People can't afford kids. Not enough time, not enough income, even hiring help is out of most people's budget.
People are being squeezed and the middle class is shrinking. No wonder they don't want kids whose lives will be worse than their own.
Answering my own question.. I think the reason people are having fewer kids is more to do with urbanisation and all the social and cultural changes that come with that.
Poorer populations have less access to sex education.
The government pays $850 a fortnight to a single mother, on top of a $5000 baby bonus and various other incentive schemes. Poor social classes see this as an easy means of money compared to working a "dead-end" job.
Maybe they have kids to escape their reality. People cope in different ways; drugs, drinking etc. Maybe they desperately want to live through their kids.
This is likely an accurate thesis based on macro and micro studies.
TLDR Education, empowerment (contraceptives), labor force participation = decline in fertility rate. Provide access to all of the above, fertility rate drops off.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... (Fertility Rate: What explains the change in the number of children women have?)
Outside of Africa, there are only a handful of countries where the fertility rate is > replacement rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tim...
In the world wide context of rich vs poor in the third world it is often the case that your children are your social security. This may also be culturally enshrined as a literal legal duty for offspring to care for their parents no matter how alienated they were.
It would be technically accurate yet misleading to say Social Security and pensions are anti-family. Ensuring care in old age regardless of savings or offspring ability to provide undermines the obligatory support network role. Of course modern perception of family has evolved in the same sense that marriage is seen more about love instead of an economic transaction.
And that is before any conscious or subconscious k/R strategy. Essentially "elites" are incentivized to get the "best" heirs and dedicate more resources to them. Those struggling and incentivized to reproduce enough to have some survive and be successful.
You are lower middle class and Disney world is fine to take your five kids and you don’t have to break the bank. But if you are upper middle class or even borderline rich, every additional expense due to extra progeny is many times over. Your savings can’t be stretched if there is a dip in earning potential. It’s difficult to ‘step down’.
A very simple example is mortgage/owning house vs renting. Less riskier to be laid off as renting capacity is elastic vs losing mansion and cost of living of a certain lifestyle is inelastic.
And this pattern appears in every aspect of life.
Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye.
I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective."
[1] "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
We don't really know that. There are environmental stressors that lead a species to adapt; there are also stressors that cause a species to go extinct. I think time scales are really important here. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than humans. But the rate of creating new antibiotics and contraceptives are probably in the same ballpark.
It would be impossible for nature to evolve such a complex, conscious yet instinct-like feature as "I want to have kids for the sake of kids... right, where do I start... I need a fit SEXUAL partner(so that I have healthy kids)... but just to have kids... totaly not for the pleasure of sex ... economy be damned, I want kids... kids are extremly hard to raise by modern standards... scratch that... I need to have kids no matter what".
We have such an instinct now. Women (some men too, I guess) in their 30s frequently attest to a feeling that their "biological clock" is ticking and that they feel a yearning to have kids for the sake of having kids. This desire is probably still secondary to the raw sex drive in humanity, but evolution is great at taking secondary drives and turning them up to 11.
Keep in mind also that evolution isn't necessarily genetic. Humanity's unique advantage is culture. We can change our "software" much faster than we can change our genetic "hardware". Some culture groups, e.g., the Mormons and the Amish, already have fertility rates very much above average. As long as fertility is heritable, it doesn't really matter whether the mechanism is genetics or culture: the future belongs to the people who reproduce.
Womens fertilty declines sharply in their 30' and it is through conscious understanding of that fact and imitation that they think "their biological clock is ticking"; they consciously understand that it is now or never, that all their friends have children and that their looks and chances of attracting mates are fading.
Also, I'm willing to bet that people in the "my biological clock was ticking" camp have much, much lower birth rates than average(probably close to 1), which is an indicator rhat they actually felt pressured not to be childless rather than a genuine desire to have childreN.
I absolutely agree with your culture argument, I am just claiming that modern culture will go extinct unless we incorporate higher birthrates into it, not that the human species will go extinct.
Those thoughts don't seem to have been going through this guy's head: https://www.sunnewsonline.com/i-slept-with-1400-girls-impreg...
The random chanches of conception for unprotectected sex between two young people is 1 in 20.
If it's the first, there's absolutely no way that would happen, if it's the latter, what's next, we ban abortions, women working, force people to marry, we ban the pull out method, the calendar(I'm not trying to build a straw man here).
A balanced and fair solution to the declining birth rates would be so complex that I'm convinced no human designed system would work; perhaps we could turn ourselves into a AI run perfect human zoo in the future, but as long as humans are in the decision loop I think it is impossible.
Perhaps we have changed our environment in such a great way that it is impossible to avoid it?
We have the(correct) climate change narrative that makes people think declining population is a good thing, instant communication and very rapid dissemination of information and tools which enable a "winner takes all" situation(which means 1% of the population has the means to comfortably raise 100 children, which they won't, while 99% can only raise 1.X children, which they are doing), birth control, anonymous and tolerant societies where it is ok to be childless(and it really is ok), pursuit of happiness(which was never a thing in human history), non-religiousness(all major religions value having children), long working hours, "good parenting"- which is a good thing for the children, but it makes raising children incredibly expensive in money and time, both of which most people don't have, the fall of monogamy, the ridiculous real estate prices, the rise of mental dissorders -- all of which lead to below replacement birth rates.
Don't count on subgroups to save the day, their higher birth rates will plummet as soon as we hook them up to our values and we free them of their oppressive values.
I feel like human culture has still not reached a steady state after the invention of birth control. I don't know what will happen per se, but it seems like the world of the future will have to be more encouraging of parenthood, in some way, than the world of the present. I hope it is a way that is consistent with the model of a modern free Western democracy.