watched them fail for 15 years.
In many fields it's easier to predict the aggregate of the whole system than the quantity of any specific component. Weather, thermal behavior, and also population.
Failed in what sense? Completely off, or close enough (like weather forecasting)?
Is it possible a school district couldn't afford the best services? Or that their goal wasn't necessarily the population number but rather an analyst of the causative forces and directional trends?
Excellent points, since school funding is student count dependent it was critical for it to be close. They mostly predicted increases but year after year it was flat or when decreasing. Maybe politics were involved, and like I said my comment probably isnt fair.
I would imagine they were only looking at past trends of the school district population - but the reality is the most information would be USPS address changes, data that various companies like Zillow have, and new building permits.
Is the implication here that if they can't get that right, they wouldn't be able to predict world population either? If so, how do you know this is an issue with demography and not just being the ones your school hired not being particularly good?
Yup they might have not been good but they kept getting hired. In my mind I am thinking if they cant reliably predict a popualtion of around 5000, his could they predict the world. I get that they are apples and oranges.
Economic issues combine with demographics for school enrollment predictions, because houses become unaffordable for families pushing them out of the school district as the multi bedroom houses fill up with retirees.
From a demographic perspective I think it is safe to say that human population is not exactly on the brink of extinction.
I think there is ample buffer for future generations to correct the population trajectory if under-population happens to be a non-imaginary issue for our species.
In my opinion, many ecological problems would be simpler to solve with half or a quarter of the current population.
And the imbalance between old and young would only last for a few decades.
How do you tell young families (women in particular) to have more children to avoid population collapse? This is a very real problem in a number of wealthy countries. I am not aware of government policies that have managed to coerce educated women to be wanting to have more (or any) children.
To be clear, I don't think this is the business of governments and nobody should be coerced to have or not to have children.
I believe that in case of population collapse, the solution will naturally appear to large enough number of people, evolution shaped us to reproduce, I don't think this instinct is likely to disappear, even if we might not fully understand it and why girls and women tend to have less children in some conditions (it happened before, in antiquity, and was considered to be a problem by Roman politicians, many of the current traditions around marriages were first created as laws...)
Is it a real problem in some countries? I’ve only seen articles about negative economic impacts and nothing like “Japan will have zero humans by 2200”.
Economic problems are real and worth addressing and I hope we can find ways other than “we need more babies”.
Economic instability, yes, that seems inevitable as people adjust to new realities. But what would be the trigger for war if there are fewer and fewer of us wanting access to land/natural resources? Sure, access to manmade resources (and other services) will become an issue but it won't be much of a war if it's the older/less fit members of society fighting against the rest for their share...
I fail to see what the ecological problem actually is given that the land factor (economic term, hope I translated correctly) and discoveries of new ways to use resources are dynamic factors.
It is really difficult to make predictions x years ahead of most topics, the further the harder when you take into account the dynamism of these factors and the innovations (discoveries on how to use new materials, for example, that replace old ones, etc.)
Population is simply the most potent factor in everything our species is doing, less people = less energy use, less farming, less fishing, less waste, less everything.
> I fail to see what the ecological problem actually is
It's as you said:
> It is really difficult to make predictions x years ahead of [things like] innovations
Humans already use more resources than they regenerate (the definition of unsustainable). Currently, most of the world population lives in relative poverty compared to the people in places like Germany, USA, Japan, etc. It would be fair to have everyone live at this standard, but that costs even more resources, making it even less sustainable! We can hardly prevent other countries from wanting to innovate, so it will happen, and our problem will get worse if we do not gain better technology (and/or reduce our consumption of animal products, learn to stop heating offices across weekends, etc. It works on both the supply and demand side of resources).
Precisely because it is hard to predict whether future innovations will materialize soon enough to fix those problems in a way that we do not reduce everyone's living standards, we cannot rely on the innovations happening and being deployed earth-wide in time
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Can’t complain about less kids and have policies which make raising kids a risky financial and life decision.
We gotta do a better job at providing for the kids we already have.
Your points about how we must do better to make having kids less financially risky are excellent however. Better parental leave and tax incentives would help.
Remember this [1] picture? Related: the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to explode further. Average age there is, according to the google infobox [2], 18.8.
In other words: US-internal policies are not going to move the needle on world population much.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Valeriep...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+age+sub+saharan+afri...
If you’re looking for an excuse to not have a kid, you’ll find one. There’s a cultural element too.
Main reason seems to be that young people in advanced societies simply don't want children because the alternate childless lifestyle seems very appealing in 20s and 30s, costs of raising kids are privatized while benefits are socialized (welfare programs funded by taxes on the working generation).
This will not work for as long as we keep building neighborhoods that require the use of cars or make biking/walking unsafe. America also lacks a comprehensive public transportation system.
You will not stop the artificially high cost of housing without addressing that root cause.
But yeah, the problem is that some people want to live in their houses with a backyard, those evil villains that don't see the advantage of living in a pigeon home for further capitalistic enhancement of the lives of fat-cat developers.
Everything that exists deserves to perish. The capitalistic leviathan can never be stopped, neither questioned. What do those small folks in the path of progress think they are?
Tax incentives help, but where Americans need federal assistance is in paid time off, college tuition assistance (self and children) , and retirement. I'm not talking about social security when I say retirement. What I mean is there needs to be incentives for companies to do better than just 401ks. Public sectors are still enjoying pensions, perhaps a tax incentive would help, but I do not necessarily have a solution there. Only a very subjective view of the problems from my perspective.
I wish the problem was money. We have been looking for a kindergarten for our daughter (~5 years old) for 2.5 years now in southwestern Germany. At one point we sued the local district as children are legally entitled to a place in kindergarten. We settled out of court and the district now pays us ~300 EUR/month for a nanny who sometimes watches her together with 5 other kids (very unreliable, and the children are all under 3 years old, so hardly suitable playing partners). Winning the case wouldn't have made any difference, there simply aren't enough kindergarten teachers available. In our suburb, there are around 120 children in kindergarten age, and the waiting list has over 50 children on it. She has been on this waiting list since March 2021. She also has no chance of getting a place in a neighboring city / suburb, because local residents are always preferred. We often joke that it was easier to buy a car in East Germany than to get a kindergarten place here. We have pretty much given up at this point, and my wife had to stop working. Ironically, she is a social education worker, so exactly the profession that is in very short supply.
Is the situation similar in Germany? It strikes me that if a teacher can’t afford a reasonable life with their own family, then it’s unlikely the education system is sustainable.
Certainly having children on a shoestring budget involves a lot more struggle than most care to risk, and if someone is thoughtful enough to hold off on having kids until they feel they’re financially ready they probably want their kids to have a rich childhood.
So more accurately, what’s unaffordable is the ability to eliminate economical risk while providing for children to the desired degree. People don’t want to be one disaster away from being out on the street and/or to be giving their kids a barebones childhood.
Lots of kids grow up sitting alone with the TV and eating bologna. Lots of parents want tutors and sports equipment and musical instruments, and crucially: free time to spend with their kids.
They also want to minimize the impact of that on their other dreams, and if the impact is too high, they'll at least try to wait.
Kids are a sacrifice regardless of social class. Even rich people deal with the costs of raising children.
And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.
I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points).
I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots?
This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies.
I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change.
What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.
Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it.
When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation.
The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.
Looking at this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer... - none of the top 10 countries seem to have great daycares or comprehensive parental leaves or generous social safety nets.
> women want careers too
Ding ding ding. This seems to be the dominant factor when looking at countries with the lowest fertility.
Diving deeper into the birthrates of "developed" countries, it seems a big chunk of babies are born to immigrants. Germany - 25% [1], USA - 26% of kids under 18 have at least 1 immigrant parent[2]
[1] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
The funny thing is that thanks to a somewhat successful career in tech, I could afford them more than the average family in my area can. But that doesn’t matter - I’ve conditioned myself to not want them, and I don’t regret not having them one tiny bit.
I participated in a mentoring program where I worked with younger people entering tech careers. It was mind blowing to hear them talk about children as being impossibly expensive while we had just discussed negotiation of their six-figure offer letter a few days prior. It’s like the reality of having kids got distorted and twisted and exaggerated so much on sites like Reddit that they all lost touch with reality and instead cemented the idea that kids were impossible for them.
If you’ve “conditioned yourself to not want them” then that’s a really weird place to be. That implies that you did maybe want them at some point and overrode that via “conditioning” based on facts that turned out to be untrue (that you couldn’t afford them). If I was in your shoes, I’d be taking a long, hard look at what other life assumptions you’ve been “conditioned” out of from exposure to false narratives and internet exaggerations.
Maybe kids are not for you, but I’ve seen enough very happy parents into even their 40s who started out thinking they never wanted kids until they finally re-evaluated how they arrived at that conclusion and realized it was the result of bad inputs. If you know the key inputs were false, maybe re-run that whole decision process again with a clean slate and some accurate facts. You might be surprised.
I quite like the idea that when it is about vision or meaning of life we should carefully make the learning or setting in stone kind of process harder. I think when young we are very biased to see the world in some way as we are biased to see it in some other way at 50.
Not trying to convince you to revisit specifically the decision about children. Just sharing my own learning
A lot of young people have done exactly that because a childless lifestyle seems much more appealing. Particularly for women who have to sacrifice their careers as well.
I'm in my 40's and when I was born my parents had newspapers, radio and 3 channels on the TV. The channels stopped airing content after midnight. They'd have been bored to death if they didn't have kids.
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This will probably be an unpopular comment, but I think this is true for every generation, and is a simple byproduct of having young people earning comparatively low salaries compared to people who have been working for a decade or two already.
I'm in my 40s now, and while I'd have loved to buy a house in my 20s, I couldn't afford it until my 30s. At the time, I thought it was very unfair that all the housing I wanted was priced just out of reach of the maximum mortgage I could get, but a decade of pay rises later, and I could just afford to get on the property ladder but I had no spare money left over each month, and another decade later my mortgage costs were a relatively small fraction of my income and I have a comfortable lifestyle now.
I think the only difference with the current generation of youngsters is that they are far more vocal about it, whereas my generation just accepted it as part of life and quietly put up with it.
It's pretty much the same that every generation of teenagers believes their parents couldn't possibly understand how unfair life is, until a decade or so later, when they've grown up a bit more and realise that they've become the same as their parents after all.
Median salary 2022 was £33k. Median house price was £265k; over 8 times the median salary.
Not controlled for interest rates or changes in the tax codes, nor the increases in student loan debts.
People had nothing after ww2 yet had a lot more kids. We are way richer now in comparison so the cost of kids is really a bad argument to make.
The problem today is a 2 full-time salaried income is required to be able to afford a decent standard of living for a family, whereas even as late as the 80s it was feasibly to raise a family on a single median income.
- low taxes
- a workplace with women in it
- a birth rate that exceeds the replacement rate
Do you want a workplace with women in it? You have to subsidize workplaces giving huge benefits to them if/when they decide to have kids, to the degree that you essentially fire a money cannon at the gender pay gap.
Do you want a birth rate that exceeds the replacement rate? You have to subsidize people trying to get pregnant, people who are pregnant, and people who have kids. Welcome to dropping (more) money bombs on the health care sector and the child care sector.
This is the bare minimum. You also generally need regulations to force businesses to give adequate leave and flex policies, health care benefits (many plans don't cover pregnancy/birth, believe it or not), etc. You also have a huge labor problem when it comes to day care and schooling. You also have a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing for families near any kind of job at all.
I used to live in a small provincial "city" of 150.000, 250km from the country's only big city. People often mocked it was the graveyard of ambition. But to me it really felt like that. I hated living there so much.
If remote work is a possibility, or big cities decentralize a bit, that makes sense.
We've seen during COVID, if people can move from San Francisco and keep their jobs, they will do it.
A new generation can already choose from way too many offers, which will be even more expanding as the larger generation ages out and needs more care.
Continuing the trend, junior educated talent will be in such demand that economically, I see no choice than rising prices for their service. Which will in turn triggering inflation and devaluation of existing assets. Additionally, remote work options (held in place by the shortage for talent) will continue to significantly eat into ever increasing city density, and the population plateau — which in developed countries already is a decline — will empty many apartments as well.
The only effect left is rising inequality through inheritance. Slap a hard 90% inheritance tax on any "set for life" money above 2 million USD to finance the rest of society and you're fine.
Just my 2 cetn.
Most careers don't pay enough to only require a single/1.5 income family.
Most people are hijacked by keeping up with the Jones's.
At least in democracies (many of the large metro hubs are not in democracies).
The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury.
Of course it might be nice to be sitting at the wheel of a Rolls Royce, but we might be sitting there in rags and tatters, and gaunt with hunger, after having squandered enormous amounts of labor, capital, and costly materials that could have been put to better use elsewhere. That doesn’t happen in a market economy because most of us take one look at the price tag on a Rolls Royce and decide that it is time for another Toyota.
The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.
Reality doesn’t change when the government changes price tags. Talk about “bringing down health care costs” is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them.
Hidden costs continue to take their toll— and it is often a higher toll than when these costs are freely transmitted through the marketplace.
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Capitalism doesn't care about families. The only thing capitalism cares about is consumption. So it doesn't really matter if you have 10 kids or no kids, as long as you're consuming, the system is happy. This is of course great if you're the kind of person who never wanted kids to begin with.
The problem however is that Capitalism is short-sighted. It doesn't care about future consumption, just consumption right now in the moment. So inevitably capitalism face issues sustaining itself when there are less people around in the future to consume, as well as sustain all existing debts.
Look at countries where population growth is negative. The economies have stagnated.
Children are essential to capitalism.
I guess feudalism would increase fertility given that feudal lords need more serfs to tend their land.
An alternate phrasing, "women work for anti-birth employers and women can't find trustworthy fathers."
Immigration from other cultures brings its own set of problems of course and may lead to major social and economic issues in these countries. Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce. It may take at least one generation or more to overcome this at great economic cost.
But then there are also completely speculative developments that might happen as a society’s population retracts. Property ownership is poised to be more easily attainable for average-income people. As a result, there may be an increase in single-earner families, where the spouse can devote her (or his) time to looking after the children. Which in turn may increase the average number of children that families can afford to have. Again, that’s entirely hypothetical, just one scenario that could result from all this.
Basically it's the classic have your cake and eat it too.
A nitpick:
> Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce.
They'll often be highly qualified, though not proficient in the host culture. That's how you see so many Pilipino in the medical field. Or Indian people in IT etc.
> Property ownership is poised to be more easily attainable
It usually doesn't happen: general property value drops down, but as the population decreases the cities are restructured, and some portions of the land are completely abandonned. As a result, the amount of actually valuable property that are near active businesses in easy to live areas doesn't change much (or even decreases, as there's fewer working people)
Immigrants with a certain heritage (MENAPT) are on average unqualified and are a burden on the host social system their whole life[1]. It's certainly what I can witness in Germany as well, however we actively seek to suppress any studies that could show this. Up until 2017 we had at least criminal statistics that showed that it's also a broader problem regarding crime[2], but we axed these statistics of course.
[1]: The Economist: Why have Danes turned against immigration? (https://archive.ph/TSsQa)
[2]: German Police Crime Statistics 2017 (https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...)
> working visas are super easy to get but crazy hard to renew
That's not immigration, those are guest workers.
This is akin to grouping Mexico with other Latin American countries when discussing American immigration. The situation is fundamentally on a country by country basis, rather than geographical proximity.
What struck out to me is mentioning Thailand. There is literally 9x Vietnamese immigrants in Japan than Thai. Even Nepal is twice as many Thai. Then there’s Brazil. Meanwhile, Taiwan, despite having the proximity and cultural/social/political ties to Japan (I was at a Japanese island where I can literally see Taiwan’s mountain) is only the 10th. It’s not a matter of difference in socioeconomic development either. The top two immigrant countries to Japan is Korea and China.
Proximity is a weak correlation. The commonality here is that these are Asian countries.
Where consumerism is high, procreation is low, as children and parenthood are antithetical to the ethos of consumption. This ethos infects and corrupts every domain of the culture and conspires against families by creating a mutually enabling thicket of disincentives, consumerizing and commoditizing everything, including sexual intercourse and sexual relations, in general. Contraception and sterile "sex" are paradigmatic of consumerism. Perhaps it is not an accident that Dante places the practitioners of such a lifestyle in the same circle of Hell as usurers: the former take something fecund and renders it sterile, while the latter take something sterile and pretend to render it fecund.
I have to disagree here. Having more money to spend on consumer items is not the only reason to not want kids.
For me it's not about money but about time. I don't want to waste time raising kids that I could have used pursuing interesting opportunities to enrich myself. Which are usually not things that make me financially richer either. And also, I just don't want them. There is no attraction to fatherhood for me.
But I would not call myself consumerist at all. I don't buy that much stuff, don't have a car, only a $100 second-hand TV, buy a new phone once every 4 years or so... But I do have a really interesting life. I learn new things every day, constantly move my horizons. I couldn't do that if I were tied down with a family. Many of my friends do have them but if we want to go on a weekend away we have to plan it months in advance because they have to find a common path between all the birthday parties, judo competitions and dance performances of their offspring. I can just do whatever I want on a whim.
And once people become parents their sex life becomes pretty much null and void too.
There is definitely a correlation between high standards of living and smaller families yes. But I don't think this is because people want to spend more. It's just that they don't really need a big family for "pension" reasons, don't usually care about religious directives anymore (think the big catholic labourer families of old) and want their life to be more than about having kids. Women don't just want to be a baby machine anymore. It takes a toll on their bodies too.
And I think it's good. For environmental reasons our population should be stable, not growing rapidly. 2 children per couple is perfect.
I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question. The point, always, is to provide the best possible life to the greatest number of people, without regard to where those people come from. My goal in life is to maximize human happiness, I do not care what nation a person is from. Unless I'm misreading your words, or you chose your words clumsily, you seem to want a system that works for some set of people but not another set of people. But I'm curious, one what basis would you chose one set of people, and then why would you care about them at all, rather than care about some other group? If you're not going to care about the happiness of all people, then it seems to me you should be consistent and not care about anyone's happiness. But if you honestly care about one group, but not some other group, I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?
"You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers"
I think you meant to write "One generation has apparently found it is possible to maximize their happiness without having children, and now gratefully receives help from new arrivals so as to take care of them during old age, as they have no children to care for them."
The US has many landlocked, east coast, and great lakes city outflows where you can buy property inexpensively. But people tend to not want to raise families or retire needing medical care in declining areas given the choice to leave.
New York city Manhattan has 600k fewer people than 100 years ago and property price to average salary keeps climbing.
I don’t know what the magic is that to expand property ownership. You see cities with thousands of blighted homes and new build suburbs developing 30-90 min away at prices that are a stretch for even well paid middle class jobs.
I think affordable home building and financing could happen somehow but the trend is not going in that direction.
Possibly I'm misinterpreting ....
As far as I know, that's false:
The economic cost I'm pretty sure of: Research has shown (but I won't pretend I can cite it) that immigrants are net contributors. One (admittedly completely conjectured) explanation: Anyone motivated and healthy enough to travel to another country, where there's another language, with nothing but their shirt, is going to be very productive. Few people I know would do that.
A good friend's ancestor escaped a prison camp (political prisoner), traveled across a continent, and found their way here. They did very well - they didn't find the obstacles people face in a free, wealthy country to be especially challenging!
Finally, even highly skilled workforces are mostly not high-skilled. Most jobs are otherwise.
That very much depends on immigration policies and the way a welfare state is setup.
I am sure that countries with strict policies that mainly allow people to immigrate that a country can be sure these people can contribute to the economy, in such cases sure.
But some countries have very lax policies and (in the name of humanitarian aid) allow many people in from poor areas of the world. At the same time some of these countries might have a large welfare state, with benefits like free or cheap healthcare, schooling, state pensions, medical benefits either free or heavily subsidized, unemployment benefits, etcetera.
For those countries immigration is a huge cost. Many immigrants moving to such countries will never (be able to) work. But they will use a large amount of resources from the welfare state. And perhaps such countries hope children of these kinds of immigrants will be a net benefit, but only time will tell.
Because one additional hurdle is that for many of such countries it’s not expected (and there is little push) for immigrants to integrate into society.
For these countries unrestricted mass immigration will mean the dismantling of the welfare state. As there are too many users of welfare services and not enough people paying taxes to finance the welfare state.
Many Northern European countries fall onto this group.
Seems ridiculous to say its “false” that there are complications then offer some vague reference to research that indicates its not a problem in a particular way.
Supposing that this is true, what happens in poor countries when they selectively lose their healthiest and most productive people to emigration?
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The problem is more that they speak a language that people do not want to spend time learning, do not have a particularly dynamic economy, and have issues with work culture, gender inequality, and so on that turns off many foreigners from making the jump.
why though? Why not just figure out how to sustain your population? There may be a period of time where there aren't enough people but that could be a beneficial time where salaries increase, technology improves, etc.
Richer countries have fewer kids. Richer people have fewer kids.
I don't think it's really a question of "enjoy your riches," because no matter what your status, nobody can "afford" children, not even the ultra high net worth individuals. It's a burden regardless.
But I think therein lies the answer. There was a time not all that long ago that not having children was a burden. Who was going to bring in the harvest, or at the very least supervise bringing in the harvest? Who could you really trust to take care of you properly when you got old? And of course, there's a biological compulsion as well, but that's much easier to sidestep only in the last couple generations.
I think that also there is a culture shift that has taken place, there is less pressure to create a traditional family unit. More virtue is given to autonomy and following your dreams than settling down. In addition to this, contraceptives such as IUDs have become much more socially accepted, so less people are getting pregnant. Naturally all of this adds up to a drastically lower average fertility rate than a few decades ago.
In summary, it’s a bit of culture shift, economics and science which has led us to where we are today. The result is that in the next few decades we will either have to start having more children again, or rework the way our economies are structured to account for less growth in exchange for a focus on sustainability and providing a livable wage for all people. Its likely that if we keep with the status quo, quality of life will keep going down until we hit a breaking point.
Second generation and later of immigrants very rapidly adopt the social customs of the country they live in. This is seen everywhere. Vietnamese to Australia. Filipinas to the US. Congolese to Nigeria. Marocs to Spain.
Not typical for Canada as an example.
The bigger point is that immigration and it's effects are deeply shaped by policy.
I think this is overblown and repeated gospel.
People in factories are trained to work the tools and machines they work. What's the barrier for an immigrant besides language?
Shop clerk? Farm worker? Baker? Cleaner? Butcher? Driver? I have an infinite list of jobs that do not require much education and even a longer one of jobs that require it, but only on the resume.
Also, are you assuming immigrants at home don't study, nobody of them is a mechanic or electrician or plumber or carpenter?
Let's be honest: immigrants aren't less educated for western societies. It's us who have went through 20 years of studies to center forms in a web page or work as secretaries or scrum masters or bank clerks.
Math, low skilled immigrants often lacks basic education and can't properly read numbers. That makes them unfit even for most jobs we nowaday call "unskilled" like shop clerk etc. There are billions of such people in the world and when they immigrate there isn't much you can do to get them a job.
There is a reason why most unskilled jobs today require high school, because without basic math you can't do much at all. Immigrants with high school equivalent education or higher can integrate just fine, immigrants with lower level than that are hard to deal with so most countries refuse to take them in but those are the majority of people in low income countries.
In Sweden they are trying to teach these immigrants math etc, but it is hard since they both needs to learn a new language and math and all those standard things as an adult. And after that they have to compete with "unskilled" locals who learned those things as kids.
More generally, the challenges in communication are a well known barrier to outsourcing knowledge work.
I expect this to have pretty large effects,though predicting what those will be seems difficult.
In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. This is still a notable shift in religious demographic, just not the kind your portraying.
Further, outside the west, much of the world has kept or has increased their religiosity as they modernized. The belief that modernism produces secularism was abandoned by sociologists of religion some time ago after it was evidentially false (E.g. India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state).
The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
Which one is more fit to the environment?
Honestly... I've simply not seen this. There are many religious people in prominent positions, you just don't know about it. In my fairly traditional catholic parish, we have families where mom and dad are catholic, their five kids are catholic, and their 40 + grandchildren are as well (some are now adults and having kids of their own). And all successful, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. The idea that religious == stupid or baggage or whatever is simply at odds with history. You're conflating the Duggars with otherwise normal people that just have different views.
I think the identity will remain but the substance will change.
There are some really cool discussions on YouTube about the definition of God and the nature of consciousness that are quite compelling and unifying.
Which, BTW, live close to the centre of Global Warming's bullseye.
We might need to add extra variables on such forecasts.
Vague, non-specific, evidence-free comments in highly sensitive areas lead to all sorts of bad stuff.
Religious populations out reproducing non religious is a real thing.
What's going to be really interesting are the intersection between these two populations -- At some point some heavy breeding religious people are going to realize that as good as their heavy birthrate strategy is a heavy birthrate strategy combined with the technological advances I describe above is even better.
Imagine a near future where some ambitious and forward thinking Mennonites/Hutterites/Doukhobors/Amish are pumping out legions of productive, obedient and consistent workers in rural North America while urban and educated urban dwellers waste their time and economic opportunities away while being terminally online and outraged to the point that the economic and political balance of power shifts to these rural groups.
Artificial wombs don't change this. Embryo selection doesn't change this. Vaccines will increase the chances that whatever children are produced survive to adulthood, but childhood mortality from vaccine-preventable illness isn't high enough to compensate for a worldview that doesn't want to have children.
If you believe you're part of something much more significant than yourself, dedicating your life to moving it forward by producing other people who will outlive you and do the same makes sense. But if you're all that matters? If your scorecard is measures in dollars or followers or something else that dies with you? You don't have kids even if you do have access to artificial wombs.
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I imagine advances in fertility technology will change the landscape of procreation in ways we cannot yet predict. It's also possible that major catastrophes could change population dynamics, not necessarily by mass deaths, but by driving some populations back along the demographic transition where having many children is once again the best strategy.
Plus of course the "singularity" which, if real, could knock all predictions straight into the bin.
I personally predict that we will fuck things up and end up with huge population decline because of raising fossil fuel costs, climate change, ecosystem destabilizaion and wars. Even feedin 8 billion people is a huge ask in this declining world.
I guess these models assume that neither human cloning nor interstellar space travel will take off in this century. Models in 1923 probably didn't expect another world war, birth control, or the crazy levels of agriculture we see filling up our satellite pictures. How does one sanely account for such changes in these long-term models?
Or do you mean human "printing", some machine that can carry a pregnancy instead of a human doing it? I don't think there is even a glimmer of such technology on the horizon. Then again, you seem to also think that there is some imaginable chance that we'll discover interstellar travel in the next 75 years, so maybe that doesn't stop you?
One example scenario would require some narcissistic billionaire women to start producing their personal cloning machines. Production could go up to, say, an extra one of them (except for the billionaire part) each year. If that catches on, in a similar fashion to plastic surgery, we could see global fertility rates revert to Catholic levels. It also helps to think in terms of identical twins, triplets, and beyond.
Having a lot of children is now mostly limited by raising of said kids to require a lot of effort and money. It does not seem like a stretch to assume that robots could lend a hand here, at least on the 75 year horizon.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02901-1
now while this isn't nearly at the level of human cloning, it never ceases to amaze me how far we've come.
Beyond that, perhaps the models do assume that future birth rates don’t wildly depart from historical ranges. Seems a reasonable assumption to me.
But sure we could somehow get artificial wombs and an interest in using them, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Seems unlikely though.
Underpants gnomes models. Bounce-back could happen, but there is no understanding in governments of why the decline is occurring, nor what it takes to reverse it,* so it is unlikely.
* Exhorting people to return to traditional family values, as the new PM of Italy does, is likely to crash fertility faster.
My impression is that demographers have thought we would plateau around 9 or so billion.
Is it possible a school district couldn't afford the best services? Or that their goal wasn't necessarily the population number but rather an analyst of the causative forces and directional trends?
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I think there is ample buffer for future generations to correct the population trajectory if under-population happens to be a non-imaginary issue for our species.
In my opinion, many ecological problems would be simpler to solve with half or a quarter of the current population.
And the imbalance between old and young would only last for a few decades.
I believe that in case of population collapse, the solution will naturally appear to large enough number of people, evolution shaped us to reproduce, I don't think this instinct is likely to disappear, even if we might not fully understand it and why girls and women tend to have less children in some conditions (it happened before, in antiquity, and was considered to be a problem by Roman politicians, many of the current traditions around marriages were first created as laws...)
Economic problems are real and worth addressing and I hope we can find ways other than “we need more babies”.
Negative slope population will lead to mass economic instability and eventually war.
It is really difficult to make predictions x years ahead of most topics, the further the harder when you take into account the dynamism of these factors and the innovations (discoveries on how to use new materials, for example, that replace old ones, etc.)
It's as you said:
> It is really difficult to make predictions x years ahead of [things like] innovations
Humans already use more resources than they regenerate (the definition of unsustainable). Currently, most of the world population lives in relative poverty compared to the people in places like Germany, USA, Japan, etc. It would be fair to have everyone live at this standard, but that costs even more resources, making it even less sustainable! We can hardly prevent other countries from wanting to innovate, so it will happen, and our problem will get worse if we do not gain better technology (and/or reduce our consumption of animal products, learn to stop heating offices across weekends, etc. It works on both the supply and demand side of resources).
Precisely because it is hard to predict whether future innovations will materialize soon enough to fix those problems in a way that we do not reduce everyone's living standards, we cannot rely on the innovations happening and being deployed earth-wide in time