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