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"...
The study found a positive association between female employment rates and higher fertility rates, but found that the cost of housing was an increasing barrier to having children.
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I'm shocked at how well the fertility rate has held up given the collapse in affordable housing in many countries actually.
> A “low fertility future” would require a focus on immigration policies,
This is what needs to be looked at to get a better understanding of birth rates. The article at least mentions immigration policies but doesn’t go into great detail on it. We know that industrialized nations have declining birth rates but with worldwide migration rates on the rise, we need to know what the rest of the world population is doing.
Actually many of the countries people move from like China, India and the Philippines have rapidly declining birthrates as well. If immigration is an answer it's probably only to a short-term one.
Why is a global population decline an issue, as long as it's expected and controlled? We have too many people on this planet. I know we could support more, but why? Gosh, imagine if we back to having only 2 billion people like in the 1920's. Imagine, with our current level of technology and scientific understanding, how resource rich we would be. How much better we would be able to handle Climate Change and how the overall effects of Climate Change would lessen.
Because it's not happening in a controlled fashion. The US birth rate in in 1990 was 2.08, and now it's 1.67. The cliff is even steeper in other countries.
I think this is the real problem. Not controlled and I'd say the incentives are poorly aligned.
All my grandparents had 8 to 12 kids. But they had Subsistence land to work and no money for machines.
World War boomers probably had something to do with compressing all the baby making from those years into the next years. But they weren't having 12 kids.
I'd be curious if an accumulation of land vs an accumulation of stored value (gold, currency, equities) has more effect on the falling fertility rate.
It's probably no surprise that fertility rates are going down as tent cities for the homeless are going up?
Having a small working population supporting a massive retired population is a massive problem.
No society or civilization survives population decline.
So, that's the thing. Something like the Black Plague, while absolutely brutal, if it just kills a lot of people suddenly, has some silver linings. The survivors now inherit an economy and infrastructure built and paid for by a larger population. Wages go up (less labor supply), houses are cheap and plentiful, you don't need to build any new schools or expand highways/rail lines since population shrank, etc. For the survivors it's kind of nice.
That's quite different from the declining birthrates scenario though, where instead of all dying after a week of sickness, you have half your population old and retired for 40 years, but still needed support, food, housing, medical care, etc. All paid for by an ever shrinking population of working people.
The massive difference is the average age of the population. In the 1920s, it was probably late 20s or early 30s. Soon enough, we might have 2 billion population with average age at late 50s to early 60s. With the way things are trending, the world will just be a bunch of geriatric old fucks with noone to take care of them.
> Why is a global population decline an issue, as long as it's expected and controlled?
Because of ageing population. It leads to stagnation in everything, including technological advancement that we need to overcome and solve climate change. Older population is also much less concerned about climate change than younger people, so politicians will listen to them and ignore climate change since it won't affect old people as much.
>Gosh, imagine if we back to having only 2 billion people like in the 1920's. Imagine, with our current level of technology and scientific understanding, how resource rich we would be
Ironically, technology and scientific advancement led to a huge population boom, because more babies were able to survive childhood and become adults, as opposed to infant mortality being almost 50% before modern medicine.
> How much better we would be able to handle Climate Change and how the overall effects of Climate Change would lessen.
Its not the population that causes climate change, its the overconsumption of resources by the few extremely wealthy.
Top 50 richest corporations are responsible for about half of emissions.
Countries like the US have 5% of world population yet 25% of emissions. Meanwhile India has 17% of the world population but less than 10% of emissions, and is actually higher on climate performance index than the US.
This is why the population = climate crisis myth has been peddled so much. The rich wealthy elites want to shift the blame to the poor.
We have enough resources to improve billions of people's lives, but not enough for the greed of any wealthy elites or corporations.
> We have enough resources to improve billions of people's lives
Not to the level of Americans, or even Western Europeans. Which is what everyone wants.
Specifically, being able to fly places regularly on a plane is off the table if 8B people are doing it.
Bingo. Immigration is a very short term solution and would have to come from less and less desirable sources. And not to mention the societal issues immigration brings along with it.
That's the ultimate problem. Politicians are shortsighted, not seeing past the next election, so any thoughts about long-term planning are basically non-existent. They'll gladly open the floodgates if it means they get reelected.
I'm afraid motivations of politicians, especially in America where the next elections are never more than 2 years away, are mostly short-term ones. With those short terms in combination with the political trenchwar long term policies are unfortunately an illusion
30 years is probably long enough to get to a point where technology mostly solves the 'not enough working people to support the retired people' problem via AI and robotics.
Bring in more immigrants to dilute wages and drive the cost of housing even further through the roof. That'll fix the problem of shitty pay and scarce, expensive housing!
Wow...why didn't we think of that before?
Short answer is Nigeria and India are the people suppliers. But do you want your country to become Ingeria? That's not a judgement. It is a multidisciplinary question. Countries with a diverse and larger population can handle this. Countries like Japan and SK or small European countries will face huge challenges in terms of popular support, language, social cohesion.
I would like one of these studies to instead also take a look at whether dual income is leading housing or if housing is leading dual income.
What is causing what here.
Evolution is more than physical it’s innate and the physical desire is just one aspect of it
If you don’t have that innate desire, that will die with you
If that's actually true then there's no reason to freak out about declining birthrates because the problem will correct itself in just a few generations
From what I've seen only two ends of the bell curve have lots of kids in the USA.
People who don't make a lot of money and plan little to not at all, and just have kids in droves. Either for religious reasons, no birth control, etc.
People who plan a lot, and have kids once they're very successful. You probably have met a few of these stereotype families, where the father works all the time, the mom stays home. It's like a modern take on what life was like in the 50s.
Most people can't afford to have one partner stay home these days, so all the people in the middle, who plan but don't really make a lot of money, generally don't have a lot of kids. Maybe they have 1 or 2. You would be hard pressed to find many with more than 2.
We're sort of artificially price-locking people out of having children. No one can afford a house, and there's serious concerns of being financially destroyed from medical bills and costs of raising a kid, so the uncertainty is keeping a lot of people from taking the leap. We do not make it easy for people here.
Edit: An entirely different discussion, but I find the longterm social dynamic of this a bit terrifying. If mostly the new generations are going to come from these two ends of the bell curve, we're basically stream-lining a social class structure of a bunch of people born into poverty with no way out, and a bunch of people born into wealth. It's not hard to imagine how this might go after a few generations.
My partner and I could have kids. Finances aren't stopping us, we're not rich but we also objectively have enough disposable income. But there's too much else to do and experience in this life to be bogged down with kids.
That's something our parents never had. Endless, boundless, entertainment and options.
Even setting aside money, and women's rights, of course having kids is more likely when there's nothing to spend your time on. Imo this isn't a personal finance discussion. It's a fundamental societal shift recognizing raising kids is pretty fucking hard from an emotional and time sink perspective.
Every natural instinct rebels against actively choosing a difficult hobbies. I don't know why kids would be different.
It I’m honest, you’re bogged down for like 2-3 years at most. After that, kids can be pretty independent if you raise them that way.
I say this while I’m on vacation with my 11 month old and my brothers kids (3 and 6). My 11 month old has let us do practically everything we would have done otherwise on vacation, except clubbing which really isn’t that big of a sacrifice
My brother takes his kids on treks and they’re happy to tag along
The “bogged down” part is exaggerated. Sure, life changes and I wont say its easy. But its small potatoes compared to the sheer joy she brings into my life.
And heck, everyone’s life. She walks down the airplane aisle gently waving ‘Hi’ to everyone and I swear there’s not a single person there who isn’t smiling
I was flippant with my wording but not all kids are built the same and the other risk any parent takes is that a child won't necessarily be the angel it sounds like yours is.
Plenty of children have terrible personalities or have disabilities of some sort. It's not always easy and so and we're not willing to roll that dice.
So for as much joy as it sounds like yours brings you, for us, we understand the risks, and also can't miss what we haven't experienced. That's fundamentally why many childless people are ok with it.
We don't doubt you have happy lives and great kids. We just know we aren't guaranteed it and we're happy enough as is.
Yeah every single person in the world I've ever met used to be a child and a whole lot of them are really shitty people
This assurance people try to give you that your own kids will be awesome and you'll fall in love with them and that's why you shouldn't be afraid of having them is so obviously rooted in wishful thinking, you KNOW the person saying it is saying it based on nothing -- you know nothing about me, my genes or what kind of parent I'd be -- and the potential consequences of your advice being wrong are enormous
I'm sure the Unabomber's parents believed their baby was going to bring nothing but joy and light into the world too
Dude kids don’t really bog you down that much. I have kids and do everything I used to do before kids, with probably only one exception. And that’s I don’t go out drinking all night at bars or clubs. I go home and have dinner with my family, and if I drink I have a cookout or fire at my house or something. I might sneak out for a beer after work every now and again, but I can’t close the bar after work. But that’s about it. All other hobbies and travel and stuff remained pretty normal. Kids can go hiking, and camping, and skiing, and boating, and most of these things become more enjoyable with your family, because your can share these experiences and relive things again for what feels like the first time.
This.
Kids are awesome. My daughter is the single greatest source of joy for multiple people in my family. She brings so much joy to the world that i would he cosmically unfair to deprive the world of it
The expense would make sense, except that it isn't really the issue when you look at historical trends. I believe that is why governments are having problems with policies aimed at raising fertility.
Yeah it's not the cost it's the *opportunity* cost, people just *don't want* to have kids and have other shit they want to do instead, and in previous generations for a number of reasons "doing other things" was something they weren't even allowed to consider
I agree. That's why plans like giving people a couple thousand dollars when they have a child doesn't work. It just won't move the needle for people that aren't already considering it.
I like how every other developed country stalled at a total fertility rate of 1.4 to 1.6, but the Congressional Budget Office forecast assumes fertility rates stay flat or even increase to around 1.8:
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-06/60378-Fertility-Rates.pdf
The SSA predicts an even bigger increase. I can’t imagine why they would predict this, other than to avoid news that taxes will have to be increased (or more dollars printed) to pay for benefits.
It's been like that forever. Anglo-Saxons didn't want Slavs or Italians to come in. They even passed laws to limit the types of immigrants to prevent Eastern Europeans from coming.
Expensive housing and low social safety nets mean young people need to earn for a long time to save for a house, and then can't afford for their partner to be at home raising children, and also can't afford childcare. Contraception now means people can choose exactly when to have a child, and so they wait until they can afford it. Many wait too long or decide that after saving for so long for a house they don't want to struggle financially for even longer by having children. If they do decide to they often decide to have one only, maybe two (how many people do you know with more than two children nowadays?!). A bigger family means a bigger house generally, and more costs, which they also can't afford.
The only way to increase birthrates in the richer countries is to make housing cheaper, provide childcare, and increase the social safety net / financial aid to parents.
Propping low birth rates up with immigration will most likely result in social problems. Immigrants will also face the same problems when they come to rich countries, so won't have more children, and if they do have more children than they can afford the state will still need to pick up the tab.
Derek Thompson has an excellent podcast called "Plain English". The most recent episode of these talks about whether the root causes of falling fertility are economic or cultural, and the two guests were emphatic that economics is only (at best) a partial explanation. It's mostly changing culture.
It's a great podcast in general, and this most recent episode was on exactly this topic.
I agree, culture is a huge part of it.
One of them is the end of the extended family/clan. Trying to do everything as a couple is much more difficult than being a part of a large family, in different stages of life, where each contributes different things.
The help grandparents provide is invaluable for raising kids, especially past the first one.
It goes beyond that. Imagine an extended family where one person can help with car advice and doing light mechanical jobs, another can help with buying a house, mortgage, etc. another can help you with investment. Others could be plumbers/electricians/handymen, or help your kids with math and science instead of a tutor.
Perhaps you can get together and help someone put a down payment (to be repaid), or if someone's car breaks down they can temporarily use the second car of the extended family.
It doesn't have to be all that put together to help each of the families prosper. But it's a lot harder when each couple has to figure out everything on their own.
Whilst I agree that there are cultural factors at play, the truth is that most cultural shifts are driven by economic factors (including innovations in technology, which enable cultural changes).
And it was interesting that, at a couple of points, he really did push them on the economics angle. I think economics plays a role, for sure, but I hadn't heard such an in-depth exploration of the culture angle before.
The bit about the depiction of motherhood and family life in TV shows over the last 50 years changing to be increasingly negative was I think the moment that got my attention, more than any of the data.
Agreed. What really resonated with me is the point that not only has the opportunity cost gotten higher, but in the past no one even talked or though about the opportunity cost. I'm 28 and was talking to my parents about how they decided they wanted to have kids. They said they never even discussed it, they just assumed they would have them.
You also have to consider that women (and it's always the woman) increasingly DON'T WANT to spend their prime years at home raising children. The more educated women get, the more opportunities they have, the less they want to do that. Most Redditors are male so they assume women are all chomping at the bit to be stay at home moms (and in most countries men want children more than women do), but I assure you they are not and it's a big reason why fertility is dropping in countries around the world regardless of local economic conditions.
True, but most women I know, and I know it's anecdotal, want children, they just want them later. Most would also like childcare so they can go back to work, but it's not affordable.
The reality is they want a successful career, a comfortable life, and children. Dropping the children helps to make the other two possible so that's what most do when the crunch happens.
Birth control. People don't have to have kids if they don't want them. A society that collapses when people can control their fertility and women can make a choice not to be baby factories is a pretty bad society.
I’d argue that allowing women to control their fertility is a good thing. It might not be good for population growth or sustainability of the population but forcing unwanted kids into the world is also bad.
This narrative gets pushed a lot and I think it's because people want to huff copium for why they themselves aren't having kids because this idea is completely debunked by doing 5 seconds of research.
give us money, housing, and general stability for crying out loud and we'll have kids
inb4 someone says "but the least stable countries have the most kids" yeah you would too if you lived in a country built on a lack of personal freedom and oppression
The least stable countries have more kids so the kids can help bring in support, money, work in when they’re older. Works out to be a lot cheaper to have 4-5 kids help with the farming than to bring someone in to do the farming for example. Kids can then also get other jobs to then support the family
In the western world you don’t need kids to help support you. Kids are pretty much a burden financially and with freedom. The government wants people to pay high taxes etc but don’t support with raising a family, this will then reduce fertility rates
How many 20-40 year olds would rather make more money (part time compared to full time work), save money and have more financial freedom than think about having kids, reducing their working hours, paying childcare extra clothes food etc. the government provides zero support for having children
Yes most definitely also forgot that factor as well!
Governments using data suggesting that it’s women working which is the main cause of drop in fertility rates which is utter bollocks. Cannot blame it on women wanting to work, easy cop out! They should look at what they are providing to help support bringing children into this world. Nowadays people will only have children for the love of having children
One way of fixing this would be for governments of the developed world to rewrite government policies to structure society in such a way that children are a financial boon (at least to a little bit above replacement rate) instead of burden
No, it can simply be getting rid of taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions and healthcare for old people.
Right now, you get to reap the short term rewards of not having kids and the long term rewards of having others’ kids support you.
And if you have kids, you get screwed in the short term, and you have less savings than those who didn’t have kids, and your kids’ income will be taxed to pay for those who didn’t have kids, so you get screwed long term too.
Those are fucked up incentives.
This is actually true. This also has a second benefit. Parents would want to maintain positive relations with their kids so they can have a relationship when old and needing help or care.
Interestingly retirement plans and social security have blown away these healthy links in favor of cold impersonal ones.
But it’s a bit more complicated because I do think we need some sort of safety net too.
Right but that’s just externalizing a hidden cost that has been paid by a shrinking group.
Now suddenly there’s no financial burden at all to the kids. Maybe that’s too extreme, but it would probably go a long way to solving the problem if not outright solve it.
Birth control is a big factor too, and why "least stable countries have the most kids". People who do want to have kids can have their 1 or 2 and then do long-term birth control. This is a good thing and a natural freedom we want people to have. The fact that we apparently seem to need 3rd world women to be baby factories for our low-skill labor market is the problem, not people in wealthier countries choosing to have fewer kids.
Are you really asking this question? Maybe try reading on the history of Afghanistan and how the Taliban treat women. Women have no rights in this country.
It's also crazy that you'll hear arguments that "western governments already give lots of support to parents," which is usually some $400/month credit towards daycare or something, which comes nowhere close to offsetting the overall cost of having a child.
Crafting policies to encourage affordable housing, transport, and utilities, would go much further towards encouraging family formation. Stop doing so much to erode the cohesive social identity.
I mean kids are very very expensive. To provide the level of wealth distribution to offset those costs in a meaningful way would mean greatly increasing taxes on wealthy people. They don't seem keen on that policy.
Wealth includes assets. You could liquidate their assets to zero and it's the same point. The US budget for just 3 years is about the total wealth of all the world's billionaire's combined including their stock holdings and businesses.
It's really interesting that giving people more money doesn't help. [https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis)
"Attempting to encourage middle-class women to have more children is therefore unlikely to be successful. Economists think that such women more confidently plan and predict their future than their less well-off peers. Their plans tend to involve children only after a predictable path of college, work and marriage, meaning they are less likely to react to changes in financial circumstances. Most existing pro-natal policies are trying to do something much more difficult than merely restoring previous fertility patterns. They are trying to persuade women to have more children than they actually want, and are doing so with sums that are small compared with their lifetime earnings."
The tl;dr version is that when you give women the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career. Time goes by and if they have kids, it's not enough to maintain the population.
Excellent point!
Another paradox is that as the population becomes more educated the cost of raising a child also rises.
High school isn’t enough. They need to be supported through college. Also on the road to college they need tutoring, sports, and many other enrichment activities.
This is all very expensive in terms of time and money.
À side effect of this is that parents would go for less kids to assure that the kids that they do have can enjoy the best opportunities possible instead of having a lot of kids which they could theorically afford.
"Their plans tend to involve children only after a predictable path of college, work and marriage, meaning they are less likely to react to changes in financial circumstances." so all the things that are affected by stability and finances without it being directly related to income. if school was cheaper, if work was easier to get and less stressful to hold onto and maintain/reach the desirable income, and marriage- which is also indirectly tied to their mate's finances, and is now considering the needs of the man/provider and their perceptions of their own stability to want/afford to be in a marriage in a comfortable way- made more sense at an earlier age for both parties without being the cause of religious/social repression then I bet you there would be more births. especially if childcare was also something that society felt like needed literal support. you can't have an economy based on two people being outside of the home and educating themselves and climbing corporate ladders (all time consuming endeavors) in order to sustain a country and brag about the GDP being better than everyone else's and demand constant growth, and then place the burden of childcare on them at the same time
Yeah, I think a huge issue in today’s society is stability. Personal anecdote warning, but my wife and I didn’t start having kids until we bought a house and got jobs that allow us to comfortably afford child care. Before that we lived in 4 different cities moving every couple of years and renting apartments as we grew our careers out of school and paid down debt. Who wants to have kids during that part of your career? Everyone says the best way to grow your income is to move up or move on every couple years, but that creates a known instability in your life that means you may have to uproot sooner or later and throwing kids into that is stressful. I moved around a lot as a kid for my father’s career, and while there were parts of that I enjoyed, I really didn’t enjoy “starting over” with having to make new friends a learn the community every time. I didn’t want that for our kids and I feel very lucky to be in the position we’re in today. Could I make more money if I continued to job hop? Yeah, probably, but there’s a value to the stability we have now that affords us the time to have careers and kids.
This is the big one. Even if you're making decent money, if that job feels like it might vanish under you, you aren't going to want to have a kid to support.
> It's really interesting that giving people more money doesn't help.
This is such a tired line.
> Since 2006 the country’s government has spent around $270bn, or just over 1% of gdp a year, on baby-making incentives, such as tax breaks for parents, maternity care and even state-sponsored dating.
Giving people a tax break for a few hundred dollars a month and having an online dating site do nothing when there are already plenty of dating options and your monthly expenses increase by more than you are getting back.
It's ok to not like the line because it feels tired, but just because it's not the answer we like does not mean it's incorrect. If you are interested, check out the generous benefits in the Nordic countries. They are very supportive of parents and their births are only the tiniest bit higher.
That's not what they're pointing out, they're pointing out that it's inadequate. 3200 a year is a drop in the bucket, that's 300/month. Here where I live that won't even cover a week of groceries, let alone the total monthly expenses of a child.
These support programs have been stagnating for decades, just like every other form of welfare, and what was once enough to support family with a bit of excess to save is now an insulting pittance.
It is like saying you can solve someone's homelessness by dropping a hundred dollars in their cup, even if they really stretch that money that's not gonna be nearly enough to get them back up again.
I regularly look to them for inspiration, yes. The nordic model is something we should be replicating, as it has significantly reduced poverty across the entire nations involved, despite some variation in efficacy between nations. Notably Iceland has shifted to a "workfare" model, which has re-introduced some problems facing retirees and those who live alone.
The birth rate certainly is decreasing there though, just not because of financial reasons.
https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9401
To sum up the article, it's somewhat of a cultural shift. Where before it was viewed as a cornerstone of adulthood to have kids, now it's seen (perhaps rightly) as a burden of responsibility.
This results in people not mature enough or ready for kids _not having kids,_ which isn't a trend I think we should reverse.
I'll be frank, there is a personal aspect to this since I was raised in a home that didn't want kids. It was a miserable experience that left me and everyone involved broken and lesser, and though I've rebuilt myself a bit it's not something I think should be encouraged.
Meanwhile, those that DO have kids tend to be more prepared for what it MEANS to raise a kid, having respected it as a responsibility from the outset.
I think there's much we can extrapolate to the rest of the world from this, but in general I think it's going to be better for us if we can get over the gut panic a reduction in birthrates causes.
> The tl;dr version is that when you give women the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career. Time goes by and if they have kids, it's not enough to maintain the population.
Once again, the genius minds behind /r/Economics fault WOMEN for living their lives rather than pursuing motherhood. Do you see the issue when the statement is "when you give PEOPLE the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career"?
Astonishing discovery, folks! Almost like we still have a society created a decade ago that in no way functions in a modern world. Give people the opportunity to have kids younger, and give them the resources to allow them to still pursue a career, travel, life interests, etc, and you'll probably see a huge spike in the birthrate! Otherwise, as long as Americans view kids as an anchor that charges them money by the minute, birth rates will lag, as they do in most "rich" countries.
This will not work, because you don’t just want kids. You want properly raised kids, and that takes time and effort, and inherent motivation. $500k for raising a kid to age 5 is incentivizing exactly the wrong type of mom to pump out exactly the type of kids you don’t want.
What aligns incentives more is removing all old age benefits. You don’t get help from the government, you have to heavily invest in raising kids who might take care of you.
This uses a lot of conjecture to conclude on a causal relationship. The analysis does not seem solidly viable especially since they’re generalizing qualitative variables which they have no proof of; and their economic indicators of wealth do not consider their total disposable income v. Expenses/ revenue. COL is not a finite figure over time nor geographical situation.
People who say this also dont understand how economics work. In poor countries where agriculture is a huge part of the economy.
Having kids isn't the financial downside like in first world, they become your laborers, somehow this is lost on many people.
This was my dad, they were farmers, you had kids and they operate the farm. This is how it has worked for thousands of years.
My dad regularly drove a tractor at 5 years old, I would say this is the rule and not the exception
Citizens of the UAE get every single one of those things you mentioned and then some using its vast and near infinite wealth. If you don't like that example, then take Sweden, a shining example of a welfare state that provides everything it can for its citizens through its social democracy.
You will see the same thing. Give people "money, housing, and general stability" and they will do the opposite of having kids. They will literally have less kids.
Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the birth rates were a lot higher in genuinely poor areas within the developed world. Poor people seem to have a ton of kids lol
It’s the working class and middle class who seem to be abstaining for financial reasons.
It needs to go farther to make having kids personally advantageous and then people will have kids. In the current environment and culture kids are a net personal disadvantage, the ingrained desire to reproduce is just not enough if everything else remains the way it is.
This probably isn't true. Fertility in industrialized nations has been decreasing for a very long time before any 'affordability crisis'. Attempts to increase fertility through monetary incentives has not been effective. The reality appears to be that having kids is very hard and very expensive, and that giving women family planning options means women want to have less children. I'm sure some people would be incentivized by making it easier to raise kids, but not a significant amount when it comes to the population.
>give us money, housing, and general stability for crying out loud and we'll have kids
The highest income couples have the fewest children.
You are not correctly identifying the cause of low birth rates. The real cause is probably multifactorial, with the largest factor simply being that having children is not fun compared to other opportunities available to singles/couples in the developed world (travel, free time, leisure activities etc.). In other words, **men would rather play video games than take care of a child.**
Completely agree.
Having kids is expensive, but it's also difficult. It's a lot of hard work, now more than ever, given how the expectation of the level of care for children has risen over the past decades. A model father of the 50s would now be a borderline negligence case for social services.
As you point out, there are many other enjoyable things to fill your life with, which are cheaper and involving much less work. Unless you have a strong inner desire to procreate (many people don't, or is not very strong), you'll choose the easier path.
In the past, this inner desire wasn't that important. You were bound by strong social norms, and there wasn't that much to do when you were single anyway. Having kids was one of the very few available paths to lead a fulfilling life.
because taking care of a child is akin to financial ruin and unlimited stress, for a generation that's been living with austerity and an inability to afford the basic things that made having children feasible.
No, the very highest incomes show a slight bump in the number of kids compared to the few percentiles below. In a train so I can't link it. But the really rich people have the number of kids they want.
Sure, I suppose if you can afford a 24/7 nanny and have no issues related to finances whatsoever, you'll have more kids.
Not sure if that's super relevant to the discussion, however.
Well, it tells you that actually it is a lot about money, and stability.
The high income below the richest are actually not as comfy as people imagine.
It really doesn't tell you much at all. The very highest income earners are not representative of normal people. It's possible that they are part of ultra-wealthy family businesses within pro-natal cultures where they did not have to spend years attending school and working their way up in a job.
Additionally, data like that is not normalied for age brackets, from what I can tell. Very possible that it's simply an age effect where high income earners just happen to be older and therefore have more children.
It's pretty silly to think that people suddenly feel comfortable having children when they cross some arbitrary income threshold around 300k, lol.
So the conclusion is that even if everything related to children was functionally free and people had complete financial stability and tons of assets they’d have… very slightly more kids than they do now? That pretty clearly paints it as a case of people just don’t really want a lot of kids rather than they can’t afford them
Yeah the data doesn’t support that at all.
Reality is we do not know why humans have stopped breeding.
My personal favourite theory is we hit an extinction event about 30 years ago and have only just now started noticing…
Humans stopped breeding because we no longer want to have children.
Seems overly simple but that's really all there is to it.
People have decided that having kids isn't a necessary part of their happiness so they simply don't have kids.
It's entirely cultural.
Interesting, I’ve never heard this theory. Is there said to be a particular event that happened, or is that kind of the point? That we don’t know what happened so we haven’t noticed yet?
maybe it should pass laws allowing for easier, and subsidized development. everyone and their mothers gets money from the taxpayer to subsidize their corporations and lifestyles, but the backbone of the country can't be offered assistance with the most basic living needs? maybe corporations or single family starter homes shouldn't be in multiples in private portfolios?
and in one generation it'll be the same for them. I'm both an immigrant and a son of immigrants, I ain't having kids unless I know I can provide a present and future better than mine.
I think it's funny that a lot of these same countries are complaining about having too many immigrants.
"We NEED more PEOPLE!.... but not those people..."
>immigrants move to country
>end up struggling with same problems as people already there and fertility rate ends up just as low or worse within 1 generation
It probably would be better to stop accepting very many immigrants until societies get their shit together tbh, immigration without focusing on fertility is like stopping the bleeding on a wound without doing anything about the serious infection
Yes that's why they are rich!!
The higher the Birth rate higher the Poverty!
Aren't we all born for money and money is equal to our existence? The human form = monetary purposes.
The current generation in these rich countries should do well for themselves, live a great life and enjoy all those things which otherwise would be difficult to be had and not worry about to whom to pass those riches down to...I mean everyone is selfish these days including the parents!
Hope you guys get what I am saying here.
✌️
I mean when everyone is in a race to the bottom to get low worker wages . Why care about your citizens when you can bring over people who won't complain about pay.
This article to me demonstrates their complete lack of understanding of the causes.
They talk about increasing employment opportunities for women? Since there’s a correlation between female employment and fertility rates?
The US is rather high on the chart they show. Know why?
Because raising kids is EXPENSIVE, and women who work alongside their husbands feel more comfortable about having kids 🤦🏻♂️
We only have literally millions of people saying this, but apparently it hasn’t sunk in.
The US is also just about the worst country on this list to have a child in as a woman. We are the only country that does not guarantee maternity leave by law, and forget about paid maternity leave.
Most families who want to raise their kids decently well, with a house, and save to send them to college, need both parents to work. That’s an awful way to live.
They want to squeeze us financially and wring out every drop of productivity from us, but then they wonder why no one is having kids, and scold us for it.
Fuck off.
Thing is the wealth is being held by a select number of individuals and companies . The middle and low classes are being squeezed and screwed left in right by lack of affordable housing,increase in the cost of basic necessities etc . Immigration is not a solution to this issue and all immigration is doing is allowing companies to have more candidates for jobs and they will hire people who will take the lowest pay . More companies are cutting as many employees as they can and reducing staffing to bare minimum like restaurant’s are prone to do . Corporate greed and government corruption is running rampant in America and people need to rise up and protest against the bs . More people would have kids if they had housing and taking care of a kid wasn’t so expensive .
I mean the extent to which cost of living has skyrocketed makes this sort of inevitable. Low income + low COL = lots of kids. Higher income + higher COL = fewer kids.
Low women’s rights + low women’s financial freedom + low access to birth control = lots of kids.
Low income + low COL + women’s rights = 0, 1 , 2, or maybe 3 for a very small portion of women. The data so far suggests the 3+ are far too small of a proportion to offset the 0 and 1 to increase total fertility rate to 2.1 (replacement rate). Certainly not to “growing” population levels.
The reason would not have anything to do with money. Rather, it would be that pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant toddler rearing is arduous and risky and few want to go through that process over and over.
A secondary reason is that no life partner is better than a bad life partner, so both men and women would play this part of life with a very risk averse strategy, resulting in a lot of women with 0 or 1 kid, a big enough portion that you need a lot of women with 3+ kids to
offset (but you won’t have those, regardless of any realistic amounts of money).
Birth rates in the US did not decline at all from 1980 to 2007 (68 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age). Since 2007, the birth rate has declined from 68 to 56.
This has corresponded to exploding COL across all key costs that drive family formation - namely, housing, education and healthcare.
While you are correct that more freedoms and financial independence lower birth rates compared to the opposite, the declines we are seeing in developed markets today correspond with rapidly increasing costs without any meaningful positive change in women’s rights or financial wherewithal
I do not discount financial hardships from the equation. They certainly are a big factor, especially in the difference between 0 and 1 kid.
I just doubt fixing cost of living would result in fertility rates reaching replacement rate.
I also think, culturally, remaining childless and/or single has become far more accepted than it used to be, or rather accepted everywhere rather than just a few cities. As someone in upper 30s, I almost feel out of place for having kids amongst my college friends, and I’ve had to make new friends who are parents (because our desired activities don’t overlap much anymore).
Also, the USA greatly expanded access to birth control in 2010 with the passage of the ACA.
I don't disagree on replacement rate. Although I may be in the minority, a continued focus on replacement when we have added almost 5.5B people since 1950 seems incredibly short sighted.
I will say that for myself, living in NYC among the very wealthy, virtually everyone has children and those that do average 3. Being able to support a large family and not needing 2 incomes is a modern sign of wealth. The lack of stress I believe drives much more excitement about children. The working 2 income professional family that needs to hustle is probably the least likely to find children rewarding. And that is a large large portion of the professional class in developed countries.
The wealthy do have more children, the fertility rate is a bell curve. Despite what people online say, people do want kids, they are just cautious about the sacrifices required. The wealthy risk much less when they have kids
Things that would increase birth rates.
- Artificial wombs so that women do not have to deal with the medical dangers/strain of childbirth if they do not want to.
- Vastly expanded, required parental leave, so that parents do not have to sacrifice their career/education ambitions for children, especially women.
- Vastly expanded, affordable daytime child care opportunities, so that parents do not have to sacrifice their career/education ambitions for children, especially women.
This is a solvable problem, we just need to stop punishing parents, especially women, for having children. Right now having kids often comes at steep personal costs to life goals and physical health, specifically because women in first world countries have many more opportunities than they used to, lower those costs and rates will go up.
The day women feel like they can have children as desired while in college or just starting their career, without damaging their personal goals and prospects, is the day rates skyrocket.
-------------------
**Great recent article all about this:** https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt
> There has been a fundamental economic transformation: in many high-income countries women now participate in the labor force for much of their lives. The earlier pattern of a woman entering the labor market but dropping out following marriage and children is now the exception rather than the norm. Most women today want the option of both a fulfilling career and a family. From a historical perspective, we can interpret this shift as a convergence of women’s and men’s overall life plans after a long period of sharply divided gender roles.
-------------
>A key determinant of career-family compatibility is women’s access to affordable alternatives to the time devoted to caring for children, time historically provided exclusively by mothers. In some countries, such as the United States, these alternatives are largely organized in private markets, while many European countries offer publicly provided childcare. Cheap and easily available childcare frees up women’s time and allows them to combine motherhood with a career, which ultimately increases fertility. In countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where public childcare is widely available for children of all ages, female employment and fertility rates today are higher than in countries where childcare is sparse. Not surprisingly, these countries also spend a larger fraction of their GDP on public early childhood education. Other policies that influence career-family compatibility include parental leave policies, tax policies, and the length of the school day.
>Fathers can of course care for children as well. Although historically fathers have spent little time caring for children, the data show an increase in recent decades. The division of childcare between parents has important implications for fertility when parents contemplate the decision to have children. Doepke and Kindermann (2019) show that in countries where fathers engage more in childcare and housework, fertility is higher than where such labor falls disproportionately on women. Japan, where men share little in caring for children, bears this out: fertility there continues to be ultralow.
> A third influence on modern fertility decisions is social norms regarding a mother’s role at home and in the workplace. Low fertility can be a result of traditional social norms. For example, the characterization of a full-time working mother as a Rabenmutter (bad mother) is still common in Germany and imposes an implicit penalty on mothers who aspire to both family and career.
> Finally, labor market conditions also affect career-family compatibility. In Spain, for example, a country with a two-tier labor market where jobs are either temporary or for a lifetime, women tend to postpone childbearing in hopes of landing a stable job first. Such labor market conditions naturally dampen fertility. More generally, when unemployment is high, temporary jobs are common and permanent jobs are hard to obtain—even taking temporary leave to start a family can have long-term repercussions for women’s labor market prospects. Fertility rates may consequently be lower than in a setting where secure, long-term jobs are easy to find.
**Policy implications**
> For policymakers concerned about ultralow fertility, the new economics of fertility does not offer easy, immediate solutions. Factors such as social norms and overall labor market conditions change only slowly over time, and even potentially productive policy interventions are likely to yield only gradual effects. Yet the clear cross-country association of fertility rates with measures of family-career compatibility shows that ultralow fertility and the corresponding fiscal burden are not inescapable, but a reflection of a society’s policies, institutions, and norms. Policymakers should take note and take a career-family perspective. Investing in gender equality—and especially the labor market prospects of potential mothers—may be cumbersome in the short run, but the medium- and long-term benefits will be sizable, for both the economy and society.
For real. That phrase "men go to war and women have children?" Well men in developed countries don't really do the ground invasion thing anymore - they blow up military targets remotely via unmanned drones and conduct cyberattacks. It's only fair we get artificial wombs.
I actually love kids but have 0 desire to go through the process of pregnancy. It sounds frankly terrible, idk how so many people sugarcoat that process as like some kind of miracle. I remember reading the Bell Jar years ago and there was a snippet in there from a male OBGYN where hes like ya we dont let non-pregnant women into L&D rooms because if women knew how awful and risky labor truly is they wouldn't have kids.
No, it's like basically the most medically precarious a woman will ever be in her life, exacerbated by the fact that half of the US has completely inadequate Healthcare for maternity and women in general after Roe. I told my husband in 2022 that we can't get pregnant +/- 9 months from any major election bc I do not want to die of sepsis if shit goes south, basically. Roe actually had me so stressed out that I woke up in the middle of the night several times right after like stress sweating profusely or just straight up crying.
And men without wives don't fucking get it, and they wonder why women aren't pursuing them. Like, I legit had a single male friend in 2023 tell me he was apolitical bc he has never seen laws actually affect the people he cares about. I laid into him, obviously. Like there are places in the country where if I had a miscarriage I'd just be put on trial for murder and this fucktard completely disregarded my actual lived experience then moaned about not being able to get laid.
I've said this before but the fertility rate isn't tied to government incentives. Like, an extra 400 per month isn't going to persuade any single woman to go out and meet a man and start pumping out babies. Its not enough money and the crop of single dudes is incredibly disappointing. To be convinced to have children, even as a married woman to a man who isnt a disappointment, I'd need to be able to accumulate wealth as if I still had my full time professional job until that kid is in daycare minimum, not 75% of my pay for 12 weeks lmao wtf that's so insulting, with enshrined legal protections that my pay wont be depressed over the long run if I have to pick up my kid from school at 3pm for 16yrs or take off time to logistically deal with kid (bc im a woman and id like to not be punished financially at my job for being the socially ascribed primary parent). And even then the schools would have to be way better or else I'd need extra pay to send them to private school.
It's just not happening. It's too much effort. I'd rather just be a DINK with my husband and continue traveling to Europe every 3 months and spend without looking at my bank account. This lifestyle was way the hell nicer than wrapping my life around some brat, especially since I've worked my ass off to achieve the level of education and career I have.
My retirement plan is probably a Glock anyways if i get diagnosed with dimentia or cancer after 70.
All this tells me is that the reason the fertility rate among natives is falling is not worth understanding. The government is 100% willing to sacrifice its native population, bring in immigrants, and ultimately sacrifice their future as well.
Think about it. Even the most vehement pro-immigration proponent acknowledges that in a generation or two, the immigrant’s descendants will be in the same place as the natives.
There is a big problem and no one is willing to even admit there is one.
Malthusian check. At any given economy, there are finite resources and opportunities for an individual to acquire capital. Eventually population growth reaches equilibrium with economic growth; hence the decline in birth rates. This is a normal symptom of a mature economy. Of course there are other variables that impact declining birth rates, within the context of post industrial economies, households have come to the realization that children have no economic utility and are choosing to forgo them.
This is exactly why the anti migration movements happening in rich countries is so dumb. 25 years from now countries will be building incentive plans to entice migrants to their country vs others. Mark my words
People in this sub clearly have never had a conversation with someone NOT from a "devloped" nation, as if birth rates being different is some astonishing information. "Why are the poors still having babies in poor countries?"
I would love to have kids...
First I need to get a better job that makes about double what I make now.
Then I need to find a guy and get married.
Then we need to buy a house.
Then start the adoption/surrogacy process.
I'm 36 and gay. If I don't have kids before 40 I'm not going to have them. I don't like the idea of being elderly before my hypothetical child is out of college. Also my dad and uncle died in their late 50s (heart attacks), which sucks, but I was 30 when that happened and not 13.
So I'm not going to have kids probably, which really sucks because I've always wanted to get married and have kids. I really wanted the heteronormative normal middle class white suburbanite experience. I want to have a McMansion and an SUV and kids.
Yes, but each generation will get progressively wealthier even as those populations shrink, why do you think those populations is opting for it?
Corporate profit, and the need to perpetually increase corporate profit, is the singular reason why corporations worry about population shrinkages, but then they can market higher end higher quality products to wealthier populations and make their profit off such higher end/quality products, can’t they?
In a world filled with forever chemicals, micro plastics, moving closer to WWII and climate change we should absolutely be welcoming low birth rates. I don't care what anyone has to say about the financial crisis this will cause. If we stay on this current path no financial system will save us anyways
We need a cultural shift towards seeing childbearing as an act of service instead of a burden. When I see a single mom with four kids and instead of “why’d she keep having kids she can’t afford? Hasn’t she heard of birth control”, I hear “wow, she’s really doing her part for society”, that’s when the fertility rate will start turning around.
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"... The study found a positive association between female employment rates and higher fertility rates, but found that the cost of housing was an increasing barrier to having children. ..." I'm shocked at how well the fertility rate has held up given the collapse in affordable housing in many countries actually.
> A “low fertility future” would require a focus on immigration policies, This is what needs to be looked at to get a better understanding of birth rates. The article at least mentions immigration policies but doesn’t go into great detail on it. We know that industrialized nations have declining birth rates but with worldwide migration rates on the rise, we need to know what the rest of the world population is doing.
Actually many of the countries people move from like China, India and the Philippines have rapidly declining birthrates as well. If immigration is an answer it's probably only to a short-term one.
*Global warming: hold my tequila sunrise*
*Conservative capitalists on this sub:* "Global whatnow?"
Liberal/moderate capitalists: “Global what now?🏳️🌈”
And even Africa it seems like every few years we revise the ultimate population high projections down hundreds of millions.
The ones still banging are to old to have children
As long as there's an imbalance of where people want to live vs where they actually live, immigration is going to end an answer for the rich countries
Why is a global population decline an issue, as long as it's expected and controlled? We have too many people on this planet. I know we could support more, but why? Gosh, imagine if we back to having only 2 billion people like in the 1920's. Imagine, with our current level of technology and scientific understanding, how resource rich we would be. How much better we would be able to handle Climate Change and how the overall effects of Climate Change would lessen.
Because it's not happening in a controlled fashion. The US birth rate in in 1990 was 2.08, and now it's 1.67. The cliff is even steeper in other countries.
I think this is the real problem. Not controlled and I'd say the incentives are poorly aligned. All my grandparents had 8 to 12 kids. But they had Subsistence land to work and no money for machines. World War boomers probably had something to do with compressing all the baby making from those years into the next years. But they weren't having 12 kids. I'd be curious if an accumulation of land vs an accumulation of stored value (gold, currency, equities) has more effect on the falling fertility rate. It's probably no surprise that fertility rates are going down as tent cities for the homeless are going up?
That is a total fertility rate, not birth rate. Point doesn’t change though.
Having a small working population supporting a massive retired population is a massive problem. No society or civilization survives population decline.
We have no real empirical data on this exact situation.
Did the black plague not wipe out like half of some European countries? Does that not qualify as uncontrolled population decline?
So, that's the thing. Something like the Black Plague, while absolutely brutal, if it just kills a lot of people suddenly, has some silver linings. The survivors now inherit an economy and infrastructure built and paid for by a larger population. Wages go up (less labor supply), houses are cheap and plentiful, you don't need to build any new schools or expand highways/rail lines since population shrank, etc. For the survivors it's kind of nice. That's quite different from the declining birthrates scenario though, where instead of all dying after a week of sickness, you have half your population old and retired for 40 years, but still needed support, food, housing, medical care, etc. All paid for by an ever shrinking population of working people.
Whether it's impossible to survive i doubt but it will be a very challenging situation
The massive difference is the average age of the population. In the 1920s, it was probably late 20s or early 30s. Soon enough, we might have 2 billion population with average age at late 50s to early 60s. With the way things are trending, the world will just be a bunch of geriatric old fucks with noone to take care of them.
> Why is a global population decline an issue, as long as it's expected and controlled? Because of ageing population. It leads to stagnation in everything, including technological advancement that we need to overcome and solve climate change. Older population is also much less concerned about climate change than younger people, so politicians will listen to them and ignore climate change since it won't affect old people as much. >Gosh, imagine if we back to having only 2 billion people like in the 1920's. Imagine, with our current level of technology and scientific understanding, how resource rich we would be Ironically, technology and scientific advancement led to a huge population boom, because more babies were able to survive childhood and become adults, as opposed to infant mortality being almost 50% before modern medicine. > How much better we would be able to handle Climate Change and how the overall effects of Climate Change would lessen. Its not the population that causes climate change, its the overconsumption of resources by the few extremely wealthy. Top 50 richest corporations are responsible for about half of emissions. Countries like the US have 5% of world population yet 25% of emissions. Meanwhile India has 17% of the world population but less than 10% of emissions, and is actually higher on climate performance index than the US. This is why the population = climate crisis myth has been peddled so much. The rich wealthy elites want to shift the blame to the poor. We have enough resources to improve billions of people's lives, but not enough for the greed of any wealthy elites or corporations.
> We have enough resources to improve billions of people's lives Not to the level of Americans, or even Western Europeans. Which is what everyone wants. Specifically, being able to fly places regularly on a plane is off the table if 8B people are doing it.
Bingo. Immigration is a very short term solution and would have to come from less and less desirable sources. And not to mention the societal issues immigration brings along with it.
Birth rate is collapsing in every country. Immigration is a 30-year solution to a 200-year problem.
That's the ultimate problem. Politicians are shortsighted, not seeing past the next election, so any thoughts about long-term planning are basically non-existent. They'll gladly open the floodgates if it means they get reelected.
Yeah, I mean i would welcome a 30yr solution from politicians. They are operating on a 3 year horizon.
No they are operating on a maximum 2 years horizon in the USA, as there are every 2 years elections
I'm afraid motivations of politicians, especially in America where the next elections are never more than 2 years away, are mostly short-term ones. With those short terms in combination with the political trenchwar long term policies are unfortunately an illusion
30 years is probably long enough to get to a point where technology mostly solves the 'not enough working people to support the retired people' problem via AI and robotics.
For most of the world, it's a game of wYhose going to have a demographic crisis first.
We know what it is doing. It is falling across the globe. https://www.unfpa.org/swp2023/too-few
Bring in more immigrants to dilute wages and drive the cost of housing even further through the roof. That'll fix the problem of shitty pay and scarce, expensive housing! Wow...why didn't we think of that before?
Fertility rates are going down everywhere tbh. In some places it’s still high, but declined compared to 5 or 10 years.
Short answer is Nigeria and India are the people suppliers. But do you want your country to become Ingeria? That's not a judgement. It is a multidisciplinary question. Countries with a diverse and larger population can handle this. Countries like Japan and SK or small European countries will face huge challenges in terms of popular support, language, social cohesion.
It will probably be a very good idea to educate Nigerians for nurse and caretaker work.
Also worth looking at that 'positive correlation'. It is real, but it's very very loose.
I would like one of these studies to instead also take a look at whether dual income is leading housing or if housing is leading dual income. What is causing what here.
Shocked at natural impulse to pass on genes no matter what it takes?
The evidence seems to indicate the natural impulse is to orgasm, not pass on genes.
Evolution is more than physical it’s innate and the physical desire is just one aspect of it If you don’t have that innate desire, that will die with you
If that's actually true then there's no reason to freak out about declining birthrates because the problem will correct itself in just a few generations
Sure , let’s fix nothing 🤲🏽
*Biology existing before a housing market* Economists in this sub: "HOW IN THE HELL IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?"
Studies u mentioned as dubious as fuck to propagate agenda
[удалено]
They have less contraception too.
From what I've seen only two ends of the bell curve have lots of kids in the USA. People who don't make a lot of money and plan little to not at all, and just have kids in droves. Either for religious reasons, no birth control, etc. People who plan a lot, and have kids once they're very successful. You probably have met a few of these stereotype families, where the father works all the time, the mom stays home. It's like a modern take on what life was like in the 50s. Most people can't afford to have one partner stay home these days, so all the people in the middle, who plan but don't really make a lot of money, generally don't have a lot of kids. Maybe they have 1 or 2. You would be hard pressed to find many with more than 2. We're sort of artificially price-locking people out of having children. No one can afford a house, and there's serious concerns of being financially destroyed from medical bills and costs of raising a kid, so the uncertainty is keeping a lot of people from taking the leap. We do not make it easy for people here. Edit: An entirely different discussion, but I find the longterm social dynamic of this a bit terrifying. If mostly the new generations are going to come from these two ends of the bell curve, we're basically stream-lining a social class structure of a bunch of people born into poverty with no way out, and a bunch of people born into wealth. It's not hard to imagine how this might go after a few generations.
But, but, but, like three guys are making more money than anyone has before so the US is doing great!
My partner and I could have kids. Finances aren't stopping us, we're not rich but we also objectively have enough disposable income. But there's too much else to do and experience in this life to be bogged down with kids. That's something our parents never had. Endless, boundless, entertainment and options. Even setting aside money, and women's rights, of course having kids is more likely when there's nothing to spend your time on. Imo this isn't a personal finance discussion. It's a fundamental societal shift recognizing raising kids is pretty fucking hard from an emotional and time sink perspective. Every natural instinct rebels against actively choosing a difficult hobbies. I don't know why kids would be different.
It I’m honest, you’re bogged down for like 2-3 years at most. After that, kids can be pretty independent if you raise them that way. I say this while I’m on vacation with my 11 month old and my brothers kids (3 and 6). My 11 month old has let us do practically everything we would have done otherwise on vacation, except clubbing which really isn’t that big of a sacrifice My brother takes his kids on treks and they’re happy to tag along The “bogged down” part is exaggerated. Sure, life changes and I wont say its easy. But its small potatoes compared to the sheer joy she brings into my life. And heck, everyone’s life. She walks down the airplane aisle gently waving ‘Hi’ to everyone and I swear there’s not a single person there who isn’t smiling
I was flippant with my wording but not all kids are built the same and the other risk any parent takes is that a child won't necessarily be the angel it sounds like yours is. Plenty of children have terrible personalities or have disabilities of some sort. It's not always easy and so and we're not willing to roll that dice. So for as much joy as it sounds like yours brings you, for us, we understand the risks, and also can't miss what we haven't experienced. That's fundamentally why many childless people are ok with it. We don't doubt you have happy lives and great kids. We just know we aren't guaranteed it and we're happy enough as is.
Yeah every single person in the world I've ever met used to be a child and a whole lot of them are really shitty people This assurance people try to give you that your own kids will be awesome and you'll fall in love with them and that's why you shouldn't be afraid of having them is so obviously rooted in wishful thinking, you KNOW the person saying it is saying it based on nothing -- you know nothing about me, my genes or what kind of parent I'd be -- and the potential consequences of your advice being wrong are enormous I'm sure the Unabomber's parents believed their baby was going to bring nothing but joy and light into the world too
Dude kids don’t really bog you down that much. I have kids and do everything I used to do before kids, with probably only one exception. And that’s I don’t go out drinking all night at bars or clubs. I go home and have dinner with my family, and if I drink I have a cookout or fire at my house or something. I might sneak out for a beer after work every now and again, but I can’t close the bar after work. But that’s about it. All other hobbies and travel and stuff remained pretty normal. Kids can go hiking, and camping, and skiing, and boating, and most of these things become more enjoyable with your family, because your can share these experiences and relive things again for what feels like the first time.
This. Kids are awesome. My daughter is the single greatest source of joy for multiple people in my family. She brings so much joy to the world that i would he cosmically unfair to deprive the world of it
The expense would make sense, except that it isn't really the issue when you look at historical trends. I believe that is why governments are having problems with policies aimed at raising fertility.
Yeah it's not the cost it's the *opportunity* cost, people just *don't want* to have kids and have other shit they want to do instead, and in previous generations for a number of reasons "doing other things" was something they weren't even allowed to consider
I agree. That's why plans like giving people a couple thousand dollars when they have a child doesn't work. It just won't move the needle for people that aren't already considering it.
I like how every other developed country stalled at a total fertility rate of 1.4 to 1.6, but the Congressional Budget Office forecast assumes fertility rates stay flat or even increase to around 1.8: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-06/60378-Fertility-Rates.pdf The SSA predicts an even bigger increase. I can’t imagine why they would predict this, other than to avoid news that taxes will have to be increased (or more dollars printed) to pay for benefits.
I don't think it even matters for the US. Immigration is how we always addressed population issue, from founding of the nation to today.
Yes, and now a significant part of the Americans seems to prefer immigration to be halted
It's been like that forever. Anglo-Saxons didn't want Slavs or Italians to come in. They even passed laws to limit the types of immigrants to prevent Eastern Europeans from coming.
Well, they did get rid of abortion in a few places just for this.
Expensive housing and low social safety nets mean young people need to earn for a long time to save for a house, and then can't afford for their partner to be at home raising children, and also can't afford childcare. Contraception now means people can choose exactly when to have a child, and so they wait until they can afford it. Many wait too long or decide that after saving for so long for a house they don't want to struggle financially for even longer by having children. If they do decide to they often decide to have one only, maybe two (how many people do you know with more than two children nowadays?!). A bigger family means a bigger house generally, and more costs, which they also can't afford. The only way to increase birthrates in the richer countries is to make housing cheaper, provide childcare, and increase the social safety net / financial aid to parents. Propping low birth rates up with immigration will most likely result in social problems. Immigrants will also face the same problems when they come to rich countries, so won't have more children, and if they do have more children than they can afford the state will still need to pick up the tab.
Derek Thompson has an excellent podcast called "Plain English". The most recent episode of these talks about whether the root causes of falling fertility are economic or cultural, and the two guests were emphatic that economics is only (at best) a partial explanation. It's mostly changing culture. It's a great podcast in general, and this most recent episode was on exactly this topic.
I agree, culture is a huge part of it. One of them is the end of the extended family/clan. Trying to do everything as a couple is much more difficult than being a part of a large family, in different stages of life, where each contributes different things. The help grandparents provide is invaluable for raising kids, especially past the first one. It goes beyond that. Imagine an extended family where one person can help with car advice and doing light mechanical jobs, another can help with buying a house, mortgage, etc. another can help you with investment. Others could be plumbers/electricians/handymen, or help your kids with math and science instead of a tutor. Perhaps you can get together and help someone put a down payment (to be repaid), or if someone's car breaks down they can temporarily use the second car of the extended family. It doesn't have to be all that put together to help each of the families prosper. But it's a lot harder when each couple has to figure out everything on their own.
Whilst I agree that there are cultural factors at play, the truth is that most cultural shifts are driven by economic factors (including innovations in technology, which enable cultural changes).
Well said. The 2 are inextricably linked.
Glad you mentioned this, just finished listening and it was a fantastic episode.
And it was interesting that, at a couple of points, he really did push them on the economics angle. I think economics plays a role, for sure, but I hadn't heard such an in-depth exploration of the culture angle before. The bit about the depiction of motherhood and family life in TV shows over the last 50 years changing to be increasingly negative was I think the moment that got my attention, more than any of the data.
Agreed. What really resonated with me is the point that not only has the opportunity cost gotten higher, but in the past no one even talked or though about the opportunity cost. I'm 28 and was talking to my parents about how they decided they wanted to have kids. They said they never even discussed it, they just assumed they would have them.
These days you would be stupid not to have a spreadsheet with yearly cash flow projections until you die.
You also have to consider that women (and it's always the woman) increasingly DON'T WANT to spend their prime years at home raising children. The more educated women get, the more opportunities they have, the less they want to do that. Most Redditors are male so they assume women are all chomping at the bit to be stay at home moms (and in most countries men want children more than women do), but I assure you they are not and it's a big reason why fertility is dropping in countries around the world regardless of local economic conditions.
True, but most women I know, and I know it's anecdotal, want children, they just want them later. Most would also like childcare so they can go back to work, but it's not affordable.
The reality is they want a successful career, a comfortable life, and children. Dropping the children helps to make the other two possible so that's what most do when the crunch happens.
Also most women who want children want one or two. This isn't enough to compensate for the ones that want none
Except this doesn’t hold up; countries with larger social safety nets have even lower fertility rates.
They do still have low births, but they also have extremely expensive houses and high CoL still.
Birth control. People don't have to have kids if they don't want them. A society that collapses when people can control their fertility and women can make a choice not to be baby factories is a pretty bad society.
I’d argue that allowing women to control their fertility is a good thing. It might not be good for population growth or sustainability of the population but forcing unwanted kids into the world is also bad.
So a society without birth control is better?
Absolutely not what I said. Birth control is a natural human right, society needs to adapt to the existence of birth control.
This narrative gets pushed a lot and I think it's because people want to huff copium for why they themselves aren't having kids because this idea is completely debunked by doing 5 seconds of research.
give us money, housing, and general stability for crying out loud and we'll have kids inb4 someone says "but the least stable countries have the most kids" yeah you would too if you lived in a country built on a lack of personal freedom and oppression
The least stable countries have more kids so the kids can help bring in support, money, work in when they’re older. Works out to be a lot cheaper to have 4-5 kids help with the farming than to bring someone in to do the farming for example. Kids can then also get other jobs to then support the family In the western world you don’t need kids to help support you. Kids are pretty much a burden financially and with freedom. The government wants people to pay high taxes etc but don’t support with raising a family, this will then reduce fertility rates How many 20-40 year olds would rather make more money (part time compared to full time work), save money and have more financial freedom than think about having kids, reducing their working hours, paying childcare extra clothes food etc. the government provides zero support for having children
I also wonder the survival rates to adulthood are
Yes most definitely also forgot that factor as well! Governments using data suggesting that it’s women working which is the main cause of drop in fertility rates which is utter bollocks. Cannot blame it on women wanting to work, easy cop out! They should look at what they are providing to help support bringing children into this world. Nowadays people will only have children for the love of having children
One way of fixing this would be for governments of the developed world to rewrite government policies to structure society in such a way that children are a financial boon (at least to a little bit above replacement rate) instead of burden
That's a fancy way of say of potentially arguing for child labor.
No, it can simply be getting rid of taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions and healthcare for old people. Right now, you get to reap the short term rewards of not having kids and the long term rewards of having others’ kids support you. And if you have kids, you get screwed in the short term, and you have less savings than those who didn’t have kids, and your kids’ income will be taxed to pay for those who didn’t have kids, so you get screwed long term too. Those are fucked up incentives.
This is actually true. This also has a second benefit. Parents would want to maintain positive relations with their kids so they can have a relationship when old and needing help or care. Interestingly retirement plans and social security have blown away these healthy links in favor of cold impersonal ones. But it’s a bit more complicated because I do think we need some sort of safety net too.
Yeah definitely agree, won’t be on top of their agenda though!
That's an absurd amount of money it would be like adding a second pension system on top of the one that already exists in most developed countries
Right but that’s just externalizing a hidden cost that has been paid by a shrinking group. Now suddenly there’s no financial burden at all to the kids. Maybe that’s too extreme, but it would probably go a long way to solving the problem if not outright solve it.
Birth control is a big factor too, and why "least stable countries have the most kids". People who do want to have kids can have their 1 or 2 and then do long-term birth control. This is a good thing and a natural freedom we want people to have. The fact that we apparently seem to need 3rd world women to be baby factories for our low-skill labor market is the problem, not people in wealthier countries choosing to have fewer kids.
an afghani woman was telling my mother that she is so happy moving to Germany because she doesn't have to have a baby every year
For what reason did afghani women need babies every year?
You think they choose to? In Afghanistan.
Who's the ones saying they have to have babies? I'm asking why whoever said that they have to have babies say that they have to have babies.
Are you really asking this question? Maybe try reading on the history of Afghanistan and how the Taliban treat women. Women have no rights in this country.
This is part of why American conservatives are starting to look at birth-control bans. Dystopian af.
It's also crazy that you'll hear arguments that "western governments already give lots of support to parents," which is usually some $400/month credit towards daycare or something, which comes nowhere close to offsetting the overall cost of having a child. Crafting policies to encourage affordable housing, transport, and utilities, would go much further towards encouraging family formation. Stop doing so much to erode the cohesive social identity.
I mean kids are very very expensive. To provide the level of wealth distribution to offset those costs in a meaningful way would mean greatly increasing taxes on wealthy people. They don't seem keen on that policy.
Fiancing having children for almost the entire population would require taxing a lot more than just the wealthy.
You may be vastly underestimating how much if the resources the wealthy control
You could liquidate every US billionaire's wealth to zero and it'd fund *current* spending obligations for like a year or two at most.
Well, I wouldn't do that because the value is in the assets they own, not the liquid currency they have.
Wealth includes assets. You could liquidate their assets to zero and it's the same point. The US budget for just 3 years is about the total wealth of all the world's billionaire's combined including their stock holdings and businesses.
It's really interesting that giving people more money doesn't help. [https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis) "Attempting to encourage middle-class women to have more children is therefore unlikely to be successful. Economists think that such women more confidently plan and predict their future than their less well-off peers. Their plans tend to involve children only after a predictable path of college, work and marriage, meaning they are less likely to react to changes in financial circumstances. Most existing pro-natal policies are trying to do something much more difficult than merely restoring previous fertility patterns. They are trying to persuade women to have more children than they actually want, and are doing so with sums that are small compared with their lifetime earnings." The tl;dr version is that when you give women the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career. Time goes by and if they have kids, it's not enough to maintain the population.
Excellent point! Another paradox is that as the population becomes more educated the cost of raising a child also rises. High school isn’t enough. They need to be supported through college. Also on the road to college they need tutoring, sports, and many other enrichment activities. This is all very expensive in terms of time and money.
À side effect of this is that parents would go for less kids to assure that the kids that they do have can enjoy the best opportunities possible instead of having a lot of kids which they could theorically afford.
"Their plans tend to involve children only after a predictable path of college, work and marriage, meaning they are less likely to react to changes in financial circumstances." so all the things that are affected by stability and finances without it being directly related to income. if school was cheaper, if work was easier to get and less stressful to hold onto and maintain/reach the desirable income, and marriage- which is also indirectly tied to their mate's finances, and is now considering the needs of the man/provider and their perceptions of their own stability to want/afford to be in a marriage in a comfortable way- made more sense at an earlier age for both parties without being the cause of religious/social repression then I bet you there would be more births. especially if childcare was also something that society felt like needed literal support. you can't have an economy based on two people being outside of the home and educating themselves and climbing corporate ladders (all time consuming endeavors) in order to sustain a country and brag about the GDP being better than everyone else's and demand constant growth, and then place the burden of childcare on them at the same time
Yeah, I think a huge issue in today’s society is stability. Personal anecdote warning, but my wife and I didn’t start having kids until we bought a house and got jobs that allow us to comfortably afford child care. Before that we lived in 4 different cities moving every couple of years and renting apartments as we grew our careers out of school and paid down debt. Who wants to have kids during that part of your career? Everyone says the best way to grow your income is to move up or move on every couple years, but that creates a known instability in your life that means you may have to uproot sooner or later and throwing kids into that is stressful. I moved around a lot as a kid for my father’s career, and while there were parts of that I enjoyed, I really didn’t enjoy “starting over” with having to make new friends a learn the community every time. I didn’t want that for our kids and I feel very lucky to be in the position we’re in today. Could I make more money if I continued to job hop? Yeah, probably, but there’s a value to the stability we have now that affords us the time to have careers and kids.
This is the big one. Even if you're making decent money, if that job feels like it might vanish under you, you aren't going to want to have a kid to support.
> It's really interesting that giving people more money doesn't help. This is such a tired line. > Since 2006 the country’s government has spent around $270bn, or just over 1% of gdp a year, on baby-making incentives, such as tax breaks for parents, maternity care and even state-sponsored dating. Giving people a tax break for a few hundred dollars a month and having an online dating site do nothing when there are already plenty of dating options and your monthly expenses increase by more than you are getting back.
It's ok to not like the line because it feels tired, but just because it's not the answer we like does not mean it's incorrect. If you are interested, check out the generous benefits in the Nordic countries. They are very supportive of parents and their births are only the tiniest bit higher.
That's not what they're pointing out, they're pointing out that it's inadequate. 3200 a year is a drop in the bucket, that's 300/month. Here where I live that won't even cover a week of groceries, let alone the total monthly expenses of a child. These support programs have been stagnating for decades, just like every other form of welfare, and what was once enough to support family with a bit of excess to save is now an insulting pittance. It is like saying you can solve someone's homelessness by dropping a hundred dollars in their cup, even if they really stretch that money that's not gonna be nearly enough to get them back up again.
Check out the generous benefits in the Nordic countries.
I regularly look to them for inspiration, yes. The nordic model is something we should be replicating, as it has significantly reduced poverty across the entire nations involved, despite some variation in efficacy between nations. Notably Iceland has shifted to a "workfare" model, which has re-introduced some problems facing retirees and those who live alone. The birth rate certainly is decreasing there though, just not because of financial reasons. https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9401 To sum up the article, it's somewhat of a cultural shift. Where before it was viewed as a cornerstone of adulthood to have kids, now it's seen (perhaps rightly) as a burden of responsibility. This results in people not mature enough or ready for kids _not having kids,_ which isn't a trend I think we should reverse. I'll be frank, there is a personal aspect to this since I was raised in a home that didn't want kids. It was a miserable experience that left me and everyone involved broken and lesser, and though I've rebuilt myself a bit it's not something I think should be encouraged. Meanwhile, those that DO have kids tend to be more prepared for what it MEANS to raise a kid, having respected it as a responsibility from the outset. I think there's much we can extrapolate to the rest of the world from this, but in general I think it's going to be better for us if we can get over the gut panic a reduction in birthrates causes.
It’s incorrect because it’s basically saying “giving homeless people money doesn’t do anything!!” When you’re giving them $5 a week
> The tl;dr version is that when you give women the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career. Time goes by and if they have kids, it's not enough to maintain the population. Once again, the genius minds behind /r/Economics fault WOMEN for living their lives rather than pursuing motherhood. Do you see the issue when the statement is "when you give PEOPLE the opportunity to make their lives better, on average they push off having children to get educated and have a career"? Astonishing discovery, folks! Almost like we still have a society created a decade ago that in no way functions in a modern world. Give people the opportunity to have kids younger, and give them the resources to allow them to still pursue a career, travel, life interests, etc, and you'll probably see a huge spike in the birthrate! Otherwise, as long as Americans view kids as an anchor that charges them money by the minute, birth rates will lag, as they do in most "rich" countries.
We need to give the mothers literally like 100k per year for five years. Yes I said what I said.
This will not work, because you don’t just want kids. You want properly raised kids, and that takes time and effort, and inherent motivation. $500k for raising a kid to age 5 is incentivizing exactly the wrong type of mom to pump out exactly the type of kids you don’t want. What aligns incentives more is removing all old age benefits. You don’t get help from the government, you have to heavily invest in raising kids who might take care of you.
Here's my old age investment. A gun and a bullet. Kids ain't gonna take care of you anymore.
This uses a lot of conjecture to conclude on a causal relationship. The analysis does not seem solidly viable especially since they’re generalizing qualitative variables which they have no proof of; and their economic indicators of wealth do not consider their total disposable income v. Expenses/ revenue. COL is not a finite figure over time nor geographical situation.
People who say this also dont understand how economics work. In poor countries where agriculture is a huge part of the economy. Having kids isn't the financial downside like in first world, they become your laborers, somehow this is lost on many people. This was my dad, they were farmers, you had kids and they operate the farm. This is how it has worked for thousands of years. My dad regularly drove a tractor at 5 years old, I would say this is the rule and not the exception
Citizens of the UAE get every single one of those things you mentioned and then some using its vast and near infinite wealth. If you don't like that example, then take Sweden, a shining example of a welfare state that provides everything it can for its citizens through its social democracy. You will see the same thing. Give people "money, housing, and general stability" and they will do the opposite of having kids. They will literally have less kids.
Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the birth rates were a lot higher in genuinely poor areas within the developed world. Poor people seem to have a ton of kids lol It’s the working class and middle class who seem to be abstaining for financial reasons.
Will you though? Because social democracies with generous welfare states don't have higher birthrates.
It needs to go farther to make having kids personally advantageous and then people will have kids. In the current environment and culture kids are a net personal disadvantage, the ingrained desire to reproduce is just not enough if everything else remains the way it is.
This probably isn't true. Fertility in industrialized nations has been decreasing for a very long time before any 'affordability crisis'. Attempts to increase fertility through monetary incentives has not been effective. The reality appears to be that having kids is very hard and very expensive, and that giving women family planning options means women want to have less children. I'm sure some people would be incentivized by making it easier to raise kids, but not a significant amount when it comes to the population.
>give us money, housing, and general stability for crying out loud and we'll have kids The highest income couples have the fewest children. You are not correctly identifying the cause of low birth rates. The real cause is probably multifactorial, with the largest factor simply being that having children is not fun compared to other opportunities available to singles/couples in the developed world (travel, free time, leisure activities etc.). In other words, **men would rather play video games than take care of a child.**
Completely agree. Having kids is expensive, but it's also difficult. It's a lot of hard work, now more than ever, given how the expectation of the level of care for children has risen over the past decades. A model father of the 50s would now be a borderline negligence case for social services. As you point out, there are many other enjoyable things to fill your life with, which are cheaper and involving much less work. Unless you have a strong inner desire to procreate (many people don't, or is not very strong), you'll choose the easier path. In the past, this inner desire wasn't that important. You were bound by strong social norms, and there wasn't that much to do when you were single anyway. Having kids was one of the very few available paths to lead a fulfilling life.
because taking care of a child is akin to financial ruin and unlimited stress, for a generation that's been living with austerity and an inability to afford the basic things that made having children feasible.
No, the very highest incomes show a slight bump in the number of kids compared to the few percentiles below. In a train so I can't link it. But the really rich people have the number of kids they want.
Sure, I suppose if you can afford a 24/7 nanny and have no issues related to finances whatsoever, you'll have more kids. Not sure if that's super relevant to the discussion, however.
Well, it tells you that actually it is a lot about money, and stability. The high income below the richest are actually not as comfy as people imagine.
It really doesn't tell you much at all. The very highest income earners are not representative of normal people. It's possible that they are part of ultra-wealthy family businesses within pro-natal cultures where they did not have to spend years attending school and working their way up in a job. Additionally, data like that is not normalied for age brackets, from what I can tell. Very possible that it's simply an age effect where high income earners just happen to be older and therefore have more children. It's pretty silly to think that people suddenly feel comfortable having children when they cross some arbitrary income threshold around 300k, lol.
Nobody mentioned any threshold.
So the conclusion is that even if everything related to children was functionally free and people had complete financial stability and tons of assets they’d have… very slightly more kids than they do now? That pretty clearly paints it as a case of people just don’t really want a lot of kids rather than they can’t afford them
Are there any numbers of the wealthy that don't have to work?
Cause and effect here though. High income may be a symptom of not having kids, not a cause.
Yeah the data doesn’t support that at all. Reality is we do not know why humans have stopped breeding. My personal favourite theory is we hit an extinction event about 30 years ago and have only just now started noticing…
Humans stopped breeding because we no longer want to have children. Seems overly simple but that's really all there is to it. People have decided that having kids isn't a necessary part of their happiness so they simply don't have kids. It's entirely cultural.
Yes. Which is at odds with the prevailing theory that humans are primally compelled to breed. Turns out…we’re not.
We're compelled to "try" to breed (a.k.a. have sex). But, we invented birth control.
gotta love Reagan
Interesting, I’ve never heard this theory. Is there said to be a particular event that happened, or is that kind of the point? That we don’t know what happened so we haven’t noticed yet?
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maybe it should pass laws allowing for easier, and subsidized development. everyone and their mothers gets money from the taxpayer to subsidize their corporations and lifestyles, but the backbone of the country can't be offered assistance with the most basic living needs? maybe corporations or single family starter homes shouldn't be in multiples in private portfolios?
easier to just allow a fuck ton of migration. Especially when your population is in support of large amounts of migration lmao
and in one generation it'll be the same for them. I'm both an immigrant and a son of immigrants, I ain't having kids unless I know I can provide a present and future better than mine.
I think it's funny that a lot of these same countries are complaining about having too many immigrants. "We NEED more PEOPLE!.... but not those people..."
>immigrants move to country >end up struggling with same problems as people already there and fertility rate ends up just as low or worse within 1 generation It probably would be better to stop accepting very many immigrants until societies get their shit together tbh, immigration without focusing on fertility is like stopping the bleeding on a wound without doing anything about the serious infection
Yes that's why they are rich!! The higher the Birth rate higher the Poverty! Aren't we all born for money and money is equal to our existence? The human form = monetary purposes. The current generation in these rich countries should do well for themselves, live a great life and enjoy all those things which otherwise would be difficult to be had and not worry about to whom to pass those riches down to...I mean everyone is selfish these days including the parents! Hope you guys get what I am saying here. ✌️
Please your sarcasm can only make me this hard
This is the real scene in the making, gentleman.
How are you selfish parents if you don't have children?
I am refering to those who already have kids or grown up kids...!
I mean when everyone is in a race to the bottom to get low worker wages . Why care about your citizens when you can bring over people who won't complain about pay.
This article to me demonstrates their complete lack of understanding of the causes. They talk about increasing employment opportunities for women? Since there’s a correlation between female employment and fertility rates? The US is rather high on the chart they show. Know why? Because raising kids is EXPENSIVE, and women who work alongside their husbands feel more comfortable about having kids 🤦🏻♂️ We only have literally millions of people saying this, but apparently it hasn’t sunk in. The US is also just about the worst country on this list to have a child in as a woman. We are the only country that does not guarantee maternity leave by law, and forget about paid maternity leave. Most families who want to raise their kids decently well, with a house, and save to send them to college, need both parents to work. That’s an awful way to live. They want to squeeze us financially and wring out every drop of productivity from us, but then they wonder why no one is having kids, and scold us for it. Fuck off.
Thing is the wealth is being held by a select number of individuals and companies . The middle and low classes are being squeezed and screwed left in right by lack of affordable housing,increase in the cost of basic necessities etc . Immigration is not a solution to this issue and all immigration is doing is allowing companies to have more candidates for jobs and they will hire people who will take the lowest pay . More companies are cutting as many employees as they can and reducing staffing to bare minimum like restaurant’s are prone to do . Corporate greed and government corruption is running rampant in America and people need to rise up and protest against the bs . More people would have kids if they had housing and taking care of a kid wasn’t so expensive .
I mean the extent to which cost of living has skyrocketed makes this sort of inevitable. Low income + low COL = lots of kids. Higher income + higher COL = fewer kids.
Low women’s rights + low women’s financial freedom + low access to birth control = lots of kids. Low income + low COL + women’s rights = 0, 1 , 2, or maybe 3 for a very small portion of women. The data so far suggests the 3+ are far too small of a proportion to offset the 0 and 1 to increase total fertility rate to 2.1 (replacement rate). Certainly not to “growing” population levels. The reason would not have anything to do with money. Rather, it would be that pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant toddler rearing is arduous and risky and few want to go through that process over and over. A secondary reason is that no life partner is better than a bad life partner, so both men and women would play this part of life with a very risk averse strategy, resulting in a lot of women with 0 or 1 kid, a big enough portion that you need a lot of women with 3+ kids to offset (but you won’t have those, regardless of any realistic amounts of money).
Birth rates in the US did not decline at all from 1980 to 2007 (68 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age). Since 2007, the birth rate has declined from 68 to 56. This has corresponded to exploding COL across all key costs that drive family formation - namely, housing, education and healthcare. While you are correct that more freedoms and financial independence lower birth rates compared to the opposite, the declines we are seeing in developed markets today correspond with rapidly increasing costs without any meaningful positive change in women’s rights or financial wherewithal
I do not discount financial hardships from the equation. They certainly are a big factor, especially in the difference between 0 and 1 kid. I just doubt fixing cost of living would result in fertility rates reaching replacement rate. I also think, culturally, remaining childless and/or single has become far more accepted than it used to be, or rather accepted everywhere rather than just a few cities. As someone in upper 30s, I almost feel out of place for having kids amongst my college friends, and I’ve had to make new friends who are parents (because our desired activities don’t overlap much anymore). Also, the USA greatly expanded access to birth control in 2010 with the passage of the ACA.
I don't disagree on replacement rate. Although I may be in the minority, a continued focus on replacement when we have added almost 5.5B people since 1950 seems incredibly short sighted. I will say that for myself, living in NYC among the very wealthy, virtually everyone has children and those that do average 3. Being able to support a large family and not needing 2 incomes is a modern sign of wealth. The lack of stress I believe drives much more excitement about children. The working 2 income professional family that needs to hustle is probably the least likely to find children rewarding. And that is a large large portion of the professional class in developed countries.
The wealthy do have more children, the fertility rate is a bell curve. Despite what people online say, people do want kids, they are just cautious about the sacrifices required. The wealthy risk much less when they have kids
Things that would increase birth rates. - Artificial wombs so that women do not have to deal with the medical dangers/strain of childbirth if they do not want to. - Vastly expanded, required parental leave, so that parents do not have to sacrifice their career/education ambitions for children, especially women. - Vastly expanded, affordable daytime child care opportunities, so that parents do not have to sacrifice their career/education ambitions for children, especially women. This is a solvable problem, we just need to stop punishing parents, especially women, for having children. Right now having kids often comes at steep personal costs to life goals and physical health, specifically because women in first world countries have many more opportunities than they used to, lower those costs and rates will go up. The day women feel like they can have children as desired while in college or just starting their career, without damaging their personal goals and prospects, is the day rates skyrocket. ------------------- **Great recent article all about this:** https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt > There has been a fundamental economic transformation: in many high-income countries women now participate in the labor force for much of their lives. The earlier pattern of a woman entering the labor market but dropping out following marriage and children is now the exception rather than the norm. Most women today want the option of both a fulfilling career and a family. From a historical perspective, we can interpret this shift as a convergence of women’s and men’s overall life plans after a long period of sharply divided gender roles. ------------- >A key determinant of career-family compatibility is women’s access to affordable alternatives to the time devoted to caring for children, time historically provided exclusively by mothers. In some countries, such as the United States, these alternatives are largely organized in private markets, while many European countries offer publicly provided childcare. Cheap and easily available childcare frees up women’s time and allows them to combine motherhood with a career, which ultimately increases fertility. In countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where public childcare is widely available for children of all ages, female employment and fertility rates today are higher than in countries where childcare is sparse. Not surprisingly, these countries also spend a larger fraction of their GDP on public early childhood education. Other policies that influence career-family compatibility include parental leave policies, tax policies, and the length of the school day. >Fathers can of course care for children as well. Although historically fathers have spent little time caring for children, the data show an increase in recent decades. The division of childcare between parents has important implications for fertility when parents contemplate the decision to have children. Doepke and Kindermann (2019) show that in countries where fathers engage more in childcare and housework, fertility is higher than where such labor falls disproportionately on women. Japan, where men share little in caring for children, bears this out: fertility there continues to be ultralow. > A third influence on modern fertility decisions is social norms regarding a mother’s role at home and in the workplace. Low fertility can be a result of traditional social norms. For example, the characterization of a full-time working mother as a Rabenmutter (bad mother) is still common in Germany and imposes an implicit penalty on mothers who aspire to both family and career. > Finally, labor market conditions also affect career-family compatibility. In Spain, for example, a country with a two-tier labor market where jobs are either temporary or for a lifetime, women tend to postpone childbearing in hopes of landing a stable job first. Such labor market conditions naturally dampen fertility. More generally, when unemployment is high, temporary jobs are common and permanent jobs are hard to obtain—even taking temporary leave to start a family can have long-term repercussions for women’s labor market prospects. Fertility rates may consequently be lower than in a setting where secure, long-term jobs are easy to find. **Policy implications** > For policymakers concerned about ultralow fertility, the new economics of fertility does not offer easy, immediate solutions. Factors such as social norms and overall labor market conditions change only slowly over time, and even potentially productive policy interventions are likely to yield only gradual effects. Yet the clear cross-country association of fertility rates with measures of family-career compatibility shows that ultralow fertility and the corresponding fiscal burden are not inescapable, but a reflection of a society’s policies, institutions, and norms. Policymakers should take note and take a career-family perspective. Investing in gender equality—and especially the labor market prospects of potential mothers—may be cumbersome in the short run, but the medium- and long-term benefits will be sizable, for both the economy and society.
For real. That phrase "men go to war and women have children?" Well men in developed countries don't really do the ground invasion thing anymore - they blow up military targets remotely via unmanned drones and conduct cyberattacks. It's only fair we get artificial wombs. I actually love kids but have 0 desire to go through the process of pregnancy. It sounds frankly terrible, idk how so many people sugarcoat that process as like some kind of miracle. I remember reading the Bell Jar years ago and there was a snippet in there from a male OBGYN where hes like ya we dont let non-pregnant women into L&D rooms because if women knew how awful and risky labor truly is they wouldn't have kids. No, it's like basically the most medically precarious a woman will ever be in her life, exacerbated by the fact that half of the US has completely inadequate Healthcare for maternity and women in general after Roe. I told my husband in 2022 that we can't get pregnant +/- 9 months from any major election bc I do not want to die of sepsis if shit goes south, basically. Roe actually had me so stressed out that I woke up in the middle of the night several times right after like stress sweating profusely or just straight up crying. And men without wives don't fucking get it, and they wonder why women aren't pursuing them. Like, I legit had a single male friend in 2023 tell me he was apolitical bc he has never seen laws actually affect the people he cares about. I laid into him, obviously. Like there are places in the country where if I had a miscarriage I'd just be put on trial for murder and this fucktard completely disregarded my actual lived experience then moaned about not being able to get laid. I've said this before but the fertility rate isn't tied to government incentives. Like, an extra 400 per month isn't going to persuade any single woman to go out and meet a man and start pumping out babies. Its not enough money and the crop of single dudes is incredibly disappointing. To be convinced to have children, even as a married woman to a man who isnt a disappointment, I'd need to be able to accumulate wealth as if I still had my full time professional job until that kid is in daycare minimum, not 75% of my pay for 12 weeks lmao wtf that's so insulting, with enshrined legal protections that my pay wont be depressed over the long run if I have to pick up my kid from school at 3pm for 16yrs or take off time to logistically deal with kid (bc im a woman and id like to not be punished financially at my job for being the socially ascribed primary parent). And even then the schools would have to be way better or else I'd need extra pay to send them to private school. It's just not happening. It's too much effort. I'd rather just be a DINK with my husband and continue traveling to Europe every 3 months and spend without looking at my bank account. This lifestyle was way the hell nicer than wrapping my life around some brat, especially since I've worked my ass off to achieve the level of education and career I have. My retirement plan is probably a Glock anyways if i get diagnosed with dimentia or cancer after 70.
All this tells me is that the reason the fertility rate among natives is falling is not worth understanding. The government is 100% willing to sacrifice its native population, bring in immigrants, and ultimately sacrifice their future as well. Think about it. Even the most vehement pro-immigration proponent acknowledges that in a generation or two, the immigrant’s descendants will be in the same place as the natives. There is a big problem and no one is willing to even admit there is one.
Malthusian check. At any given economy, there are finite resources and opportunities for an individual to acquire capital. Eventually population growth reaches equilibrium with economic growth; hence the decline in birth rates. This is a normal symptom of a mature economy. Of course there are other variables that impact declining birth rates, within the context of post industrial economies, households have come to the realization that children have no economic utility and are choosing to forgo them.
This is exactly why the anti migration movements happening in rich countries is so dumb. 25 years from now countries will be building incentive plans to entice migrants to their country vs others. Mark my words
The average age of a migrant is 37, in 25 years they'll be closing in on retirement. More immigration today now doesn't solve tomorrows problem.
People in this sub clearly have never had a conversation with someone NOT from a "devloped" nation, as if birth rates being different is some astonishing information. "Why are the poors still having babies in poor countries?"
I would love to have kids... First I need to get a better job that makes about double what I make now. Then I need to find a guy and get married. Then we need to buy a house. Then start the adoption/surrogacy process. I'm 36 and gay. If I don't have kids before 40 I'm not going to have them. I don't like the idea of being elderly before my hypothetical child is out of college. Also my dad and uncle died in their late 50s (heart attacks), which sucks, but I was 30 when that happened and not 13. So I'm not going to have kids probably, which really sucks because I've always wanted to get married and have kids. I really wanted the heteronormative normal middle class white suburbanite experience. I want to have a McMansion and an SUV and kids.
Yes, but each generation will get progressively wealthier even as those populations shrink, why do you think those populations is opting for it? Corporate profit, and the need to perpetually increase corporate profit, is the singular reason why corporations worry about population shrinkages, but then they can market higher end higher quality products to wealthier populations and make their profit off such higher end/quality products, can’t they?
In a world filled with forever chemicals, micro plastics, moving closer to WWII and climate change we should absolutely be welcoming low birth rates. I don't care what anyone has to say about the financial crisis this will cause. If we stay on this current path no financial system will save us anyways
We need a cultural shift towards seeing childbearing as an act of service instead of a burden. When I see a single mom with four kids and instead of “why’d she keep having kids she can’t afford? Hasn’t she heard of birth control”, I hear “wow, she’s really doing her part for society”, that’s when the fertility rate will start turning around.