The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
It's not necessary to pay for other peoples housing, all that is necessary is to repeal absurd zoning laws and ridiculous bureaucracy that makes building such things 100x more expensive (if it's even possible) than they need to be.
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty.
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
Housing and infrastructure? We even have bigger problems, and even if economists claim endless growth it is clear that our population, unless we grow into space, cannot grow forever.
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
Children can live in their parents' homes, or parents can live in their childrens' homes.
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
There’s a really fundamental socio-economic change that nobody has touched upon here yet, as it’s such a slow one with such inertia it’s barely noticeable from the ground.
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
* (sociologic) fear of climate change (will the world still be habitable in 20 years' time) or commitment to make a small positive impact on climate change by not having kids
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
I generally agree with you and while reading that line made me laugh, I think you are misunderstanding the statement.
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008.
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
don't forget education is expensive, and quite a few have received funding in predatory lending ways where the debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy without even receiving the degree.
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
* (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workplace
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
I feel like real estate prices outweigh a lot of other factors entirely because real estate costs in places people would prefer to live are an order of magnitude higher than they were even a generation ago after accounting for inflation, and where people live determines an immense number of other factors.
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
These statistics [1] would suggest that sociological factors are in play, especially if you look at the graphs for young people. The number of young men not having sex is at record numbers.
Would there also be effect that long term relationships are hard and pairing up has been disturbed by dating apps. If you aren't living together with regular partner taking next step of getting kid rarely happens.
There's a comical Jurassic Park "life finds a way" outcome lurking... those reproductively restricted by these ideas gradually will be replaced by those who are not so inhibited.
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
I think your last two points make up most of the drivers. Particularly now many people are in an un-breakable relationship with their smartphones.
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
* (policy) - If things don't work out, your wife will divorce you, take half of what you have and enslave you to pay her support for the next 15 years. Actually, she might do that just because she needs more passion while you are hard at work.
> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline.
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.
Here's another possible cause that I don't see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it's really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.
> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved.
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.
That this analysis tries to claim this doesn't correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say "the economy recovered" we don't mean anything that's meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the "real economy" and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore "distributional outcomes" and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a "recovery" or really even "the economy" has less and less to do with the majority of people's real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs.
“””
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.
There was a funny diagram I sawed that presented the birth rate of my country and placed the launch of Tinder to the timeline. The same year Tinder was published the birth rate started going down. Most likely there are other better explanations for this but it made me think. How has the radical disruption of dating market affected the way people form relationships and start families?
> In general, a smaller workforce and an aging population would have negative implications for economic productivity and per capita income growth. In addition, the combination of a smaller workforce and an aging population puts fiscal pressure on social insurance programs, like Social Security, that rely on tax payments from current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees.
This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change.
Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies.
But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?
> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)
Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.
> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).
From your perspective, do you think there's a good possibility the USA will improve the living conditions of our generation and the zoomers? I'm very skeptical and that's why I don't live there anymore, but I'm curious about those who are sticking it out. Is the hope that there'll be some kind of political change, a slow shifting to more progressive politicians?
Had a job in SV, we moved to EU when my wife was pregnant. We would have loved to stay but as many of immigrant friends, we had difficulties figuring out how to be a happy family in USA. We couldn’t afford a house, education without becoming slaves to our career and not to feel threaten by the constantly changing immigration policy.
As an American who moved to the EU after having a child in the US, when I tell people we had to pay for our son on a payment plan, they cringe. Yes, we had insurance, but ironically, the calculated conception date was 2 days before we got insurance -- reality is that we got insurance when we decided to have a kid, so the calculated date is actually wrong. Thus, it was a pre-existing condition and insurance wouldn't cover it. True story.
As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family/fertility campaign [1]. It's so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability.
I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80:
- Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric.
- A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation.
- By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths.
- The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium.
- The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models.
It's helping Germany offset an ageing population and declining economic productivity. If age distribution in your population is becoming unbalanced and you can't encourage the current residents to increase the birth rate, what other option is there?
I always thought this type of argument assumes that the immigrants will magically locate and fix societal problems that lead to the decline as they integrate, and that that would be an unreasonable expectation.
Could this be saying that future dystopian megalopolises should sustain own existences by capturing free-ranged humans roaming wastelands, promise them successes and citizenships, and then letting them die without offsprings?
I don't understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.
It's a problem when it happens suddenly because you end up with a 'top heavy' age distribution. The elderly pensioners:young earners ratio explodes and society security/national insurance cannot afford healthcare/pensions etc.
This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy.
The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
It's considered a problem because the entire system, for most developed nations, implicitly relies on a specific demographic distribution.
Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio).
A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management.
Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution
If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem.
But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
The problem is that a significant part of the current world economic system is dependent on adequate supply of human labor. The declining population phase is especially painful as this will lead to a larger proportion of older people, which cannot supply the same amount of labor yet do consume the same amount of resources.
I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!
"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".
Birth rates in 2018-2020 were about equal here, NW Europe (per capita, within the margin of error) and went up afterwards. But that was not what you wanted to hear.
pjc50|2 years ago
The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
Aeolos|2 years ago
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
DonsDiscountGas|2 years ago
albertgoeswoof|2 years ago
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
marginalia_nu|2 years ago
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
throwbadubadu|2 years ago
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
dumpsterdiver|2 years ago
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
findthewords|2 years ago
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
secretsatan|2 years ago
throwaw12|2 years ago
I disagree with this statement.
Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids?
* (economic) difficult to manage finances
* (economic) can't buy house, too expensive
* (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off.
* (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks
* (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on
madaxe_again|2 years ago
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
red_admiral|2 years ago
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
usui|2 years ago
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
taylodl|2 years ago
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
than3|2 years ago
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
t0mislav|2 years ago
I can't even imagine working a minute longer than 8 hours per day, and 12+ hours is woow. Is this common in US?
I work 8 hours my whole career (IT). My wife works 6 hours per day. (central Europe)
echelon|2 years ago
throwaw12|2 years ago
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
crooked-v|2 years ago
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
rufus_foreman|2 years ago
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US tracks this. Average weekly hours worked as of April of this year is 34.4, or 6.9 hours a day: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
ethor|2 years ago
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
kbrkbr|2 years ago
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
Ekaros|2 years ago
RhysU|2 years ago
thiht|2 years ago
Yeah what the hell, of course it can. How blind do you have to be to write something like that?
quaintdev|2 years ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I
throwaway346434|2 years ago
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
greenimpala|2 years ago
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
loxs|2 years ago
kypro|2 years ago
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
erfgh|2 years ago
HDThoreaun|2 years ago
jcfrei|2 years ago
samwillis|2 years ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the...
Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people.
Anecdotal evidence, I'm in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.
pjc50|2 years ago
dumpsterdiver|2 years ago
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
bboygravity|2 years ago
scotty79|2 years ago
advael|2 years ago
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
dpflan|2 years ago
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “””
Will have to check back on this in a few years.
wunderland|2 years ago
surgical_fire|2 years ago
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.
raptorraver|2 years ago
consp|2 years ago
louwrentius|2 years ago
This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change.
Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies.
But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?
mschuster91|2 years ago
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
AnimalMuppet|2 years ago
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)
Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.
> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).
komali2|2 years ago
batmansmk|2 years ago
withinboredom|2 years ago
somenameforme|2 years ago
I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80:
---
(100) Year 0: 100 births, 0 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(150) Year 20: 50 births, 100 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(175) Year 40: 25 births, 50 twenties, 100 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(187) Year 60: 12 births, 25 twenties, 50 forties, 100 sixties, 0 deaths
(93) Year 80: 6 births, 12 twenties, 25 forties, 50 sixties, 100 deaths
(46) Year 100: 3 births, 6 twenties, 12 forties, 25 sixties, 50 deaths
Year 120: 1 birth...
---
Various observations:
- Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric.
- A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation.
- By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths.
- The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium.
- The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models.
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290693.shtml
pjc50|2 years ago
shp0ngle|2 years ago
richeyryan|2 years ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german...
numpad0|2 years ago
Could this be saying that future dystopian megalopolises should sustain own existences by capturing free-ranged humans roaming wastelands, promise them successes and citizenships, and then letting them die without offsprings?
CalRobert|2 years ago
atemerev|2 years ago
otikik|2 years ago
atemerev|2 years ago
jphoward|2 years ago
This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy.
The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
NalNezumi|2 years ago
Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio).
A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management.
Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution
If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem.
But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
sushibowl|2 years ago
I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
dukeyukey|2 years ago
1. Fewer productive taxpayers to pay for old-age pensions
2. A drop-off in available investment capital as private pensions are converted to bonds and cash
3. Fewer workers for an economy with soaring demand for specific fields e.g. medical
loxs|2 years ago
lynx23|2 years ago
CalRobert|2 years ago
DoingIsLearning|2 years ago
"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".
exitb|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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shjake|2 years ago
Like working into your 70s
gsich|2 years ago
sprash|2 years ago
[deleted]
exitb|2 years ago
louwrentius|2 years ago
emptyfile|2 years ago
[deleted]
hanselot|2 years ago
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consp|2 years ago