My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
Abortions are not the primary reason why teen pregnancy is way down. There's actual data, you know.
Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.
It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age.
Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.
It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
Because there's nothing in the article. It's a couple loosely correlated events around '35-'55 that anyone can Google together in 10 minutes. The article has no more authority that anyone's post around here.
My bet is still WW2. The fact that the boom started earlier than '45 is easily explained by his own quoted graph in which the birthrate plummets in the 20s (which I would assign to WW1), the first rise is merely a correction.
Why would one result in a bust and the other into a boom? For one, the economy followed the same bust ('29) boom pattern. WW1 ended unresolved, showed the evil of man in general, where WW2 resolved WW1 and showed the evil of particular man, and it wasn't us, but which we defeated.
WW2 learned a lot of lessons from WW1 which made post war society thrive for not only the rich.
One significant difference between WW1 and WW2, at least in the US -- the country realigned itself for wartime in a way it did not the first time around. You had women entering the workforce in ways they did not during WW1, which meant you had some families earning dual incomes. At the same time, the US instituted a rationing scheme, so even though households were earning more money, they couldn't spend as much.
Two other significant differences: the GI bill for returning vets (which made it significantly easier for them to get higher education) and the rise of automobiles (which in turn unlocked suburbs and mass home ownership) gave households somewhere useful to put their money.
The second graph is so interesting. Pulling the slider shows less births but an average increase in the mother's age (which in turn accounts for less births if you're looking at 35+ yo first time mothers you don't expect n more kids to follow for (among others biological/medical reasons)). It would be interesting to have a complementary chart on divorces just to have a look whether existential uncertainty plays a role in age decisions.
Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on. I don’t think people of yesteryear contemplated if they were ready to start a family. I don’t think they contemplated if a job was the “right fit”, and I doubt they scoured the world looking for their soulmate. So, if you live in our current time period where you are never “complete”, then you may have a hard time feeling confident about any next step.
Obviously the downside to this was that just about any idiot from yesteryear saw themselves perfectly qualified to start a family.
They also didn't contemplates it as something ubearable if they had to live many persons or even extended family in the same small house, including rentals, and if two persons had to work hard. Manual laborers, factory workers, etc, farmers where both father and mother worked, still had many children.
It's not like this only happened in the window between 1940s-1980s where the run-of-the-mill average job let you support your entire family and purchase a big enough house.
Exactly. I suspect the lack of understanding or overcomplicating the reason the birthrate is declining may have something to do with the much higher than average salary of the average HN commenter relative to the average worker's salary in the US. It's common for people who need to go to the doctor to avoid going to the doctor because they can't afford it. A baby is an order of magnitude more expensive than that and an ongoing expense of doctor visits and potential ER visits among other costs and logistical issues.
> Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on.
I don't think so. I think it's because
A new couple can't support themselves when
rent=1mo typical wages. It is impossible to pair off.
Parenting time is up 20-fold from the 1950s.
Was a few hours wk. Now it's ceaseless, 24/7 adulting.
Childhood is effectively ruined due to
- eradication of free ranging area thanks to automobile
and trespassing culture.
- eradication of regular hours of adult-free peer time
where critical social and growth skills are learned.
Modern childhoods are spent in boxes w/ adults.
Poor mental health follows and kids cope using devices.
So adults predictably want to take that away as well.
> Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
its a microcosm of our entire political discourse as of late imo: everyone is talking anecdotes and feels and barely anyone is bringing the receipts (and if they do its barely noticed)
>this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).
It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.
As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.
But people's anecdotes are part of their life experience. I trust my personal life experience over anything I read, and if I trust a person, I value theirs over anything I read too.
I get it, you like stories of individuals. We should figure out a way you can listen to more stories, so you can form an even better opinion! Perhaps we write them out, shorten them a bit. Or perhaps group them by similarity. And then if we count the types of story per category… and boom, we’ve invented statistics!
And ...boom! we lost the nuance, and shoehorned together disparate elements into a bunch of measurements, as if those explain everything (as opposed to needing explanations and a working theory themselves, and often fitting multiple theories about how they came about).
Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...
And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that shortcoming.
The point is that if you have over 100 correlates to assess a situation, any particular story you try to tell is probably a lie even with the best intentions.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child".
Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
For most of human history, people didn't have to worry about
- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items
- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel
- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you
- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior
- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)
- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor
My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us.
Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult."
I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".
Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?
Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?
Having a child under a certain age has all the health risks of a serious disease putting the life of the mother and child at much higher risks. Why shouldn't it be treated as such?
Yes, I think our cavalier use of antibiotics is a real problem, that could wipe a huge number of people out through the development of populations with huge immune deficiencies and uber-bacteria. Similarly for antiviral resistance.
Plus the need for such drugs itself is overplayed, most of the time the human body can take care of an infection itself. Things like clean water, hand washing, etc, helped for the rest many times over than drugs do.
> Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air.
Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
Yep, we are new parents and we are almost 40. There just wasn't any moment before where it was possible to start a family. We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. Also, with the expectation that outside is for cars. So, there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us which is largely cleaning and de-stressing. If anyone had laid this fully out for us before we made this choice, it would have been an easy heck no.
>There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age
Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that.
Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity.
>But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about.
You mean the kind of knowing better that led us to destroy the environment, and appears to be removing whole populations from the gene pool with way below subreplacement rates?
It's a bit tongue-in-cheek because of the multiple interpretations of "knowing better". On one hand, we "know better" in a way that we, as in all humans, constantly try to control nature and the natural flow of things. Our entire civilization and way of life is a result of that.
On the other hand, I mean it a bit sarcastically, because I'm not convinced on a philosophical level that this kind of living is morally, ethically, humanely superior than that of ancient people's living. Often it looks like that progress is just for the progress' sake, an eternal power struggle, a Prisoner's dilemma. In short, when I ask myself "is progress good", I don't feel strongly toward any answer. I meant to encapsulate this by phrasing it as "knowing better".
But the drive to "know better" is there for sure, even though the results vary. I do believe that good can come from it, and that many efforts actually resulted in lessening human suffering, which I consider a good thing. I mean here efforts like equal rights movements, reproductive health and education, and proper access to medical help (to stay on topic).
> we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole
You are citing a source that talks about unintended pregnancies (often as a result of sexual abuse) in developing nations. With nearly half of those being prematurely aborted in some (medically safe or not) way.
I’m inclined to believe that the support system throughout most of history was better than what these girls get.
And now, while preventing and tabooing teen pregnancy, society is about to collapse on itself by lack of reproduction. We coddled our kids to extinction.
> Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
Raises the moral question of what kind of living is worth it, and on what level is it okay to impose on one another. Looking at how families from teen pregnancies fare*, I'm absolutely positive that mitigating these is far from the biggest contributor to "societal collapse". Doing anything to raise this number is not going to do society any good, even if it results is a larger number of children on paper. Taking proper care of this situation is not any kind of coddling, more like basic human decency.
That was a very interesting read. Even if it leaves me feeling like the reason teenage pregnancies are ‘bad’ is mostly because society is not set up for/condemns them. A teenage mother in a healthy family unit that drops the child with their parents while they continue to attend school will have significantly better outcomes.
I’m fairly certain a teenage pregnancy in Japan would work out more or less the same, because society is set up to facilitate people working 9h/day and dropping the kids off at daycare basically from several months of age. Of course, that’s combined with massive social stigma, so it wouldn’t on the balance really help things.
I don't understand why population studies people don't even mention this: we're technically wild animals, competing for survival. In absence of a specific and effective imperative stipulating population must grow, we must subconsciously modify societal frameworks exactly to impede reproduction.
It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.
> And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.
The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.
You don't have to be an "extinction apologist" or whatever to think that we'll probably solve the problem before we go from 7 BILLION people to not enough humans for healthy genetic diversity. We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.
>that we'll probably solve the problem before we go from 7 BILLION people to not enough humans for
This just goes to show how little you've ever considered the problem. I don't think you're stupid (probably), so let me get you started...
It's not "from 7 billion to not enough", because right now we don't have 7 billion. We only have the generation(s) that are from 0 to 40 years old... everyone older doesn't even count. 80 yr olds and 55 yr olds aren't potential parents.
We will still have many billions of people even once we become functionally extinct, because you were counting everyone even the octogenarians, when you should've been counting the people who mattered in this regard.
>We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.
But there's no "us" to rescue us in that manner, and we can't do it ourselves. Why? Because doddering senile geezers don't have the ambition, marbles, or energy to do such a thing and those are the only people who would be left at that point. Not to mention that any such rescue would turn us into franken-people, no thanks. We should all be terrified of the science fiction dreams of artificial wombs and gestation chambers and so forth because just as those might be used for good things, the CCP and North Korea will use them to churn out armies of replicants.
You really are the extinction apologist you think you're not.
I think it's actually quite likely that quite a few "dominant" cultures - both in terms of nations and groups within nations - will effectively die out.
But humanity almost certainly won't? Why? Because there are sub-groups within humanity who have much higher fertility rates. As long as there are groups of people which are large enough to have viable genetic diversity, and recognise that a high birth rate is crucial for the continued existence of their culture, there will be humans.
Realistically, that means the decline of western liberal ideas and the growth of more extreme religious groups.
I’m sorry, but calling anything but above-replacement birth rates “slow-motion extinction” is ridiculous. This is the equivalent to expecting babies to be 15 meters tall by the time they’re adults from extrapolating their rate of growth in their infant years.
Below-replacement rate might be an economic issue around retirement, but as far as the human species goes, it’s a nothingburger at this scale. We’re not passenger pigeons.
It's not “developed countries have reduced population growth”.
It's: ALL countries have reduced population growth in recent decades compared to their historical baselines. Including in "non-developed" countries, like in Africa.
Many (most) countries have also dropped to sub fertility rates or close above.
On top of cultural and other reasons, there are also objective fertility issues with sperm counts and others emerging (likely due to modern food, climate crisis, microplastics, or some such).
Combine that with looming issues emerging from population shrinkrage causing economic decline, pension collapse and things like that, and then add environmental issues and resource wars into the mix.
It's no consolation if some pockets of humanity here and there carry on the torch, if humanity shrinks down to irrelevance.
Any fertility rate below 2.1 isn't reduced population growth. It is the literal, factual opposite of population growth... it is population shrinkage/decline/whatever.
These countries we discuss all have population decline. This is masked by multiple factors including immigration and increased longevity.
If there's no culture, development level, and way of life preferences, for different national states and ethnic groups, and humans are just interchangeable units, sure. Just add as many immigrants as you want, problem solved.
Adding, say, to a country an additional 10%-20% of its current population in people from another culture, to be the younger and more fertile group, in an aging domestic population, would absolutely go without issue.
At least, if we also ignore that immigrant origin countries all see fertility drops, many projected to reach sub-fertility rates themselves soon, of course.
it is heavily politicized, atleast for the forseable future, until society reaches a conclusion, people will lie with statistics, smear their opponents in discussion as bigots, sexists, whatever.
But sooner or later it needs to be asked and acted upon. Should society structure itself to penalise abortions, and reward births of children.
Did our old religious and conservative societies where parents and grandparents helped together to give a great childhood to 2 or more children be something we need to bring back (for folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood, aborted children have NO childhood a death for themselves that they didnt choose). Should premarital intercourse be banned again or shunned ?
Religions have brought tons of miseries causing constant conflicts between communities, wars, allowing politicians and rulers to manipulate masses.
However, they also carried laws and doctrines refined over centuries, on philosophy, morality, and most importantly societal structure.
Monogamy itself and the construct of marriage was refined and finalized in all major religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc across several centuries (and in some cases greater than 1000 yrs).
One must consider, why did our ancestors come to certain conclusions globally regardless of faith around societal structure? What conditions did they want to create across society, to bring about prosperity or growth. Why were certain conservative and unpopular opinions regardless were imposed on men and women alike.
We should remove all the horrible stuff, things we can leave behind that our ancestors used to do sure. but throwing everything away is also not going to lead to anything good for us in the future.
Should abortion be readily accessible simply for the sake of liberty and freedom ? Should contraceptives be widely made available and promoted ? , should families force kids to be responsible for their actions again, and first try their best to give their newly born child a better life before allowed to just throw everything apart with divorces, single parent childhood, etc. Should premarital intercourse be banned , to encourage youth to form meaningful relationship instead of coasting between new girlfriends and boyfriends every new year ?
Im not saying we should do X, but these questions will need to be asked sooner or later, if western society or even asian societies want to survive (both have ultra low birthrates, china, japan, korea, russia, even india is now going the below tfr rate and will join them far sooner than was estimated within 20 yrs).
I really love european, american and asian societies and cultures, and i dont want them to die off, or perish away. Even my own culture's TFR is 0.98 for multiple decades and its perishing away quite fast too.
Hard questions will need to be asked in the future. It's not just a matter of what feels right to our emotional minds at a moment, but rather, whats best for society and cultures itself long term.
Not to mention, housing prices need to go way down, it needs to be removed from being a speculative asset or a way to whitewash black money, its wreaking havoc on whatever remaining part of society that does want kids, but cant afford to own a home by age of 30 even with double income household. We have enough land to house the entire world in each of the major countries, yet just out of sheer regulation, greed and laziness from politicians, policymakers, and banks who are afraid of the housing market crashing and causing problems for them, they are keeping this charade up.
There are many problems that need to be solved in coming decades, I hope each of our societies solve it.
When people feel the game is unfair, they quit. When the game is society, the society ceases to exist.
It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not surprising so many people choose not to bring new life into it. Liberty and freedom aren't abstract ideals. Their real absence makes people find coping mechanisms in a world that often feels rigged.
If a society truly wants to persist, it has to give people a reason to stay - something more than survival, more than struggle, more than empty promises about meritocracy or bootstrap fantasies. Otherwise, the logic of self-preservation kicks in, and people will exercise whatever autonomy they can muster, including the right to say, "No, not this."
So, yeah, access to abortion isn't simply about individual rights in the abstract; it's a symptom and a signal. When people would rather not create new life than subject it to the current system, that's not a moral failure on their part. It's an indictment of the system itself.
I don't disagree, but better doesn't make up for unfairness.
Inequality isn't an act of nature. No volcano or hurricane is disrupting lives. The source is human, a system we built, the society we live in. If we can't change the system that binds us, then it doesn't deserve us.
The core conceit is, "When I win, it's merit. When you lose, it's fair."
It’s symptoms all the way down. If the system decides it needs more births it will ban abortion, and that’s not a moral failure on the system’s part, it’s an indictment of the symptoms itself.
Hans Rowling found that one of the best way to increase numbers of births is to reduce education for women. Or at least there’s strong correlation between both.
The system has no morals, but every person operating within it does. If the system demands what it needs from us without regard for morality, it's on us, as moral agents, to refuse compliance. The system can demand what it wants, but no one is obliged to give it anything.
If the point is that the system will coerce what it needs from us, then it deserves not merely to perish, but to be destroyed, actively, deliberately, and ruthlessly. If births are the air it breathes, let us suffocate it by refusing to bear its children. Let it choke on its own demands.
Things should be made better I agree,
But at the same time.
Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us.
They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.
Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity and energy. (and higher fertility and birth rates)
More things, "non meritocracy", "bootstrap fantasies", those things arent the problem.
People of our generation and the one before, are just always whining complaining, too lazy. I dont want to believe that either, but it is the truth.
Our freedom to do anything and everything, abort children easily, control birth planning easily, making casual sex the norm, etc, making housing unaffordable to keep this stupid real estate based bubble alive for banks, and politicians alive under garb of "Regulation" and "NIMBYism".
Are 100% much more contributing to all of this. Than nihilism, doomism, etc.
Give people better things, more money, better lifestyle, and more freedoms and no societal pressure to have kids, people are just opting for the "DINK" philosophy, Double Income No Kids.... , spend on expensive cars, better homes, more travel, but no... no kids.
Go observe every major society, the top 10% of each society in almost all of them have a pretty decent life with good savings and sense of security, freedom to not overwork too much. This is the top 10% populist politicians villify as having everything.
Now go look at the birth rates of that top 10% in EVERY major society its lower than the rest of the 90%.
More money, more affordability are not linked to birth rates at all, except for a teensy minority who overthinks things and calculates 1000 different decisions from climate change to their wealth to their partner's loyalty, to decide if they want kids. They are not the majority
No amount of motivation, higher incomes, etc will reverse this trend of birth declines, (however governments and society should strongly work towards giving people higher income, less overworking, more motivation to be optimistic not for boosting birth rates, because it wont, but simply because its the duty of public servants, politicians, policymakers and the state that serves the society in return for the society serving the state with loyalty)
TLDR; make better society yes, but even that will just lead to even fewer kids, make a more responsible society while improving people's lives.
Empirically, how well does the "we have it better off now" response work against feelings of an unfair system. Does it tend to change perspective in your experience?
the mindset you're discussing isnt whats driving this for majority of people (im myself young and in my 20s). its a problem in your extremely small bubble of leftist spaces which i've often heard this doomism being argued.
World has never been that fair, its a work in progress that has been going on since 1000s of years heck probably 100,000s for humans.
First there was Anarchy / Stateless Societies (Pre-Leviathan),
then came the notion of leviathan / Authoritarian Centralization the idea that letting a state get run by a ruler and his nobles would lead to a more stable state (the era of kings and emperors since last several centuries),
then came Theocratic or Feudal Orders : Society governed by divine rule or hierarchical feudal obligations. Middle Ages in Europe, dynastic China, Islamic Caliphates.
then Absolute Monarchy / Early Nation-States
then Constitutionalism / Enlightenment Liberalism
then came Democracy (but anti minority and primarily majoritarian with tons of political violence on minorities, still can see it in places like bangladesh, malaysia (singapore itself was born out of violence on such a non-malay minority) )
then came Liberal Democracy / Republic
Which is what most western europeans, americans, indians, japan, etc live under or atleast the ideals its politicians promise to follow and do follow majority of the time.
Everything you and enjoy in our lives was created and improved upon by people before us, life has never been 'fair' nor will ever reach that utopian ideal of fair ever. Nor has it ever been the limiter on birth rates or growing societies.
It's just an excuse (sorry I'm not saying your concerns are invalid, but only that you share it with every human who has ever existed across time, and this has never been the bottleneck for our current problem with birth rates)
The problems are more behavioural in kind, and the norms that have arised rather than unfair system, psycological issues like that.
Can you explain how all of this is supposed to make me feel like it's worth opting in to? It sounds like this society is fundamentally broken. Why support something I don't believe in?
A little. The real perspective shift happens when people learn how to stop comparing their lives to stories about other people they’ll never meet, but that’s a harder and more general lesson. The idea that medieval peasants had more free time than me comes from the same place as the idea that everyone could afford a house in the 1950s, or the idea that everyone I see on Instagram is living more vibrant lives than me.
Have you ever seen that meme about having less days off than a medieval peasant?
Yes, I can get chicago, new york, italian, or tokyo style pizza from my phone, in about an hour in a city that is none of those places. Still even my weekends include work. A strong effort in high school, college, grad school and at my jobs has led to fairly regular weekend work and working after putting the LOs down for bedtime, not connecting or socializing.
No one’s stopping you from not working on weekends, for most high income earners people who do it, it’s purely the obsession with no end to wanting more (other than those who live paycheck to paycheck and need those weekends due to having multiple jobs, that is indeed a tragedy and should be a policy priority for gov to fix).
But tell me this, If society is overworking so much.
How is the average screen time of an american adult around 4-5 hours per day ? thats 8-10 hours per couple per day. Are you saying most of that time spent on facebook, tiktok, youtube and instagram overworking time ?
Do americans work hard ? absolutely way more than europeans who have a much better work life balance, tons of holidays, maternity leave, paternity leave, none of which america has.
Chinese and american workers are some of the hardest workers on earth.
Then tell me this. How is it that western europe with better work life balance has even worse birth rates (significantly worse for significantly many more years) than america ?
Western Europe already has more rights and it doesnt work.
Whatever semblance of sanity they have in birth rates (as horrible as those metrics are) most of the children are born to single income regressive households mostly north african, morocon, and pakistani immigrants in western europe and uk. So, if you exclude those, the birth rates of families with more rights, more work life balance, is even worse than the official stats.
Rights or no rights isnt the issue, but a discussion on what’s promoted by society should be had, more rights doesnt mean more children. Coercion, promotion of ideals, behavioural nudging are standard things every single country and its government does, (a good book on this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State)
So More rights, more work life balance while are amazing ideals that society should definitely work on, like it has for thousands of years with on average significant better results if one sees growth in 100 yr cycles.
More rights is not the solution to birth rates, atleast its not the existing bottleneck in most western societies and cultures that’s for sure.
We have to find a new equilibrium for fertility that does not depend on opression of women. This could very well mean we need more rights, most of all more stable, plannable lifes i think. The old opressive ways of ensuring fertility are gone and without major societal upheaval they will not come back. I think that is good and we should focus on alternative solutions.
> Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.
What’s your definition of our generation? What you described is true of multiple generations, and flat out wrong for things like lifespan in the United States which has been declining.
> folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood
If you count a 11 year girl child to be raped by and then married to her 60 year old (maybe wealthy) relative then yeah she indeed had a fucking fabulous childhood.
> penalise abortions, and reward births of children
For fuck's sake - there's a difference between a teen abortion and an adult abortion! But then you wouldn't understand why one "aborts"! Oh you do understand but you want that decision to be "society's" - not that person in whose body a fucking foetus is growing!
I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
Who said I'm for or promoting teenage pregnancies ?????
No woman should be allowed to be married off to someone until they are 18 especially with that kind of age gap.
Marrying under 18s with 30-40 yr olds is not a solution and diabolical, no major religion even recommends that.
We need to restructure our society so that men and women aged 20-25 yrs old, can have a easy access to owning their own homes, with sustainable careers and occupation.
We need to make children before college postgraduation studies or even higher studies like phd not only more acceptable but the norm.
Pedophilia should not be encouraged and most sane societies have been vehemently against what you're saying (including me).
This cycle of people having kids after 35 yrs old, needs to be fixed that is the disaster.
> I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
I agree with what you said, but abortion is also causing the issues, its been normalized that its ok if majority of men and women attempt to have their first kid after 30 (it should not be this way). Premarital sex, casual sex and one night stands has destroyed the whole notion of commitment between man and a woman. Our Instagram feeds that constantly glorify unattainable photoshopped beauty from select actresses and actors influencing the masses all the time, has made expectations of men and women delusional.
There are many issues, and some of the main ones are what you described correctly , with it being overworking people, not giving 20 yr old stable careers instead keeping them stuck in gigwork, internships, and no career growth or help.
They must be rectified, our society has enough wealth to fix this.
Yep — adding 500,000 births per year to the U.S. population would increase our overall TFR from 1.62 to 1.85, which is certainly significant.
The impact of other contraceptive methods is likely far larger. Social pressure not to conceive being perhaps the most effective contraceptive...
My wife and I had our first child while she was in medical training — the amount of absolutely vile commentary she had to push through from fellow trainees and program supervisors was absurd. But she also paved the way for other mothers at her program. In the ~two years since, she’s had at least five other women tell her that she proved it was possible and was the catalyst for their pregnancy.
>the amount of absolutely vile commentary she had to push through from fellow trainees and program supervisors was absurd
I believe you, it happened to me as well. I'm glad you both pushed through that; it actually is a Level 0 attack, but at the right time it can be quite demoralizing. You are way better than those pieces of filth.
My best wishes to you and your family, may you have a blessed life :D.
I think the uncomfortable truth that many are reluctant to admit is that religion and societal norms (as you highlighted above) played a major role in this.
I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary.
Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of safe abortions and readily accessible birth control methods, they have regained their bodily autonomy which allows them to skip unwanted pregnancies.
I think that ultimately, liberating women is a _good_ thing because child bearing is difficult and no one women should be forced to go through it.
With all that said, having children can be wonderful. Perhaps a better solution is to both celebrate and encourage families while keeping abortion and birth control accessible. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.
The issue is not so much the access to the methods, but the negative feedback loop that they cause. For every woman freed from unwanted childbearing, how many are socially pressured into not having a child?
Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.
The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.
Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.
>Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default.
People expected a married couple of grown adults to get an abortion by default rather than congratulating you on accomplishing what you were plainly trying on purpose?
Simpler than this: how long does an unwanted pregnancy remain unwanted? Basically 9 months tops. After than it's automatically into rearing mode and don't have time to mull such crap. Then as the shock peters off after a year or so, any original thoughts or utterings of "unwanted" get code-of-silence buried til the end of days, and don't ever come back.
> how long does an unwanted pregnancy remain unwanted? Basically 9 months tops
An unwanted pregnancy can remain unwanted for the rest of your life.
(everyone then walks back to "oh I didn't mean abortion should be banned in cases of rape or medical risk to the mother", at which point we have to point out that the religious conservatives very much do want that.)
That's some quality "you're ok, I'm ok". Nice safe warm, "it's all part of the tapestry of life" utterings. Carefully avoiding any kind of spine or conviction.
You'd probably watch a partial birth abortion and utter in nice warm soothing language how good it is that it's "safe", and that her (the woman not the killed girl) has exercised bodily autonomy, probably followed later by a dinner at a Michelin started restaurant nicely dressed up where you can all pontificate together in warm tones about your righteousness.
Or you can stand over a woman and prevent her receiving medical treatment until her avoidable death. Thus shocking an entire nation into permitting abortion.
Having kids when you are young and financially not established is just irresponsible, but particularly female bodies don’t do well having kids older when you are established enough to do so responsibly. I’m having this problem right now with my spouse (we have a kid, but are thinking about another), it’s just super hard to get pregnant without medical help.
Why? Can you defend this for me? I'm genuinely asking. Why is it irresponsible to have a child when you're young and financially not established? Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?
Children are resilient, and so are parents.
In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
Reminds me of that scene from idiocracy about the genius couple that wanted kids but kept pushing it off until everything was “perfect”. Then they were too old and resented each other then died childless.
If you have a child, but don't have a house, you'll probably stay with your parents. They probably would rather you have your own house so they can have privacy and such.
A lot of the "multiple generations of families under one roof" type thinking are only practical if you have a large property, which was more common and much cheaper before the industrial revolution, tract housing, high rise apartments, and $2000/mo. rent for 500 square feet. Even if you think it's OK for 3 generations and 20 children to live in a 500 square foot apartment, most others don't want that.
When you have people with more money than they could possibly spend in their entire lives who wouldn't have to work a day in their life if they didn't want to, telling you that people need to start having babies and oh, also they need to work 80 hours a week and "sacrifice" to pay for them as well, lol no thanks.
I had my first child at 24 on a shoestring budget in a 700 sq. ft. apartment and it has been completely manageable. Children are way less expensive than you might think (definitely cheaper than an adult) and if you’re creative you can find good quality, full-time daycare or childcare for $10-15k/yr.
Does this add extra work? Oh yes, absolutely it does. But while having children means you sacrifice certain things, they are an incredible gift and more than make up for the trouble they cause.
It’s appalling to me how heavily we gatekeep parenthood and building a family. There is an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4 billion years from the very first organism to you. Your ancestors all managed to do it and they were no smarter, more gifted, or more affluent than you are. Chances are they were younger than you when they started and in a far more perilous situation to boot.
I think one problem is that it's difficult to share with non-parents that the sacrifice is worth it. It's easier to understand the pain of losing opportunities, losing freedom, losing hobbies, losing sleep, or downsizing living space.
How do you explain that you miss your newborn so much, that when the baby is asleep all you do is look through pictures of him/her? i almost cried the first time my toddler ran up to me and gave me a hug. i cried when i picked him up after the first day of daycare and he said "i missed you" - i didn't even know he knew that phrase!
My (immigrant) parents never explained to me how awesome it is to be a parent. Also they are a 100 times more affectionate as grandparents than as parents.
I hope to teach my son that being a parent is the best luckiest blessed thing ever.
Maybe we as a society should decide that having children is fine when you don't have a stable career yet and finance it as such. The contradiction that our most fertile years are also the most unstable is something society could and should balance.
Don't the difficulties in pregnancy related to age tend to come up around 40 or older?
I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?
Oh, I’m sure some “anecdotal” stories will come up, painting a perfect picture of the “good old days” — without calling them that, of course. Here's one then:
Take my great-grandfather, for example. 56, falls head over heels for a 14-year-old girl from church, and boom — 30 days later, they’re married. 8 months later, my grandfather’s born. They stayed married for 50 years. My grandmother was 16 when she married my 47-year-old grandfather after a chance meeting in the woods, and, guess what, smooth pregnancy again. My parents? Same song, different verse. Now, fast forward to today: I broke up with my girlfriend (late 30s, early 40s) because we wanted kids, but couldn’t conceive — and back then when were were younger and when we could, I couldn’t afford it. See, back then, the older man was not only virile but also financially set, while the young woman could pop out babies at the drop of pants.
Yeah, those “good old days” sound amazing. Make World Pregnant Again.
Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high.
It’s almost like our social norms prevent “good” and “okay” people from becoming parents, waiting for a “perfection” they’ll never achieve… but those norms have no real effect on the people who will be “shitty” parents.
I guess it matters what "shitty" parent means. You can give all the financial/material support in the world to a child and still cause irreversible lifelong damage with the wrong parenting style. You don't need to be a "perfect" parent, but at the same time you do need to be a "good enough" parent, or the consequences are dire.
Knowing what I've been through, I'd much, much rather those people spend an extra 5 or more years working through those problems instead of having children that will grow up to regret being born.
And reality is, some people should never become parents, because they carry mental issues they will forever lack the self-perception to acknowledge and attempt to change. But they will become parents anyway, and the outcome is all but certain.
It's a perspective that often gets lost in the macro-level fertility discussions: how many births never happen not because people don’t want kids, but because the only off-ramp they might've taken got paved over by modern expectations, norms and etc
In the present, how many of your daily actions and decisions are made not because you want to but because of social expectations or norms?
Is there any utility to having social expectations or norms that push you to do things that you may not “want” to?
In the past, people had kids because that's just what happened between people. Pregnancy was a natural consequence of human life.
Making childbearing a choice means that you need some social framework to encourage it, otherwise it becomes completely gauche and impractical. In the absence of this supportive social framework, fertility rates will drop, and in many cases precipitously. The long-term consequence of that drop in fertility is, at its most extreme, the collapse of modern civilization.
Compare Israel with South Korea, for example. Both are mostly developed economies. In one of these societies, kids are a status symbol; in the other, they are generally considered a nuisance (e.g. kids will often be banned from restaurants or other social watering holes). Can you guess which one of these societies will survive longer?
What loss? It was not her but her "girlfriend" which I don't even know how to correctly interpret these days. Is she saying it was her love interest or just a friend who is female? Heaven knows!
Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
It goes both ways. Add to this that boys today have been raised on a steady diet of pornography on their smartphones from a young age and never taught to master their impulses and learn genuinely masculine virtue. What do you think this does to their perception and treatment of women? And women are taught to view sex as an instrument of power and control (look at the number of young women with OnlyFans accounts), and raised on a steady diet of viewing men as sleazes by nature, not by condition. They are not taught feminine virtue. What do you think will do to female behavior?
The cycle continues.
The cycle must be broken by admitting that boys can be raised to be self-sacrificing gentlemen who have no interest in bad women, and girls can be raised to be loving ladies who can discern between exploitative jerks and noble men.
Pretty sure my interactions with 60+ old man and the younger generation refutes this. Of course this is anecdotal but you also offer no evidence whatsoever.
I'm not sure this scans really because teenage births as well as teenage pregnancies enjoyed a local peak around 1990. There certainly was not a general pan-American societal instinct against teenage births at that time. The rate has fallen by more than 75% since. Even the mother-under-15 birth rate in 1990 was ridiculous (about 10x more than today, in most states).
The local peak around 1990 was a very small bump from the flat run through the 1980s, and was probably a brief rebound effect of the extreme negative social pressure related to unprotected casual sex stemming from the AIDS crisis fading a bit as that became perceived as less acute of a threat, and there numbers dropped rapidly after that peak, quickly going through the floor they had settled in during the long flat period preceding the brief rise and peak.
So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.
It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.
Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
My grandmother was scandalously had. If abortion had been legal her entire family tree wouldn't exist. Me, my dozen or so cousins, my father, aunts, all gone.
I thought your anecdote was interesting and thought provoking and I appreciate that you posted it. Thank you.
I am disappointed at the hostile reaction it provoked in some others ... as if you, or your anecdote, reminded them of something that angered them and they lost track of the difference.
I think the point of the post is that society has changed its stance on having kids. People who aren't purposefully branching out on their own and are just "going with the flow" of their external influences are more likely to not have kids. Everyone still has the choice, but the default has changed for most of us.
This is a shocking take. I can personally attest (in my 40s) to the pressure felt from professionals during the foetal abnormality scan, pregnancy especially a first time pregnancy is an incredibly vulnerable and difficult experience where those you're surrounded with in every context have massively outsized influence on your otherwise clueless state.
Our baby had no abnormalities, but the language and presentation of the doctor almost had me ready for violence. It's easy to understand from his perspective - he must dehumanize the thing in many cases he is going to encourage you to abort, and if that is what he recommends, it's a recommendation that would have carried tremendous authority for both parents, who would then have immediately acted upon each other.
I feel this isn’t so generous a response. This person is describing their lived in experience, coloured by the time and experiences they’ve had since. They certainly recognise that it would have been a moment that had things transpired differently would have dramatically altered the course of their life.
I read their remarks as a somewhat mournful expression of a desire to follow “the road not travelled”.
I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA)
The system has a system and a narrative. If you’re working against the narrative you have to be very prepared.
It's less that hospitals are pushing circumcision and more that there's a discharge checklist everyone is working from and the circumcision question is on it. The repetition is some combination of verifying your answer and/or people not reading the notes other people have written when they document your answer. If your answer were "yes, we want a circumcision," they'd be asking you repeatedly just the same until they actually did it.
It shouldn't even be legal, much less on a checklist. Doctors will swear up and down on their oaths or whatever other high horse when it comes to euthanasia, but mutilating children without their consent is all good!
> I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA)
Also USA but opposite experience: They asked about circumcision as a checklist item but there was absolutely no pressure at all.
It could have been a location specific culture thing, or you might have mistaken their routine checklist as pressure. Hospital personnel get blamed if parents go home without being offered all of the services, so they’re under pressure to make you aware of it and confirm your no.
When the baseline belief in society goes from “make it work” to “better to end the pregnancy” it shouldn’t be surprising that overall the number of birth goes way down.
That's probably not why the number of births is way down.
Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.
Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.
It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.
We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.
Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
We didn't really use contraceptives and we had three "oopses". Those three oopses are pretty awesome.
Nothing like a kid to help you get your head out of your ass. Probably why people report feeling happier, because you can't think about the stupid stuff you used to worry about.
>Nothing like a kid to help you get your head out of your ass. Probably why people report feeling happier, because you can't think about the stupid stuff you used to worry about.
Not all of those things were stupid, and not in need of being worried about and worked on. Though childless myself, I try to remind those who are currently rearing the next gen all those problems they "don't have time to worry about" are still there. Do your children a favor and maybe worry about problems bigger than you still. You, as opposed to me (the childless), have a materialized interest in the future. I get odd looks because I spend an awful amount of time worrying over everyone else's futures even to the detriment of my own; but if y'all aren't looking forward for them, someone else has to.
He hasn't said that, but he's pointing out, correctly, that if you want to go to past numbers, you need to increase teenage and very young women having children.
Or, by extension, promote older women having babies at rates they never had.
These studies never seem to look at time spent parenting, between baby-boom years and now.
My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers.
My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation.
Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
Don't forget the parenting of extended family and neighbors - it takes a village.. But we're moving further and further from local, village-like lives.
We're also seeing baby boomers, who were raised partially by their grandparents, neglecting the role of grandparent. They live vicariously, through Facebook and video calls, and when the parents ask for them to get more involved, they're met with "I raised you, so I've done my part"
Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
I don't think that's a significant factor because it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8. Nobody is thinking "I'll have to drive them to music lessons in 10 years instead of letting them play outside".
I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
I think the level of obsessive care people feel obliged to deliver to their single child prior to age of 8 is a part of the same story. You can see how radically it changes even with the second child (not to mention the third) but half of the parents never get there nowadays and think it's the norm.
I actually have two children and this is nonsense. Obviously the first child gets more attention than the second, but not in terms of the amount of time and money the childcare involves. And most people (in the UK at least) are not delivering obsessive levels of care. Some are of course, but most aren't.
Since what age did your kids start to go outside and play by themselves?
I'm not in the UK, but in France it seems that people generally won't let their kids outside alone until they're 10 or not even then. That makes a difference of several hours of free time a week which is quite significant. Luckily people seem to be fine to leave their kids alone at home, which amounts to a few more hours of time per week. Also luckily there are mandatory public schools starting from the age of 3, so France in general is not bad for raising kids time-wise and money-wise. However I do notice that amount of autonomy people entrust to their kids here is lower than what I tend to do.
> it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8.
Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.
Back in the 90s, there was fear about a population bomb. 10 billion people by 2010, mass starvation, etc. We've successfully defused the population bomb since, and now the conversation has flipped. In most developed countries, there's declining birthrates and new concerns over who will support the future economy. The problem now is that these countries do very little to support new families and children. Housing is expensive, childcare costs are crushing, expectations on parents is higher than ever, and there's less community support than ever before. So it's really no wonder why people are choosing to have smaller families or no kids at all.
No; we just have birth control that works. The rest of these are all parts of the puzzle that help people not desire having offspring, but previously there simply wasn't a 99% fool-proof method to do so aside from abstinence or hysterectomy. So; regardless of economic factors, people had kids and dealt with those outcomes.
Is this true for very wealthy people, or only for above average earners?
There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.
Quick google shows some support for this idea:
"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."
ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
Most younger people can't afford homes. People's money doesn't go as far as it used to. Academic qualifications are worth less than they used to be. Many people currently working now won't see a pension. Many won't see a good paying job, even with good academic qualifications and work experience. General health and wellbeing is getting worse, with businesses abusing human psychology to shift product that knowingly causes worse health outcomes. Many people are concerned about the political direction of the countries they live in, and many are concerned about the changes in the community and culture around them. Many might see the first shockwaves of climate change (climate refugees, more extreme weather, water shortages). War is growing, and will grow further when states start fighting over dwindling resources. All generations, especially the young and impressionable are becoming addicted to information (not in a good way) and media consumption, the only upside of which is an inverse relationship to alcohol and substance consumption.
And their kids will have it worse than them. The world is getting worse to live in, and we (or many of us) have just enough education this time around to not want to burden another generation with that. In the past, and in certain places today, a lack of education would mean people would procreate even as society collapsed around them.
We've lived through a very small golden age of being alive (in select places) the last 70 years. It was unsustainable, and we are now seeing the undoing of those times. We might not see such a boom of prosperity again.
There is an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4.5 billion years of evolution from the very first organism to you. Every one of our ancestors made it, and chances are they did so in more difficult and perilous circumstances than we can imagine. You can as well.
This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.
Throughout the history of civilization, we have made such incredible progress in medicine, technology, science, the standard of human living, energy production, space exploration, you name it. The world is a very bright place. Any prophecy of economic or climactic doom or cultural doom is just pessimism. In the long-term optimism is the most rational strategy.
In line with this, you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults. Child care is accessible and affordable if you look in the right places and are willing to be creative. And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life. (At least this has been my experience; I had my first child at 24 on a small budget and in a small apartment with not all that much help.)
> This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.
I have zero social media, don't read the news, and have a happy stable lifestyle. I can afford to raise kids and ten years ago, yeah go for it. I wanted to have children.
Now? no way. My generation stops with me and many others my age (36) echo the same statement. I don't want to push kids through the next up-generations of the shite that's starting to pile up now.
"it's you because of X" is a strawman argurement. The world is bleak it's not a happy place but your welcome to keep that illusion.
We have wars, we have povetry, we have divide. Will it get better? Maybe, the future will decide but with my history of life doesn't feel like it will be anytime soon, I've seen in the past twenty years; how long do I wait for?
I like to think the good will always outweigh the evil however until something does come along and dethrones the current evil, issue consquences for their actions we are stuck here in a swurling-black-hole of dispair. That's realism and will that be you? Because I like to think it will be me. I can walk outside my apartment and see how shite it all is.
We have achieved so much, people are more educated than past generations, vaccines, advance technologies and the rest which is great. And now have a text box where you can ask a silly question of your choice and some robot will spit out the answer. Amazing stuff, the caveat being those running these systems are those who are producing the dysoptian mist.
> you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults.
This is fallacy, i'm no father but there is much more expense then just feeding kids. What if your child get's ill? Need's special tutoring? Has a disability? Wants to learn to horse ride? Fair assumption if all kids were born equal but life isn't like that.
What if the "budget" ends up being cancelled, say losing your job because of some political reform and cuts? How do you raise children when themselves have no money; poverty is only increasing. Please tell because I'm sure their are plenty of homeless who would love to have that life hack.
The past didn't have rapid game changing technology like we have now.
Just because we are always evolving doesn't mean we can afford to in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next stage of evolution are desiginer-babies. Artfically created in a lab and ready to be posted to you to cradle. Some exec's wet dream and it's already in the making.
This isn't doomerism, this is real life, reality. Try looking outside the walled gardens and maybe you'll see the past, the present and the curtian of the future holding futuristic lies and corruption of the real world that shroud the real harmony of humanity.
We are at the best time in humanity but that can only be said by those who can afford it. Being pesstistmic is a downer, but being optistmic is bloody hard at the moment and to think some angel will come down from the sky and save us all, I won't stop you from dreaming.
It's popular opinion, but it's demonstrably wrong. In terms of procreation richer countries doesn't do better, richer communities doesn't do better, and while economic incentives may shift needle a little temporarily, so far no consistent effects have been shown with them. Since condoms/pills/abortion detached sexual intercourse from its original biological function, it's only ideals, and culture which make people to choose becoming parents. It's too big a part of life to be paid with money for if you simply don't want it.
No, it’s not the economy. All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents. Yet they are doing fine.
Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?
There's a difference between being able to survive and living a good life. The reason the more financially literate and educated people put off having kids is because they care about their own futures and the futures of their kids. They know they can't work forever and they know that the current political environment is one of removing and undoing every single social safety net out there. Meaning, a mistake today very well could mean homelessness/eating cat food/etc or ultimately starving to death.
My father-in-law is 72 and still needs to work to pay the bills. He can't retire. That's the future for the less financially and intellectually equipped parents and their kids in the current political climate.
When aging population cannot be supported by enough young hands joining the economy, retirement accounts won't mean much. One can't eat digits, or take them as medicine. Money is as useful as you can exchange them for somebody's work.
If someone is struggling to take care of themselves, why would they have children? Heck, if you have people working 80+ hours a week just to stay housed, when can they find time to have kids?
Cruel societies punish people for having kids. We have a cruel society. The 90s "welfare queen" talk caused the US federal and state governments to gut social programs specifically designed to aid and support people in having families.
For so many people, affording the necessities requires 2 incomes. Childcare either takes out an income or it incurs a huge new necessity.
And then there's always the impact of "what if the child has a disability" in that case most people are really truly screwed in the US if that happens.
> Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?
> All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents
Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents.
The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible.
An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.
In the UK, more often than not, when a couple has more than 2 children they are often part of a certain demographic. The idea of this demographic and its culture becoming over-represented is not popular amongst a large portion of the population, regardless of what societal wide effects that may have.
In addition and in general, paying people to have kids is not a good solution. More often than not, it leads to less educated, less capable people becoming baby mills and ruining the rest of society with their poorly raised children. 2 children is fine. It's almost replacement level.
The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
It's only a fluke because we've allowed the resources that once enabled this period to accumulate at the top so that it's not feasible on a broad scale any more.
It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.
This explanation seems lacking to me. The same time period had a single-earner home-owning, baby-boom-raising middle class in places like Germany and Japan where entire cities had been completely obliterated by war. They didn't have as many cars or televisions as the Americans but they could pay their mortgage. And blowing up a whole bunch of productive infrastructure and capital worldwide is not the kind of thing you'd expect to contribute to gross material wealth. And gross wealth should be much higher now anyways, since we have so much more technology and better infrastructure.
The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?
As much as I’d like to agree with this, India was literally in the trenches of its own civil war and independence movement AND impacted by the world wars AND figuring itself out as a new country in the early 50s.
Yet Indian middle class was still very distinctly one-income driven.
> There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels.
This has been the dream since the dawn of time (agriculture is automating food production to some extent). The gains in increased productivity is rarely if ever distributed back to the workers though. We have concrete data on wage stagnation when productivity has been increasing in the past few decades. What makes you think it's different this time?
This is dead wrong. For all of human history through say 1800 gains in productivity flowed back to the general population in the form of more kids (but no per capita growth), this was the Malthusian equilibrium. Since 1800 not only has the typical person’s standard of living exploded but the typical person works in both paid and nonpaid labor far fewer hours. Roughly the typical person worked 4000 hours a year in paid and domestic labor in 1800 compared to less than 2000 hours a year today.
I make 5 times more than my SO and I can realistically have 3/4 families if I wanted.
I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.
I had a similar financial situation. Difference is we already had two kids. My wife gladly gave up her career to be a stay at home mom. She’s still independent, though. The “contract” is that I make the money, she takes care of home stuff and kids, and she gets to do whatever else she wants.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
I wasn't implying it was bad, just saying that it ain't as simple as "once men could feed a family of four alone". Even if you do, women have progressed past that point.
It is a bit more complicated, but long story short she works in a bank and leaves the house at 7 am and is back at 7.30 pm which makes it very difficult to have a life like that, she's always tired and stressed, let alone children.
I see her situation as a blocker, but other than proposing her to move part time I don't know what to do really.
Saying it was a fluke discounts the hard work and sacrifice it took. It didn’t happen accidentally. It took raw will and courage to wrestle the social fabric into something more equitable. And without continued effort from those who came later it’s being unwound.
Hard work had little to do with it. A unique set of factors generated a historic economic boom that was briefly able to sustain a uniquely prosperous lifestyle for some Westerners. It came unwound because it was never sustainable.
The cause and effect might be the other way around. When capital relaxes its grip on your neck a bit and when it loosens its fingers just a bit, people naturally produce more and there's more surplus for everyone. The economy is just human sweat and no one wants to sweat just to see their output go overwhelmingly to people who, basically by fluke and moral flexibility, control capital.
It came unwound when we allowed mass immigration to destroy the wages of the lower end and stopped building to respond to the housing demand. That can be easily undone, if the powers to be allowed it.
It came unwound when we allowed enterprises to destroy the wages of the lower end and stopped building to respond to the housing demand. That can be easily undone, if the powers to be allowed it.
Enterprises respond to market forces, as is natural. A massive increase in labour results in lower wages. Enterprises don’t want to give away money in the same way labourers don’t want to give away labour, but mass unskilled immigration has turned it into a heavily unbalanced market for the lower end.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
You're talking about the widely known concept called the "demographic transition" and it has slowed, not accelerated, the death of the single-income household in the West because it's more affordable to support smaller families and to start families later in life.
Nah I don't believe it was a fluke, I believe it is still possible today if not even more so if our economic system wasn't focused purely focused on maximizing capital generation and maximizing profit margins. People are working more today than ever and have never been more productive.
Also in 1950 the population of the US was 151 million, today it's 341 million. it has more than doubled, and the amount of space has stayed the same. More people competing for the same amount of property will always lead to inflated housing costs beyond what inflation would predict.
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house
As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.
Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.
I'm 38 and the overwhelming majority of women I had relationships with had the maturity of a teenager well in their 30s. Barely able to take care of themselves financially, mentally, physically, let alone of a family. I seriously felt, except once, I had daughters rather than significant others.
Mind you, I might've been unlucky, but the narrative that women are more mature than men, might be true on large statistics which are quickly lost on an anecdotal level.
That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman. You weren't unlucky, you specifically made choices that led to these outcomes.
Had you chosen women purely randomly, it'd be a different discussion, but you hadn't.
You've done the equivalent of consistently driving above the speed limit and subsequently complaining about the police being too eager to give out speeding tickets.
Right, it’s the same in Spain, a similar country culturally. On top of that they act as if they are doing you a favour being with you. A matriarchal society that makes them feel very entitled.
>That you've consistently chosen immature women to have relationships with tells us nothing about the average woman
He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time. We've got records of roman male heads of household lamenting basically the same thing. He did not voice a novel or even close to novel-ish complaint.
>Had you chosen women purely randomly,
Have you met men? They're not exactly discerning except at the very tail end of the "yeah this one is worth giving a ring to" funnel. They don't necessarily have a perfect picture of what's available in the market but they're not wildly out of touch.
A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is:
> fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.
> Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.)
Almost all the traditional male tasks got automated or delegated away for your 30 yo male. Live in an apartment, no maintenance take the car to a mechanic if it even breaks anymore, all that’s left is work and earn money.
yeah, so instead of stepping up around the house with this extra 'free time', they either worker longer hours at their job or relax watching tv/sports/games.
Important to remember many traditionally female tasks were also automated and simplified - washing machines, fridges, air fryers, dishwashers etc all reduce the time spent on those “inside the home” tasks.
The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published.
And after. Women live on average 3 years longer than men, at least in the U.K.
In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension.
When this was equalised there were massive protests.
It’s sometimes difficult to find the links through Google on short notice but I found one random site that discusses this. Of course the site is pro fathers but they do link to primary sources to verify the claims in the article.
There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website.
What they linked cited sources well. Quote from the original source study.
"Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework."
Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket.
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.
That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays.
I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble?
I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
You mean they're perceived to not offer what it takes. Of all phenomena, hypergamy is one of the best documented. And in my experience, as inequality grows so too does hypergamy.
Meh, I’ve never met a man who was incapable of doing what it takes. It’s not rocket surgery. Just mostly don’t be a dick and treat your wife how you’d want to be treated. If there’s anything more to it please let me know (for the sake of my marriage)
The bar is not high but a shocking number of men still fail it. I’ve lost track of how many coworkers I’ve had relate some story about their “crazy” girlfriend or wife expecting sympathy and not noticing that their audience is feeling bad for her.
You are right, that's all it takes. You're lucky though to not have met a man incapable of doing what it takes. I see them all the time, being total dicks.
Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more.
Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more.
And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.
We've asked you before to refrain from engaging in gender flamewar on HN. Please cease from doing this now and make an effort to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend.
When you sign a contract you have to be careful to consider how fucked you can be by the other side. It's not really the fault of that particular lady, you don't know how things will turn out.
Not every state is a 50% community property split. That's not to mention the child support, which is just wild when you see how it's calculated in most places.
And conversely being a dad sucks. For the same reasons you list.
There is no longer a way to come up with a sane division of labor for the average couple. Both parents are not intended to be working full time. It does not work for either party.
Heck, humans are not designed to operate as two parents even. There should be multiple generations of help at hand for it to truly be a decent experience. Humans need breaks and our hyper scheduled existence is entirely unnatural.
I watch friends who have kids where both have professional careers and to be honest none of it looks like a fun time. I don’t think it’s good for the kids either.
15-20 years of “sucking it up” and dealing with a horribly overbooked and stressful life is not good for any party. Women have it worse on average, but no one appears to be having a good time.
Greetings from the trenches. My wife and I both work (because we both want to but, realistically, we also don’t have much choice). We split it all 50-50, and I pay more because I earn more, but There isn’t enough time for the house work, childcare, and work. Let alone time for ourselves or for eachother. It leads to tension and stress for both.
So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”
A generation looking for fulfillment in cubicles... let me show you how that works out:
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor. Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed. Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/f...
Being a Dad really sucks, too--I'm unemployed at 52 at what should be the height of my career when my kids really need someone who is making money so help pay for college tuition and my wife has cancer, so save it how rough breast feeding is when breast feeding only last about a year or so anyways.
I'm sorry you're going through that. I don't mean to discount the man's issues with modern dating. We are trying to do our best, but its still really hard.
Good news is if your income is still low by the time they head to college, depending on the state, in-state tuition to a state college will be reasonable or free.
If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.
Ive been married for 12 years and know a dozen married couples pretty well. I know of one where the husband expects to come home to a meal and a clean house. Chores are almost always split. Me, my dad and my brother in law all do more chores than our wives.
The only couple actually like the gender stereotype you invoke is a conservative one in their 60s.
Not convinced that this is down to women. In my personal experience women want to have kids wayyyy more than men it is the men who are refusing them or want to delay. In fact I would say this is basically everyone I know, the men are the ones being anti-natal while women want kids way earlier.
Same boat. I know a number of women who couldn't find partners who both wanted kids and could pay half the bills so those women are now freezing their eggs or pursuing single motherhood by choice. Of the woman I know who are married, all of them had to talk their husbands into the first child and second child.
My sister is one of these cases. My take is the bar for marriage / life partner is really really high in modern relationships. Women aren't able to attract the mates they want, so they would rather try to do it on their own or wait, than "settle" for a guy that isn't meeting their standards.
The female dating coach Logan Ury wrote a book called "How not to die alone" which discusses this issue.
> Women aren't able to attract the mates they want, so they would rather try to do it on their own or wait, than "settle" for a guy that isn't meeting their standards.
This seems like a rational decision to me. Better go it alone than risk becoming the sole carer of both a baby and a man-baby.
This tracts, but I think women are evaluating men in “TikTok” metrics, instead of qualities that make a man a great partner.
For example, being over 6ft doesn’t make you a good dad. Or being physically attractive, doest’t make you a supportive partner.
If anything, these characteristics make a man worse, as men in these categories tend to have the pick of the litter, resulting in many women frustrating and disappointed in men if they weren’t selected.
In 20 years, with more women than men going to college, a lot of women aren’t going to find partners if they want someone that matched or exceeds their education level.
Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.
If 20-something women wanted kids at that age they could marry 30-something men who want to settle down if they were suitable marriage/mother material in the eyes of those men.
Oh good god! Get over yourself! Those 2-3 female partners were willing participants, not being led on. If you believe they were being led on, then you are not saying very much about women and their level of intelligence!
I don't feel as though I wasted any of the "fertile years" of my female partners who ended up not wanting to marry me!
I had a couple of different long-term relationships in my 20s before I found a woman to marry and start a family with, which we did just fine in our 30s despite having two miscarriages in between kid #1 and kid #2.
You say ‘modern relationships’ but I feel like you’re describing a stereotypical 1950s relationship in that paragraph. The lack of contrast surprises me.
The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.
Wasn’t the non-working housewife mostly a middle class thing and a weird blip in history? Women worked long before the baby boom either with less heavy tasks related to subsistence agriculture or cottage industries, and many worked during the baby boom. (I think the difference from today is partly different rates and partly women having actual careers in ways they didn’t before)
Maybe that is a good explanation for the baby boom though.
I think I agree with you that though women could work in the ’50s, there weren’t really careers available to them in the same way as for men. Maybe it is just women having ‘real’ careers and therefore higher opportunity cost/more practical liberty/fulfilling alternatives to children making a big difference.
I guess what I’m getting at is that, even if you describe men’s desires accurately, I don’t think it describes their behaviour in my parents’ generation let alone mine. But maybe this just varies a lot by country/income/education/social class and I see some weird sample. I know divorce rates have become super divergent by education in the US for example so presumably relationships are quite different too.
In many HCOL cities, for many couples, SAHM isn't a financially feasible option.
Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.
Alimony is temporary and fixed, whereas careers are not only life-long, but have compounding growth.
There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.
You forgot to mention child support which is for up to 18 years. Also, nothing stops the woman from having a career, especially if she cooperatively shares 50/50 custody, but often they prefer aiming for nearly 100% custody because it increases their child support payments, and then still have the option to cry victim that they’re a single mother despite getting thousands of dollars a month and they’re actively preventing the father from being involved with the kids. Happens a lot.
As for a stay at home mom who doesn’t get divorced, she doesn’t need to be entirely stay at home for all 18 years.. kids go to school at 5 and can go to after school programs if necessary while she works. A couple years before that if the kids are in pre school she could get a degree or masters degree or work part time. So the career gap could be minimized.
Probably depends on the state, but last time I checked it was until 18 or high school graduation, but not later than 19, in the state I’m familiar with.
Western Marriage is a contract where one party is rewarded for breaking the terms. The low marriage rates of Millennials / Elder Z [1] are indicative of this new world order. It isn't just "because men!!".
You all created this economic disaster with high taxes and high cost of living via your voting patterns and you own it now. I'm sure I'll be downvoted to hell for saying this, but it is, in fact, the truth.
There's also the benefits of career progression, avoiding a long resume gap, saving for retirement, not being financially dependent on your spouse, and increased financial resilience for the family.
I can think of some communism problems that are not capitalism problems. Central planners causing famine that kills millions not once but twice that I know of.
Also reports from communist nations sound like living under communism sucks balls.
I suppose the Nordic socialist democracies are pretty nice. They probably have birth rates below replacement levels as well though. It turns out if you offer women the choice to have a career, enough of them take it that you drop below the replacement rate.
No, but if the load is uneven and you’re giving up career possibilities it becomes harder not to think about what you were giving up because instead of some hard to quantify 1950s-style bargain you’ll be thinking of lost promotions relative to your peers when you're doing laundry at 11pm.
It sucks even more when you're broke, which too many people are right now. We've optimized for extracting money from people, it's no wonder they have no more money to spend on their children. Since they now have more choice to not have children, well, they're going to make the obvious choice on a population level.
I like being a parent much more than being a breadwinner. Working in an office, commuting, sitting in front of a computer, climbing the ladder, meetings, deadlines, office politics, fighting for promotions and raises and bonuses, OKRs and KPIs, insane pivots to chase fads, the constant fear of layoffs hanging over your head... It sucks. The only rewarding part is coming home to my partner and child.
I much prefer cooking, cleaning, and parenting. I would choose being a full-time parent in a heartbeat over my career if I had the option. But due to my particular skills, my earning potential is much higher than my partner's. It wouldn't make much sense for us. So I slog it out so we can afford what we need. She works too, but not full-time.
But so much of what you talk about is foreign to me. My partner and I have no concept of "my own money" vs "my partner's money"; it all goes into a joint account that we both control and we trust each other to spend wisely. And yeah of course we both share the housework and childraising (because that's table stakes for an egalitarian relationship). I don't just come home from work and play video games or something. Seeing my kid grow, play, and copy me is the biggest external validation I could ask for.
If you value your income more than your kids, then you either shouldn't have kids, or you should marry someone who prioritizes domestic work and parenting over their career. But then don't think they're not pulling their weight just because they earn less than you.
That said, I think if the government wants to encourage more babies, it should pay a basic income to stay-at-home parents, something perhaps comparable to the cost of daycare. Then maybe people like you won't consider it unpaid labor anymore and it will become a more respected option.
True. The pay you get on that leave is according to the pay you earn at your job, is it not? If so, that's a policy that rewards working parents with busy, high-paying careers, having kids later in life, rather than young full-time parents. I don't know which policy is better but that might be one reason.
Even if dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.
Between daycare, transportation to events, eating out and paying for cleaners because you don’t have time to do them yourselves all add up. Unless you’re making more than $60k it doesn’t make financial sense for the mom to work.
> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are.
This absolutely isn't the reality I observe in my circle, but I acknowledge it was the reality for my parents and grandparents.
Not gonna lie: it just seems like you made a poor choice in picking a partner.
I think that you're right and that this is one of the predominant reasons for declining child births.
I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy.
Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.
Peter Zeihan, whose YouTube prognostications seem iffy, likes to call children "expensive furniture". They were useful labor on the farm a hundred years ago, but in small apartments they can be a real nuisance.
Modern parenting is wild - there are too many rules and regulations and things just have to be just perfect to have a kid. Our great grandparents just had them all over the place and would let them roam around in the wilderness. Today we have to coddle and bubble wrap, sign them up for classes, take them places. Just thinking about it seems stressful.
At the same time, we've got these little dopamine cubes in our pockets that are taking our time away from socializing and dating and meeting people. It takes time and deliberation to find someone to settle down and commit to raising "expensive furniture" with for the next twenty years. You can just keep scrolling your feed and filling life with experiences.
Perhaps instead it's that the modern life creates the perception that something different or exciting could be just around the corner - like a kind of hedonistic treadmill, or wishful longing. Our ancestors just accepted their fate and lived their short lives. We have too many things taking our time and attention, and everything has to be "perfect" before we commit.
Not making any value judgments here, just stating observations.
"Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today."
Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.
Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
Yeah, drives me crazy when governments are trying to lower the cost of childcare with tax incentives or creating dating apps to encourage connectivity.
Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.
My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.
Burn the grind from 18-25 or so, saving everything you can, and around 25 switch to WIC and EBT and all other subsidies you can find, and make them babies!
(It’s an actual if accidental strategy employed by some).
I think to qualify for FMLA (have your job protected while you go on unpaid maternity leave) you have to work for a company for at least a year so if you lose your job unexpectedly that can postpone having a family as you have to re-set your FMLA timer.
Our dreams and aspirations, a product of our society, do not easily fit within our biology and our short lifespans. I'm not just talking about women and children.
There's too much opportunity (good!) and too much opportunity cost.
We're truly gradient ascent explorers in the rawest sense. And our adventures take us off the evolutionary path. We've jumped the shark on our biology.
> Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.
One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).
Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.
> I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy
And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.
your experience sucks. I'm a 50 yr old man with two teenagers and a wife, I'm the major bread winner, but we both work 5 days a week. I do most the shopping and cooking.
being a mum doesn't have to suck. choices are being weighed and made.
What if we just made people financially comfortable and secure again? The axis is "feed and breed" vs "fight or flight."
And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.
Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.
I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.
Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold
Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am. On top of a $3000/mo mortgage. NE USA. When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded." Either that or they have one parent who cannot be employed outside the home.
> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
> Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.
Where are you at?
Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
Also they only need to be nannied for a couple years, so there's like 48-40 other years of their lives where they can spend the bulk of their focus on the kid they're nannying instead of their own.
There are two ways to hire a nanny. The "law abiding as a point of pride" way is comically expensive.
The "pay your neighbor's teenager cash" way is cheap.
If even that's too expensive for you then send your kids to whatever unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated daycare that some tradesman's wife runs out of her house.
OP's comment was so wild, I can't believe it was anything but disguised sarcasm.
> Have a parent stay at home and not work
> Hire a nanny
> Move (presumably farther away from your job) closer to your (assumed idle) parents so they can help
> Take a couple of years off of work
These options are available to a vanishingly small percentage of working people, at least in the USA. OP must know this, so why even mentions these outlandish options?
I'm expecting a kid in Jan. It was sort of unexpected (earlier than planned by about a year!). I'm gonna be honest I had a really grim talk with my partner about finances... I don't make tech money right now and my partner is not in a high paid field.
You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.
I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.
I'm sorry dude, but you are clearly part of the 1%. No one I know can afford any of what you're suggesting. "Just take a sabbatical and put up the nanny in your guesthouse!"
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
It's a lot to ask grandparents to take care of an infant full time during the work week. Here and there, on occasion, that is a completely reasonable thing to ask for. It helps strengthen family bonds. But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.
I have been in tech for 7 years and it would be a stretch to afford the house I grew up in. Plus the commute to the city from my parents has increased from 45 minutes to 2 hours over the last 30 years. My high school recently closed down because families can't afford to live in the neighborhood.
The house my parents bought in the early 90s (after local inflation) would cost between 1/3 and 1/4 of what such a house goes for right now. Big surprise I didn't buy one, but I suppose with 2 incomes we would have bought one for that price.
Which worked great when people had long retirements and were procreating early. Grandparents are working longer, older age when their children have children, and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.
Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
same here. not near her parents but close enough to both hers and mine that we can effectively have them rotate through consistently (got a spare room and king sized bed for the g-parents).
even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.
I think one dynamic going on here is there is more animosity between generations now than there used to be.
Many people get hyped up about their beliefs on social media, and when they go out into the real world they take some of that divisive thinking with them.
As something of a tautology, when both parents have high paying jobs, child care can charge whatever they want. And they still have limited spaces, which the highly paid parents are now competing for.
It can be, but it's incredibly risky for women to stay home to take care of children. And, let's be honest - they're the ones actually putting in the effort here most of the time. Most women don't want to be at the complete financial behest of their husbands, nor do they want to risk missing out on a decade of work experience.
Men are avoiding marriage due to the possibility of alimony, child support and courts favoring mother’s custody over children. It happened to my dad, my mom got over $1 million in 2011 when they divorced.
Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.
Divorce laws vary by state. California is equal property, and alimony kicks in immediately (no minimum length of marriage). As a female, higher earner, I paid my ex-husband alimony for a 1 yr 9 month marriage.
Do you feel that this is a fair way to distribute earnings upon divorce? When no children are involved?
My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.
My take is that the spirit of the law is to compensate spouses for sacrifices and risks they took in support of the other spouse. So for example, if Spouse A reduces their earning potential for Spouse B (ex. a military spouses are disadvantaged in their careers b/c they move constantly, if a doctor moves to a rural area that can support their career but not their spouse's career etc) then Spouse A should be compensated by Spouse B because Spouse B's career growth depended on Spouse A sacrificing theirs. Other examples are if a Spouse stays home to care for dependents, if a Spouse puts another Spouse through graduate / medical / law school etc. It's about acknowledging that you gained because of someone else's actions and compensating for that, honoring your debts as it were.
I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
What if you think about it this way: By default, a marriage is a contract agreeing to equally pool financial resources. If that contract feels unfair to you, it's usually possible to draft a contract with a different distribution, which people often do if one of the two has vastly more financial resources going into the marriage.
> Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this,
Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)
BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.
one of my theories for why we specifically see highly-educated people waiting longer or opting out is that it's a consequence of tiger-mom/helicopter-parent upbringings
its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.
if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.
Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.
Look at the way our cities are built. I live in a grid based streetcar suburb and my kids can be let out feral. If you live in a modern subdivision ... Good luck. The roads are too big, and there is nowhere for kids to go. Meanwhile, my local city has free lunch at the park for kids every day during the summer and kids can go unaccompanied. I see tons of kids out riding bikes and walking by themselves.
Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.
Agreed, the consequences of a car-dependent society are far reaching, and this is a very insidious one.
I'd also add that it may even be illegal in some places to let your kids outside by themselves at all. Even when it's not illegal, it just takes one busybody to call the police and you've got a potential charge waiting for you, all because you let your kid walk a couple blocks to school. And of course, this just exacerbates the problem further.
> this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
My anecdote: As a parent, when I talk to people my same age or younger without children they often greatly overestimate the sacrifices necessary to have children. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people (who don’t have children) make wild claims like having children means you won’t have good sleep for the next decade, or that they need a 4,000 square foot house before they have kids, or that it’s impossible to raise kids in a MCOL city without earning $200-$300K.
A lot of people have locked their idea of what it’s like to have children to the newborn phase and they imagine changing diapers, paying $2-3K infant care costs, and doing night time feedings forever. I’ve had numerous conversations where people simply refuse to believe me when I tell them my kids were sleeping through the night after a couple years or potty trained by age 2.
I think a lot of this is due to class isolation combined with getting a lot of bad info from social media. When you mingle with more of the population you realize most families with kids are not earning programmer level compensation and not living in 4,000 square foot houses, yet it’s working out.
Reddit is an interesting peek into this mindset. Recently there was a thread asking for serious answers from parents about if they regretted having children. The top voted comments were all from people who said “I don’t have kids but…” followed by a claim that all their friends secretly regretted having kids or something. If you sorted by controversial there were a lot of comments from people saying they didn’t regret it and loved their kids, but they were all downvoted into the negatives. It’s wild.
I’ve got one fantastic child, the relief of starting to get my time and freedom back is still enough to remind me I don’t what to loose that again, even temporarily.
That's because they've been raised to believe it's hard.
And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.
For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.
Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.
Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.
I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.
There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book
They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.
They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.
The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.
Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
The parents might be fine but the kids aren’t. I got my great programmer job entirely because of anger that my family was and continues to be in relatively bottom feeder jobs. The trauma associated with living in even relative poverty compared to your peers is hard to overstate.
Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture back. The culture has fundamentally changed.
Just to cause arguments, some things which I'm guessing were an influence in getting her. Cars? (easy to get away from family/village, the culture that valued family). TV/Cable/Video-Games/Youtube? (infinite entertainment 24/7). Fast easy prepared food? (no needing to meet with others for meals). Computers/SmartPhones/Internet? (infinite entertainment and/or ways to interact with others but not actually meet). Suburbia? (the need to drive to be close others)
"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"
It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago
The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.
> According to that the issue is culture.
This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.
What we need are 25/30+ year-olds who are completely at ease with sex, who have no hang-ups, and who know how to form strong relationships because they’ve been doing it and having sex freely since they were teenagers.
Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.
On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.
What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.
Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.
Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
This is completely a-historical. Humans have been having sex outside of marriage since that concept was invented and you’re projecting an idealized Western European view on an entire world with a complex history of different cultures. What you’re describing isn’t even true of European history (e.g. read up on hand fasting or the high rates of marriage after pregnancy) and it’s even less so globally. Marriage is in part a financial relationship, and that drive a lot of premarital sex: if men were expected to make a significant monetary contribution (dowry, house/land, etc.) even in the most religious societies many would not be celibate for a decade, they just weren’t having sex in formal legally-binding relationships.
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.
This isn’t a western view, it’s literally how the majority of the world still operates. Marriage is not an abrahamic invention, it happens in eastern cultures, middle eastern cultures, african cultures, it’s basically universal.
Before contraceptives sex outside of marriage results in children born out of wedlock. This is catastrophic for the mothers, their families, and for the child.
In the past they used to build temples dedicated to Moloch for sacrificing unwanted babies. The Israelites looked down on this practice, and instead insisted on marriage with rules: thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. These rules were crucial for social stability.
Why is marriage and punishment for adultery universal? Because a two parent household is the only healthy way to raise kids and ensure wealth is preserved between generations. This has always been true.
Yes, obviously; there was a much higher reproductive rate. It seems like you're talking about enjoyment or something else, but that really wasn't the focus of this thread.
What do you mean by “great”? It was successful in reproduction. That’s what we’re talking about here. People were having families and raising children that went out to have families and raise children.
Gay couples can’t have children (outside of adoption or surrogacy), so I’m not sure how that is relevant to the topic at hand. Gay couples will not be helping with the next baby boom.
We made a change in the culture, from the standpoint of the species continuing to survive into the future. The change put us on what looks like a worse path. Would it not be wise to question those changes to see where it went wrong and course correct, just like we’d do if this was any other problem in any other domain?
This has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with not having the population collapse, because we've become so focused on pleasure that we forgot why there is a biological advantage to it being pleasureful... to do it more and reproduce more. But modern technology has eliminated that pesky side effect of children.
The pleasure can and does still exist. It's not like it gets removed when sex is ends in a pregnancy. It doesn't have to be some mechanical act, the way you seem to be framing it.
I get the sense that by pleasure you’re referring simply to orgasm during sex itself? Again, that is part of the problem. As for religion, I believe your view is in fact rooted in religion which strategically and historically segmented the sexual experience; not that you’re explicitly espousing a religious view but that it is implicit in what you’re suggesting.
How’s that working out? Overbearing control over sex is not only unnecessary, it’s the problem. It’s also so exceptionally culturally ingrained, people immediately and emotionally come to its defence.
People have always been and will always have casual sex. People didn't used to be perfect Christian monogamous couples until the 60s. We just punish people less for it than we used to which is a good thing.
Before contraceptives, there was no such thing as casual sex (except for the homosexual kind).
Sex produced babies, 2% of women died in childbirth. Children need a father to help provide and protect, without that, babies were often just abandoned in the woods.
Yes..people in the past were celibate until marriage - what? Maybe some were, like som are now.
From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.
Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first place), or delay having children until you are financially secure. Couple this with the constant inundation of social media and the myriad experiences available with the click of a button and people are simply taking the short term gratification route.
Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
It's even less about buying a home now and more about just affording a second or third bedroom in a rental. If you look at job centers, even when they do build multi-family they aren't building family sized units.
"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.
No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
The main thing is a rejection of oneself and the prioritizing of others. For those in the past this was normal, this was life itself. The dwindling number of parents of today may be able to see this. Parents sacrifice their life for their children. That the baby boom happened during a time of great sacrifice (war) is very significant.
For most of us today this is horrific to think about! Our life is ours!
We don't want to give up our freedoms! We don't want to sacrifice our life. I include myself in this. We have made Human Rights about ourselves and our own choices. My body! Our responsibility is for ourselves not others. It's not money nor housing, it's how we think about what life is.
To argue for people to sacrifice their lives is completely insane. But that is what it would take, a kind of insanity in a selfish world. An argument against freedom is insanity in our culture of the self.
This is probably one part of it, but I'm not sure it's a very big part. Sacrificing yourself for the group is still a part of some east asian cultures but they aren't doing any better in this regard.
I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
It seems obvious to me that the baby boom was caused by plentiful access to secure, affordable homes in decent communities, lots of communal social activity outside of the home, common religiosity, and plentiful access to reasonably well-paying work, for most people of a modest level of education.
We have none of these things today. A small amount of cash is not going to fix it.
War, duh. No, really, the only reason for that happening was a total war. War caused devastated countries to collectively sign Bretton-Woods which affirmed USD as a reference currency and allowed USA to externalize a lot of it's issue, both immediate and future. Allowing this externalization, plus major political influence in the first decades after the war, plus rapid innovation accelerated by the war allowed USA to become filthy rich, which allowed Homer Simpson to afford a mansion, car and 4 jobless dependents on a single government job.
Unfortunately the rapid global development means that even new world war wouldn't replicate this period. Train has left, bye bye, and won't return in our lifetimes. We need to adapt.
That was my first thought too - USD world reserve - but other countries had similar prosperity and child booms so can’t be that. At least not primarily
You mean it was the giant war the people went through that had all these kids and not that things just happened to line up at that time with my stupid political beliefs?
Even though I have put zero thought into most of my political beliefs, I just repeat what my social media programs me to believe, that can't be true.
I can't be full of shit.
Recent wars haven't been expensive enough: World War II was significantly more expensive for the U.S. than the Gulf War. The Gulf War cost roughly $60-$70 billion (in 1990s dollars). In contrast, World War II cost the U.S. over $4 trillion when adjusted for inflation to today's dollars.
It's not the cost itself. 40 PERCENT of GDP went toward war production in the 1940s. Almost half of everything we produced was to win the war. The other 60 percent largely went to feeding and clothing and housing the people working on the war effort, and keeping the lights on, etc. since they were no longer producing those things.
Everyone in the whole society was literally working on the same thing toward the same goal at the same time. There's simply no comparison with that to anything we've experienced since then. That kind of thing can't be measured in dollars.
No it does not, not for countries like the US that are primarily composed of immigrants. I think we often forget that a lot of the white people here are immigrants, too, usually only a couple generations removed.
Presumably either the countries being emigrating from must be at replacement rate, or themselves declining? Somebody has to be producing the next generation, somewhere..
But the point is that the illness of developed nations is having the symptoms treated by infusions of immigrants from countries that don't _yet_ have the same illness. If it's a matter of "as countries develop they have less children", you'd better hope other places of the world stay poor and uneducated.
We live in such unprecedented times I'm again unsure why you would choose population growth rate as a factor to single out as particularly interesting and not, say, wealth inequality, climate stability, relative access to basic resources goods and services, perception of the competence of the ruling class, etc etc
The total number of people living in the world does not matter to local areas that see themselves age rapidly and hollow out as young people leave and they become unable to support the generous welfare we give to the old.
In other words: it's quite famous for how absurdly enormous swings in birth rate can be. It's famous for how critical it is for a species to have a stable birth rate.
I don't know where you got that idea. Some species critically depend on wildly unstable birth rates (grasshoppers and cicadas, but probably also deer and many other prey populations).
Stable populations are completely irrelevant at the microscopic levels; InBev would fold within a week if yeast populations were stable.
And both grasshoppers and cicadas are famous for suddenly disappearing across enormous areas. Which is a situation only very rarely referred to as "stable".
I know there's a joke in here about this being literally in the bible, with God using such an insect birth rate swing as a punishment for an entire state. That's how "stable" it is.
The population is rapidly shrinking because our “elites” only sow the seeds of despair. They only act in their own best interests. The commons are gone and all we have left is the memory of it. Stability is not on the horizon.
We can’t have billionaires with their own private space programs and 5 families with more wealth than 50% of America, and have a stable society.
This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.
Who's we? If we had a consensus that they shouldn't be allowed to have that stuff it would be easy enough to vote it away from them without killing anyone. Seeing as we don't have a consensus, "we" are going to face a lot of opposition to the killing, let alone the redistribution.
Really? Because one obvious thing it'll require is about a doubling of the birth rate ... it's not about growth, it's about stability. At least at first.
Population stability and economic/societal stability don't have to be the same thing.
If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.
It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
At the very least, it would take enough automation such that the elderly don't need to either work or get wealth transfers from the working population to survive. Wealth transfers to the old only work when you have many more working-age people than retired people; if you don't, the whole thing implodes.
It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.
It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.
I don't think that is possible so long as inflation occurs. When money is worth less, items costs more which means more economic growth is necessary (increased salaries, expenses, etc). Maybe I am missing something though?
It would take a TFR of 2.1, so depending where you live, a 40-250% increase in fertility.
There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that
You’re answering the wrong question. That’s the answer to “how do we maintain the status quo?” We can absolutely exist in a world where growth does not exist from ever increasing population, but profits will evaporate as inflation increases and labor supply contracts. As a sibling comment mentions, automation will be a component.
Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.
I'm pointing out that even in a profitless world, a dependency ratio of 2:1 is not workable. It literally does not matter how you distribute resources.
Sure, at a certain point, not replacing enough people means the species goes extinct over time.
That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
The electrical grid collapses in a couple weeks if not for constant maintenance by thousands of individuals. Many parts of our technology society are like that, it will be interesting to see how the system decays.
Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.
Based on unemployment rates, wages, and profits, we have a long way to go before labor for infrastructure maintenance is so scarce it cannot be maintained.
But the point is that you must begin poaching people from other parts of the economy to keep the essentials going, and therefore begin to chip away at our standard of living.
I think the more important point is that at a 2:1 dependency ratio everyone would be expected to take care of half another person, either directly or through payments, and be required do whatever labor is required to do that.
In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.
Why? The metaphorical "You" won't pay for children, won't pay for doctors, won't pay for research ... are you going to pay for robotics? And by that "pay for" I mean two things. First: having one human shared by about 12 elderly costs 2700 euro per month where I am (including room and -basic- food, apparently better food is 300 extra per month, and I think you really want that. Oh and that includes management. Really it's one person per about 16 elderly). Let's say robotics halves the human part of that. That'll make it about 2200 euro per month (about 40% more than the normal pension, that's being reduced).
This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.
Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.
This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.
Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)
> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.
No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.
You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.
Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.
I think the capital class will attempt all the things you suggest as this shift occurs, yes. I think that system inevitably collapses, though. At a certain point, you get a French Revolution style mess when you push the working classes to the breaking point.
The system IS collapsing, because people refuse to do basic math and prevent it. And if the "capital class" succeeds in doing this, it MAY prevent a full collapse and, frankly, those members of the capital class deserve a nice wad of cash for it, as far as I'm concerned.
This is an opportunity to see how to make it work. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead eventually. I find the idea of creating new life to keep a poorly functioning pyramid scheme going grotesque, ymmv.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
Things that old people need are going to get super expensive with a shrinking population because there are so few working age people providing those services compared to the number of retirees.
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic).
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
This is like going along with the crowd in China when they started killing off all their young girls leading to this current population imbalance. The right solution is to go where no one else is at the moment and have large families.
No one is stopping couples from having big families (except their economics perhaps), but no one should help them either. There are 8 billion people on Earth, headed to 10 billion. We are currently unwilling to spend what it takes and reconfigure socioeconomic systems to provide quality of life for the humans here now. Fix this and then an argument to have more kids is potentially palatable. But "spit more expensive [time and fiat] kids into the torment nexus?" Neither a rational nor empathetic argument imho.
Yeah, the people in the year 1000 really had it a lot better than us. You see when they had 10 kids and realized that they couldn’t split up their plot of land 10 times. They just went off to war and took some of their neighbour shit we should really just go back.
We currently have about 800 times the population as we did during the time of hunter gatherers, so we can lose quite a large portion of our population while still greatly exceeding the previous levels. It could be that we are seeing the end game of logistic growth. A decline in population would mean that resources would become cheaper, which in turn could stimulate population growth again.
A population that declines through birth rate attrition gets old. The average age in hunter gather communities was about 15 years old. In the next 10-20 years, the average age in a number of countries is going to approach 60.
You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.
I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.
Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.
Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.
Etc.
I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids:
#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.
#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.
The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.
As someone with 5 kids, I can attest to #1. Kids are hard and expensive, but they are also the single most rewarding aspect of my life. I rushed into having kids in my early twenties, and those early years were very difficult. Now that my kids are a bit older, I am so grateful for them. My life is infinitely richer because of them, even though I may have less time and money for myself.
There is also #4, there is plenty of women who don't want kids. Women having kids was not option until advent of modern birth control unless they were totally celibate.
My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.
This is almost 100% the answer, despite it pissing literally everyone off. I really feel like the only long term solution is getting artificial wombs figured out. Last I checked, we're closer than I thought, but people are still hung up on all the ethical questions that will probably evaporate when we realize it's the only way people are largely going to have kids at all.
>People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)
Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.
As a new parent, it’s money. Daycare costs $400 USD per week in my area, from 7am-6pm, 5 days a week.
So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually.
Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures.
So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons.
If you want actual actions congress can take:
1. Expand limits on the dependent HSA account to allow more than 5,000 annually. Daycare alone is much more than 5,000 USD, it seems making that completely tax free will help.
2. Subsidize the entire cost of daycare. This will never happen but by golly it will work.
Quebec housing is not affordable by any means, but still much more affordable than the rest of Canada. Especially when you look at cities like Montreal and compare it to other cities like Toronto.
It’s not just affordability, it’s one big piece but it’s not the only thing.
I mean, kids start school at around 6 in the US. So one every 2 years. That's not uncommon for people who want families? Most of the folk my age with 3 kids had them within 3 or 4 years?
Idk if it's ADD or just being poor for so long. I can't imagine taking care of someone (a child) for 18 years. My life is so unstable. So I probably won't have children. I think about it but yeah. It's crazy to remember how stable your life was to get through 12 years of school/maybe college.
Well, let's see how it works for Russia. Russia has a 1.41 fertility rate (2.1 is breakeven). Plus Russia has lost somewhere around a million soldiers so far in Ukraine. Deaths outnumber births by 1.6 to 1.
They need fresh meat for the grinder.[1]
Current steps being taken include:
- Emphasizing family values via the Russian Orthodox Church
- Restricting abortion, which was cheap and easy in the USSR days
- Encourage teenage pregnancy (there's a "Pregnant at 15" TV show)
It's not that scary. You don't have to go to church. And don't have to listen to church broadcasts or channels. And no one forces you to do anything.
There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia.
It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia.
There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing.
Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.
Most countries today are losing population (below replacement value).
The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85.
There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies.
They are matching people up who won't ever have babies.
What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.
Having a kid is no longer high-status for women. The only women (in the US) having kids in excess of the replacement rate are the poorest and most wealthy, in other words those too destitute for child-rearing to bring them any lower, and too rich for the burdens of it to have any effect on them. For all those in the middle, pregnancy and raising a kid is catastrophic to free-time, career success, and a sense of freedom in one's life trajectory.
I find the repeated comments of how much parenting 'sucks' and how much childbearing 'sucks' to be distasteful.
It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
I feel like, primarily, the reason why our society isn't having children is because of a growing selfishness and entitlement; which happens to be the very thing that Rome was suffering from when their society was collapsing too.
No, I'm not rich and I'm not old. But I was brought up in a family that cherished loved ones and family. Love was agape, not eros.
People are sharing their own views and outlooks. There is nothing "distasteful" about that, nor are these people selfish and entitled. Bizarre comment.
If they were really selfish, then they'd stop being parents. It's not selfish to say that something you're going through is hard or sucks if you're still putting in the work.
The answer is not for there to be less people--less youth and vitality in the world--or to deny anyone the right to have children (within limits. You can't just be plopping out 5 kids if you're a broke fuckwit).
Parenting can be deeply meaningful and fulfilling, and your experience is a powerful reminder of that. But I'd be cautious about chalking up declining birth rates to selfishness. People today are navigating a very different world
I think the issue is that the very different world is different because it's about the self and the individual. I am the most important thing. Human rights are about the person. My body. I can still be selfish and unselfish in my consumer choices. I can be unselfish and share my cake with you but I still get to eat my cake. What choices I make define who I am. The identities I freely adopt make me whom I am. The rewards of life impact me first.
It used to be about sacrifice and responsibilities. It's about giving up on choice. It's about not having cake. Our grandparents were defined by their responsibilities not their choices. Their identity was assigned to them as parent, it wasn't something they made themselves. It's horrific to think about for many (including me). How could I advocate for less of me?
A fear of the future of the world is about my future identity. Indeed we fear giving up our identity. We even want to die on our own terms. Many comments here talk about having babies as a kind of economic consumer choice and I imagine some parents do have children as a luxury good. "If only it was cheaper." It's still a choice of the self.
Our world is different in that it's hard to think about and talk of a world where the self is less important than the other and yet being a parent is usually about putting the child before themselves. Ironically therefore, babies are the best way to talk about not living in a selfish world!
The incentives are not there, for example, you’re financially invested in raising 5 kids that will pay my pension in the future. By not having said kids, I get all the economic benefit of not having to spend money raising kids, while getting my pension paid (maybe)
Here in the US. I think for the young population there is a genuine affordability crisis, coupled with health insurance being so expensive it is a genuine blocker for a lot of people.
some of the younger people i work with also mention climate change and global instability, amongst other things. they don’t want to bring kids into this world as it exists today.
It's Malthusian scarcity, expressed through market-clearing prices. It's like some alpha baboon hordes all the food so nobody else is going to reproduce.
People are choosing not to have kids so they can live their own lives, or because they don't want to bring more children into this crazy world, or any number of various other perfectly legitimate reasons, such as economic worries.
While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.
> I find the repeated comments of how much parenting 'sucks' and how much childbearing 'sucks' to be distasteful.
Shouldn't people who think that parenting is not a glamorous job be allowed to express their thoughts on this subject?
> It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
So other people's feelings and experiences are according to you distasteful but yours should be accepted as some sort of universal truth?
You had a great experience bringing kids into this world, that's nice but that doesn't mean that everyone should be willing to go through the same things you did.
You would need an economy where the average man can work and provide a life for his stay-at-home wife to raise the 3-4 kids at a decent living standard.
It’s kind of naïve to think it’s a sexist attitude.
Some young women are waking up to the fact that even though their corporate overlords call them family a month before mass layoffs, it can be a lot more rewarding to work for your actual family instead of the family assembled by billionaires looking for a good return on investment and pension funds.
I have two teenagers and they are wonderful. But the world is NOT the same anymore. In the current moment, I would really think twice before bringing any more kids into this world. I feel sorry for everyone coming of age at this time. The world got very bad very quickly. There's no jobs, no one can afford a house, healthcare, or retirement, and the climate is toast.
Of the 110 billion people to have ever been born, maybe 2 billion have been born into more comfortable circumstances than the median child born in the United States today.
Were those children born to brave parents who made a choice to selflessly sacrifice to do their societal duty, or could it be that having sex is fun and only relatively recently have we managed to figure out how to do it without risking pregnancy? Given individual choice, would we have such a large population to begin with?
What a ridiculous attitude. The world will always have problems you cannot control. People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.
Why is this ridiculous? If the topic is about the baby boom, surely "optimism" at the end of WWII plays a big role. (Unsurprisingly, birth rates during the Great Depression had plummeted)
It may be hard to believe, that is considered a major reason for the baby boom. People were happy the war was over, happy to be back with their families, The GI Bill made people optimistic about the future.
There was PTSD of course, a lot of grief and life altering injuries, but back then you didn't talk about it and just drank and beat up your wife and kids instead.
> People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.
Anatomically modern humans exist for ~100,000-200,000 years. Reliable contraception widely available is something that didn't exist until ~60 years ago. So we can't just use past performance to predict the future.
Weird, I think having the right to bodily autonomy and freedom to control your own life is - by default - right and moral. And any attempt to mandate what others must or cannot do, outside of what harms those around them, is - by default - wrong and immoral.
Shockingly, declarations as if we are gods laying down "the one true morality" are not actually definitions of "the one true morality".
You made that up. It’s very easy to think of circumstances where it would be very immoral because of all the suffering the children will have to endure.
Moral norms evolve to ensure survival of it's bearers.
Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.
I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.
I was literally told as a kid that we were heading to overpopulation and that having kids would be immoral. The Chinese committed a genocide against girl infants with that as a justification.
I'm not saying that's something that can't happen, I'm saying it can't last for long.
The "immoral to have kids" crowd still exists e.g in Europe but their options are to either change their mind or to be gradually overrun by people who think otherwise.
yeah but compared to the entirity of human history, its still pretty good. Like, I prefer the era I grew up in but so does my dad probably, so its hard to work out if its just a "when I were young and could run a mile without wheezing thing". i.e. We could paint similar tales of woe during the cold war about the uncertainty of the future.
But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.
I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.
Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.
But the idiopathic depression of the modern era is certainly interesting. Doubtful it can be studied before natural selection exacts its ruthless revenge
I used to be really angry at parents, thinking it was incredible cruelty to throw children into a world without teaching them just how hard capitalism is going to try and wreck them. But i guess it didn't "used" to be this bad, you used to be able to afford rent i guess.
But still, we need to be teaching above all the other dumb shit thats happening in school: how capitalism hates them. How you need to eliminate middle men, having a regular wage means you are going to be an oppressed slave for life. You need to come up with your own thing, that you own and control and get to do some kind of negotiating for its value. You need to invest in things that can be used to make money in the future, little side hustles always. And maybe even deep dives on how crime really does pay, and if not figure one out yourself at least know the huge majority of people that are going to try and scam you. It is pure evil not to teach reality in high school
It's not that deep. Young couples need to have a primal sense of home and safety to want to raise kids, and no young people can afford a 3+ bedroom home anymore. And it's gone on so long now that "not wanting to have kids" has entered the culture and become a big part of many people's personalities today. But it all starts with the affordability of homes.
Few things that should be noted: women at 25+ have more or less the same children they had 60 years ago.
It's teenage and very young women virtually not having kids anymore.
Thus, the narrative that in order to stop population shrinking we have to go back to some past state is false. We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies, and we should support older women and men having child at later stage at higher rates than previously during humanity.
> We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies
Why not? The statement seems very much derived from 'current culture' morals. For most of human history I would guess that behavior was normal human behavior.
Because as of 2025 we know that in modern times such young pregnancies are closely related to financial difficulties, lack of maturity and stability, and in the end those lead to unhappy families and more importantly children.
Western Family courts are based on biblical punishment (divorce is bad and a sin, nuclear family is good, must punish sin). And extreme Christian crazy Judges falsify outcomes routinely, hence why they are hiding behind closed doors.
Leaving men broke and barely seeing their child means the next generations of men know not to marry.
2. Child Support
No sensible safeguards of how it is spent and even if the woman is a high earner the man can be asked to pay 100% of the child costs. So men are very cautious about getting the wrong woman pregnant, as women are financialy incentivised to ensure a child lives as little as possible with the father as that means more money for them. You want a balance between deterrence to unplanned kids and motivation to have kids.
Generations of men have seen what happens/been told this/social media and they are more wary.
Many relationships and marriages fail. It needs to be normalised and the lunatic Christian extremists need to be put away.
People will have more kids when the population of the planet is closer to 1 billion people than 10 billion, it is a problem that mostly self-corrects without intervention from what I can tell.
To answer the headline question: find a way to make other planets inhabitable and the human population will grow to fill the new spaceships, but for now this one is too crowded.
Doom and gloom that is somewhat substantiated by material reality. The world is getting warmer and nothing is done about it. Far right populism is getting more and more popular, with no end in sight. No way am I bringing kids in this environment.
I've found a lot of parallels between now and 1910s-1930.
Thru genealogy I see how families and extended families lived together to afford living expenses. MultiFamily housing was common and jobs were within walking distance. The automobile dispersed jobs and families, taking all the above away.
The needs we have now are no longer possible to fill.
What about the doom and gloom that people are living? Low wages, expensive housing, unstable employment, and crappy medical care do not fill people with optimism.
I'm surprised it was really considered mystery. My grandparents told me straight up, who had four children, that the reason that had such a large family is because they were supposed to. It was their patriotic duty. Did this zeitgeist get lost a time or is it now some sort of secret? Perhaps it's not politically correct the point out that actually, people, there is a class of people who determine what we're supposed to believe. Just like I grew up thinking computers were cool just when we needed a lot of software developers, right before my career was outsourced to H-1Bs.
I suppose it makes sense. It's not like there's any single place that documented where we're all agreeing about what we're supposed to believe. After all, nobody has a date where we all decided that hackers were really cool and awesome.
It's religion. The church pastor would visit the family if a young couple didn't have children within a year to ask what's up.
That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen.
It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.
Highly recommend Family Unfriendly [1] to understand how societal expectations and structures discourage large families. For example, people tend to feel like they have to get their kids into Ivies or whatever, which means tons of extracurriculars (which cost time and money).
Even if you have no interest in having more kids, it's an interesting look at how we can parent differently and have happier families.
Homer Simpson is a bumbling incompetent who manages to have a stable job, and can afford a mortgage, insurance for his family of 5, and two good enough cars as the sole breadwinner for his household.
That was modelled on the peak post-War nuclear family, a type of family entity that had not existed before and will likely never exist again. One person working to support 4 or 5 is not something we can strive for without a serious look at UBI along with a revolution in automation.
This is one of the few pieces that actually treats the baby boom as the historical anomaly it was, rather than some baseline we should be trying to claw back to with tax credits and daycare vouchers
I think the article makes sense for me. IMO, a 10x decrease in mental load at an affordable price would be the key. Examples:
* You can bring and pick up the kids at the daycare/babysitter every day of the week, every time of the day.
* Household chores take at most 10 minutes a week.
* High quality school and education standards are available everywhere
(Probably there's more)
I think that if such problems would be cracked more people might consider having more kids. I think at the moment these problems are easily solvable with a lot of money, so it would seem that kids have become a luxury good. So affordable support for the masses might be an answer.
How about: recreate the actual policy that created the baby boom in the first place? Make child allowance such that 3 kids means 20 years of 20% over supermarket wages. Either for women alone, or for a family. In other words: 3 kids? Have a "free" stay-at-home parent.
A strong family culture and the return of all the troops from ww2.
More younger people getting married and having kids. It seems like cost of living has a lot to do with it as well. Most people who want to start a family are waiting for a house but it is impossible for most to afford one.
Why not pay women a competitive (not $10/hr) salary for raising a child, collected from taxes from people who don't have children under 18? To make building a family more profitable than working a job. It seems that politicians (calling for ban of abortions) want to have a cake and not pay for it.
For example, a Russian millionaire, Pavel Durov has 5 children, although it seems that they are raised by his ex-girlfriends. Once there is enough money, problem is solved.
So you basically want to add another tax on young single/unmarried people?
What if you are infertile? Is the government/state going to pay for all the procedures related to adoption/ fertility treatments?
What about gay people? Would they be forced to adopt kids or use surrogates to have children so that they stop paying this tax?
At what age should men stop paying this tax? After all, a man in his 60s and even later can still in theory father a child with a younger woman, so there is really no cut off date for men in this case?
Finally why not pay men as well if they are the ones doing most of the child raising? This would apply in cases where the mother died or left. Would that be acceptable?
I am sorry to say but your proposal is not very well thought out and on top of that your forget that people in relationships without children are already paying more than there fair share of taxes.
A single child raised to adulthood in the United States is worth over $10 million to the economy. Consider that in the calculation of what a fair share of investment bringing that into the economy is.
I continue to think that despite the likelihood of birth rate being multiplicatively impacted by different factors, housing being stable and inexpensive has to be a leg on which all the other factors build. I know so many people who have put off having kids despite wanting them because they do not believe (having gone through the great recession, experiencing modern hiring and firing practices, the pandemic, and seeing global warming, and now AI, while being given a roadmap called "just go to college and everything will be easy" from boomers) that it's prudent when rent and mortgage payments hang over ever all other factors and when things never actually "feel" like they improve for them and don't seem likely to.
Make housing so cheap that people feel there's nothing risky about working minimum age job with 3 kids and you have the first leg of higher birth rates being societally supported IMO.
Even a stable population can't mean it can never shrink. A long-term stable population means that sometimes it grows a bit over a period of decades, and sometimes it shrinks a bit over a period of decades. Overall long-term it roughly stays the same, but short-term it doesn't necessarily.
The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible.
The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future.
And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.
It's not just a money issue. You need medical and other care staff. You need appropriate places to house people. Things like that. None of this is really a "we can just pay for it" thing.
But yes, obviously something will have to be done about taxation on wealth. But simply "tax wealth" doesn't really solve anything here on its own.
I find it funny when people talk about the baby boom and then also worry about maintaining 2.1 babies per couple.
Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement.
But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out.
The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.
There's a lot of economic explanations that seem perfectly legitimate.
I'm wondering if a simple contributor is the fact that many people are moving away from their immediate family. Then you feel more on your own when considering having child, which is significantly more daunting. I think a network of friends helps, but is simply not the same as parents/siblings/cousins sharing the load and advice. Let alone the experiences.
Also, it seems there's a negative feedback loop, where each person that chooses to postpone or not have kids influences their network to do the same.
I think it was having a government having an active hand in guiding society: housing, education, childcare, stable government jobs, high enough taxes at the top end to finance all of that.
Every major economy was either running at max capacity due to the war effort or was in desperate need of repair and reconstruction. The US starts handing out loans like candy to a) help rapidly rebuild the economies of our allies and trade partners and b) fend off communism. So here we have...
1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce
2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees
3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer).
4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort.
It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.
If people think at all rather than just doing what everyone else does. People invest in their future. Peasants don't own land, can't own land, have zero access to financial wealth or education, so they try to breed because adult children are the only type of family wealth they can produce.
Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity.
Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.
Rationalist circles will go to “yes, we must enslave women in order to save humanity from the fertility crisis”, before even considering “wages for housework/child rearing”
Good read. I've been reflecting recently on the idea of demand-side economic growth as something that happens across two variables: consumption and reproduction. Until very recently in history, only the reproduction variable ever moved the big number much at all. It could be that as each of our own energy needs continues to increase, especially as compute-hungry AI proliferates and personalized medicine extends lifespans, it becomes culturally more normal for populations to fall.
Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.
My bet is on banning the pill and reversing the sexual revolution. We probably don't want to do that. Frankly, I don't think we need to do anything about this problem. Evolution will work its magic and in a couple of hundred years we'll have overpopulation the way we used to have before artificial fertilizer.
I think this idea that we need more people is completely bonkers. Look at the housing market in any developed country; overcrowding at tourist destinations around the world; environmental impact of resource extraction, plastics manufacturing, fossil fuel consumption. There are WAY TOO MANY people in the world already. We had thriving communities with <1B people on the planet, we certainly don't need to go rocketing past 10B.
In the US at least, the end of the Vietnam war didn't have the same social attitude as the end of WWII.
For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam.
Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others.
Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so.
WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.
Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.
I know this is what spurred the first, but I can't believe it would spur another.
Both sperm counts and testosterone are way, way down for who knows what reason. People are waiting longer and longer to get married, and the number of unmarried people is higher than ever.
I think war just leads to mostly broken, single men, as there's nobody to come home to.
Maybe it was the strange mix of capitalism and socialism that existed in America at that time? High taxes, high levels of investment and well paid public servants:
I can't ignore the profound degradation in the American standard of living as a contributing factor, especially in the last ~5 years (the recent housing bubble and "transitory inflation" (remember that one?) being disproportionate contributors.
This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty.
I hear concerns like the following, across social groups:
"I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft."
"If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?"
Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc.
I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from.
Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
The baby boom started immediately after the Great Depression. I think that what happened is that the depression wiped out the rich, and the mega-corps of the time, and leveled the playing field by a lot.
The Googles and Facebooks of the time were destroyed, and there was a vast green field on which people tried to build new empires.
Nobody cared if you went to Yale or Oxford, or were related to the upper management somehow, they just hired based on ability.
For a brief period the American Dream was real: work hard, work smart, and you'll get far.
So people worked hard, and rather than having their job stolen by ofshoring or AI, they get compensated well. They spent that money on houses, and then... they didn't know what else to do. They had everything they needed. Money in the bank. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Might as well have a big family, too.
So that explains what caused it. What would it take to have another? We're currently having one in another part of the world.
cultures would have to change to encourage motherhood and fatherhood, keeping marriages intact, etc. Also campaigns against contraceptives/abortion would help
This post gradually seems to tiptoe towards eugenics, which makes me a little nervous, closing with this bit:
> If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them.
This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too.
I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.
The assumption that a war would trigger another baby boom is incorrect. The conditions are very different than in the 50s and there's no going back. World devastation, reverting to the stone age or some agriculture society will not result in a population growth for decades, maybe a generation at best, as western society falls into the familiar throes of barbarism and resource starvation.
The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon.
If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.
> between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent
that’s it
so basically very few people - as in both partners - were consciously planning kids, they were just having sex, but the irresponsibility was curbed by nature, sanitation, as many of the resulting children died.
of the people that were planning children, they also has to hedge with many dead children, but suddenly they were all living
so now people had to plan for the consequences and post 1950s the planning resulted in real practical choices, where people realized they dont want children.
people never wanted the consequences of having children or many children. the history corroborates this. when both parties are now choosing
the incentives haven’t helped for that reason
the incentives are all based on the assumption that family planning is difficult and out of reach. merely delaying something desired, when they just won’t accept that most of has just don’t want children and never did.
we still have sex. the decline in that amongst always single people is new, just the last several years. couples do the things that make children all the time, and just don’t get pregnant or output children.
Do we still have sex? I keep seeing headlines that younger generations aren't having sex. My last relationship ended because my mid-30s male partner wasn't interested in sex.
I think this would be worth a post and a bunch of discussion all by itself. I think there are a bunch of factors influencing this.
If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons?
For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?
many people have very active libidos, there is a burgeoning "consent culture" about being more upfront about talking about it so you find what you're looking for faster. removes the guess work and hoping the vibes turn out to be what you want.
Catholics certainly were having more kids than Protestants at the time, who had by then been normalizing contraception (following the Lambeth Conference of 1930). But eventually Catholics drank the Koolaid like everyone else, so it's less about "cultural confidence" and more about "cultural detox".
Catholics are the only world religious group that rejected the pill. Currently, actual Catholics (who believe and practice the defining doctrine) are the only group above replacement rate.
Cultural Catholics in the United States mostly aligned with Protestant secular world views.
My grandmother passed away almost ten years ago in her late nineties. She was born in the 1920s and was a teenager when ww2 broke out.
One of her memories is interesting and very relevant. There were a lot of soldiers trained in Canada and the government put on dances to entertain them. Had my gram or of her sisters asked to go to a dance with a bunch of soldiers in 1936, they would have been locked in a barn while he burned something down. But by 1939, it was his patriotic duty and he’d buy his girls dresses and take them to the dances.
When my Gram was in her nineties, she would talk about the soldiers, the music and the dances. Then she’d start to glow and her neck would turn red. Romance of the times is a comfortable euphemism. :)
Hope. Hope that the world was on track to be better and better. Faith that people would do the right thing. Confidence that good would triumph over evil.
The current US TFR would be more than enough to grow the population if the female to male ratio of births were sufficiently skewed. In the limit of a mostly female population, a TFR of just above 1 is enough to sustain the population.
So perhaps the problem isn't increasing the number of births per woman, but rather increasing the fraction of the population that are women. Women already do better than men in college; perhaps if women are perceived as having better economic prospects, and if technical means of choosing the sex of children were available, parents would tend to choose female children.
80 million people died during WW II. That's what caused the baby boom. I assume birth rates also rose after the black death. Babybooms and societal renaissance I think only happen after cataclysmic events.
Hedgehog's dilema. Interacting today with random average human being leads in 99% to such a painful disappointing conclusion that I got PTSD from it. Just being within a line of sight of another human being makes me nervous and looking for a place to hide.
I dislike the premise here. It assumes we want another baby boom. There are 8.2 Billion humans on Earth. We do not need another "boom." A 7% increase in birthdate would be disasterous. Define Boomers and the boom: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers)
While I'm sure won't be a popular opinion, the data seems to backup that the rise of far-left liberalism and feminism by women and shift toward moderate and conservative men has been a huge contributing factor.
Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]!
Secondly, social media, including onlyfans. This ideology of feminist power I believe has been a cancer.
I don't disagree that misalignment between the sexes might have some influence, but crass men who seem to think women are basically fertility slaves is wildly toxic, wildly dangerous, and only reinforces feminism.
In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.
But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
Well, you see, when a man and a woman love each other very much, and they've been separated by war, they come back to each other afterward and reaffirm their exuberance for life and become mommies and daddies.
The idea that it might be important to have another baby boom is essentially a late stage capitalist delusion.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Well in excess of its carrying capacity given current technological usage. A smaller population is, in all objective senses, a good thing. Desiring a larger population is a purely greed-based obsession.
Relative stability, focus on family, growth, men as head of household, minimal single parent families, women spending time with their kids.
Raising kids is a full time job. I am doing both as a father and also as a founder. My wife does not work, does minimal contribution here and there. I dont know where she spends time but she is unavailable. I would rather do it myself than keep fighting.
I think from population front we are not going to have baby boom anytime in next 30 years. Technology will create more isolation than ever. Laws never favor men.
India, most populous country, recently dropped birth rates below replacement level. That is probably most fertile land (for food and reproduction) and yet they are falling behind.
I think unless we see dramatic change in policies worldwide (not going to happen) that puts men and families as center of policy making, it will be all doom from here.
Come back in 30-50 years when new generation is in charge and thinking patterns change.
Typical liberal talk rather than solving the problem.
It worked for centuries. No one is stopping women from working or doing anything. But, making whole world gynocentric and policies around it is how you get mass inequality.
For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood?
Decades of mistakes and yet you come here with sexism talk. Words are cheap. Life is hard.
> For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood?
Your solution is to enslave women again so they become baby incubators, exactly as right-wing theocrats want. The real solution is ofcourse 'socialism' and a rampant curtailment of capitalism, that is currently accelerating the migration of money from poor to rich.
The world now is in better place than it ever was. We are less violent, live longer, live healthier, minimum wage workers can have luxuries unimaginable by kings back in time. It's time to end the nihilism epidemic.
It only happened after WW2 because the US came out of that war as the only untouched developed economy. A WW3 isn't going to leave anyone unscathed and would probably mean all-out nuclear war.
I think a bigger factor is how the war broke up a lot of the old power structures and for a couple of decades it was really possible to get ahead even if you started off poor. There was an abundance of need for labor rebuilding the world and servicing the sudden boom in consumer goods that arose from all of the technologies being developed. Those power structures have reformed and now we are back in the neofeudalism model that arises when power is allowed to ossify.
There is no guarantee that a WW3 would even repeat this phenomenon.
US feared people from ravaged countries would embrace communism, and showered them with cheap cash for jobs and reconstruction. Unfortunately capitalism today faces no competition, and it's devolving into techno-feudalism. The super-rich have a hard time sharing wealth with the rest of us, in absence of credible threat of some revolution putting their heads to the guillotine or something like that.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.
Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.
It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
My bet is still WW2. The fact that the boom started earlier than '45 is easily explained by his own quoted graph in which the birthrate plummets in the 20s (which I would assign to WW1), the first rise is merely a correction.
Why would one result in a bust and the other into a boom? For one, the economy followed the same bust ('29) boom pattern. WW1 ended unresolved, showed the evil of man in general, where WW2 resolved WW1 and showed the evil of particular man, and it wasn't us, but which we defeated.
WW2 learned a lot of lessons from WW1 which made post war society thrive for not only the rich.
Two other significant differences: the GI bill for returning vets (which made it significantly easier for them to get higher education) and the rise of automobiles (which in turn unlocked suburbs and mass home ownership) gave households somewhere useful to put their money.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother
Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother:
* 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then
* 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 40-44 is higher than the 20th century except the 1960's
Estimated number of births each year by the age of the mother. 1950-2023 relative change. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother?s...
Birth rate by women's age group, United States https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-by-age-gro...
Obviously the downside to this was that just about any idiot from yesteryear saw themselves perfectly qualified to start a family.
The solution is somewhere in the middle.
It's not like this only happened in the window between 1940s-1980s where the run-of-the-mill average job let you support your entire family and purchase a big enough house.
But if people cant afford kids they wont have them.
Its like super simple.
I don't think so. I think it's because
The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).
It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.
As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.
That's just how humans are.
Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...
It has to do with unknown unknowns.
At least the former doesn't pretend to be scientific or objective, it's just a story.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items
- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel
- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you
- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior
- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)
- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor
My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".
Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
If you are old enough to have a child, you are very likely old enough to successfully raise one. Otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5965834/
Plus the need for such drugs itself is overplayed, most of the time the human body can take care of an infection itself. Things like clean water, hand washing, etc, helped for the rest many times over than drugs do.
Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs.
> I mean, it was a thing for most of human history.
During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place.
For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone.
Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.
Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that.
Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity.
*https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...
You mean the kind of knowing better that led us to destroy the environment, and appears to be removing whole populations from the gene pool with way below subreplacement rates?
It's a bit tongue-in-cheek because of the multiple interpretations of "knowing better". On one hand, we "know better" in a way that we, as in all humans, constantly try to control nature and the natural flow of things. Our entire civilization and way of life is a result of that.
On the other hand, I mean it a bit sarcastically, because I'm not convinced on a philosophical level that this kind of living is morally, ethically, humanely superior than that of ancient people's living. Often it looks like that progress is just for the progress' sake, an eternal power struggle, a Prisoner's dilemma. In short, when I ask myself "is progress good", I don't feel strongly toward any answer. I meant to encapsulate this by phrasing it as "knowing better".
But the drive to "know better" is there for sure, even though the results vary. I do believe that good can come from it, and that many efforts actually resulted in lessening human suffering, which I consider a good thing. I mean here efforts like equal rights movements, reproductive health and education, and proper access to medical help (to stay on topic).
You are citing a source that talks about unintended pregnancies (often as a result of sexual abuse) in developing nations. With nearly half of those being prematurely aborted in some (medically safe or not) way.
I’m inclined to believe that the support system throughout most of history was better than what these girls get.
> Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002018/
I’m fairly certain a teenage pregnancy in Japan would work out more or less the same, because society is set up to facilitate people working 9h/day and dropping the kids off at daycare basically from several months of age. Of course, that’s combined with massive social stigma, so it wouldn’t on the balance really help things.
It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.
The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.
This just goes to show how little you've ever considered the problem. I don't think you're stupid (probably), so let me get you started...
It's not "from 7 billion to not enough", because right now we don't have 7 billion. We only have the generation(s) that are from 0 to 40 years old... everyone older doesn't even count. 80 yr olds and 55 yr olds aren't potential parents.
We will still have many billions of people even once we become functionally extinct, because you were counting everyone even the octogenarians, when you should've been counting the people who mattered in this regard.
>We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.
But there's no "us" to rescue us in that manner, and we can't do it ourselves. Why? Because doddering senile geezers don't have the ambition, marbles, or energy to do such a thing and those are the only people who would be left at that point. Not to mention that any such rescue would turn us into franken-people, no thanks. We should all be terrified of the science fiction dreams of artificial wombs and gestation chambers and so forth because just as those might be used for good things, the CCP and North Korea will use them to churn out armies of replicants.
You really are the extinction apologist you think you're not.
But humanity almost certainly won't? Why? Because there are sub-groups within humanity who have much higher fertility rates. As long as there are groups of people which are large enough to have viable genetic diversity, and recognise that a high birth rate is crucial for the continued existence of their culture, there will be humans.
Realistically, that means the decline of western liberal ideas and the growth of more extreme religious groups.
When it comes to animals - species that refuse to breed have a tendency to go extinct.
"How can we be out of gas if the car is still coasting forward?" asks the fool.
https://populationmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Hea...
Below-replacement rate might be an economic issue around retirement, but as far as the human species goes, it’s a nothingburger at this scale. We’re not passenger pigeons.
It's: ALL countries have reduced population growth in recent decades compared to their historical baselines. Including in "non-developed" countries, like in Africa.
Many (most) countries have also dropped to sub fertility rates or close above.
On top of cultural and other reasons, there are also objective fertility issues with sperm counts and others emerging (likely due to modern food, climate crisis, microplastics, or some such).
Combine that with looming issues emerging from population shrinkrage causing economic decline, pension collapse and things like that, and then add environmental issues and resource wars into the mix.
It's no consolation if some pockets of humanity here and there carry on the torch, if humanity shrinks down to irrelevance.
(I strictly used the word culture and not anything biological or genetic since I'm not aiming at that line of talk in the slightest, to be clear)
These countries we discuss all have population decline. This is masked by multiple factors including immigration and increased longevity.
Adding, say, to a country an additional 10%-20% of its current population in people from another culture, to be the younger and more fertile group, in an aging domestic population, would absolutely go without issue.
At least, if we also ignore that immigrant origin countries all see fertility drops, many projected to reach sub-fertility rates themselves soon, of course.
Ease of access to birth control and ease and safety of abortion will be having a very detectable impact on the birthrate.
Not saying they need to be restricted, just that they're very relevant data points.
But sooner or later it needs to be asked and acted upon. Should society structure itself to penalise abortions, and reward births of children.
Did our old religious and conservative societies where parents and grandparents helped together to give a great childhood to 2 or more children be something we need to bring back (for folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood, aborted children have NO childhood a death for themselves that they didnt choose). Should premarital intercourse be banned again or shunned ?
Religions have brought tons of miseries causing constant conflicts between communities, wars, allowing politicians and rulers to manipulate masses.
However, they also carried laws and doctrines refined over centuries, on philosophy, morality, and most importantly societal structure.
Monogamy itself and the construct of marriage was refined and finalized in all major religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc across several centuries (and in some cases greater than 1000 yrs).
One must consider, why did our ancestors come to certain conclusions globally regardless of faith around societal structure? What conditions did they want to create across society, to bring about prosperity or growth. Why were certain conservative and unpopular opinions regardless were imposed on men and women alike.
We should remove all the horrible stuff, things we can leave behind that our ancestors used to do sure. but throwing everything away is also not going to lead to anything good for us in the future.
Should abortion be readily accessible simply for the sake of liberty and freedom ? Should contraceptives be widely made available and promoted ? , should families force kids to be responsible for their actions again, and first try their best to give their newly born child a better life before allowed to just throw everything apart with divorces, single parent childhood, etc. Should premarital intercourse be banned , to encourage youth to form meaningful relationship instead of coasting between new girlfriends and boyfriends every new year ?
Im not saying we should do X, but these questions will need to be asked sooner or later, if western society or even asian societies want to survive (both have ultra low birthrates, china, japan, korea, russia, even india is now going the below tfr rate and will join them far sooner than was estimated within 20 yrs).
I really love european, american and asian societies and cultures, and i dont want them to die off, or perish away. Even my own culture's TFR is 0.98 for multiple decades and its perishing away quite fast too.
Hard questions will need to be asked in the future. It's not just a matter of what feels right to our emotional minds at a moment, but rather, whats best for society and cultures itself long term.
Not to mention, housing prices need to go way down, it needs to be removed from being a speculative asset or a way to whitewash black money, its wreaking havoc on whatever remaining part of society that does want kids, but cant afford to own a home by age of 30 even with double income household. We have enough land to house the entire world in each of the major countries, yet just out of sheer regulation, greed and laziness from politicians, policymakers, and banks who are afraid of the housing market crashing and causing problems for them, they are keeping this charade up.
There are many problems that need to be solved in coming decades, I hope each of our societies solve it.
It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not surprising so many people choose not to bring new life into it. Liberty and freedom aren't abstract ideals. Their real absence makes people find coping mechanisms in a world that often feels rigged.
If a society truly wants to persist, it has to give people a reason to stay - something more than survival, more than struggle, more than empty promises about meritocracy or bootstrap fantasies. Otherwise, the logic of self-preservation kicks in, and people will exercise whatever autonomy they can muster, including the right to say, "No, not this."
So, yeah, access to abortion isn't simply about individual rights in the abstract; it's a symptom and a signal. When people would rather not create new life than subject it to the current system, that's not a moral failure on their part. It's an indictment of the system itself.
TLDR; make a better society bruh.
Conscription, poverty, illiteracy, I mean wow.
By almost every conceivable metric, the world is getting better.
Inequality isn't an act of nature. No volcano or hurricane is disrupting lives. The source is human, a system we built, the society we live in. If we can't change the system that binds us, then it doesn't deserve us.
The core conceit is, "When I win, it's merit. When you lose, it's fair."
If the point is that the system will coerce what it needs from us, then it deserves not merely to perish, but to be destroyed, actively, deliberately, and ruthlessly. If births are the air it breathes, let us suffocate it by refusing to bear its children. Let it choke on its own demands.
Most people just have whatever morals the system gives them.
Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.
Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity and energy. (and higher fertility and birth rates)
More things, "non meritocracy", "bootstrap fantasies", those things arent the problem.
People of our generation and the one before, are just always whining complaining, too lazy. I dont want to believe that either, but it is the truth.
Our freedom to do anything and everything, abort children easily, control birth planning easily, making casual sex the norm, etc, making housing unaffordable to keep this stupid real estate based bubble alive for banks, and politicians alive under garb of "Regulation" and "NIMBYism".
Are 100% much more contributing to all of this. Than nihilism, doomism, etc.
Give people better things, more money, better lifestyle, and more freedoms and no societal pressure to have kids, people are just opting for the "DINK" philosophy, Double Income No Kids.... , spend on expensive cars, better homes, more travel, but no... no kids.
Go observe every major society, the top 10% of each society in almost all of them have a pretty decent life with good savings and sense of security, freedom to not overwork too much. This is the top 10% populist politicians villify as having everything.
Now go look at the birth rates of that top 10% in EVERY major society its lower than the rest of the 90%.
More money, more affordability are not linked to birth rates at all, except for a teensy minority who overthinks things and calculates 1000 different decisions from climate change to their wealth to their partner's loyalty, to decide if they want kids. They are not the majority
No amount of motivation, higher incomes, etc will reverse this trend of birth declines, (however governments and society should strongly work towards giving people higher income, less overworking, more motivation to be optimistic not for boosting birth rates, because it wont, but simply because its the duty of public servants, politicians, policymakers and the state that serves the society in return for the society serving the state with loyalty)
TLDR; make better society yes, but even that will just lead to even fewer kids, make a more responsible society while improving people's lives.
World has never been that fair, its a work in progress that has been going on since 1000s of years heck probably 100,000s for humans.
First there was Anarchy / Stateless Societies (Pre-Leviathan), then came the notion of leviathan / Authoritarian Centralization the idea that letting a state get run by a ruler and his nobles would lead to a more stable state (the era of kings and emperors since last several centuries),
then came Theocratic or Feudal Orders : Society governed by divine rule or hierarchical feudal obligations. Middle Ages in Europe, dynastic China, Islamic Caliphates.
then Absolute Monarchy / Early Nation-States then Constitutionalism / Enlightenment Liberalism then came Democracy (but anti minority and primarily majoritarian with tons of political violence on minorities, still can see it in places like bangladesh, malaysia (singapore itself was born out of violence on such a non-malay minority) )
then came Liberal Democracy / Republic Which is what most western europeans, americans, indians, japan, etc live under or atleast the ideals its politicians promise to follow and do follow majority of the time.
Everything you and enjoy in our lives was created and improved upon by people before us, life has never been 'fair' nor will ever reach that utopian ideal of fair ever. Nor has it ever been the limiter on birth rates or growing societies.
It's just an excuse (sorry I'm not saying your concerns are invalid, but only that you share it with every human who has ever existed across time, and this has never been the bottleneck for our current problem with birth rates)
The problems are more behavioural in kind, and the norms that have arised rather than unfair system, psycological issues like that.
Make a society worth believing in.
Yes, I can get chicago, new york, italian, or tokyo style pizza from my phone, in about an hour in a city that is none of those places. Still even my weekends include work. A strong effort in high school, college, grad school and at my jobs has led to fairly regular weekend work and working after putting the LOs down for bedtime, not connecting or socializing.
The answer isn't fewer rights. Its more.
But tell me this, If society is overworking so much.
How is the average screen time of an american adult around 4-5 hours per day ? thats 8-10 hours per couple per day. Are you saying most of that time spent on facebook, tiktok, youtube and instagram overworking time ?
Do americans work hard ? absolutely way more than europeans who have a much better work life balance, tons of holidays, maternity leave, paternity leave, none of which america has.
Chinese and american workers are some of the hardest workers on earth.
Then tell me this. How is it that western europe with better work life balance has even worse birth rates (significantly worse for significantly many more years) than america ?
Western Europe already has more rights and it doesnt work. Whatever semblance of sanity they have in birth rates (as horrible as those metrics are) most of the children are born to single income regressive households mostly north african, morocon, and pakistani immigrants in western europe and uk. So, if you exclude those, the birth rates of families with more rights, more work life balance, is even worse than the official stats.
Rights or no rights isnt the issue, but a discussion on what’s promoted by society should be had, more rights doesnt mean more children. Coercion, promotion of ideals, behavioural nudging are standard things every single country and its government does, (a good book on this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State)
So More rights, more work life balance while are amazing ideals that society should definitely work on, like it has for thousands of years with on average significant better results if one sees growth in 100 yr cycles.
More rights is not the solution to birth rates, atleast its not the existing bottleneck in most western societies and cultures that’s for sure.
What’s your definition of our generation? What you described is true of multiple generations, and flat out wrong for things like lifespan in the United States which has been declining.
If you count a 11 year girl child to be raped by and then married to her 60 year old (maybe wealthy) relative then yeah she indeed had a fucking fabulous childhood.
> penalise abortions, and reward births of children
For fuck's sake - there's a difference between a teen abortion and an adult abortion! But then you wouldn't understand why one "aborts"! Oh you do understand but you want that decision to be "society's" - not that person in whose body a fucking foetus is growing!
I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
Marrying under 18s with 30-40 yr olds is not a solution and diabolical, no major religion even recommends that.
We need to restructure our society so that men and women aged 20-25 yrs old, can have a easy access to owning their own homes, with sustainable careers and occupation.
We need to make children before college postgraduation studies or even higher studies like phd not only more acceptable but the norm.
Pedophilia should not be encouraged and most sane societies have been vehemently against what you're saying (including me).
This cycle of people having kids after 35 yrs old, needs to be fixed that is the disaster.
> I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
I agree with what you said, but abortion is also causing the issues, its been normalized that its ok if majority of men and women attempt to have their first kid after 30 (it should not be this way). Premarital sex, casual sex and one night stands has destroyed the whole notion of commitment between man and a woman. Our Instagram feeds that constantly glorify unattainable photoshopped beauty from select actresses and actors influencing the masses all the time, has made expectations of men and women delusional.
There are many issues, and some of the main ones are what you described correctly , with it being overworking people, not giving 20 yr old stable careers instead keeping them stuck in gigwork, internships, and no career growth or help. They must be rectified, our society has enough wealth to fix this.
Did you bother to check it out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
More than half a million in the US alone, per year. That's material.
The impact of other contraceptive methods is likely far larger. Social pressure not to conceive being perhaps the most effective contraceptive...
My wife and I had our first child while she was in medical training — the amount of absolutely vile commentary she had to push through from fellow trainees and program supervisors was absurd. But she also paved the way for other mothers at her program. In the ~two years since, she’s had at least five other women tell her that she proved it was possible and was the catalyst for their pregnancy.
I believe you, it happened to me as well. I'm glad you both pushed through that; it actually is a Level 0 attack, but at the right time it can be quite demoralizing. You are way better than those pieces of filth.
My best wishes to you and your family, may you have a blessed life :D.
I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary.
Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of safe abortions and readily accessible birth control methods, they have regained their bodily autonomy which allows them to skip unwanted pregnancies.
I think that ultimately, liberating women is a _good_ thing because child bearing is difficult and no one women should be forced to go through it.
With all that said, having children can be wonderful. Perhaps a better solution is to both celebrate and encourage families while keeping abortion and birth control accessible. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.
Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.
The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.
Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.
People expected a married couple of grown adults to get an abortion by default rather than congratulating you on accomplishing what you were plainly trying on purpose?
An unwanted pregnancy can remain unwanted for the rest of your life.
(everyone then walks back to "oh I didn't mean abortion should be banned in cases of rape or medical risk to the mother", at which point we have to point out that the religious conservatives very much do want that.)
You'd probably watch a partial birth abortion and utter in nice warm soothing language how good it is that it's "safe", and that her (the woman not the killed girl) has exercised bodily autonomy, probably followed later by a dinner at a Michelin started restaurant nicely dressed up where you can all pontificate together in warm tones about your righteousness.
To you sir I ask: do you know what you are?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
Children are resilient, and so are parents.
In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
A lot of the "multiple generations of families under one roof" type thinking are only practical if you have a large property, which was more common and much cheaper before the industrial revolution, tract housing, high rise apartments, and $2000/mo. rent for 500 square feet. Even if you think it's OK for 3 generations and 20 children to live in a 500 square foot apartment, most others don't want that.
When you have people with more money than they could possibly spend in their entire lives who wouldn't have to work a day in their life if they didn't want to, telling you that people need to start having babies and oh, also they need to work 80 hours a week and "sacrifice" to pay for them as well, lol no thanks.
Does this add extra work? Oh yes, absolutely it does. But while having children means you sacrifice certain things, they are an incredible gift and more than make up for the trouble they cause.
It’s appalling to me how heavily we gatekeep parenthood and building a family. There is an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4 billion years from the very first organism to you. Your ancestors all managed to do it and they were no smarter, more gifted, or more affluent than you are. Chances are they were younger than you when they started and in a far more perilous situation to boot.
How do you explain that you miss your newborn so much, that when the baby is asleep all you do is look through pictures of him/her? i almost cried the first time my toddler ran up to me and gave me a hug. i cried when i picked him up after the first day of daycare and he said "i missed you" - i didn't even know he knew that phrase!
My (immigrant) parents never explained to me how awesome it is to be a parent. Also they are a 100 times more affectionate as grandparents than as parents. I hope to teach my son that being a parent is the best luckiest blessed thing ever.
For people still making only the mid 5-figures, that's a significant chunk of money.
EDIT: typo
I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?
Take my great-grandfather, for example. 56, falls head over heels for a 14-year-old girl from church, and boom — 30 days later, they’re married. 8 months later, my grandfather’s born. They stayed married for 50 years. My grandmother was 16 when she married my 47-year-old grandfather after a chance meeting in the woods, and, guess what, smooth pregnancy again. My parents? Same song, different verse. Now, fast forward to today: I broke up with my girlfriend (late 30s, early 40s) because we wanted kids, but couldn’t conceive — and back then when were were younger and when we could, I couldn’t afford it. See, back then, the older man was not only virile but also financially set, while the young woman could pop out babies at the drop of pants.
Yeah, those “good old days” sound amazing. Make World Pregnant Again.
Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high.
There were even worse alternatives, like the mass grave at Tuam or the Victorian practice of "baby farming". https://www.bbc.com/news/extra/4ko2zsk2tb/Tuam
The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent.
There are still lots and lots of shitty parents out there.
Knowing what I've been through, I'd much, much rather those people spend an extra 5 or more years working through those problems instead of having children that will grow up to regret being born.
And reality is, some people should never become parents, because they carry mental issues they will forever lack the self-perception to acknowledge and attempt to change. But they will become parents anyway, and the outcome is all but certain.
And whose fault was that, eh?
Is there any utility to having social expectations or norms that push you to do things that you may not “want” to?
In the past, people had kids because that's just what happened between people. Pregnancy was a natural consequence of human life.
Making childbearing a choice means that you need some social framework to encourage it, otherwise it becomes completely gauche and impractical. In the absence of this supportive social framework, fertility rates will drop, and in many cases precipitously. The long-term consequence of that drop in fertility is, at its most extreme, the collapse of modern civilization.
Compare Israel with South Korea, for example. Both are mostly developed economies. In one of these societies, kids are a status symbol; in the other, they are generally considered a nuisance (e.g. kids will often be banned from restaurants or other social watering holes). Can you guess which one of these societies will survive longer?
Thanks for pointing out that the baby boom happened by accidental births and confirming it with your own anecdotal evidence.
Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
The cycle continues.
The cycle must be broken by admitting that boys can be raised to be self-sacrificing gentlemen who have no interest in bad women, and girls can be raised to be loving ladies who can discern between exploitative jerks and noble men.
Shame you didn't ensure the same for your own kid
So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.
It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.
Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
That's why my father is against abortion.
Kids are a phenomenal experience.
I concur with you, social pressure is a defining element on having/not having them.
I am disappointed at the hostile reaction it provoked in some others ... as if you, or your anecdote, reminded them of something that angered them and they lost track of the difference.
You either got married to a man who protected you or you got raped. That's it.
Our baby had no abnormalities, but the language and presentation of the doctor almost had me ready for violence. It's easy to understand from his perspective - he must dehumanize the thing in many cases he is going to encourage you to abort, and if that is what he recommends, it's a recommendation that would have carried tremendous authority for both parents, who would then have immediately acted upon each other.
I read their remarks as a somewhat mournful expression of a desire to follow “the road not travelled”.
The system has a system and a narrative. If you’re working against the narrative you have to be very prepared.
Also USA but opposite experience: They asked about circumcision as a checklist item but there was absolutely no pressure at all.
It could have been a location specific culture thing, or you might have mistaken their routine checklist as pressure. Hospital personnel get blamed if parents go home without being offered all of the services, so they’re under pressure to make you aware of it and confirm your no.
And it switches relatively quickly (all the propaganda is anti-dikksnip at our birth center now).
When the baseline belief in society goes from “make it work” to “better to end the pregnancy” it shouldn’t be surprising that overall the number of birth goes way down.
That's probably not why the number of births is way down.
Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.
Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.
It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.
We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.
Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
We didn't really use contraceptives and we had three "oopses". Those three oopses are pretty awesome.
Nothing like a kid to help you get your head out of your ass. Probably why people report feeling happier, because you can't think about the stupid stuff you used to worry about.
Not all of those things were stupid, and not in need of being worried about and worked on. Though childless myself, I try to remind those who are currently rearing the next gen all those problems they "don't have time to worry about" are still there. Do your children a favor and maybe worry about problems bigger than you still. You, as opposed to me (the childless), have a materialized interest in the future. I get odd looks because I spend an awful amount of time worrying over everyone else's futures even to the detriment of my own; but if y'all aren't looking forward for them, someone else has to.
Or, by extension, promote older women having babies at rates they never had.
My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers.
My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation.
Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
It’s not hard to have 3 or 4 kids when the expectation is public schools then “they figure it out”.
Today the expectation is much higher on a per kid basis.
I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
I'm not in the UK, but in France it seems that people generally won't let their kids outside alone until they're 10 or not even then. That makes a difference of several hours of free time a week which is quite significant. Luckily people seem to be fine to leave their kids alone at home, which amounts to a few more hours of time per week. Also luckily there are mandatory public schools starting from the age of 3, so France in general is not bad for raising kids time-wise and money-wise. However I do notice that amount of autonomy people entrust to their kids here is lower than what I tend to do.
It's bizarre to me that the piece doesn't mention the contraceptive pill, which debuted in 1960, the exact same year as peak fertility.
Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.
There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.
Quick google shows some support for this idea:
"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...
ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
Most younger people can't afford homes. People's money doesn't go as far as it used to. Academic qualifications are worth less than they used to be. Many people currently working now won't see a pension. Many won't see a good paying job, even with good academic qualifications and work experience. General health and wellbeing is getting worse, with businesses abusing human psychology to shift product that knowingly causes worse health outcomes. Many people are concerned about the political direction of the countries they live in, and many are concerned about the changes in the community and culture around them. Many might see the first shockwaves of climate change (climate refugees, more extreme weather, water shortages). War is growing, and will grow further when states start fighting over dwindling resources. All generations, especially the young and impressionable are becoming addicted to information (not in a good way) and media consumption, the only upside of which is an inverse relationship to alcohol and substance consumption.
And their kids will have it worse than them. The world is getting worse to live in, and we (or many of us) have just enough education this time around to not want to burden another generation with that. In the past, and in certain places today, a lack of education would mean people would procreate even as society collapsed around them.
We've lived through a very small golden age of being alive (in select places) the last 70 years. It was unsustainable, and we are now seeing the undoing of those times. We might not see such a boom of prosperity again.
This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.
Throughout the history of civilization, we have made such incredible progress in medicine, technology, science, the standard of human living, energy production, space exploration, you name it. The world is a very bright place. Any prophecy of economic or climactic doom or cultural doom is just pessimism. In the long-term optimism is the most rational strategy.
In line with this, you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults. Child care is accessible and affordable if you look in the right places and are willing to be creative. And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life. (At least this has been my experience; I had my first child at 24 on a small budget and in a small apartment with not all that much help.)
That is really not the case.
> And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life.
Honestly, they actually quite often do. You are not allowed to talk about it, but reality of it is that you loose a lot.
I have zero social media, don't read the news, and have a happy stable lifestyle. I can afford to raise kids and ten years ago, yeah go for it. I wanted to have children.
Now? no way. My generation stops with me and many others my age (36) echo the same statement. I don't want to push kids through the next up-generations of the shite that's starting to pile up now.
"it's you because of X" is a strawman argurement. The world is bleak it's not a happy place but your welcome to keep that illusion.
We have wars, we have povetry, we have divide. Will it get better? Maybe, the future will decide but with my history of life doesn't feel like it will be anytime soon, I've seen in the past twenty years; how long do I wait for?
I like to think the good will always outweigh the evil however until something does come along and dethrones the current evil, issue consquences for their actions we are stuck here in a swurling-black-hole of dispair. That's realism and will that be you? Because I like to think it will be me. I can walk outside my apartment and see how shite it all is.
We have achieved so much, people are more educated than past generations, vaccines, advance technologies and the rest which is great. And now have a text box where you can ask a silly question of your choice and some robot will spit out the answer. Amazing stuff, the caveat being those running these systems are those who are producing the dysoptian mist.
> you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults.
This is fallacy, i'm no father but there is much more expense then just feeding kids. What if your child get's ill? Need's special tutoring? Has a disability? Wants to learn to horse ride? Fair assumption if all kids were born equal but life isn't like that.
What if the "budget" ends up being cancelled, say losing your job because of some political reform and cuts? How do you raise children when themselves have no money; poverty is only increasing. Please tell because I'm sure their are plenty of homeless who would love to have that life hack.
The past didn't have rapid game changing technology like we have now.
Just because we are always evolving doesn't mean we can afford to in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next stage of evolution are desiginer-babies. Artfically created in a lab and ready to be posted to you to cradle. Some exec's wet dream and it's already in the making.
This isn't doomerism, this is real life, reality. Try looking outside the walled gardens and maybe you'll see the past, the present and the curtian of the future holding futuristic lies and corruption of the real world that shroud the real harmony of humanity.
We are at the best time in humanity but that can only be said by those who can afford it. Being pesstistmic is a downer, but being optistmic is bloody hard at the moment and to think some angel will come down from the sky and save us all, I won't stop you from dreaming.
Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?
There's a difference between being able to survive and living a good life. The reason the more financially literate and educated people put off having kids is because they care about their own futures and the futures of their kids. They know they can't work forever and they know that the current political environment is one of removing and undoing every single social safety net out there. Meaning, a mistake today very well could mean homelessness/eating cat food/etc or ultimately starving to death.
My father-in-law is 72 and still needs to work to pay the bills. He can't retire. That's the future for the less financially and intellectually equipped parents and their kids in the current political climate.
That doesn't change the reality of self-interest.
If someone is struggling to take care of themselves, why would they have children? Heck, if you have people working 80+ hours a week just to stay housed, when can they find time to have kids?
Cruel societies punish people for having kids. We have a cruel society. The 90s "welfare queen" talk caused the US federal and state governments to gut social programs specifically designed to aid and support people in having families.
For so many people, affording the necessities requires 2 incomes. Childcare either takes out an income or it incurs a huge new necessity.
And then there's always the impact of "what if the child has a disability" in that case most people are really truly screwed in the US if that happens.
It’s in Europe.
Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents.
The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible.
An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.
In addition and in general, paying people to have kids is not a good solution. More often than not, it leads to less educated, less capable people becoming baby mills and ruining the rest of society with their poorly raised children. 2 children is fine. It's almost replacement level.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?
Yet Indian middle class was still very distinctly one-income driven.
This has been the dream since the dawn of time (agriculture is automating food production to some extent). The gains in increased productivity is rarely if ever distributed back to the workers though. We have concrete data on wage stagnation when productivity has been increasing in the past few decades. What makes you think it's different this time?
I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
I see her situation as a blocker, but other than proposing her to move part time I don't know what to do really.
Unfortunately suspect this is the right answer.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
Being a mom just sucks.
As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.
Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.
Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.
I'm 38 and the overwhelming majority of women I had relationships with had the maturity of a teenager well in their 30s. Barely able to take care of themselves financially, mentally, physically, let alone of a family. I seriously felt, except once, I had daughters rather than significant others.
Mind you, I might've been unlucky, but the narrative that women are more mature than men, might be true on large statistics which are quickly lost on an anecdotal level.
My last gf had a really high IQ and a very low EQ. I wish someone warned me about being single in your 30s.
Had you chosen women purely randomly, it'd be a different discussion, but you hadn't.
You've done the equivalent of consistently driving above the speed limit and subsequently complaining about the police being too eager to give out speeding tickets.
Yes, I suspect that my mother being this kind of person, immature even at 50, made me feel at home with women like that.
In any case, I can't say that most of the other women I know is that much different in my area (Rome - Italy).
They are all more or less 35+ teenagers (the single ones).
He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time. We've got records of roman male heads of household lamenting basically the same thing. He did not voice a novel or even close to novel-ish complaint.
>Had you chosen women purely randomly,
Have you met men? They're not exactly discerning except at the very tail end of the "yeah this one is worth giving a ring to" funnel. They don't necessarily have a perfect picture of what's available in the market but they're not wildly out of touch.
But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is:
> fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.
> Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.)
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...
In 2025, some of that labor is recaptured by the man, as that improves the value of the family home or cars.
Also, if your family chooses to rent (which seems to be a trend now for millennials), the man doesn’t have a lawn to cut or a car to fix.
This is written about quite a bit.
Measures of productivity didn’t count domestic labor at all for the longest time. That correction occurred in this life time.
In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension.
When this was equalised there were massive protests.
Go on.
There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website.
It just happened to easily show up in my search.
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-th...
"Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework."
Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
[0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...
I will take a look at your linke tho
That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays.
I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble?
I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.
You mean they're perceived to not offer what it takes. Of all phenomena, hypergamy is one of the best documented. And in my experience, as inequality grows so too does hypergamy.
Instead of introspection men react angry- predictably.
Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more.
Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more.
And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When you sign a contract you have to be careful to consider how fucked you can be by the other side. It's not really the fault of that particular lady, you don't know how things will turn out.
There is no longer a way to come up with a sane division of labor for the average couple. Both parents are not intended to be working full time. It does not work for either party.
Heck, humans are not designed to operate as two parents even. There should be multiple generations of help at hand for it to truly be a decent experience. Humans need breaks and our hyper scheduled existence is entirely unnatural.
I watch friends who have kids where both have professional careers and to be honest none of it looks like a fun time. I don’t think it’s good for the kids either.
15-20 years of “sucking it up” and dealing with a horribly overbooked and stressful life is not good for any party. Women have it worse on average, but no one appears to be having a good time.
So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”
Any way thank you for making me feel seen.
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor. Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed. Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/f...
If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.
The only couple actually like the gender stereotype you invoke is a conservative one in their 60s.
The female dating coach Logan Ury wrote a book called "How not to die alone" which discusses this issue.
This seems like a rational decision to me. Better go it alone than risk becoming the sole carer of both a baby and a man-baby.
For example, being over 6ft doesn’t make you a good dad. Or being physically attractive, doest’t make you a supportive partner.
If anything, these characteristics make a man worse, as men in these categories tend to have the pick of the litter, resulting in many women frustrating and disappointed in men if they weren’t selected.
Women set expectation bar so high, only top 5% of men meet.
Anecdotally, I see many women who want to settle down but never take the initiative to ask a guy out.
Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.
I don't feel as though I wasted any of the "fertile years" of my female partners who ended up not wanting to marry me!
I had a couple of different long-term relationships in my 20s before I found a woman to marry and start a family with, which we did just fine in our 30s despite having two miscarriages in between kid #1 and kid #2.
This does not make sense. It's not men taking birth-control pills, plan-b and having abortions.
The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.
Maybe that is a good explanation for the baby boom though.
Today, Tinder and Instagram gives you access to literally the entire planet of single people and the illusion that you have the chance to be with one.
I guess what I’m getting at is that, even if you describe men’s desires accurately, I don’t think it describes their behaviour in my parents’ generation let alone mine. But maybe this just varies a lot by country/income/education/social class and I see some weird sample. I know divorce rates have become super divergent by education in the US for example so presumably relationships are quite different too.
Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.
Men don’t want to take that risk, so many men opt out of marriage as well.
There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.
As for a stay at home mom who doesn’t get divorced, she doesn’t need to be entirely stay at home for all 18 years.. kids go to school at 5 and can go to after school programs if necessary while she works. A couple years before that if the kids are in pre school she could get a degree or masters degree or work part time. So the career gap could be minimized.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MediocreTutorials/comments/18lhait/...
Sure - a combination of a race to the bottom on working hourse and supply/demand for housing.
We need major tax breaks for single income households and to legalise building homes.
I have a child, alot of what I read on these internet groups isn't relatable.
I suppose the Nordic socialist democracies are pretty nice. They probably have birth rates below replacement levels as well though. It turns out if you offer women the choice to have a career, enough of them take it that you drop below the replacement rate.
I have never expected to be paid for raising my children.
This is a sexist take. It is not universally true, and a like-for-like retort would be considered sexist.
But, I don't share at all the bit where men just want to work, etc, that's really not the experience of most couples I know (Europe, non rural).
I much prefer cooking, cleaning, and parenting. I would choose being a full-time parent in a heartbeat over my career if I had the option. But due to my particular skills, my earning potential is much higher than my partner's. It wouldn't make much sense for us. So I slog it out so we can afford what we need. She works too, but not full-time.
But so much of what you talk about is foreign to me. My partner and I have no concept of "my own money" vs "my partner's money"; it all goes into a joint account that we both control and we trust each other to spend wisely. And yeah of course we both share the housework and childraising (because that's table stakes for an egalitarian relationship). I don't just come home from work and play video games or something. Seeing my kid grow, play, and copy me is the biggest external validation I could ask for.
If you value your income more than your kids, then you either shouldn't have kids, or you should marry someone who prioritizes domestic work and parenting over their career. But then don't think they're not pulling their weight just because they earn less than you.
That said, I think if the government wants to encourage more babies, it should pay a basic income to stay-at-home parents, something perhaps comparable to the cost of daycare. Then maybe people like you won't consider it unpaid labor anymore and it will become a more respected option.
However, birth rates are through the floor even in countries with 2 years paid parental leave.
Breast pump is a thing, the husband can definitely do the feeding with frozen breast milk warmed up in minutes. Or just do formula.
Even if dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.
i have a long term spouse and let her make the call because i know it sucks too, i doubt i would sign up for it
theres always adoption. yes, i know the adoption process is rigorous and expensive
This absolutely isn't the reality I observe in my circle, but I acknowledge it was the reality for my parents and grandparents.
Not gonna lie: it just seems like you made a poor choice in picking a partner.
Don't blame it on the entire male population.
I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy.
Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.
Peter Zeihan, whose YouTube prognostications seem iffy, likes to call children "expensive furniture". They were useful labor on the farm a hundred years ago, but in small apartments they can be a real nuisance.
Modern parenting is wild - there are too many rules and regulations and things just have to be just perfect to have a kid. Our great grandparents just had them all over the place and would let them roam around in the wilderness. Today we have to coddle and bubble wrap, sign them up for classes, take them places. Just thinking about it seems stressful.
At the same time, we've got these little dopamine cubes in our pockets that are taking our time away from socializing and dating and meeting people. It takes time and deliberation to find someone to settle down and commit to raising "expensive furniture" with for the next twenty years. You can just keep scrolling your feed and filling life with experiences.
Perhaps instead it's that the modern life creates the perception that something different or exciting could be just around the corner - like a kind of hedonistic treadmill, or wishful longing. Our ancestors just accepted their fate and lived their short lives. We have too many things taking our time and attention, and everything has to be "perfect" before we commit.
Not making any value judgments here, just stating observations.
Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.
Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.
My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.
(It’s an actual if accidental strategy employed by some).
There's too much opportunity (good!) and too much opportunity cost.
We're truly gradient ascent explorers in the rawest sense. And our adventures take us off the evolutionary path. We've jumped the shark on our biology.
And cheap, reliable, birth control.
One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).
Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.
And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.
Drinking beer and playing video games for 10 hours a day AND WORKING A FULLTIME JOB would also suck.
From everything I hear, being a mom is pretty awesome and rewarding.
But there are only 24 hours in a day and you can't have everything and you have to choose what is most important. Welcome to life.
Then you don’t even read magazines, let alone mom forums, or attend playgroup, or basically hear anything.
For example, grocery pickup at Walmart has been the best gift to mothers since disposable diapers.
being a mum doesn't have to suck. choices are being weighed and made.
And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.
Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.
I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.
Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.
I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.
Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.
I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
Yes, or just have your servants watch them.
Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.
> It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
Mostly women, and that helps keep the gender pay gap going.
Where are you at?
Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
The solution to "kids are expensive" being to just pay someone lower class to do it is absurd.
> You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
You're re-inventing daycare here.
Nannies take multiple children (up to 4 here in France) at the same time. So he/she can take his/her own.
There is nothing morally wrong with hiring someone to do labor for you.
There are two ways to hire a nanny. The "law abiding as a point of pride" way is comically expensive.
The "pay your neighbor's teenager cash" way is cheap.
If even that's too expensive for you then send your kids to whatever unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated daycare that some tradesman's wife runs out of her house.
> Have a parent stay at home and not work
> Hire a nanny
> Move (presumably farther away from your job) closer to your (assumed idle) parents so they can help
> Take a couple of years off of work
These options are available to a vanishingly small percentage of working people, at least in the USA. OP must know this, so why even mentions these outlandish options?
You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.
I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
Being a mom just sucks.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.
Many people get hyped up about their beliefs on social media, and when they go out into the real world they take some of that divisive thinking with them.
Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.
My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.
I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
Does that make it feel more fair?
Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)
BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.
Yep. When typical wages equal 100% of rent, how is a new couple supposed to sustain themselves?
its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.
if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.
My mom would yell out the back door when it was time for dinner.
Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.
I'd also add that it may even be illegal in some places to let your kids outside by themselves at all. Even when it's not illegal, it just takes one busybody to call the police and you've got a potential charge waiting for you, all because you let your kid walk a couple blocks to school. And of course, this just exacerbates the problem further.
My anecdote: As a parent, when I talk to people my same age or younger without children they often greatly overestimate the sacrifices necessary to have children. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people (who don’t have children) make wild claims like having children means you won’t have good sleep for the next decade, or that they need a 4,000 square foot house before they have kids, or that it’s impossible to raise kids in a MCOL city without earning $200-$300K.
A lot of people have locked their idea of what it’s like to have children to the newborn phase and they imagine changing diapers, paying $2-3K infant care costs, and doing night time feedings forever. I’ve had numerous conversations where people simply refuse to believe me when I tell them my kids were sleeping through the night after a couple years or potty trained by age 2.
I think a lot of this is due to class isolation combined with getting a lot of bad info from social media. When you mingle with more of the population you realize most families with kids are not earning programmer level compensation and not living in 4,000 square foot houses, yet it’s working out.
Reddit is an interesting peek into this mindset. Recently there was a thread asking for serious answers from parents about if they regretted having children. The top voted comments were all from people who said “I don’t have kids but…” followed by a claim that all their friends secretly regretted having kids or something. If you sorted by controversial there were a lot of comments from people saying they didn’t regret it and loved their kids, but they were all downvoted into the negatives. It’s wild.
And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.
For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.
Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.
Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.
I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.
There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book
They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.
They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.
The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.
Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456
According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture back. The culture has fundamentally changed.
Just to cause arguments, some things which I'm guessing were an influence in getting her. Cars? (easy to get away from family/village, the culture that valued family). TV/Cable/Video-Games/Youtube? (infinite entertainment 24/7). Fast easy prepared food? (no needing to meet with others for meals). Computers/SmartPhones/Internet? (infinite entertainment and/or ways to interact with others but not actually meet). Suburbia? (the need to drive to be close others)
It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.
> According to that the issue is culture.
This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.
Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.
On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.
What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.
Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.
Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.
Before contraceptives sex outside of marriage results in children born out of wedlock. This is catastrophic for the mothers, their families, and for the child.
In the past they used to build temples dedicated to Moloch for sacrificing unwanted babies. The Israelites looked down on this practice, and instead insisted on marriage with rules: thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. These rules were crucial for social stability.
Why is marriage and punishment for adultery universal? Because a two parent household is the only healthy way to raise kids and ensure wealth is preserved between generations. This has always been true.
Maybe that way wasn’t wrong.
Yes, obviously; there was a much higher reproductive rate. It seems like you're talking about enjoyment or something else, but that really wasn't the focus of this thread.
Gay couples can’t have children (outside of adoption or surrogacy), so I’m not sure how that is relevant to the topic at hand. Gay couples will not be helping with the next baby boom.
We made a change in the culture, from the standpoint of the species continuing to survive into the future. The change put us on what looks like a worse path. Would it not be wise to question those changes to see where it went wrong and course correct, just like we’d do if this was any other problem in any other domain?
The pleasure can and does still exist. It's not like it gets removed when sex is ends in a pregnancy. It doesn't have to be some mechanical act, the way you seem to be framing it.
Sex produced babies, 2% of women died in childbirth. Children need a father to help provide and protect, without that, babies were often just abandoned in the woods.
There’s nothing casual about that.
From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.
Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
It's weird how much happens for random, completely unrelated reasons.
Seems to be working!
No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
(edit: added translation of unit)
For most of us today this is horrific to think about! Our life is ours!
We don't want to give up our freedoms! We don't want to sacrifice our life. I include myself in this. We have made Human Rights about ourselves and our own choices. My body! Our responsibility is for ourselves not others. It's not money nor housing, it's how we think about what life is.
To argue for people to sacrifice their lives is completely insane. But that is what it would take, a kind of insanity in a selfish world. An argument against freedom is insanity in our culture of the self.
I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
We have none of these things today. A small amount of cash is not going to fix it.
Unfortunately the rapid global development means that even new world war wouldn't replicate this period. Train has left, bye bye, and won't return in our lifetimes. We need to adapt.
Even though I have put zero thought into most of my political beliefs, I just repeat what my social media programs me to believe, that can't be true. I can't be full of shit.
Look how much I get paid to write javascript!
Everyone in the whole society was literally working on the same thing toward the same goal at the same time. There's simply no comparison with that to anything we've experienced since then. That kind of thing can't be measured in dollars.
Stable populations are completely irrelevant at the microscopic levels; InBev would fold within a week if yeast populations were stable.
I know there's a joke in here about this being literally in the bible, with God using such an insect birth rate swing as a punishment for an entire state. That's how "stable" it is.
This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.
You need to know what the current population is, what the carrying capacity is, etc etc.
Generic statements sound and feel good, but are completely useless.
Yet we have made (hopefully this is not contentious) great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life.
Certainly there were some stable societies in that timeframe?
If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.
It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.
It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.
There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that
Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
I am increasingly tired of arguments for the elites to do something for the betterment of society. They have repeatedly shown that they don't care.
That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.
In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.
This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.
Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.
This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.
Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)
> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.
No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.
You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.
Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
No form of civilization has ever had the access to automation we have today.
And in another 20 years, I suspect that'll be even more clear.
You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.
I'm not talking about self-service kiosks, I'm talking about "talk directly to the machine" sort of things they're already testing out.
I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.
Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.
Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.
Etc.
I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
When you retire there will only be two. Expect less than half the care, because automation of elderly care is more expensive than a person.
#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.
#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.
The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.
My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.
At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)
Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.
So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually.
Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures.
So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons.
If you want actual actions congress can take:
1. Expand limits on the dependent HSA account to allow more than 5,000 annually. Daycare alone is much more than 5,000 USD, it seems making that completely tax free will help.
2. Subsidize the entire cost of daycare. This will never happen but by golly it will work.
It’s not just affordability, it’s one big piece but it’s not the only thing.
Current steps being taken include:
- Emphasizing family values via the Russian Orthodox Church
- Restricting abortion, which was cheap and easy in the USSR days
- Encourage teenage pregnancy (there's a "Pregnant at 15" TV show)
- Encouraging immigration
So far, it's not working much.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-might-be-losing-1...
There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia.
It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia.
There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing.
Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.
The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85.
There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies.
They are matching people up who won't ever have babies.
What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.
It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
I feel like, primarily, the reason why our society isn't having children is because of a growing selfishness and entitlement; which happens to be the very thing that Rome was suffering from when their society was collapsing too.
No, I'm not rich and I'm not old. But I was brought up in a family that cherished loved ones and family. Love was agape, not eros.
The thing with the most impact to climate and environment is without a doubt, people. People having kids are selfish.
It used to be about sacrifice and responsibilities. It's about giving up on choice. It's about not having cake. Our grandparents were defined by their responsibilities not their choices. Their identity was assigned to them as parent, it wasn't something they made themselves. It's horrific to think about for many (including me). How could I advocate for less of me?
A fear of the future of the world is about my future identity. Indeed we fear giving up our identity. We even want to die on our own terms. Many comments here talk about having babies as a kind of economic consumer choice and I imagine some parents do have children as a luxury good. "If only it was cheaper." It's still a choice of the self.
Our world is different in that it's hard to think about and talk of a world where the self is less important than the other and yet being a parent is usually about putting the child before themselves. Ironically therefore, babies are the best way to talk about not living in a selfish world!
While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.
Shouldn't people who think that parenting is not a glamorous job be allowed to express their thoughts on this subject?
> It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
So other people's feelings and experiences are according to you distasteful but yours should be accepted as some sort of universal truth?
You had a great experience bringing kids into this world, that's nice but that doesn't mean that everyone should be willing to go through the same things you did.
Are you suggesting I should not have the right to express my thoughts about their thoughts?
As such it can be true or false, but I don't really see how it can be sexist.
If you think it's not true, it would be curious to hear why.
Some young women are waking up to the fact that even though their corporate overlords call them family a month before mass layoffs, it can be a lot more rewarding to work for your actual family instead of the family assembled by billionaires looking for a good return on investment and pension funds.
It’s absolutely capable of changing demography.
It’s not capable of providing consistent timing of pregnancies.
There was PTSD of course, a lot of grief and life altering injuries, but back then you didn't talk about it and just drank and beat up your wife and kids instead.
Anatomically modern humans exist for ~100,000-200,000 years. Reliable contraception widely available is something that didn't exist until ~60 years ago. So we can't just use past performance to predict the future.
But they didn't know how screwed they were.
(If you implied sarcasm I apologize, it's extremely hard to tell when dealing with HN posters)
I expect better, more thoughtful replies on HN than this.
Shockingly, declarations as if we are gods laying down "the one true morality" are not actually definitions of "the one true morality".
Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.
I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.
The "immoral to have kids" crowd still exists e.g in Europe but their options are to either change their mind or to be gradually overrun by people who think otherwise.
But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.
I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.
Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.
But the idiopathic depression of the modern era is certainly interesting. Doubtful it can be studied before natural selection exacts its ruthless revenge
But still, we need to be teaching above all the other dumb shit thats happening in school: how capitalism hates them. How you need to eliminate middle men, having a regular wage means you are going to be an oppressed slave for life. You need to come up with your own thing, that you own and control and get to do some kind of negotiating for its value. You need to invest in things that can be used to make money in the future, little side hustles always. And maybe even deep dives on how crime really does pay, and if not figure one out yourself at least know the huge majority of people that are going to try and scam you. It is pure evil not to teach reality in high school
As to why life is less affordable today and getting worse, I would start here: https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
It's teenage and very young women virtually not having kids anymore.
Thus, the narrative that in order to stop population shrinking we have to go back to some past state is false. We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies, and we should support older women and men having child at later stage at higher rates than previously during humanity.
Why not? The statement seems very much derived from 'current culture' morals. For most of human history I would guess that behavior was normal human behavior.
1. Fix Family Courts
Western Family courts are based on biblical punishment (divorce is bad and a sin, nuclear family is good, must punish sin). And extreme Christian crazy Judges falsify outcomes routinely, hence why they are hiding behind closed doors.
Leaving men broke and barely seeing their child means the next generations of men know not to marry.
2. Child Support
No sensible safeguards of how it is spent and even if the woman is a high earner the man can be asked to pay 100% of the child costs. So men are very cautious about getting the wrong woman pregnant, as women are financialy incentivised to ensure a child lives as little as possible with the father as that means more money for them. You want a balance between deterrence to unplanned kids and motivation to have kids.
Generations of men have seen what happens/been told this/social media and they are more wary.
Many relationships and marriages fail. It needs to be normalised and the lunatic Christian extremists need to be put away.
Being online is not the same as being in the real world.
You have to take risks, including speaking with people, face to face, and forming meaningful relationships.
Swiping right is not the same as approaching someone attractive in person.
Complaining on Reddit is not the same as talking directly with lawmakers.
Interpersonal communication, persuasion, is hard work that should be re-embraced.
To answer the headline question: find a way to make other planets inhabitable and the human population will grow to fill the new spaceships, but for now this one is too crowded.
Thru genealogy I see how families and extended families lived together to afford living expenses. MultiFamily housing was common and jobs were within walking distance. The automobile dispersed jobs and families, taking all the above away.
The needs we have now are no longer possible to fill.
I suppose it makes sense. It's not like there's any single place that documented where we're all agreeing about what we're supposed to believe. After all, nobody has a date where we all decided that hackers were really cool and awesome.
That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen.
It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.
Even if you have no interest in having more kids, it's an interesting look at how we can parent differently and have happier families.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Family-Unfriendly-Culture-Raising-Har...
It's going to take something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
You forgot a couple of 0s
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77v4x8g7pro
What if you are infertile? Is the government/state going to pay for all the procedures related to adoption/ fertility treatments?
What about gay people? Would they be forced to adopt kids or use surrogates to have children so that they stop paying this tax?
At what age should men stop paying this tax? After all, a man in his 60s and even later can still in theory father a child with a younger woman, so there is really no cut off date for men in this case?
Finally why not pay men as well if they are the ones doing most of the child raising? This would apply in cases where the mother died or left. Would that be acceptable?
I am sorry to say but your proposal is not very well thought out and on top of that your forget that people in relationships without children are already paying more than there fair share of taxes.
Make housing so cheap that people feel there's nothing risky about working minimum age job with 3 kids and you have the first leg of higher birth rates being societally supported IMO.
But that's not an easy place to arrive.
The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible.
The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future.
And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.
But yes, obviously something will have to be done about taxation on wealth. But simply "tax wealth" doesn't really solve anything here on its own.
Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement.
But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out.
The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.
I'm wondering if a simple contributor is the fact that many people are moving away from their immediate family. Then you feel more on your own when considering having child, which is significantly more daunting. I think a network of friends helps, but is simply not the same as parents/siblings/cousins sharing the load and advice. Let alone the experiences.
Also, it seems there's a negative feedback loop, where each person that chooses to postpone or not have kids influences their network to do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom
1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce 2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees 3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer). 4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort.
It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.
Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity.
Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.
Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.
Also, the day Paris was liberated in WW2, there wasn't a soldier in the city who could not get laid.
Seems like some politicians are doing their best to arrange that
The post Vietnam war economy implies this wasn't really true. Also our current post Afghanistan/Iraq war economy.
For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam.
Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others.
Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so.
WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.
Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.
Both sperm counts and testosterone are way, way down for who knows what reason. People are waiting longer and longer to get married, and the number of unmarried people is higher than ever.
I think war just leads to mostly broken, single men, as there's nobody to come home to.
The war is the cause, but it has to end to do it.
https://www.unfpa.org/swp2025
Please make them feel good for it. Make it desirable.
https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/back-when-america...
This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty.
I hear concerns like the following, across social groups:
"I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft."
"If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?"
Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc.
I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from.
Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
The Googles and Facebooks of the time were destroyed, and there was a vast green field on which people tried to build new empires.
Nobody cared if you went to Yale or Oxford, or were related to the upper management somehow, they just hired based on ability.
For a brief period the American Dream was real: work hard, work smart, and you'll get far.
So people worked hard, and rather than having their job stolen by ofshoring or AI, they get compensated well. They spent that money on houses, and then... they didn't know what else to do. They had everything they needed. Money in the bank. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Might as well have a big family, too.
So that explains what caused it. What would it take to have another? We're currently having one in another part of the world.
Doesn’t seem like the winning solution is to apply policies that directly reduce the amount of people that _can_ give birth
Romania’s abortion policy killed north of 200,000 women that died to at home abortions going wrong
I'm not sure that the idea is right, but I'm pretty sure that, after World War II, the parents of the Baby Boom generation definitely had that.
(only half joking)
> If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them.
This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too.
I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.
The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon.
If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.
that’s it
so basically very few people - as in both partners - were consciously planning kids, they were just having sex, but the irresponsibility was curbed by nature, sanitation, as many of the resulting children died.
of the people that were planning children, they also has to hedge with many dead children, but suddenly they were all living
so now people had to plan for the consequences and post 1950s the planning resulted in real practical choices, where people realized they dont want children.
people never wanted the consequences of having children or many children. the history corroborates this. when both parties are now choosing
the incentives haven’t helped for that reason
the incentives are all based on the assumption that family planning is difficult and out of reach. merely delaying something desired, when they just won’t accept that most of has just don’t want children and never did.
we still have sex. the decline in that amongst always single people is new, just the last several years. couples do the things that make children all the time, and just don’t get pregnant or output children.
If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons?
For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?
What would cause another baby boom would be a recovery of catholic cultural confidence.
Cultural Catholics in the United States mostly aligned with Protestant secular world views.
One of her memories is interesting and very relevant. There were a lot of soldiers trained in Canada and the government put on dances to entertain them. Had my gram or of her sisters asked to go to a dance with a bunch of soldiers in 1936, they would have been locked in a barn while he burned something down. But by 1939, it was his patriotic duty and he’d buy his girls dresses and take them to the dances.
When my Gram was in her nineties, she would talk about the soldiers, the music and the dances. Then she’d start to glow and her neck would turn red. Romance of the times is a comfortable euphemism. :)
We have none of those things at present.
So perhaps the problem isn't increasing the number of births per woman, but rather increasing the fraction of the population that are women. Women already do better than men in college; perhaps if women are perceived as having better economic prospects, and if technical means of choosing the sex of children were available, parents would tend to choose female children.
It seems not. Wikipedia says it took 80-150 years (4-7 generations) to recover from a ~21% population drop [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]!
Secondly, social media, including onlyfans. This ideology of feminist power I believe has been a cancer.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.
But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Well in excess of its carrying capacity given current technological usage. A smaller population is, in all objective senses, a good thing. Desiring a larger population is a purely greed-based obsession.
Raising kids is a full time job. I am doing both as a father and also as a founder. My wife does not work, does minimal contribution here and there. I dont know where she spends time but she is unavailable. I would rather do it myself than keep fighting.
I think from population front we are not going to have baby boom anytime in next 30 years. Technology will create more isolation than ever. Laws never favor men.
India, most populous country, recently dropped birth rates below replacement level. That is probably most fertile land (for food and reproduction) and yet they are falling behind.
I think unless we see dramatic change in policies worldwide (not going to happen) that puts men and families as center of policy making, it will be all doom from here.
Come back in 30-50 years when new generation is in charge and thinking patterns change.
This reads as deeply obnoxious sexism. Man as head of the household, sounds like religious fundamentalism.
The idea that women are their own person with their own agency and desires seems foreign to you.
It worked for centuries. No one is stopping women from working or doing anything. But, making whole world gynocentric and policies around it is how you get mass inequality.
For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood?
Decades of mistakes and yet you come here with sexism talk. Words are cheap. Life is hard.
Your solution is to enslave women again so they become baby incubators, exactly as right-wing theocrats want. The real solution is ofcourse 'socialism' and a rampant curtailment of capitalism, that is currently accelerating the migration of money from poor to rich.
WW2
>What Would It Take to Have Another?
WW3
There is no guarantee that a WW3 would even repeat this phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom