I think we very rapidly went from a world with high child mortality rates, no access to birth control and children being at least moderately useful on the farm or doing some other work quite young to a world where having children is both a choice and very very expensive.
This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
Worse: the costs are front-loaded and (all but) must come early-ish in your life.
The opportunity cost—the shadow, if you will, that the cost of children casts on your future retirement savings—is enormous. It’s way larger than the nominal cost. Big ouch.
Also from a world where the ability of women to access decently paying jobs outside the home was heavily restricted to one approaching equality. Motherhood is one choice of many, with negative pay.
Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.
2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.
Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.
But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.
There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.
I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.
Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.
Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did.
But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.
If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it.
Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.
I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.
Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.
> Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
We (the West, generally) have successfully put the fear of god (including metaphorically, for atheists) into people that they MUST NOT HAVE CHILDREN THEY CANNOT SUPPORT. We have provided them with means for not having children. Now everyone is surprised?
Yeah it is absolutely baffling to me that the discussion of teen pregnancy never seems to come up in these "oh no birth rates are down" discussions. Like, you told us that a substantial portion of these births were bad for society (and I generally agree) and now you are freaking out that the number of births went down?
It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids.
Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years.
This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.
Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce.
I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.
Depends on what you expect for the future. A lot of those children have a hard time thinking of what kind of job they'll be able to do. Most of them seem to land on "influencer" or something.
I know it is contentious, but there is a very real chance that a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value in the somewhat near future. You may not believe that, but if it is true then adding to that number of people is not a good thing.
> a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value
Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.
Why would people even exist if they weren't going to contribute to shareholder value?
I completely agree that more people is not good, but for completely different reasons: there are WAY too many already.
Our primate species has so overpopulated the planet that every single "environmental service" (to put this in the money = purpose in life perspective) is massively over burdened.
My personal opinion is that there is no such thing as "purpose in life", we just grew from the mud here. But I think there is a general awareness among people with some exposure to the state of the planet that we're trashing the place, and that's mostly due to there being way too many humans.
Even if a person can't put their finger on it, there is a general feeling that the future holds a dubious opportunity to flourish.
Therefore less kids.
I also believe that raising a child takes a lot of time and effort, and modern first world youth just aren't interested in spending that much time away from their phones.
Could it be perhaps that they need to be established first and feel like talking less risks because the future feels uncertain like the essay suggests? “People don’t want to take risks” seems like half an answer and isn’t finding root cause. When things feel crazy, people control what they can, establish routines, and perhaps take less risks.
Just the other day my wife and I were marveling that people in our neighborhood groups are requiring pet sitters to be insured and bonded.
The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.
All these wild theories are complicating a simple issue. People arent having kids because they dont want kids. For some people maybe they need to see a psychotherapist like your comment almost implies, but for many others they just think kids would make their own lives worse in a way that past generations did not.
I think that the various studies on this subject do not take into account a simple explanation. Choice.
Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore.
Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids.
From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume.
If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood?
As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.
"On a farm, a child is an investment. In a city, it's a liability".
In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city.
Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm.
But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.
This post argues that collapsing birth rates aren’t just about housing or money — they’re a rational response to the sense that the future is unstable, meaningless, or even dangerous. It introduces the concept of “temporal inflation” — the idea that just like money loses value in hyperinflation, time loses value when people can’t trust the future. Would love to hear if this resonates with others.
> Yes, kids are expensive. But countries like Korea and Singapore are pouring money into incentives and still seeing fertility drop to record lows.
This is what you're missing. They are not.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink.
In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on...
Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value.
And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
Exactly. "Pouring money" is what, a one-time $2000 payment? How is that going to get anywhere near balancing what you've already described. Unfortunately most politicians seem very out of touch and are just there to keep the status quo.
I think treating it as a rational process and looking at the reasons behind makes sense, as opposed to "attitudes", in the sense that attitudes and culture are shaped through some processes.
I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.
It's a way to frame the problem that will work well for some people, and I don't see any real downsides to it.
I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation.
And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
I am not sure. I was not alive during world war 2. I would think, though, that during world war 2 it was relatively easy to think that we just need to wait until the bad guys are defeated. Now the rise of dictatorships and populism makes me wonder whether humanity as a whole is not just too stupid to survive.
Like any single-cause explanations of the fertility collapse, it's fairly easy to poke holes in it. Usually, you just name countries as a counter-argument.
For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility.
What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war for an additional drop).
Eritrea and Ethiopia are right next door to each other, they have high birth rates dropping completely in lock-step, despite Eritrea being essentially shut off from the outside world in terms of disruptive tech - no Internet for most, no social media or whatever other bogey man you can come up with and blame for "disrupting the culture".
Countries that are essentially ignoring climate change have falling birth rates too, as do countries where people aren't into Western-style contemplative existential dread.
I haven't come up with an alternative answer, mind you. So far, I've just been noting how easy it is to poke holes in all available single-cause explanations.
The usual one is "availability of contraception and related education for women". I don't think even the fundamentalist states have chosen to and managed to reverse that. Least feminist most collapsed country Afghanistan is still falling: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afg...
We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
Its pretty related to the other article that was posted here yesterday (?) about the american dream.
I dont think its the perception of the future, because people in the cold war / WWII surely didnt believe the future is going to be bright. Just read about the youth protests in America during 1940-1945.
Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents.
Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc.
Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.
Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations. Now that children are leaving the house in those countries, the growth rate is decreasing. I doubt living with parents is affecting reproduction.
People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
>Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations.
which has a different culture than the West.
Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)
Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.
Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.
>Children in overpopulated countries like India have been living with their parents for generations.
That's comparing apples to oranges. People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries who rose to be developing countries, no? Then there's also completely different cultural norms and expectations between India and western nations and how multi generational families interact.
I had a similar discussion with someone form Africa who was shocked to hear that in some rich European countries you could have a full time job and still be homeless due to scarce housing and crazy rents. And then he replied "what's the point of a country being rich if the people are poor?". Good question mate. It's because the point of rich countries is to be tax havens and economic zones where worldwide money is funneled to the top 1% and the workers who enable that have to fight for the scraps while those who can't, get left behind for the welfare state to pick up or fall through the holes in the safety net and end up on the street.
>People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
The reasons have been written in this thread. If you don't like them or don't resonate with you, doesn't mean they're mysterious and undiscovered. Just go on the street and ask 100 random people, they'll tell you the same.
Not surprised. Housing went up a lot in recent years and it is not affordable for most young people. And if you have to rent, why not rent your parent's?
Housing in the West was basically turned into another pillar of retiree funding. Old people extract tremendous financial gains from younger generations by either a) selling them decrepit real estate at extremely high prices or b) collecting very high rents on buildings that are even older than themselves (even in the US, which is the king of corporate landlording, they are a small minority; most landlords are natural persons, mostly retirees or near-retirees).
It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible.
(Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)
Readit News
This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
The opportunity cost—the shadow, if you will, that the cost of children casts on your future retirement savings—is enormous. It’s way larger than the nominal cost. Big ouch.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
Six figures? False because poor people have been having children forever and continue too.
1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.
2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.
Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.
But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.
There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.
I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.
0: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/how-to-have-grandchildren
Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did. But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.
If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.
I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.
Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.
We've become too cautious for our own good.
Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
We (the West, generally) have successfully put the fear of god (including metaphorically, for atheists) into people that they MUST NOT HAVE CHILDREN THEY CANNOT SUPPORT. We have provided them with means for not having children. Now everyone is surprised?
It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids.
Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years.
This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.
Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce.
I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.
Depends on what you expect for the future. A lot of those children have a hard time thinking of what kind of job they'll be able to do. Most of them seem to land on "influencer" or something.
I know it is contentious, but there is a very real chance that a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value in the somewhat near future. You may not believe that, but if it is true then adding to that number of people is not a good thing.
More humans != more better.
Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.
Why would people even exist if they weren't going to contribute to shareholder value?
I completely agree that more people is not good, but for completely different reasons: there are WAY too many already.
Our primate species has so overpopulated the planet that every single "environmental service" (to put this in the money = purpose in life perspective) is massively over burdened.
My personal opinion is that there is no such thing as "purpose in life", we just grew from the mud here. But I think there is a general awareness among people with some exposure to the state of the planet that we're trashing the place, and that's mostly due to there being way too many humans.
Even if a person can't put their finger on it, there is a general feeling that the future holds a dubious opportunity to flourish.
Therefore less kids.
I also believe that raising a child takes a lot of time and effort, and modern first world youth just aren't interested in spending that much time away from their phones.
The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.
Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore.
Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids.
From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume.
According to this study https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-..., only 18% of stay at home parents are dads, which means that in 80% of the cases, it's the woman who has to sacrifice their career to raise the kids.
If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood?
As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.
In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city. Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm. But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.
This is what you're missing. They are not.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink.
In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on...
Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value.
And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
I think this is the key insight, on this specific topic and many others.
My mom used to say exactly the same, but she still got 3 kids with very little money because her social groups expected her to have children.
Catholic?
I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.
I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation.
And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
The results would also likely be skewed by Germany quasi-forcing people to have children in support of the party.
Skilled professions were likely to remain useful after the war. AI makes their future value seem uncertain.
Deleted Comment
For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility.
What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war for an additional drop).
Eritrea and Ethiopia are right next door to each other, they have high birth rates dropping completely in lock-step, despite Eritrea being essentially shut off from the outside world in terms of disruptive tech - no Internet for most, no social media or whatever other bogey man you can come up with and blame for "disrupting the culture".
Countries that are essentially ignoring climate change have falling birth rates too, as do countries where people aren't into Western-style contemplative existential dread.
I haven't come up with an alternative answer, mind you. So far, I've just been noting how easy it is to poke holes in all available single-cause explanations.
We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents. Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc. Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.
Kids living at home aren't saying "I still live in my parent's basement"
"oh, lets have a baby!" this really is the depth of the issue. Confidence isn't going to have you change this answer.
People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
which has a different culture than the West.
Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)
Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.
Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.
It's the liberation of women, we can all stop now guys it's directly correlated with women's rights.
Turns out if you just give women more of a choice over having kids then a lot of them say "uh... no thanks".
That's comparing apples to oranges. People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries who rose to be developing countries, no? Then there's also completely different cultural norms and expectations between India and western nations and how multi generational families interact.
I had a similar discussion with someone form Africa who was shocked to hear that in some rich European countries you could have a full time job and still be homeless due to scarce housing and crazy rents. And then he replied "what's the point of a country being rich if the people are poor?". Good question mate. It's because the point of rich countries is to be tax havens and economic zones where worldwide money is funneled to the top 1% and the workers who enable that have to fight for the scraps while those who can't, get left behind for the welfare state to pick up or fall through the holes in the safety net and end up on the street.
>People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
The reasons have been written in this thread. If you don't like them or don't resonate with you, doesn't mean they're mysterious and undiscovered. Just go on the street and ask 100 random people, they'll tell you the same.
It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible.
(Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)