The deaths are involuntary. The choice not to have another birth is voluntary. This matters rather a lot, since a lot of the 20th century was spent arguing that contraception should be allowed at all on this basis. Maximising for number of people without considering their crowding leads to squalor, and legalizing and promulgating contracaption across the world has been one of the great liberating stories of the past 100 years.
Now that women have choice, the situation becomes an economic one. If having more people around matters to you economically: you have to make it economically sensible for people to have children. Increasingly there's a cost of living crisis for everyone, and children are a subset of "everyone" that can't make their own income.
Russia hands you a medal if you have lots of children; the UK cuts off child benefit after the second child, as part of an explicit "people shouldn't have children they can't afford" policy. I wonder if anyone added up the "births avoided" of the latter.
I get they are talking about in particular year and perhaps want to emphasize the births aren’t simply delayed but the way it’s phrased is off putting
If the births happened next year it would still be an 8k reduction in this year, but not a permanent one.
Children have become so expensive to raise in the west that there is _no_ country which is not in demographic collapse. This is being offset by mass immigration which only works so long as the developing world is producing a surplus of people. Something that is no longer happening.
Because of laws like this we have set up a demographics time bomb where in any country richer than India there aren't enough women under 40 to give birth to a generation of the same size as the previous one.
It's rather bizarre listening to people praise a model which is so unsustainable it produces more 80+ year olds than >30 year olds.
france has the highest birthrate in europe, followed by ireland and sweden. i don't know what ireland and sweden are doing, but i understand that france offers infant daycare, allowing more parents to work.
as for this article, it specifically talks about families getting a third child when they already have two in car-seat age. it looks to me that the problem is not cost, but possibly the fact that many cars can't fit three car seats in the back.
this comment from the original discussion, and the study authors response also seem to support that idea:
European numbers are largely controlled by Islamic populations. Pew carried out an interesting study [1] on the numbers. The Islamic fertility rate in France is 2.9, the non-Islamic fertility rate is 1.9. In Sweden it's 2.8 vs 1.8. There is no European country with a non-Islamic fertility rate over 2. Ireland is the highest at exactly 2.0.
The fact that these extreme trends exist even within Western countries, emphasize that it's primarily a cultural issue. I am not implying the West should adopt Islamic social views, but the irony is that we will end doing exactly that if nothing changes simply because they are reproducing in healthy numbers while non-Islamic groups are not.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
what caused the culture in europe to change?
the islamic population in europe is very young. first and second generation mostly. if living standards and education are the cause it's going to take a few more generations before the effect of that set in.
Obviously the middle class individuals could afford to have children and make it work if they genuinely wanted to do so, but it might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice. So it all comes down to priorities. So the question isn't why people stopped having children, but why priorities shifted so radically away from what is ultimately the most fundamentally important responsibility of humanity?
In the US from 1960-1980 many things happened. And one of these was a precipitous decline in fertility rates, plummeting by about 50% to where it would roughly stay to present day. It's quite unfortunate so many things happened in such a short time frame, because it enables one to create a reasonably compelling case for nearly any argument, including the common economic and educational (though those have many issues outside of this time frame).
One thing that also happened during that period was a dramatic decline in religiosity. And IMO that left a vacuum for meaning in society. And that vacuum seems to have been filled, for most, by indulgent hedonism that would gradually transition into consumerism. Drugs, the "sexual revolution", and various other issues skyrocketed during this period. This would further transition into the endless pursuit of the ever more expensive next shiny thing, be those Jordans, iThing, or exotic/expensive selfies for social media image crafting.
And what could be more antithetical to this shift in values and priorities than doing something that "might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice"? There's certainly nothing more rewarding or fulfilling than raising a family, but that reward comes at immense cost and time.
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Ok, I wanted to hit more on how this hypothesis can also work as a casual explanation for the commonly observed correlations (education, income, etc) related to lower birth rates, but this post is already getting far longer than intended.
The question is do we think that individual decisions should be allowed to kill our society?
If you think it's acceptable to let women do so then do you think men ought to be able to refuse conscription without any consequence in a time of war?
what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
that's not the kind of world i want to live in.
i think there are a few tv series that show where that leads to.
no, the solution is to help families with children, so that the children are not a burden, but something to enjoy and look forward to.
the USA especially is famously failing at that. european countries are doing better, but obviously way more needs to be done.
as for conscription. we should aim to stop all wars. there should be no tolerance for any aggression today. any aggression should be stopped by a global, neutral police force without exception.
Pain is the least problem of child birth. If you want to realize what childbirth can do to a womans body look up what a prolapsed uterus is. That women aren't having that discussion with you probably means that women just don't want to have children with you.
>what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
If a society has conscription for men yes. Alternatively you can have both men and women reject the social contract and only use society as a way to make money before it collapses. We don't live in a fairy tale, we don't all get to ride off into the sunset.
Are you being purposefully obtuse? The pain of giving birth is the least damaging long term effect of getting pregnant.
pain of childbirth and any of the negative after effects are not often a topic, which suggests that they are not a common reason for not wanting children, and so that can hardly be the cause for the birthrate to drop
Expecting a temporary transient condition to be sustained seems incredibly misguided.
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
There's always the same ratio people above a given age as there are below, for a given fertility rate, once an equilibrium is established. In cases where your fertility rate is above 2, this ratio will be below 1 (more young than elderly). In cases where your fertility rate is below 2, it will be above 1. Both relationships are exponential, not linear.
I think another interesting issue that demonstrates is the sort of exponential snap, the "demographic bomb", in fertility related issues. In spite of an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubles to 187 by year 60, before suddenly collapsing down to 22 over the next 60 years.
And these are numbers that are not entirely out of question anymore in many places. South Korea's fertility rate has dropped to 0.84.
The current average population increase is estimated at 81 million people per year.
Now what happens when the median age is over 50?
The result isn't a population reduction, it is a population extinction. Too few births is just as bad as too many. It's just that you don't notice you've decided to go extinct until 30 years after the point of no return.
In the US less than 5% of the population is over 80 whereas around 30% is below thirty.
They first show up sometime in their 20s or 30s, have more children than the average for the country, then their children have more children than the average too.
When you look at the demographics of people who are third or later generation immigrants the demographics look apocalyptic.
The west is the first fully parasitic society which can't survive without constant colonialism of human capital from the rest of the world.
What's more bizarre is thinking this model can change. Despite financial incentives and many other measures short of coercion, it hasn't.
(That is, you as an infant being born pay the risk of infant death in order for the opportunity to be born -- the shot at existence. On the other hand, asking carseated children to stochastically pay with their lives for the opportunity of a sibling to exist is a different matter morally.)
Different strokes....
This is an interesting sentence. The authors say this like it's a bad thing. And I recognize there are economic risks to decreasing the birth rate. But I would not murder 57 children to cause 8,000 to be born. So I think it might be okay for these births to be avoided to save these lives? I mean it definitely should be considered in the tradeoffs but facially this seems like a reasonable trade to me.