>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/19/viktor-orbans-pr...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/south-korea-fe...
[2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/boosting-birth-rates...
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US: 1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so. - chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
I am not actually sure that this is consistent across most people who have had children.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". As in caring for children is on par with imprisonment.
Now I don't mind mind people opting out of having children to live a hedonistic life, my only issue is describing it as a noble cause.
Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
Terms do have an intention behind them.
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
https://homepages.uc.edu/~moscoshn/Personal_webpage/papers/S...
Half of people watch more.
[1] https://adwave.com/resources/average-daily-tv-viewing-time
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
[edit to add this: I am talking from experience, it seems you are talking from hearsay]
Explain the details as it's somewhat interesting. Does the second kid cause the woman to explode? Perhaps the gestapo shows up and Anne Frank's the first kid? Does the hospital simply keep the kid and auction it off to the highest bidder? Is it presumed to be owned by Amazon or Microsoft?
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
You must have had a very boring time when you were young. It is very sad.
The personal attack is immature. Grow up champ, you'll be happier!
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
And according to your article, this is almost exclusively a problem with the elderly:
> Those aged 85 and older die from malnutrition at a rate about 60 times higher than the rest of the American population, with deaths in that group increasing about twice as fast.
(Of course, I'd expect those aged over 85 to be dying at a much higher rate from _most_ causes.)
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.
When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
I agree with you.
Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!
Super happy I had so much life experience, not wanting to go out and party etc.
Trying to keep up with her snowboarding and biking and climbing and hiking and all the rest through her teen years is going to be a great motivator to stay fit and strong.
So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?
Also, I've definitely seen pro-parenthood posts be downvoted on Reddit. I don't mean anything obnoxious, just literally people talking about how they like parenting or how rewarding it is when it's relevant to the conversation. Obviously that's a super liberal group and that's where we see almost all of the decline, though.
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
Don't get me wrong, I think the problem is multifaceted, but don't you think it's odd that in very disparate cultures they're practically all having the same issue, but only in places that have first world-type amenities? Yes, there are odd groups here and there that don't conform, but the trend to that affect is worldwide. And again, this is when we know our hormones are definitely getting disrupted.
"Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one."
I don't understand that. Why? If anything I've heard the opposite most of my life, where men are afraid to have kids for child support reasons.
Why do you say so?
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical.
How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
Funny enough I saw a couple last night. 2-3 flying around.
Who is focused on destroying the world?
I don't think hardly any super villains exist. People might have a different assessment of what destroying the world means than you do.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
We live in a blessed window.
We have billionaries and LLCs, supervillains whose superpowers are based on being rich, don't worrying about the future much beyond the next quarter, and pretending personhood to hold rights like people, but without the possibility of getting arrested.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
The world is actually great, you are just focused on the negatives.
Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?
What a sad, resigned way to think about the world.
Our economic system is a pyramid of consumption, wealth gets concentrated up and relies on an ever increasing lower strata to maintain the status quo. When the lower section stops increasing, it breaks down. I barely want to live in a world of constant harassment by middle men.
I don't want a child to be a pawn in the greater "Population decline!!!!" propaganda mill, where the threat and fault of the failing pyramid scheme is placed on the lower strata rather than the doomsday-bunker class.
>Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?
More sweeping current problems under the future generation's rug. We could solve many of these problems today, but the causes of the problems are protected by the state.
I don't think the religion is the driver here.
see (Middle East fertility rates) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
and (OECD fertility rates)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
So no, their characterization was not correct, since the point was that, absent a particular group, fertility would be, like in almost every other OECD (and many non OECD) countries, below replacement.
Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.
If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
Large families were your source of farm labor.
Large families were your source of labor because you never given a chance to make a better life for yourself.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an...
An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.
https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/
Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.
Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.
Likewise, sure things like nannies can be hired to increase my flexibility. But, there’s a noneconomic factor of me just not wanting my kids to be raised by nannies. This requires my presence and engagement.
These are part of a noneconomic value system. In fact, many values like these are at odds with economics. Parents choose to place their values over economics. This might look like passing on a job/promotion that would require a relocation. If you are self aware enough to realize you have these values, you can estimate how becoming a parent will impact your life and choose how important creating a family is to you and if you want to ensure the consequences.
- likelihood to get pregnant
- likelihood to bring child to term
- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth
- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth
- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects
- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities
I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
Kids is fast.
Even above age 35, 85% of men are able to conceive within 12 months: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11026002/
Like it or not, fertility decline is substantially different between the sexes.
There are trade-offs everywhere.
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
However, men do have a biological clock and that clock is simply that they are proxied to women's clocks. Mick Jagger can get a young girlfriend and have babies in his old age because he is famous with lots of money. The typical man cannot do this and should not plan on being able to do this. The data tells us that if a man reaches 45 without children, it is extremely unlikely that he will ever have kids, even if his sperm tests perfectly in the lab.
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
Why start out pointlessly hostile in your first sentence like this? I can't engage with this. If saying anything without linking a study makes a person some kind of asshole, even smart, honest people couldn't communicate.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
Having kids is wildly subsidized for the poor - plot all the bennies available to a family at 2x the poverty line.
At any other time, it was assumed that if you got to a certain age and didn't have, it was a problem. We've finally mostly gotten over that hurdle (at a high level, not necessarily within close-knit groups and families), and people act surprised that many of us never wanted them to begin with.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
> your whole life
pretty sure the diaper changing part only lasts a couple years
Tribes and communities helped raise kids. That's no longer true in an individualistic and institutionalized society.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
An early form of birth control in my home country was naming your baby Enough (Dosta). Not very efficient, obviously.
edit: it seems this was mostly used for breaking a streak of female babies (the name is feminine). but also in general.
The incentives just aren't there.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
which is another approach. how about for each child you get automatically accounted a number of years of payments as if you had earned money. if it takes 30 years of work to earn enough for a decent pension, and every child counts for 5 years then 3 children would allow you to get the same pension with only 15 years of work. how is that?
btw, the global infertility rate is 5%. the global disability rate is 10%. those people are also affected by not being able to work. in other words, 15% of the population are unable to fully contribute to pension funds. where a full contribution means work and having children. but making children a pension contribution actually helps a number of disabled who are still able to have children. so now they are able to contribute more than they would if we ignored children as a contribution.
seriously, this constant shooting down of ideas just because it appears that one group is disadvantaged is tiring. try thinking a bit more creatively and help come up with a solution.
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
Usually disappeared. Once DNA tests were invented, it became straighforward to go after them. Underrated breakthrough to support children and single mothers.
my point is to support couples who actually want to be together to build a family. getting pregnant from a guy you messed around with is not a family. the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making it easier to have wanted ones in a supportive environment. hunting down a guy who didn't mean to get you pregnant after it happens unintentionally doesn't accomplish that.
Is it possible this is actually a better model than the nuclear family?
To a limited extent, the school system itself is how we collectively care for the next generation. How far can it be pushed in the direction you ask about?
the two main benefits are that parents get to know each other better, just like they would in a village, instead of being anonymous like we are most of the time, barely knowing who our neighbors are. and the sharing of resources. my dad loved books and music. i basically grew up in a library. it was nice when i had to make a school report that required some research, but it would not have hurt if those books would have been shared with a lot more people. ok, we have public libraries too, but you get the idea. by sharing resources you are able to get a lot more things that you would not be able to get if you lived alone.
Not saying it can't be done, only that this is harder than the Nike slogan (just do it).
can you share more about the spaces where you lived?
saluton... ;-)
The first few places were all at university: shared kitchen, shared laundry facilities, etc. and most had shared showers.
After I graduated, one of my partners was living in a HMO, I can't find any pics, but if you imagine a dozen big private rooms surrounding a central living area, a bunch of normal sized shower rooms also attached to it, and also a big communal kitchen with enough cupboard space for everyone to have their own.
More recently, though still 8 years ago, an older family member got Alzheimer's and both I and my brother wanted to help look after her, which ended up overcrowding the place with a normal UK semi-detached home having me, them, and my brother's whole family living in it while the builders slowly converted the garage into a granny annex for her, with its own min-kitchen and bathroom; by the time the annex was ready, we were all too stressed out and I made the move to Germany that I'd delayed in order to help look after her.
> saluton... ;-)
Ankaŭ Saluton! Mi ĝojas, ke iu legas mian uzantoprofilon ^_^;
In the US, there is ~$115 billion worth of child support debt outstanding. Even with DNA testing, we’re not going after the folks who aren’t supporting their offspring, mostly because they are low income and have nothing to take to satisfy these debts.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-support-statistics
> Yet, 2020–2022 data in the KIDS COUNT® Data Center reveal that just 23% of U.S. female-headed families reported receiving any amount of child support during the previous year (down from 26% in 2018–2020). Female-headed families refer to unmarried women living with one or more of their own children under age 18, which may include stepchildren and adopted children.
> One in three kids — nearly 24 million kids total — lives with a single parent, mostly single moms. In fact, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, of the 10.9 million one-parent families with children under age 18, 80% were headed by a mother. This makes women the more frequent custodial parent and the majority of those who need child support.
While fertility rates are down, roughly 40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute). There is still much work to do to drive down the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
Don't read me wrong, I'm not stating that the current economic/social pressure is good at producing healthy/happy parents/families, it just doesn't seem good either to turn teenagers into parents. The "sweet spot" probably lies in between, and what you say is very much an appeal to extremes.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
Once you have the job, it’s hard to fire you. So it’s a reoccurring pattern that people apply, work for the minimum needed time to get paid parental leave and then start to implement their family plans.
That is completely within their legal rights and for society as a whole it’s a good thing to have more kids.
At the same time it’s also bad for everyone else in the same team.
For comparison I assume you're German given the username, here this would amount to 300 billion per year, which is about 100x what the government spends on BAföG (the mentioned federal student aid). I genuinely wonder how much countries will have to spend until people realize that this has quite literally nothing to do with money.
It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.
It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
----
Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575
The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.
It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.
We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.
We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?
Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.
That's why the babies have disappeared.
Fun killed babies.
Yes, next question
Unquestionably. I'm sorry you got no hos
>Babies are not fun.
I'm also sorry you're an unsouled bugman living in the worst major city in the US. Sucks to suck dawg, but you are the biggest example of a swagless inhuman techslug every normie thinks a guy with a laptop is. I would say I hope you find a woman who can make you attach to a child and want to raise it but honestly I hope you die of a heart attack jerking your tiny pud to anime porn you dumb piece of shit.
1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.
1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948
Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.
Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.
2. Luxembourg is the only microstate in the chart. Fixation on a singular outlier is not useful.
I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.
Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.
Evolution didn't anticipate this.
So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.
It would be ironic if this was the great filter.
We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
Most states (and other countries) do tax the homeowners proportional to their homes’ market value. California with its tax proportional to value at purchase is the outlier.
Be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good (abundant, cheaper housing in this case) rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing (existing house value, amongst many other things, in this case).
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
Much easier to have a reserve of X, if X can be put in a warehouse and transported later.
After reading comments here, I think that US has plenty of cheap housing… but… cheap housing is in places where people don’t want to live. (Demand is low, price is low)
If you actually plan to use your own money to build a reserve of housing, better double-tripple check if anybodyz will want to live there.
I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There’s your problem.
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.
When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.
Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.
>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.
Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.
Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.
As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:
-Companies insist every employee works full time.
-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.
-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.
-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.
Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.
My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.
[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
Are you a parody account?
Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc.
I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!
Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.
In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty
Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.
Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.
Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.
We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.
Technology did this.
People have been having children later since about the 1930s. The change has been gradual, so it's only really hitting hard now because they've not had any children during the years when it's relatively easy, and now some can't. That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.
Coincidently though, this aligns pretty much perfectly to people's stability also shifting to happen later in life. Specifically the economic stability to raise a family on a single income. That's not really possible any more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't do it.
Just to add a little factual data to this point, the fertility rate in England and Wales has been below two children per woman since the 1970s.
the tech before social media - TV:
https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/tv-birth-control/
"TV As Birth Control
...
The impact of the new TV programming in rural India has been profound—and very positive, say Jensen and Oster. Their interviews revealed that when the new TV services arrived, women’s autonomy increased while fertility and the acceptability of domestic violence toward women significantly decreased."
We've been replacing biological imparatives with strange forms of nonbiological entertainment.
And it's increased now to the point that it's in endless supply and constantly attached to us.
I don't think you can point to the rise of tech as a casual just because it's popular. If people aren't having children they'll do something else instead. To say what that is you need more evidence that what people are doing.
People get hooked on this stuff before they even have biological urges to reproduce.
And it supplants the urge to reproduce.
Tech and entertainment are birth control.
How can you tell that isn't what's happened from looking at the rise of tech?
Sub-Saharan birthrates are starting to decline just as they're gaining access to smartphones.
All of the countries where women have fewer rights are also experiencing decline in birthrates. They have ~10-30% smartphone penetration.
"Having a child seems fun" is dopamine opportunity cost as much as a financial one. People have always been poorer, but they've never been so endlessly stimulated.
> I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?
Replace this with, "I'm bored. What's on TV / YouTube?" Everything else is unnecessary complication.
Childbirth has been collapsing for decades before Mark had launched "thefacebook.com". Japan's TFR cratered in 1960 and never recovered. Did Japan have smartphones in 1960?
Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.
>the highest birth rates globally occur...
Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.
>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.
I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.
Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Now THAT problem will reduce or go away. You take 20 years to debate a new garbage disposal facility and overcome NIMBY brigades? no issues! The population stays same when you stop arguing and get it done.
Err...My point being that it's not like Biharis who move to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are welcomed with open arms. West Bengal itself is a masterclass in what happens when you dont industrialise and implement birth control policies.
> Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
If USA's quality of life reduces people can still expect to live better lives than they do in India.
>IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Do you think China and Singapore just build like that? If you do you're kinda wrong. A LOT of time is put into planning and gaining consensus. Yes, the means aren't the same as India or USA, but Singapore for instance regularly holds ground level consultation with many people from different walks of life. Strong manning things leads to worse outcomes and both China and Singapore know this and only exercise it when absolutely necessary. The real issue is competent leadership. In most parts of the world only the most undesirable enter politics. It seems like the take away Indians and Americans have at looking at Singapore and China is StrongMan=Good without realising that it was a democracy that placed man on the moon, invented computing and more. The success of China and Singapore is predicated on their leadership and excellent civil service.
This is in stark contrast to a place like India where pulling up bulldozers to solve problems is becoming increasingly common. Politicians will command building of infrastructure just to satisfy voters without thinking through long term consequences. Often you get projects which exist just to check of the fact that they have built something even if that thing is utterly useless once complete.
> You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment.
> This is in stark contrast to a place like India
Second: Apply your same silly "lived in" rule to your comment about India. The hard part about building in India: It is a democracy with a (somewhat) functional court system and (somewhat) free media, so you cannot steal/take people's property without just compensation. In China? Forget it. The govt does whatever it wants.
> without thinking through long term consequences
Yes, Singapore will never have a boondoggle like California or UK HSR. But the two are not comparable precisely because of all the problems that come with democracy. You just can't see them building a "bat tunnel" for $200m.
India is just a poorer version of UK/USA. China is a bigger version of Singapore. Not just that some things are worse. You can file a lawsuit and keep things on hold for 20 years. The "bulldozing" that happens is mostly local, low level stuff like some mafia or criminal thug getting punished outside of the court system often because that is exactly what the voters demand.
> You just can't see them building a "bat tunnel" for $200m.
Im of Indian origin, I have lived in India. I also have lived in both China and now call SG home.
Re your point about "somewhat functional court system" and government land acquisition.
In Singapore when the government wants to acquire private estates a vote is held locally against an offer. The offers are extremely generous and hence it is rare for votes not to fall through. The government is also able to actually pay its citizens.
In India we had local political goons threaten to come in and takeover my relative's home since it was not occupied. We could open a court case, but when will it be heard? 50 years from now? Yes the home was in a tier 3 city but still, which is more fair/democratic?
The problem is India only has a few metros. India should be building 100+ new cities and rapidly urbanize. Cities are engines of growth. The slow migration from villages to legacy metros amplifies the infrastructure problems.
We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.
This will require incredible subsidies both to build and maintain, which I fully support, but I think is politically untenable due to everyone’s unwillingness for taxes to go up while the developed world already carries enormous sovereign debt loads (>100% GDP).
We ate the seed corn, broadly speaking, to maximize the gains for some at the expense of the young and the future. Hopefully I’m wrong, and both taxes go up and the bond market will support more borrowing in the near term for spending that actually delivers value.
If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.
The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.
And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.
Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.
This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.
Cuz where I am, any appartment priced cheap is instantly bought up and remodeled into an unaffordable 2020's standards appartment.
[1] - https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi...
if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?
Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.
The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.
if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.
The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD
Subsidies only come into affect after you have children. They can not work alone society has a much greater affect. They work wonders at making parenting possible while being part of the work force. You only get the subsidies when you have children, the question is how you are supposed to feel secure enough to have children.
These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.
It's a problem, because it's raised the bar for expected supervision effort, likely far beyond what is really needed.
Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.
Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.
I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.
Why exactly would a democratic society oppose this? Are you conflating democratic and capitalist?
Most if not all postwar European societies had ambitious social housing projects that aimed to secure housing for young workers.
Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…
The top 1% in America today controls roughly 32% of the wealth.
Tell us more about the peasants who got significant time off because the ruling class knew endless work resulted in an unhappy populace.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc.
The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals.
My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.
>western society slowly collapses
good riddance
[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[2]: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...
In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.
Absolutely not true. Minimum wage has never been sufficient to raise a family. It is (was) sufficient to keep one person out of poverty.
Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.
In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.
My parents married in 1972 at age 18. Rust belt. Both worked. While comfortable, we were always worried about money and layoffs.
Friends whose parents didn't do as well as mine or who were single income households fared far worse. Definitely didn't end up with saved "extra" money.
A single minimum wage was definitely a poverty wage in the 1970s even at the 1970s standard of living. I have no idea where you would get the idea you could raise a family on that.
My memory seems to think that wasn't true.
However, there were a ton of manufacturing and manual labor jobs that were capable of supporting a small family and they didn't need a college degree.
So, you had most young people earning positive money for four years at a very biologically fertile age rather than going into soul crushing debt at that age.
Then I got Mary pregnant
And, man, that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
As usual...
Anyway I'm sure the current oil shock and (assuming the clowns get their way) loose monetary policy will be different this time!
Birth control.
About 73 million annually worldwide, or roughly equal to the total death toll (civilian and military) of WW2 every single year.
Also, consumer credit was illegal until the same time period, and only legalized for people with vaginas in the mid-1970s. That alone might have made all the difference with marriage and fertility (which after all are only mildly related).
Imagine how your choices would expand if unlike your mother, you did not need to become Mrs. John Doe to be able to move out of your father's house.
I was responding to OP's point about how our bodies are better suited to have children when we're younger. I think that's scientifically supported. My main belief would be that having children when you have peak fertility probably goes hand in hand. Birth control is a good hypothesis, you could say it broke this link.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.
In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.
Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
If you just look at India, richer and more developed states have lower fertility compared to poorer, less developed states.
Within states, richer and more educated couples have fewer children compared to poorer less educated children.
These patterns are pretty much universal.
Could it be that the "stories" we consume (books, movies, TV, games) fill our heads (as in, focus our attention) with ideas that don't overlap much with family life? It's all about single people doing cool or fun stuff, with the occasional tired parents.
I wonder how hard it would be to give credibility to the hypothesis (yeah, "verifying" it would be much harder). What's the correlation between "percentage of time spent on non family focused stories" and "children per woman born in the following 5 years"? Sounds like a super noisy signal. Maybe averaging by country or even city could strengthen the data.
You are only explaining half of the equation.
Women do.
Men can happily wait till their 80s to have three children.
We need to get over the fantasy that biology doesn't drive survival.
If anyone is upset by that please help fund artificial womb research. There isn't nearly enough money in the space for the sole thing that can prevent human extinction at worst or soylent green at best.
As in: _why_ does everyone want a middle class life? _why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?
I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.
Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...
[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...
Actually more than one, because I also read one about scientists deciphering messages from aliens who used the word for "baby eater" to mean "good"
The other one appears to be https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15744759-three-worlds-co... (summary and review at https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/comments/up854p/three... )
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.
women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
Well yes, trivially: it's kinda difficult to engage in behaviour that can get someone on birth control pregnant. The first behaviour pretty much has to be "stop using the birth control".
When I was a teenage boy and learning about periods and the pill for the first time, I thought it obvious that women would choose the pill to stop having periods: they sound awful.
Took a decade or so before I learned that some women actually have much worse experiences on the pill than off. This is presumably why mooncups are really popular. And presumably those also have issues, otherwise I'd have stopped seeing tampons for sale.
I can't tell by your username if you're a woman with the lived experience of what you're stating is the cause of lower birth rates, or one of the many guys like me who just assumed the pill would solve a lot of the problems women talk about?
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)
So it doesn't seem that that cultural difference boosts the fertility rate all that much.
And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
"Being ready" to have a child is an impossibility so you have to embrace the unknown and be ok with mistakes. Kids are resilient, and many millions have had to do with less.
And another thing I understand is that some people actively want to raise children. You surely do. But I simply don't feel that way. Like, there's no inner sense of calling, or desire, or any moving thought or similar emotion or drive. Nothing like "yes, I want to do it".
And doing this not because I want it, but for the society's sake? It is an idea that makes sense, but but knowing the difficulties and stakes involved, a "why not" is pretty obvious to me. I most certainly don't want to spend significant resources of my lifespan on raising a kid I didn't even want. And thus I'm really glad that it's an option.
To be fair, I only realized I really wanted to kids once my wife and I started really considering it and my friends started having them.
I have daily reminders that validate my choice. The fact that it's finally something people can choose is a major factor in the downtrend.
I have always considered this to be a selfish sentiment. Wanting children so that you yourself are less lonely. That isn't to say it's a bad thing, mind you.
So you'd better brush up on your social skills, having children is no guarantee that someone will take care of you when you are old.
You clearly are a angry, bitter person. Perhaps that is why you are alone.
Still, my wife and I both feel that parenting is the best thing we've ever done or will ever do. It's everything I hoped it would be -- and much more besides. The benefits are innumerable for us.
I only encourage people to do the requisite research to make sure they make the right choice for themselves, because for many it's not.
It's really unfortunate that people who are likeliest to make terrible choices are probably also likely to make the choice to have kids. A lot of people who choose not to have kids generally know themselves well enough to make the right choice, which also means that they'd probably be better parents than a lot of the clueless people who wind up with kids they never should have had.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.
If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas that remain high cost.
The small towns in my area are desirable not just because they're small, but because they're small and have the same amenities as a bigger town. These towns are also increasingly relying on debt to fund decades of deferred maintenance just to keep the amenities they already have alive.
This would become dire if (for example) property values fell, as residential real estate taxes make up the majority of tax revenue. This might happen if demand for the town fell (perhaps due to fewer people), which would quickly become a catastrophic cycle (revenues fall, roads and schools deteriorate, which makes the town less desirable, repeat ad infinitum).
In a future with few or no kids, schools won't be needed.
So you lose some economy of scale when enrollment drops, you have to cut school funding, which makes the schools worse, which makes the town less desirable, which drops real estate prices, etc.
This was my first intuition.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
1. Teen Births in the United States: Overview and Recent Trends, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
(source: father of twins, and nearly bankrupt regardless of my tech-job, nontheless my kids me more than our usual career-shit)
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
Well mission accomplished.
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction.
As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack.
What’s going to happen over the next few decades is that a few variants here and there are going to spread throughout the population that actually lead to more kids, not just through desire for sex. It will be a population crash, followed by a recovery.
Extremely easy to beat that.
You can see that global population used to stay at around half a billion until around 1700. The growth is a recent thing.
So let me propose a more controversial theory - lead made people have a lot of children.
You can't beat this.
Humans had many offspring for millennia, humanity has had fewer offspring since lead has been banned.
I'm not the one proposing the theory, but that's a correlation.
Evolution is still working, if we understand it as having both biological and cultural components. Give it a few centuries, and secular people will be outnumbered by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Amish, and radtrad Catholics, and Mormon polygamists, and so on. That's the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? – and I believe, on the whole, he's right.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kiryasjoelvilla...
In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.
Many of them actually don’t. How could Kiryas Joel be growing so fast if it did?
80-90% of children stay in the faith, and when 6 kids is considered a small family, and families with >10 kids are common - losing 10-20% in each generation doesn’t prevent exponential growth
The other factor - a constant defection rate combined with exponential growth in the underlying population produces exponential growth in absolute number of defectors - it is easy for outside observers to misread that defector boom (e.g. the “off the derech”/OTD phenomenon) as a sign the sect is in trouble
> In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.
Why would biological evolution “have to” if cultural evolution is doing the job for it? Of course, the two work in tandem, but the biological contribution may turn out to be an increase in frequency of alleles that make people happy in high demand sects, rather than direct desire for children
Midsize sedan/SUV aren’t great at more than 2 parents + 2 kids (especially with car seats!)
Vacations are also more expensive since a lot of hotel rooms don’t allow more than 2 adults + 2 kids.
More is also harder on the parents !
I try to drive and stay in Airbnbs, and then doesn't matter how many kids.
and its use of United States tax dollars to fund social services that make it possible to raise their broods that American citizens simply don't get.
We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".
Most studies show that support and incentives is borderline money thrown away if the incentive is to have more kids.
You are giving money to people that would've had kids anyway.
Essentially for pregnancies at 25 years old or later there are no number changes. Women of that age have as many kids as they ever had.
But, pregnancies for very young women and teenagers has virtually disappeared. As women start having children much later, they simply have much less.
As a millennial in southern Europe, the average age of our mothers in early 20s.
35 years later, the average age of first time mothers in my group is 33+.
The article you're commenting points it out as well:
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions.
Now if the state wants children it would need to pay both for the missed fun times and also the missed career opportunities that come from having children.
> As indicated by the results: (1) Family welfare policies notably boost fertility, and the boosting effect is long-lasting
There appears to be a concerned effort to claim that incentivising raising children doesn't work.
Clearly the people with (control of) the money don't feel like spending it on this.
Or, as societies industrialize, life becomes more complex, time-consuming, and tiring than the simpler ways of life people were used to and able to manage...
In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.
So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.
And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.
All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.
We're having kids in our 40s when our parents started in their 20s. We're naturally less able to have as many because menopause kicks in.
There are no easy answers here. Younger pregnancy limits education and careers.
I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.
It’s a hedonistic choice to forgo children in order to enjoy the pleasures of an unencumbered lifestyle. It’s also a personal choice (though I would not say it’s straightforward for most).
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/>1 child life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/