- This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
- I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more.
Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.
If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
- This is really the message of Abundance.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
- I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87.
Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.
In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty
- My understanding of Singapore work culture though is it's intense and competitive. Yes the housing is cheaper and more accessible but it's the same age to get there (maybe a bit earlier). You aren't "economically secure" earlier in life than in Western countries. I don't know enough Vienna's system to speak for it.
- This has nothing to do with economic security.
Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.
Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.
Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.
We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.
Technology did this.
- Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.
People have been having children later since about the 1930s. The change has been gradual, so it's only really hitting hard now because they've not had any children during the years when it's relatively easy, and now some can't. That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.
Coincidently though, this aligns pretty much perfectly to people's stability also shifting to happen later in life. Specifically the economic stability to raise a family on a single income. That's not really possible any more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't do it.
Just to add a little factual data to this point, the fertility rate in England and Wales has been below two children per woman since the 1970s.
- >That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.
the tech before social media - TV:
https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/tv-birth-control/
"TV As Birth Control
...
The impact of the new TV programming in rural India has been profound—and very positive, say Jensen and Oster. Their interviews revealed that when the new TV services arrived, women’s autonomy increased while fertility and the acceptability of domestic violence toward women significantly decreased."
- How can you tell that tech is the cause of people not having children, and not just what they're doing because they don't have children to fill their time?
I don't think you can point to the rise of tech as a casual just because it's popular. If people aren't having children they'll do something else instead. To say what that is you need more evidence that what people are doing.
- "I'm so worried I can't have children, I think I'll go watch a movie or do something online instead" is so obviously wrong on cause and effect.
People get hooked on this stuff before they even have biological urges to reproduce.
And it supplants the urge to reproduce.
Tech and entertainment are birth control.
- I was thinking more along the lines of "I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?"
How can you tell that isn't what's happened from looking at the rise of tech?
- The wealthy demographics aren't having kids either, and the decline correlates with each inflection point in the rise of pleasure and mental stimulation technology.
Sub-Saharan birthrates are starting to decline just as they're gaining access to smartphones.
All of the countries where women have fewer rights are also experiencing decline in birthrates. They have ~10-30% smartphone penetration.
"Having a child seems fun" is dopamine opportunity cost as much as a financial one. People have always been poorer, but they've never been so endlessly stimulated.
> I'm not in a position to have children because I can't afford them, so I won't. Now I have more time to fill, what's on TV?
Replace this with, "I'm bored. What's on TV / YouTube?" Everything else is unnecessary complication.
- Exactly.
We've been replacing biological imparatives with strange forms of nonbiological entertainment.
And it's increased now to the point that it's in endless supply and constantly attached to us.
- "Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible."
Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.
>the highest birth rates globally occur...
Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.
>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.
I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.
- Not to repeat myself too much here, but Japan also handling housing very well for two reasons: (1) NIMBYism does not exist by law (and practice) and (2) there is almost zero protected homes for historical/architectural reasons. As a result, you can build and build and build in Japan. There are few limitations except a uniform national building code. Tear down and rebuild (bigger) is constant in big cities in Japan.
- Exponential decay isn't impossible to manage if the exponent is reasonable (i.e. closer to 1, i.e. if the average number of children per woman was closer to 2.1). It's just going down too fast.
- Vienna massively depopulated in the mid-20th century, so it had a large excess of underused real estate. Vienna is only now starting to come back to its former population. It is like making the observation that housing is cheap in Detroit.
We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.
- > We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.
This will require incredible subsidies both to build and maintain, which I fully support, but I think is politically untenable due to everyone’s unwillingness for taxes to go up while the developed world already carries enormous sovereign debt loads (>100% GDP).
We ate the seed corn, broadly speaking, to maximize the gains for some at the expense of the young and the future. Hopefully I’m wrong, and both taxes go up and the bond market will support more borrowing in the near term for spending that actually delivers value.
- In the long run this trend will depopulate all the cities, so we'll get there one way or another.
- May the economically fittest mega cities win I suppose.
- Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.
Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Now THAT problem will reduce or go away. You take 20 years to debate a new garbage disposal facility and overcome NIMBY brigades? no issues! The population stays same when you stop arguing and get it done.
- > Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.
Err...My point being that it's not like Biharis who move to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are welcomed with open arms. West Bengal itself is a masterclass in what happens when you dont industrialise and implement birth control policies.
> Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.
If USA's quality of life reduces people can still expect to live better lives than they do in India.
>IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.
Do you think China and Singapore just build like that? If you do you're kinda wrong. A LOT of time is put into planning and gaining consensus. Yes, the means aren't the same as India or USA, but Singapore for instance regularly holds ground level consultation with many people from different walks of life. Strong manning things leads to worse outcomes and both China and Singapore know this and only exercise it when absolutely necessary. The real issue is competent leadership. In most parts of the world only the most undesirable enter politics. It seems like the take away Indians and Americans have at looking at Singapore and China is StrongMan=Good without realising that it was a democracy that placed man on the moon, invented computing and more. The success of China and Singapore is predicated on their leadership and excellent civil service.
- China (I assume you mean mainland) and "gaining consensus" (before large infra projects) in the same sentence? You lost me here.
- You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment. What usually happens is some authorities float a project idea on the news. At this point the idea would be toyed with. Depending on feedback gathered via academic studies and social media responses, if the project is seen as controversial the projects scope will be adjusted to some common ground that works well enough for most of the identified stakeholders involved - this is what the civil servants are paid to do. In china this usually is an ongoing dialog between local and central government. In Singapore this usually means focus groups and discussion. Neither countries really want to deal with angry citizens (but will do so extremely harshly when the need arises).
This is in stark contrast to a place like India where pulling up bulldozers to solve problems is becoming increasingly common. Politicians will command building of infrastructure just to satisfy voters without thinking through long term consequences. Often you get projects which exist just to check of the fact that they have built something even if that thing is utterly useless once complete.
- That problem won't go away because India is not at 80 - 95% urbanized like the west. There are still ~50% in villages, who will continue to migrate to cities.
The problem is India only has a few metros. India should be building 100+ new cities and rapidly urbanize. Cities are engines of growth. The slow migration from villages to legacy metros amplifies the infrastructure problems.
- Yes. Actually it'll make sense to build new cities instead of pumping billions paying inflated land cost to build roads, rail etc. and metro systems that only pull even more crowds. Let the main cities rot, be replaced over time by new ones. Most empires did that, globally.
- The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too.
if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?
Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.
The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.
if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
- > Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.
The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD
- > heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work
Subsidies only come into affect after you have children. They can not work alone society has a much greater affect. They work wonders at making parenting possible while being part of the work force. You only get the subsidies when you have children, the question is how you are supposed to feel secure enough to have children.
- Literally what china is doing now
- Let's not speak so airily of forced pregnancies.
- I was home alone, it was fine. What do you mean by "kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised"?
- Depending on where you live, police will be called.
- Then pass Karen's Law and start fining the people making those calls if made without good reason to believe of imminent or reasonable danger to the child. It not only screws up society, but is a complete waste of resources.
- Yeah, exactly that. Most friends I have in Canada only started to have families once they were able to secure appropriate-sized dwelling. Which didn’t happen until late 30s. And current generations possibly cannot afford it at all in many jurisdictions. And stories I read from back in the day were “a factory worker and a teacher bought and paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in 3 years” are just insane. If I had that kind of purchasing power today I’d have more kids for sure.
- > and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs.
Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…
- Wealth was quite consolidated when most population were peasants.
- The wealth distribution in England in the 1500s had the top 1% controlling roughly 25% of the wealth.
The top 1% in America today controls roughly 32% of the wealth.
Tell us more about the peasants who got significant time off because the ruling class knew endless work resulted in an unhappy populace.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
- No disrespect, but historical evidence does not support this argument. I've seen similar claims made in other threads.
Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc.
The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals.
My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.
- You are missing a major driver of this. The main reason fertility rates have been decreasing is because of decreasing infant mortality. The number of children surviving to adulthood has been relatively stable until recently.
- Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.
The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.
And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.
- This is definitely not true. As recently as the 50s the cost of a 2/2 house was about 14% of a single median personal income per month. [1] In contemporary times median personal income is about $45k, so that'd be about $525 per month. And they paid lower taxes as well. In contemporary times people pay dramatically more for housing without getting much of anything more in return. People often claim overall housing size has increased which is true, but lot sizes have slightly decreased. So all that means is in the 1950s you also had a much bigger yard instead of walk-in closets or whatever.
[1] - https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi...
- Can you point to such places for sale in a reasonably sized city?
Cuz where I am, any appartment priced cheap is instantly bought up and remodeled into an unaffordable 2020's standards appartment.
- > Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.
- Exactly. If you subsidize the abundance for everyone, the effect will just be raised expectations floor.
- >Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.
Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.
- Agreed with all of this but,
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
- My point is only that we can see the value capture of the housing shortage by looking at the delta of housing development COGS and housing prices. I generally agree with you that there is plenty of room for profit margin, but when we see housing prices diverging significantly from lowest-cost construction prices, then we can measure our shortage.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
- > We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it.
Much easier to have a reserve of X, if X can be put in a warehouse and transported later.
After reading comments here, I think that US has plenty of cheap housing… but… cheap housing is in places where people don’t want to live. (Demand is low, price is low)
If you actually plan to use your own money to build a reserve of housing, better double-tripple check if anybodyz will want to live there.
- This is really the message of Abundance.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
- I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it misses that abundance means abundance. Consumer staples should cost near the price of production, and where margins are out of control, the government should step in and end the rent-seeking... that is what abundance is. If we live in a society where there is no price appreciation in owning an apartment to rent because another apartment can be build next door, then we live in a society where your dollar goes further, and cannot be captured by the wealthy cornering the market.
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
- > we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
- I think there should be a relatively simple solution. Tax the homeowners proportional to their homes' market value. Either you get enough tax revenue to build more houses, or the tax burden is too high for those NIMBY to remain at their beautiful suburban homes, and their houses will be back on the market.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
- Are you in California?
Most states (and other countries) do tax the homeowners proportional to their homes’ market value. California with its tax proportional to value at purchase is the outlier.
- In the places I have lived, the value of the property for tax calculations was significantly lower than the market value.
- I think it’s largely just that people just don’t want to live near poor people, because they think they have bad culture/values/behavior, and will be risky to live near.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
- > people just don’t want to live near poor people
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
- Yeah, no argument. I think many in the US want the bar to be higher, though - many want expensive single family housing to be the minimum in their area, apartments would be too affordable, even unsubsidized.
- “A society grows great when old men build five-over-ones whose shade will immediately cover their favorite park bench for 4 days per year.”
- I think that’s compatible with my take:
Be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good (abundant, cheaper housing in this case) rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing (existing house value, amongst many other things, in this case).
- It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
- > FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
- I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
- If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.
- Every economic bracket got smartphones and internet.
The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.
Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.
Evolution didn't anticipate this.
- Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.
- You're right, but it's a fun phrase.
So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.
It would be ironic if this was the great filter.
- Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
- It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
- I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:
1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
- The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
- Affordability is relative to a lifestyle though. Not starving to death is the absolute lowest level.
- Right. Kids cost time and money. So the lifestyle you can afford _with_ kids is slightly lesser than _without_ kids. But this is true at all income levels below the richest 1% or so.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.
- Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
- The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
----
Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
- Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.
- > Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
Yes, next question
- No, next question.
- This is an unfalsifiable pet theory. It is hardly worth discussing.
- Don't be so dismissive.
Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575
The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.
It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.
We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.
We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?
Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.
That's why the babies have disappeared.
Fun killed babies.
- Yep, the real answer’s electricity.
- Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.
1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948
- I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.
Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.
Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.
- 1. Proven causation is a high bar for drawing conclusions in conversation or on a website.
2. Luxembourg is the only microstate in the chart. Fixation on a singular outlier is not useful.
- > This is effectively impossible in a democratic society
Why exactly would a democratic society oppose this? Are you conflating democratic and capitalist?
Most if not all postwar European societies had ambitious social housing projects that aimed to secure housing for young workers.
- At no point in history did we have economic security at child bearing age and the assumption that it has a correlation with number of children seems to go against the data.
- > If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30.
I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.
- If not money, what are the types of issue you face?
- There's no evidence of this what-so-ever
Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.
Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.
- I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income.
I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There’s your problem.
- A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff. And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths. I don't buy any economic arguments.
- I suspect that getting contraceptives was also complicated during the Jaruzelski Junta days.
- > nice house in a nice suburb!
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
- Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.
- Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).
- in the USA you wouldn't not be able to afford it - it just wouldn't exist. There would be no homes inside a 1 hour commuting range.
- Are you joking right now?
I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!
Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.
When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.
Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
- I am with you sans shit hole country town. Talk about a large brush.
- Meanwhile, I grew up in an 800 sq ft apartment that housed my parents, my father's parents, me, and my sibling.
Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.
- Except that 100k years of not being economically secure at childbearing age and having kids anyway... disagrees with you.
- No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!).
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
- You clearly did not read the book or understand the message. I say this as someone who thinks we need a wealth tax (or at least a tax on unrealized semi-liquid capital gains).
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
- You can call something undemocratic without needing to compare it to the actual worst country on this planet.
- We are letting developers dictate what housing gets built?
Are you a parody account?
Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc.
I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!
- Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.
- And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).
- incidentally a few years ago china banned tutoring, but to my understanding it was mainly because most tutoring places were scams, and maybe also because mostly rich parents would spend the money, thus giving them an advantage.
- I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about postponing children. People back then probably would think delaying it was unnatural and this really wasn't that long ago.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[2]: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...
- You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.
- Birth control was illegal in the USA until the late 1960s (other than condoms, which is what sailors used with prostitutes). It takes a while for changes to propagate through society.
Also, consumer credit was illegal until the same time period, and only legalized for people with vaginas in the mid-1970s. That alone might have made all the difference with marriage and fertility (which after all are only mildly related).
Imagine how your choices would expand if unlike your mother, you did not need to become Mrs. John Doe to be able to move out of your father's house.
- > There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like
- > There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like,
Birth control.
- And abortion.
- And the oil shock.
- That's absurd. Remind me again what the ratio of abortions to pregnancies is?
- I remember reading that in certain areas/communities in the USA, it's pretty close to 50:50.
- In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.
In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.
- In 1970 minimum wage was $1.60/hour, equating to about $3.3k a year. A typical mortgage was about $126/month. Car payment, around $100. You weren't raising a family and saving on minimum. Median income was about 3x that for a family, so you could definitely raise a family and save at the median. Note, these come from querying AI, but they match my recollections as a child a few years later.
Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.
In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.
- The 1970s had a whole different level of poverty than we have in 2026. As in, the normal poverty of the 1970s largely doesn't even exist today in the US. The poor today would have been middle class back then, ignoring differences in technology. The standard of living is not comparable.
A single minimum wage was definitely a poverty wage in the 1970s even at the 1970s standard of living. I have no idea where you would get the idea you could raise a family on that.
- as professional with a professional salary, wages are not enough. we need abundant housing. Imagine taking a year or two dedicate to helping your mate through pregnancy and early childcare? Or, taking a year or two get your dating life in order. This second one might be important in city with bad traffic or for demanding jobs. This is not possible right now for 99% of people because housing is too expensive.
- > In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra
Absolutely not true. Minimum wage has never been sufficient to raise a family. It is (was) sufficient to keep one person out of poverty.
- > In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.
My memory seems to think that wasn't true.
However, there were a ton of manufacturing and manual labor jobs that were capable of supporting a small family and they didn't need a college degree.
So, you had most young people earning positive money for four years at a very biologically fertile age rather than going into soul crushing debt at that age.
Bruce Springsteen -- "The River" -- which was apparently a fictionalization of his brother-in-lawThen I got Mary pregnant And, man, that was all she wrote And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat - Not really.
My parents married in 1972 at age 18. Rust belt. Both worked. While comfortable, we were always worried about money and layoffs.
Friends whose parents didn't do as well as mine or who were single income households fared far worse. Definitely didn't end up with saved "extra" money.
- > in the late 70s
As usual...
- Weird site, seems to completely ignore the oil shock and following grave errors with loose monetary policy. Goldbugs gonna goldbug I suppose.
Anyway I'm sure the current oil shock and (assuming the clowns get their way) loose monetary policy will be different this time!
- the website's concluding statement is obviously propaganda but all these effects are real. Something clearly happened in the 1970s.
- house prices
- This is a real thought process people are contending with. There's also just the simple fact that kids are liabilities more so than assets. That's not been the case through most of human civilization.
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
- It's worth remembering that schools in American farming regions would shut down during planting and harvest seasons just 100 years ago.
Large families were your source of farm labor.
- Reminder that universal public high school education wasn't obtained in the US until the 1940s.
Large families were your source of labor because you never given a chance to make a better life for yourself.
- Appreciate you putting it bluntly.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
- Same. I contended with having children at all because I enjoyed my freedom. As much as I enjoy it and find it inspiring and rewarding, there’s a part of me that’s counting down to independence again. I was fortunate enough economically it doesn’t require sacrifices but I still see the tally and it’s enormous. When I see median numbers on common stats like home prices, incomes, groceries, etc. there’s no way I would have taken it on if that was my reality.
- I hate to break it to you but those are almost all economic problems in the grand scheme of things.
- You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
- This entire blog post series is well worth a read:
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an...
- I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.
An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.
https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/
Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.
Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.
- Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
- > Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
- Get poorer, or get in a better location. Preschool is covered free here, with a pittance for after-school care (which is covered if your income is below something like 3x the poverty line).
Having kids is wildly subsidized for the poor - plot all the bennies available to a family at 2x the poverty line.
- You've also tangentially pointed out why wealth inequality is more detrimental to society than an absolute low level of wealth is.
- I think the "entitlement" argument can be easily refuted by telling your interlocutor they're not entitled to you having children, and if they want America to have a million more children they should have them themselves.
- Well put. Adding that for those who are looking to have kids, there are generational considerations. It's not only the parents wanting the middle-class life for themselves, but it's also understanding that raising a child with that level of access to resources is what ideally sets the child up for a better life onward. The impact is exponential down the line, and no one wants to be responsible for a move in the opposite direction generationally.
- If you are referring to the US in your unsupported decline assertion the numbers don't support what you are saying (I disagree the US is more in decline than it was in the 70s/80s. It has different structural problems today, like housing and wealth concentration, but that isn't the same thing).
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
- >your unsupported decline assertion
Why start out pointlessly hostile in your first sentence like this? I can't engage with this. If saying anything without linking a study makes a person some kind of asshole, even smart, honest people couldn't communicate.
- Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.
- People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security; this used to be done by the parents rejecting marriages that didn't bring enough dowry and extreme punishment for extra-marital relationships.
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
- > People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
- The framing as such makes a systemic issue into an individual one. If you can't afford children don't have one... until everyone can't afford them at the same time, then there are none and that civilization dies out.
(Even when it's not affecting everyone at the same time, isn't it a form of eugenics? Who decides which individuals can afford children? It's not the individuals.)
- It's not just women either. The older the father is the more you get risks for certain things like mental illness in the child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect
- Yes, but it's a false equivalence.
- No need to gender this, and I feel like people would be more receptive to the issue if it wasn't. Everybody ages: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12801554/
- Your source doesn't contradict the fact that women's fertility has a sharper and earlier cliff than men's. It doesn't even use the same age brackets for men and women. It compares men age over 45 against men age under 25, whereas for women the study compared those age > 35 vs age < 25.
Even above age 35, 85% of men are able to conceive within 12 months: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11026002/
Like it or not, fertility decline is substantially different between the sexes.
- Gender does matter though. Men can sire offspring into their 60s, women have marked decline in fertility starting from 32 and hit an absolute wall (menopause) by their fifties.
- Men can sire offspring into their 60s but not without some increased risk of undesirable outcomes such as their kid having schizophrenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect
- Men offspring-ing in their 60's and dying 10 years later is perfect way to build a society where kids get to grow up without their fathers when they need them the most
- Then again, they inherit a nice house at the beginning of their adulthood instead of being a landlord's squeezed client for decades.
There are trade-offs everywhere.
- > Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
- True - but, honest question that I've always wondered: Do we know the degree of this problem as it relates to whether or not people have kids? I.e. yes, it takes longer to get pregnant, but how much less likely does it become to get pregnant at all?
- Nearly every metric gets worse
- likelihood to get pregnant
- likelihood to bring child to term
- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth
- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth
- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects
- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities
I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.
- So even if it takes a year instead of one night to get pregnant, which wouldn't really affect long-scale statistics that much, more pregnancies fail, and more people may choose not to try at all because of the risks. That makes sense.
- Yes it would, because if you don't start until you are 30, you've "lost" a decade of childbearing. That's a pretty serious reduction in the maximum number of children you are likely to produce.
- How many do you want? 2 is quite normal, are you saying you'd only be able to have 3 maximum (but 2 in reality) instead of 12 maximum (but 2 in reality) or what?
- Also if you're 22 and chasing after a toddler, having more kids is going to be much more reasonable-sounding than if you're 32 or 42 doing the same.
Kids is fast.
- That or go "one and done" after having enough fun with:
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
- It's got an effect but agreed it's not the biggest effect given what else is going on. I think time might be the bigger factor here when simply discussing biology. If you have kids every ~3 years and don't start until you're 35, you have maybe 1.75 years of kids left in you before it starts getting tenuous. (ie, before the woman is over 40) That same math works out differently if your first kid is at 20.
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
- Agree and there are many reasons more.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
- Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
- I think the real interesting question isn't "why don't people have children" but more "why do those who have one or two kids not have more?" It seems everyone around came from a family of 6+ or knew those who did, yet everyone has 1 or 2 kids, three if the first two were both the same sex.
- I didn't choose to have kids, but I have a friend who prioritized doing so, and she talked about hoping to have a larger family. She got married and had her first child not long after graduating from college. So biologically a very healthy age.
She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.
In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.
Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.
- I go to church. Everyone has 3 kids. Thanks for bringing it up!
- In the U.S., birth rates fell pretty much continuously for at least 150 years until WWII and the Baby Boom. Now they are slightly declining again. Many industrialized nations have a similar graph.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
- So I think you're right, but my diagnosis of the problem is a little different.
As in: _why_ does everyone want a middle class life? _why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?
I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.
Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.
- There is the idea floating around in Europe, to nullify people’s student debts if they have children.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
- What are these European student debts you speak of, outside of the UK (which emphatically does not want to be considered part of Europe)?
- In Germany the government pays your university time. You get about 800€ per month for housing and basic needs. At least if your family is not too well off.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
- Similar in Norway. Except you have to pass exams to get part of it written off, if not you have to pay back 100%.
- but this is support for living expenses, not tuition. if you are frugal you can get by not spending all of it. that's what i did. when it was time to pay, i was able to pay off all of it at once which afforded me another discount.
- > was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
- It’s still pretty normal for public sector positions to have this discussions behind closed doors.
Once you have the job, it’s hard to fire you. So it’s a reoccurring pattern that people apply, work for the minimum needed time to get paid parental leave and then start to implement their family plans.
That is completely within their legal rights and for society as a whole it’s a good thing to have more kids.
At the same time it’s also bad for everyone else in the same team.
- Happens in Germany. As long as she can't prove it, she can't win a suit.
- >When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
- Hungary spent 5%(!) of its GDP on direct child benefits and instituted a lifelong tax exemption for women with 3 or more children and the birth rate rose by... ~0.15 for a few years and then dropped again.
For comparison I assume you're German given the username, here this would amount to 300 billion per year, which is about 100x what the government spends on BAföG (the mentioned federal student aid). I genuinely wonder how much countries will have to spend until people realize that this has quite literally nothing to do with money.
- I expect it has to do with money but is much more complicated than simply allocating a small yearly amount. By way of related analogy consider housing. If you provide a subsidy but the market is primarily constrained by an inelastic supply then all you will accomplish is raising rents. I assume that there are many such nuanced factors that all contribute to the birth rate.
- Hungary might also have a problem with too many young Hungarian women living abroad. It is hard to raise fertility if your locally present fertile population has already tanked.
- We're also teaching the younger generation imminent climate apocalypse is coming, and therefore bringing kids into this dying world would be cruel, or at best contributing to the problem.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
- actually we've been closer to WW3 in the past. Remember that Russian false sensor that almost caused them to launch a nuclear first strike but the guy whose finger was on the button felt something was off?
- I'm going to get flagged to hell but 'we' do not.
Women do.
Men can happily wait till their 80s to have three children.
We need to get over the fantasy that biology doesn't drive survival.
If anyone is upset by that please help fund artificial womb research. There isn't nearly enough money in the space for the sole thing that can prevent human extinction at worst or soylent green at best.
- Just thinking aloud.
Could it be that the "stories" we consume (books, movies, TV, games) fill our heads (as in, focus our attention) with ideas that don't overlap much with family life? It's all about single people doing cool or fun stuff, with the occasional tired parents.
I wonder how hard it would be to give credibility to the hypothesis (yeah, "verifying" it would be much harder). What's the correlation between "percentage of time spent on non family focused stories" and "children per woman born in the following 5 years"? Sounds like a super noisy signal. Maybe averaging by country or even city could strengthen the data.
- That seems like unnecessary complexity (and also doesn't match my own observations). You're replying here to a theory that it seems to me is sufficient on its own to explain the phenomenon, unless you see some issue with it? I'm not certain the theory is correct but I think it's entirely plausible and more importantly I've yet to encounter a better one.
- This narrative simply doesn't hold up at the population level.
If you just look at India, richer and more developed states have lower fertility compared to poorer, less developed states.
Within states, richer and more educated couples have fewer children compared to poorer less educated children.
These patterns are pretty much universal.
- This is talked about all the time in the US as a huge impending problem with articles about all the time. You have segment of population with higher education and higher wealth that are having fewer children and later in life as it takes more time to get secured financially and also children are very expensive in terms of maintaining what used to be a middle class life style.
- Or perhaps a small percentage(<1%) of the human race has 90% of the resources ?
You are only explaining half of the equation.
- It's not talked about more because it's very uncomfortable to talk about.
- I agree. It comes down to the opportunity cost for women to have babies.
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
- The implication of "and it turns out..." is that all else is equal, but clearly it's not. Would women still choose to have babies if they didn't have to work also? I admit that it's basically moot - we can't seem to figure out how to have a society where both members of a couple are free to choose whether or not to work. I'm only pointing out that this trend doesn't mean what you're implying about women's desires.
- If you don't think child rearing is work then you won't understand why women choose not to have kids in the first place. You cannot be a parent and choose not to work, period. Just because you're not getting paid and ordered around by an adult boss doesn't mean being a trad wife is magically somehow not work. In fact, at least with a regular 9-5 you get PTO and time off.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
- It should be framed as “taking a second job” rather than “not working”
- Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.
- I think that's a fair take. We could also frame it as society in the past has carried a lot of the burden of raising kids.
Tribes and communities helped raise kids. That's no longer true in an individualistic and institutionalized society.
- While none of this is wrong, men are also choosing not to have babies, which points to a broader root cause.
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- Take an average 22-year old. Tell them they just won the lottery, and never have to worry about money ever again. Do you think they'll be interested in starting a family?
- This routinely happens for professional athletes. Don't have any stats, but American professional athletes seem well known for having many children (with many people).
- Yup. People want a bit of hedonism. Who doesn't really? And society paints engaging in hedonism as fine in your 20s and evil for parents. Have kids? Goodbye partying. Goodbye hobbies. Goodbye a sense of agency. It doesn't have to be this way, but this is how it is framed both internally and externally.
- This absolutely would have sealed it for me. It would still seal it for me now.
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
- This is exactly it.
It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.
It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.
- So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
- Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc.
The incentives just aren't there.
- both parents having to work fulltime, and the severe hit to your career if you pause working while the children are young is the primary hindrance in my view.
- Yeah the career thing is huge, and also just a general lack of flexibility at a lot of companies. Expectations to be in-office, butt in chair for 8 hours a day, etc.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
- we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
- Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
- > didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
An early form of birth control in my home country was naming your baby Enough (Dosta). Not very efficient, obviously.
edit: it seems this was mostly used for breaking a streak of female babies (the name is feminine). but also in general.
- they didn't just happen, they were expected and demanded. there was social pressure to have children. that's still true in china today. some not yet grandparents put a lot of pressure on their children to give them grandchildren (sometimes very violently too), and i remember a comment in an earlier thread where someone told about the experience of their parents or grandparents where the local pastor was having a concerned talk with a childless couple.
- Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
- > Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
- pregnancy is literally a burden on women (and a few trans people)
- most people find great fulfillment in having children
- 'The benefits of continuing the existence of the species are not clear'
- Unironically why care if this species continues?
- Because it will be very messy and involve a lot of suffering if unmanaged.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
- The impact of humans on most other species, and the environment in general, isn't exactly positive.
- That's the neat part! You don't have to care. It will either way. But it's not looking great for liberalism (and that's good thing).
- To the individual here it now, they are not.
- > like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
- We spent decades fighting teen pregnancy for this?
- Yes I wonder why. Teen pregnancy sounds so amazing and inconsequential for individuals and societies alike that teens should just be inoculated as a rite of passage or something...
- compared to the alternative, it definitely is. The problems with it are mostly artificial ones our society created. If you were God and redesigned human society from scratch, why wouldn't you have them procreate in their most healthy, fertile, and horny years?
- the reason we have been fighting teen pregnancy is because as a society we decided not to support young parents, and because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing. i believe historically this comes from the fact that mothers used to stay at home, so as soon as you had a child you would not go to school anymore.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
- > because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing
Usually disappeared. Once DNA tests were invented, it became straighforward to go after them. Underrated breakthrough to support children and single mothers.
- https://www.ncsea.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Quick-Facts...
In the US, there is ~$115 billion worth of child support debt outstanding. Even with DNA testing, we’re not going after the folks who aren’t supporting their offspring, mostly because they are low income and have nothing to take to satisfy these debts.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-support-statistics
> Yet, 2020–2022 data in the KIDS COUNT® Data Center reveal that just 23% of U.S. female-headed families reported receiving any amount of child support during the previous year (down from 26% in 2018–2020). Female-headed families refer to unmarried women living with one or more of their own children under age 18, which may include stepchildren and adopted children.
> One in three kids — nearly 24 million kids total — lives with a single parent, mostly single moms. In fact, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, of the 10.9 million one-parent families with children under age 18, 80% were headed by a mother. This makes women the more frequent custodial parent and the majority of those who need child support.
While fertility rates are down, roughly 40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute). There is still much work to do to drive down the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
- yes, but what would be the point? they are still in school too, have no work and no income, so they are not going to pay child support either. the girl is better off without such a guy.
my point is to support couples who actually want to be together to build a family. getting pregnant from a guy you messed around with is not a family. the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making it easier to have wanted ones in a supportive environment. hunting down a guy who didn't mean to get you pregnant after it happens unintentionally doesn't accomplish that.
- In some tribal societies, everyone fucks everyone, whatever children are born are born, and since nobody knows who the father is they all care for all of them collectively.
Is it possible this is actually a better model than the nuclear family?
- Right train of thought, but as others have pointed out, this is spitting on a fire.
- in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough.
- Costs more than that.
- well, i did say it's not enough, but i disagree, if you assume free childcare, then the real cost according to statistics is not much higher than that because the bulk of the cost in those statistics comes from expensive childcare, yet, even free childcare does not help to motivate people to have more children.
- Right why would we change the behavior that got us here? Just provide some incentives and problem solved right?
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
- Why did people want to have them in the past, and what shifts do you think could undo industrialization enough to return to that?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
- > Why did people want to have them in the past
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
- Hard wired to want children and hard wired to want sex are two very different things.
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
- I think just about everyone wants more sex than children. That said, many people would love the responsibility of raising a child but don't feel like they can afford it.
- I don't mean it as a cost benefit thing, but people thinking that family is important, that they want and need family there for them in their old age, and so on.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
- how about making your pension depend on the number of kids? take an average pension now: X=100%, take half of it as a base, and then add a quarter or one fifth per child. so a childless person gets half the current pension, 1 child gives you 75% or 70%, 2 children 100% or 90%, 3 children 125% or 110%, etc...
- Sounds good, until you start arbitrarily punishing people who, for one reason or another, just can't have kids (reasons can be many, for one, biology is a bitch).
- that's a defeatist attitude. it's not like we can't make exceptions. or arrange for other ways to earn your pension. besides, if you don't have children you get more time to work, so you pay more, which means, the benefit for parents is actually offsetting lost work time.
which is another approach. how about for each child you get automatically accounted a number of years of payments as if you had earned money. if it takes 30 years of work to earn enough for a decent pension, and every child counts for 5 years then 3 children would allow you to get the same pension with only 15 years of work. how is that?
btw, the global infertility rate is 5%. the global disability rate is 10%. those people are also affected by not being able to work. in other words, 15% of the population are unable to fully contribute to pension funds. where a full contribution means work and having children. but making children a pension contribution actually helps a number of disabled who are still able to have children. so now they are able to contribute more than they would if we ignored children as a contribution.
seriously, this constant shooting down of ideas just because it appears that one group is disadvantaged is tiring. try thinking a bit more creatively and help come up with a solution.
- We don't have pensions any more
- More like guaranteed housing because not even having a college degree is a sufficient condition to enter the middle class in this day and age.
- Even wealthy nepo people wait until then to have kids. A big part of it is also societal expectations. Going out every weekend clubbing is seen as fine in your 20s. Even if that specifically isn't your thing, you probably are filling your time with something personally gratifying.
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
- There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial support. Add that into your observation that the world is more fun and selfish and it multiplies.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
- I love how the original post says this happens across vastly different societies regardless of all these different variables people are offering as possible explanations. For example, in India (which this article is about), women have a much lower rate of workforce participation than other industrialized countries. I think a lot of people who are replying are men and don't understand how physically tasking and painful pregnancy is. It seems like most women are fine having two if there's a high chance they'll make it to adulthood and they have access to family planning/contraceptives. That makes sense to me. Not sure why this is so confounding to people. Not much more of an explanation needed than that lol
- I agree that women's employment is the common factor in all societies with reduced birth rates.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
1. Teen Births in the United States: Overview and Recent Trends, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184
- > A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate
This was my first intuition.
- This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.
- Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.
- > Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies
If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas that remain high cost.
- Small towns survived for millennia before industrialization; and they could likely survive again, if anyone wanted that life.
- The Venn diagram of "people that want traditional small town life" and "people that currently live in a small town" has a smaller overlap than you'd think.
The small towns in my area are desirable not just because they're small, but because they're small and have the same amenities as a bigger town. These towns are also increasingly relying on debt to fund decades of deferred maintenance just to keep the amenities they already have alive.
This would become dire if (for example) property values fell, as residential real estate taxes make up the majority of tax revenue. This might happen if demand for the town fell (perhaps due to fewer people), which would quickly become a catastrophic cycle (revenues fall, roads and schools deteriorate, which makes the town less desirable, repeat ad infinitum).
- if they work at companies we have 2x the workers
i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.
- It’s a valid theory, and I certainly think it’s a contributor, but I would also argue that the “boom” years of fertility in modernity have been tied to periods of widespread benefit for most, if not all. When prospective parents and grandparents see the potential for a brighter future, there’s more societal pressure to have kids because their success will naturally boost your own. Then when the vice starts tightening, the idea is that having more kids improves your own prospects of survival and comfort in old age.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
- "But we gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them and it didn't measurably affect their marginal propensity to have children at all! Extractive economics couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fertility crisis!"
- There's some evidence that mobile phone access is one of the biggest drivers in this. This talks about teen fertility but I'd imagine it's similar in other age categories as well.
https://homepages.uc.edu/~moscoshn/Personal_webpage/papers/S...
- Interesting. Once you have a cellphone to amuse yourself, perpetuating the species is just too much bother?
- Or you spend all your time on your phone and can't understand why you're just not getting ahead in life.
- Maybe people don't meet in person any more because they call each other = less teen pregnancy instincts.
- i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
- A lot of people think they need to do this but it's really not true. You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids. And in terms of avoiding complications and having energy, 18-25 years old is probably the best time.
- In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it.
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
- Daycare used to be essentially free when I was growing up. Some workplaces had a little daycare wing. Gyms had them. So many adult sort of third places just had a place to plop your kids with a smattering of toys. Now people are paying $3000 a month so they can go to a spin class.
- And yet I bet there are thousands of young people in Seattle having kids. These limits are all about what kind of life you want for yourself, and not about what is possible.
- Implied in their comment is that they don’t want to be homeless and hungry, which I think is a fair prerequisite before having children.
- The parents at my kid’s daycare were in their late twenties / early thirties, had professional degrees (lawyers, physicians, tech) and only one kid in the daycare.
[edit to add this: I am talking from experience, it seems you are talking from hearsay]
- I mean, living in a garbage dump is possible, millions of of people do it around the world.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
- It's possible, but if you do it in a developed country they'd take you to jail. Just like the law imposed a minimum wage, it also imposed a mandatory minimum standard of living.
- [flagged]
- You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
- Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society
- > You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
- > You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
- The government absolutely lets people starve to death. Have you ever tried to get any welfare? It's gatekept to hell.
- I haven't checked the data for myself, but supposedly, while still not a common cause of death, malnutrition is the fastest growing cause of death in the US (https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/health-and-famili...)
- Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1102/
And according to your article, this is almost exclusively a problem with the elderly:
> Those aged 85 and older die from malnutrition at a rate about 60 times higher than the rest of the American population, with deaths in that group increasing about twice as fast.
(Of course, I'd expect those aged over 85 to be dying at a much higher rate from _most_ causes.)
- You should try it because I bet you'll find out why pretty fast. It just isn't worth it.
- If you have kids and don't have life stability, everyone will call you irresponsible and the government may take your kids away, right?
- > You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
- but this comes from parents being expected to have their life figured out and not giving them any help. if we accept as normal that young parents will not have their life figured out then we will also make sure that we don't leave them alone but actually support them.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
- I think you are correct, but not in a manner likely to happen.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
- ouch, i can't imagine the stress your parents must have been under that they lost control like that, or the pain you had to experience. i can somewhat sympathize. my dad had a rough temper too at times, but nowhere near what you describe. and we lived in germany where we got financial support from the government. not being able to pay rent is not a thing there. if that was all it took to set your parents off then this totally could have been prevented with a better welfare system.
- I have more energy in my 30s than my 20s
- > You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
- The only thing you lose there are the trips. If anything your social life can blossom.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
- > If anything your social life can blossom.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
- That's not true! Sometimes you get to spend time with grandparents of same-aged children!
- It is hard to explain to 20 year olds that bragging about their trip to Europe means nothing when you are 45.
- Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.
- Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
- You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.
- If you're at a certain income, additional kids is additional income as more and more gets taken care of.
And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.
- Yup. And it tends to cluster around rural and sectarian lines.
When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.
- We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.
- If you fail to pass on your genetics, are your really smarter?
- Potentially. You're mixing "fitness" with "intelligence" -- there's no guarantee that "intelligence" will guarantee fitness.
- If you fail to achieve goals, you're not smarter.
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
- What does the individual get out of passing on their genetics?
- That depends on whether or not you value passing on your genetics.
- Is intelligence correlated with having kids?
- Are you implying homosexuals et al are somehow inherently dumber?
- “So you hate waffles?”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...
- No, I'm responding to a comment.
- Right, and you seemed to imply that smartness can be measured in how many live copies of one's genes one manages to produce.
- Sort of. The idea that we're somehow smarter today is nonsense on stilts.
- Smartest was 10-15 years ago. Flynn effect reversed.
- we are not smarter, but we have access to more knowledge
- I wonder about that. How much of the knowledge we're exposed to is actually true?
- And other people are judging your comment as dumb and somewhat misunderstanding of genetics/fitness.
- And I'm judging them in turn for not understanding intelligence or genetics or fitness and for being passive/aggressive.
- Were they Catholic? Contraception was a sin back then.
- Respectfully, you don't know why you put off children. You may tell yourself a story of why you have, but for example if there was an environmental contaminant shaping population level stats on endocrines and hormones that reduced human sex drive and desire for children, you wouldn't necessarily be conscious of that.
- Eh, that argument works on any claim and is nonfalsifiable-ish, so I think it can be ignored.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
- We know some of the pharmaceutical residues in our sewage turn frogs gay (that really happened, that wasn't AJ making something up). We know pharmaceuticals can greatly affect people's sex drive, general mood, and other psychological factors. It's definitely not a stretch to guess we might be doing it to ourselves.
- You got people angry about that.
I agree with you.
Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!
- both points are fair, but operate at different levels. the former: willpower. the latter: constraints.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
- I didn't make a claim humans have no free will, moreso that we cannot accurately judge our own motivations/drives.
- yeah make sense, we do things, rationalize them later, i get it, i certainly am sensitive to it.
- People are very conscious that a child costs a lot to raise and the reality is usually worse than their estimates. They know children will impact their career and promotion opportunities, so a lower expected income just when they need it more. They know they no longer live next to their parents so the support structure they have in place is flimsy.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
- Okay
- I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.
The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction.
As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack.
What’s going to happen over the next few decades is that a few variants here and there are going to spread throughout the population that actually lead to more kids, not just through desire for sex. It will be a population crash, followed by a recovery.
- Last month, the US Census Bureau released their 2025 population estimates. In the ~5 years from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025, it estimates Kiryas Joel's population grew from 32,956 to 47,147 – a 43.1% increase. [0] That's not spectacular in the figures themselves–you'll see bigger bumps when new suburbs are established–but it is spectacular in being almost all due to natural increase instead of migration.
Evolution is still working, if we understand it as having both biological and cultural components. Give it a few centuries, and secular people will be outnumbered by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Amish, and radtrad Catholics, and Mormon polygamists, and so on. That's the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? – and I believe, on the whole, he's right.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kiryasjoelvilla...
- >I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.
Extremely easy to beat that.
You can see that global population used to stay at around half a billion until around 1700. The growth is a recent thing.
So let me propose a more controversial theory - lead made people have a lot of children.
You can't beat this.
- Lead? Lead was used for millenia. The Romans made copious use of lead.
- And the Romans had many children?
Humans had many offspring for millennia, humanity has had fewer offspring since lead has been banned.
I'm not the one proposing the theory, but that's a correlation.
- Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community?
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
- I'd call it hedonism if a couple wants to be able to go out on a date on a whim, easily take a vacation, watch adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room, maintain good sleep/health habits, keep a flexible schedule unconstrained by school pickups/staying home with a sick kid, etc.
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
- It's unclear what you're saying. Obviously it's not hedonistic to "want" those things, as you say. You might use the term if they try to have their cake and eat it too, irresponsibly.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
- As I wrote in another reply, I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which was a mistake on my part. My general point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) yield more individual pleasure than having children.
- I've heard a lot of vox pops in recent years on the subject of why young couples where I live are not starting families, and by far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable. It's not a yearning for hedonism that's dissuading them, it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
- >[B]y far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/19/viktor-orbans-pr...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/south-korea-fe...
[2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/boosting-birth-rates...
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
- The incentives you mentioned are meek, the opposite of aggressive.
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US: 1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
- How aggressive are those incentives really, compared to cost of childcare? Do they fully cover the cost of daycare and education for the kids for 18 years, alongside paying for a larger home?
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
- And do you think this is bad?
- I never made any value judgment on whether it’s bad or good. “Hedonism” is simply the focus of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, and everything I listed is an example of things that lead to individual happiness that are antithetical to having many children.
- Why do you think people have children then? Is that not (perhaps a bad) attempt at hedonism? I've heard (esp women) say "I can't be happy unless I have children". Then they have children, and... it often turns into "why isn't the father helping more".
- Having children is profoundly more fulfilling and pleasurable than the surface-level pleasures you listed. "hedonism" doesn't create a lack of children, if anything people are not hedonistic enough, but for economic reasons pursue cheap low-quality pleasure over high-quality pleasure.
- Not to mention that everyone finds unprotected sex pretty darn hedonistic.
- Hedonism is bad because:
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so. - chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
- Happiness is the emotional reward for eudaimonia. Since I mostly reject eudaimonia as people and genes offering you carrots for doing what they want, not what you want, I naturally don't feel happiness like someone who's like "I'm winning, life is meaningful, others think well of me". I seek out hedonic pleasure because I think it's more real than happiness.
- I wonder how those who have experienced the pleasure of having 1000 children experience that compared to the first one.
- It's a shame we can't ask Genghis Khan for his thoughts on the matter.
- > OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
I am not actually sure that this is consistent across most people who have had children.
- Certainly not. It's much more likely to be successful than getting it from work, though.
- The degeneracy of these millennials who want to maintain healthy sleep habits...
- Funny enough I know lots of millennials without children with horrible sleep patterns and habits.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
- Children surely help you get your shit together. Otoh if you don't have your shit together, adding children into the mix is a little unfair to the children.
- > Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing...
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
- I don't think most child-free adults are forgoing children to perform works of mercy. Perhaps some do, but it's not the majority.
The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". As in caring for children is on par with imprisonment.
Now I don't mind mind people opting out of having children to live a hedonistic life, my only issue is describing it as a noble cause.
- >The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free".
Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.
- > Also, the parent did not make this implication
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
Terms do have an intention behind them.
- > refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
- I’m not the one claiming having children is noble, parent was claiming that people are forgoing having children as a noble act.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
- My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.
- Using your own logic, didn't you just equate LSD and Ibuprofen to cancer?
- Part of it is activities but I think the majority is that if you want a good living, you have to work in cities. But cities are very expensive to live in due to unaffordable housing. Not to mention people don’t feel secured when employment is so unstable. People don’t want to take the risk to have kids if they can’t afford a permanent home and stable employment.
- This is likely a very significant factor as urbanization has been extremely rapid, and historically cities kept their populations afloat by a constant influx of people from rural areas.
- I’d argue that most of those support and incentives are barely enough in modern societies.
In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.
So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.
And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.
All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.
- This seems like the obvious explanation, though I think your use of the term "hedonism" is distracting. People are inherently selfish (how could any entity not be "self"-ish to some degree?). The bottom line is that we do things because we want to. Even selfless activities feel good. That's fine, honestly. But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from.
- Agreed with everything you wrote. I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which judging by the other replies was a mistake on my part.
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
- I agree a lot with your hypothesis. Most people in my demographic (mid 30s American) that aren't having kids are choosing not to primarily because they don't want to really interfere with their current lifestyle. Money seems to be a part of it, but secondary to the high opportunity cost of children.
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
- From the abstract of your link 2:
> As indicated by the results: (1) Family welfare policies notably boost fertility, and the boosting effect is long-lasting
There appears to be a concerned effort to claim that incentivising raising children doesn't work.
Clearly the people with (control of) the money don't feel like spending it on this.
- I grew up blue collar and pitched in with my father's work from a very young age. As a child I was able to balance out the time and expense of raising me by contributing back to the household. I have children and they just cannot contribute to my white collar job. They can participate in some chores, but they are essentially a massive money pit. Daycare is more than my mortgage. Public school gets out at like 2:30. It's just so exhausting sometimes.
- They don't have afterschool care anymore in schools? We had that both formally and informally (e.g. through sports).
- It takes a village.
- For this theory to be plausible we need to imagine that hedonistic creatures couldn't find anything more hedonistic than caring for multiple kids before industrialization. It doesn't sound realistic, mildly speaking. The modern culture simply doesn't oblige you to marry, and procreate the way it did 1-2 (depending on where you are) generations before. In the times of my mother's youth not marrying before 25-26, and not having at least one kid before 30 could really negatively affect someone's social standing. There are segments of modern West where culture still prioritizes procreation (like Orthodox Jews you mention, or old school Catholics) and they do procreate successfully despite being the same creatures as everyone else. Preferred hedonism is in culture, not nature.
- It's not just about fun. We are beaten into believing we need an education, a career, a home, stability before we have children.
We're having kids in our 40s when our parents started in their 20s. We're naturally less able to have as many because menopause kicks in.
There are no easy answers here. Younger pregnancy limits education and careers.
- And this is terrific news for the future. A nation of our size just cannot afford to have more than ~400 million people without severe issues causing extremely poor quality of life. We are already bursting at the seams at 1.5 billion and will be suffering deeply when it reaches 1.8 billion. (Also, the current adult population is higher than the official figures)
We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".
- Even with extensive support and subsidies from the state, having children is an economic loss for the individual in today's society. Back in agricultural society, having children was an economic gain, because you could put them to do work for you.
Now if the state wants children it would need to pay both for the missed fun times and also the missed career opportunities that come from having children.
- > more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
- I think this is close but misses the only thing that really matters: birth control makes it a choice. We are just 3 generations into being able to decide whether or not sex means kids. And making that positive choice takes a lot of energy.
- I think it's not industrialization but urbanization.
- That one ranks high on my list. If you're a farmer in the countryside children are an economic asset. They can feed the animals, plant, weed the crops, maintain fencing, etc. Once you move to the city, whatever else they are in terms of fulfillment, they're an economic liability.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
- Is this still true when machines do the farming?
- Yes, because you can let your kids use the machines at ages that would scandalize the urbanites (check the laws for your state, you find things like "twelve year olds can operate farm machinery incidentally on a road or highway").
- Not as much, but once you start mechanized farming you don't need many people in agriculture. There are few enough farmers in industrialized countries that they don't affect demographics much.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
- Unless one gets a large van, daily life becomes less convenient beyond 2 kids.
Midsize sedan/SUV aren’t great at more than 2 parents + 2 kids (especially with car seats!)
Vacations are also more expensive since a lot of hotel rooms don’t allow more than 2 adults + 2 kids.
More is also harder on the parents !
- Hotel + plane flights is too expensive for large families.
I try to drive and stay in Airbnbs, and then doesn't matter how many kids.
- For the first time ever people can finally choose not to have kids.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
- 1. Climate change is most certainly not an extinction level event. 2. I spend many days with kids. They are great. I suggest you do the same and experience the human experience. Someone had to deal with the piece of crap you were when you were 2 years old, after all. 3. You'll stop praising the lack of children when you are 80 and nobody young wants to take care of you. You will have a lonely, lonely existence.
- My love for my daughter and my wife enrich my life and contribute more to my happiness than anything else, by far. As you wrote, the majority of the very, very hard work has fallen to my wife. I wouldn't fault any woman, or man, for not wanting it.
Still, my wife and I both feel that parenting is the best thing we've ever done or will ever do. It's everything I hoped it would be -- and much more besides. The benefits are innumerable for us.
- The way I understand it, the modern sentiment is to have children meaningfully, raising them being a project parents actively invest into. Contraception brought choice, choice brought up consideration and planning. This all opened the can of "what are we doing" and "why do we do it" and "how do we do it right", that tended to be ignored in previous eras (where having or not having children was not exactly a real choice).
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
- As a dad of (soon) 3, I would say that social media/etc have raised the expectations of parenting. Keep in mind that the kids aren't the only ones growing up and learning - the parents are too. And hopefully learning from their parents too.
"Being ready" to have a child is an impossibility so you have to embrace the unknown and be ok with mistakes. Kids are resilient, and many millions have had to do with less.
- I understand about the impossibility of being ready. No one is ever ready for something they do for the first time. As any complex and long project, there's theoretical preparation and there's practice with its constant ongoing course correction when (not "if") something doesn't go as planned. It's not an immediate issue or reason, at least not for me.
And another thing I understand is that some people actively want to raise children. You surely do. But I simply don't feel that way. Like, there's no inner sense of calling, or desire, or any moving thought or similar emotion or drive. Nothing like "yes, I want to do it".
And doing this not because I want it, but for the society's sake? It is an idea that makes sense, but but knowing the difficulties and stakes involved, a "why not" is pretty obvious to me. I most certainly don't want to spend significant resources of my lifespan on raising a kid I didn't even want. And thus I'm really glad that it's an option.
- That all makes total sense.
To be fair, I only realized I really wanted to kids once my wife and I started really considering it and my friends started having them.
- I'm the same as you. I, too, think it's just opportunity cost. Even a superficial model will show some effect as median income rises https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...
- I would argue it is due to nuclearisation of families, that has always accompanied industrialisation. See my other comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416228
- Fascinating hypothesis. I wonder if technological and economic progress makes "nuclearisation" inevitable, i.e. people can just move wherever the best money is at.
- it's more like people are forced to move where the jobs are. mobility is demanded by the industry.
- I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
- The links you posted seem to say that government fertility support policies actually do have a big effect.
- People who have children often report it being the most fulfilling thing they ever did, while other pleasures are temporary. So I don't know if I can buy this argument.
- Or: boring people who have nothing fulfilling in their lives often report having children is the most fulfilling?
- Hard to assign that a value before you are a parent though. You can only understand it in the abstract.
- >due to its Orthodox Jewish population
and its use of United States tax dollars to fund social services that make it possible to raise their broods that American citizens simply don't get.
- you are right IN:
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
(source: father of twins, and nearly bankrupt regardless of my tech-job, nontheless my kids me more than our usual career-shit)
- [*] All parts of the Israeli population have high birth rates, even the secular Jews. I find it misleading to single out Orthodox Jews as the main contributor. You don't do that to Evangelical Christians or Mormons, or some other groups in US.
I don't think the religion is the driver here.
- It looks like a regional phenomenon - countries near to Israel have a similar fertility rate.
see (Middle East fertility rates) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
and (OECD fertility rates)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html
- University students are predominantly female in Israel as in North America, so female education isn't a differentiator for fertility rate.
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
- Here are the figures by group in Israel [1]:
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
- The OPs (incorrect in this very minor detail) point was that fertility is below replacement everywhere except Israel, where the only reason it wasn't below replacement was Orthodox religious members of society. That's just wrong. Fertility in Israel, across every single group except for one in your own data, is above replacement. Orthodox are the highest, and bringing the overall number up, but if you removed them, fertility in Israel would still be comfortably above replacement.
So no, their characterization was not correct, since the point was that, absent a particular group, fertility would be, like in almost every other OECD (and many non OECD) countries, below replacement.
- I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to. Let me break that norm for a second.
So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
- > but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
- > you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to
I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?
- I don’t buy that having children is the only really rewarding thing you could do as a human.
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
- In surveys, Orthodox Jewish women rate their happiness with life higher than secular women. You could argue that this is subjective, but I think you would find the same if you look at other derived markers, like substance abuse, suicide, etc.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
- > the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the “soyboy” type of person
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
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- > My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.
Or, as societies industrialize, life becomes more complex, time-consuming, and tiring than the simpler ways of life people were used to and able to manage...
- I know the "bring them into this world" thing is overdone, but a big part of me feels it to my core.
I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical.
How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
- >I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
Who is focused on destroying the world?
I don't think hardly any super villains exist. People might have a different assessment of what destroying the world means than you do.
- Many people think a well manicured lawn sprayed with pesticides is preferable to local wildflowers and shrubs.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
- SamPatt, it isn't necessarily individuals making individual decisions. Yeah, very few supervillains.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
We live in a blessed window.
- People shutting down efforts to transition from fossil fuels because they can make more money from fossil fuels and will be dead before they experience any of the consequences are the typical example.
- > I don't think hardly any super villains exist.
We have billionaries and LLCs, supervillains whose superpowers are based on being rich, don't worrying about the future much beyond the next quarter, and pretending personhood to hold rights like people, but without the possibility of getting arrested.
- I hate to say it, but I have been feeling the same way recently. I just don't see humanity being sustainable on this planet if we are relying on constantly producing more and more people. There has to be an equilibrium of some kind.
- I doubt anybody wants to produce more and more people. Most predictions for total population size I have seen are rather asymptotic.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
- I mean, a one child policy would be more sustainable than a zero child reality.
- A pawn of consumerism? Please, please, I beg you. Detail a single communist civilization that thrived. Give me a break.
The world is actually great, you are just focused on the negatives.
Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?
What a sad, resigned way to think about the world.
- Why do you think every society is either consumerist or communist?
- An odd example, as fireflies are still pretty big in the places they have always been, aren't they? I know when I get to visit my childhood states, they are still there. Similar for cicadas and other bugs of my youth that I didn't realize were far more local than I expected.
- It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
- I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.
- One could make the point this is less about industrialization causing a change in behavior, and more chemical pollution destroying fertility. Of which we have plenty of concrete evidence.
- Except evidence does not show that there are many more people trying and failing for kids as in past decades, so much as more people are delaying partnering up and having kids till later and later, along with many opting to be childless.
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
- Chemical pollution could do that. We see it in other animals. Endocrine disruptors and stuff.
- The massive change is the transformation of women's role in society and education.
Essentially for pregnancies at 25 years old or later there are no number changes. Women of that age have as many kids as they ever had.
But, pregnancies for very young women and teenagers has virtually disappeared. As women start having children much later, they simply have much less.
As a millennial in southern Europe, the average age of our mothers in early 20s.
35 years later, the average age of first time mothers in my group is 33+.
The article you're commenting points it out as well:
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions.
- > and offering extensive support and incentives to parents
Most studies show that support and incentives is borderline money thrown away if the incentive is to have more kids.
You are giving money to people that would've had kids anyway.
- you are right IN:
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
- It’s not that complicated. As soon as women are educated and have a choice of supporting themselves the birth rate drops. If you want a higher birth rate, stop educating women and disempower them. This is something republicans in the US intimately understand.
- Can't decipher sarcasm level
- While this is generally true, the first derivative of the baby bust curve is far from uniform across the planet. Indian fertility drop has been very sharp and who knows where it will end.
- Which is not a bad thing. We have limited resources. It’s not a bad thing to slow down. Even if we’re having fewer babies, we’re far from endangered, despite some (dishonest, IMO) narratives.
- My theory is different. Decades of officials telling people that the world was overpopulated. That global warming was going to kill us all and any children born would be subjected to horrific conditions.
Well mission accomplished.
- >My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
- having kids is a blast
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
- Despite that, China has a fertility rate of 0.93, which is among the lowest in the world, and certainly much lower than the US (1.6).
So it doesn't seem that that cultural difference boosts the fertility rate all that much.
- china destroyed its fertility rate with the one-child policy. so that is not comparable.
- That's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain why nearby/culturally related countries like South Korea and Taiwan have similar or even lower fertility rates, despite never having a one child policy.
And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.
- >in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children,
huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)
- i am not chinese, it's just an observation from living there.
- How people feel about having kids doesn't seem to be a uniform thing. The majority of parents certainly seem to love their children, but I do see a lot of mixed opinions about whether they love being parents.
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
- In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
- I've heard of some schools doing this fake baby thing where you have to carry a sack of potatoes everywhere you go for a week.
- The main problem is the culture of consumerism.
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
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- Except in [0] the birth rate is relatively flat between 1950-1970 and then suddenly starts a rapid reduction. Developed countries have already been industrialized for 100 years by that point. The modern work day and access to many modern fun and rewarding activitys have been available for literal decades. Mass urbanization already occurred. Many of the modern household appliances have been in use for decades. Antibiotics, vaccines, and childhood mortality had already been dramatically reduced to within the vicinity of modern norms. In developed countrys female workforce participation, education, and political activity were material with no clear fundamental shift in those metrics in the 1960s-1970s.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...
[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...
- I think that is it. We have somewhat of a confirmation with Romania and Decree 770, which led to an increase in children (though that might have been temporary I'm not well versed in the history). I think there is no inherent desire to have children or if there is, it is far weaker than a lot of people think. And it makes sense, evolutionary. If you have a desire for self-preservation, a desire for the preservation of those close to you, a desire to nurture the young (once they are there, which also shows in seeing 'cuteness') and a desire for sex, then you don't really 'need' a desire for children directly, because the children will naturally follow from that chain of desires. It just fits with how evolution seems to works (I think at least), which often causes these daisy chains of things that work intermittently to cause something else.
- Thinking along those lines, a desire to "have children" may have even been bad - no built in stopping point. New child every year, resources overwhelmed...
- There was a science fiction story I read about that once, an alien species that would die if they didn't give birth every year. I think they tried everything from hormone modification to mass baby dump pits but they couldn't maintain a stable society for longer than about fifty years when overpopulation killed everyone, so thrt just gave up.
Actually more than one, because I also read one about scientists deciphering messages from aliens who used the word for "baby eater" to mean "good"
- Yeah, the big secret out there is that half of people once born might have been unwanted and "accidental", if not more.
- And those in turn might not want to be here themselves and when given the choice decide to break the chain.
- This is table stakes obvious, though? Again we see the weirdness of having an almost exclusively male conversation about the subject.
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.
- because they are on a medication that makes their body think they are pregnant already
women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
- it’s funny how much mental gymnastics people will do to avoid this obvious answer
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
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- The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence:
"It takes a village to raise a kid".
Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%.
When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society.
Add to that all the other factors like:
- both parents working often without the grandparents nearby or even willing to help
- unnafordable housing, even when renting
- effectively delayed adulthood (university) into the 30s
- falling fertility from whatever chemicals we're poisoning ourselves with
- anti-natalist messaging
- etc.
- Yes, my wife and I live away from family. On the weekends, when there is no nanny, we are at work 100% of the time with him. One's only downtime is when he naps, or when your partner is looking after him.
Once we add a second child to that mix it'll be 100% of each of our time the entire time.
It's pretty extreme.
We both work full time (like most millennial families), so if we couldn't afford a nanny we literally could not have a child.
- If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think that two kids takes twice as much effort as one kid? People broadly agree that cost and effort both grow sublinearly. Especially effort, though it is of course much harder to quantify. But personally I suspect that even four kids (serially) may not cross the twice-as-much-effort threshold. Aging affects the amounts and types of effort required, too. Four kids in parallel (quadruplets) will definitely be more than twice as much effort for quite some time!
- I'm a father of 2. If not for my mother in law I would have gone insane by now. Way harder than 1. 1 was mainly hard because we had no idea what we were doing. With 1 it is pretty easy for a parent to take over while the other rests. Not so with 2 kids.
Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.
- Effort is definitely sub linear. And costs even more so.
Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk. The active cook time itself does not increase much either.
Hand me down clothing and books are all shared. The kids also help watch, teach, and entertain each other.
I feel sorry for children that grow up without siblings. But even more so for parents that that choose to not have any at all.
- > Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk.
Ah, now that was a challenge when I moved out of home. In theory I knew I was buying for 1 instead of 10, but it still took me a while to adapt. I had pretty much never seen food go stale or bad before!
- Do you have two or more kids? I say it’s different. For people with more kids, a single child seems like a walk in the park. Because in the worst case at least one parent is "free". With two or more kids the default is being fully occupied or if one partner takes all of them for the other to have free time, it’s insanely draining and the other partner feels almost pressure to make the sacrifice worth it.
This of course being said about the situation without any parents around. The step from two to three is worse for car/transportation and hotel room but I think it’s not nearly as hard as from one to two.
What you also have to consider: You’re gonna have bad nights. With one kid only, it’s fine. You can recover. With two, you simple don’t have room for that. The bad nights will eat you up.
- It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids
I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep things in line
Now my daughter has just 3-5 kids of her age in my locality, and because they don't have any older siblings, they always have to be accompanied by adults
- Honestly that resonates with me. I haven't made up my mind 100% about the topic, but I can say it would be an easier decision if there was a stronger support network. Watching single children be bored and play with their semi-enthusiastic parents makes me sad.
But it's not all doom and gloom, there are plenty of areas where families live and you see gangs of kids of various age-groups roam the streets and parks.
- feeling sorry for single children is just weird, not going to lie. I was a single child. Yes i had many boring days as a toddler. I’m not a sad adult because of that, i’m happily married and expecting my 1st soon. One of my parents passed lately, that had a much more profound impact on me than any boredom during toddlerhood. Playing by myself as a toddler fostered a lot of creativity and imagination… you need that to play by yourself after all.
Eventually my mom set up a “play date” up the street with a neighbor around my age, and that was the start of proper friendship and fun. And when i learned how to socialize and share better.
It sounds like you see many “semi-enthusiastic” parents. Children should ideally live near other children so they can make friends. Or be enrolled in some type of pre-k so they can make friends. That’s a (parent) life decision problem, not a “i have no siblings problem”. There’s also plenty of siblings who don’t get along anyway so that’s a poor reason to have a 2nd.
- I'm in the Netherlands, and my partner and I don't want kids for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one for us and many other friends of ours is the obscene costs of having a child. Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.
I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us. Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH. Now, most people get some form of gov't support for things like these, but we definitely wouldn't due to my income, and while I'm well off, I'm not that well off to be able to afford an expense like that.
Not to mention all the other costs associated with having a child, both material like the ludicrous price of housing but also mental.
- > Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH.
Very attractive numbers. I should look into the daycare business. I am guessing the people running daycare centers probably have several tax incentives too.
- > Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.
Perhaps the price of living to which you are accustomed to is absurd.
> I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us.
Would it though? Couples having been raising children with much less for millennia.
> Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH.
Children have a lot of economies of scale. If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.
Spending time with grandparents is also common. This is both cost effective and facilitates generational knowledge and culture transfer.
- > If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.
That's debatable ;)
I have two kids, and taking care of both during the day is vastly harder - both mentally and physically - than working two jobs. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and I don't think many people have that village anymore. As a result, a lot of kids are being raised by TV or the internet, and if you don't want that, you'll find yourself occupied with them almost 100% of the time.
Another issue is that the spouse who stays home can effectively kiss their career goodbye if they spend seven or eight years out of the workforce. Given current divorce rates, that's not a trivial risk.
I wish I had grandparents living nearby, but that's not the case either.
I'm not saying it's impossible - I have two children myself and would probably have had more if I'd started earlier - but it's not easy. And, judging from my admittedly small sample size, it seems to be getting harder.
- This varies majorly by child, parent/caretaker, and environment. For instance with my children if we go outside, then they are on full auto mode. They could play in the yard by themselves pretty much all day long as long as at least one parent's nearby watching them. But if we're indoors then they demand full attention. On the other hand somehow our nanny has got them to be able to happily play indoors while she mostly just chills out doing stuff on her phone or whatever - and I have no complaints since it works out great for everybody.
- > Perhaps the price of living to which you are accustomed to is absurd.
That is not really an actionable observation. The Netherlands is an extremely dense country already, what is OP exactly supposed to do to make their cost of living non-absurd?
> Couples having been raising children with much less for mill
It wasn't just couples then, though. It was the entire village or neighbourhood: cousins, aunts, neighbours, godparents. Nowadays our society is so fragmented that you indeed usually are alone to tackle everything. This change from extended family to nuclear family model definitely has some impact on total fertility.
> Children have a lot of economies of scale. If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.
Which also means that there is no spouse's income anymore. Unless your spouse makes really little money, you will end up in a similar financial hole either way.
> Spending time with grandparents is also common. This is both cost effective and facilitates generational knowledge and culture transfer.
If people have kids in their 30s, the grandparents are quite often too old and sick to help. They may also live way too far to be able to visit daily or even weekly.
- I’m really interested how you got these numbers. Using some of the daycare providers in our most expensive city (Amsterdam) with an obscene collective income (250k) with 5 full days of daycare (which not many parents even want) I get net 1300 per child.
For 3 days with more normal incomes it is closer to 700-800 euros
- My friend works in large tech; think SV, a satellite office in Amsterdam. Both of them earn greatly. With two kids, they literally don't have any saving at the end of the month. With 52% taxes and mortgage, even with child benefits. of course you don't pay a lot for the education, but the daily operational cost is very high. Small unplanned activity in NL can make you go in the red. Rising energy and grocery prices are not helping either.
Reddit for expat in netherlands is full these posts.
- My mother told me that daycare used to be FREE in the 70s and early 80s. She was a working single mother.
Vote long enough for the VVD and you will see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
- The demographic structure was also different.
Europe has become a pensioner-heavy society since then, these people vote, and vote, quite logically, for the welfare system to support themselves.
All the rich societies which slowly transform from 10 per cent old people to 40 per cent old people will have similar cashflow changes.
- I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is:
Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex without creating kids (and in particular, which allows women to avoid having kids even when they are raped), then the natural result is that there are a lot fewer babies popping out.
Because for the majority of sex acts, babies were never the goal in the first place.
- I don't think the data support the conclusion that contraceptives are the main driver behind the decline in fertility. Contraceptives have been available for a long time and fertility is continually decreasing even when nothing changes in the availability of contraceptives.
Also, data going further back show that fertility has been declining since before contraceptives were widely available. Sweden for example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033535/fertility-rate-s...
- It seems a natural consequence of the pill is going to be that in a few generations, most of the people will be of the kind for whom babies are a goal if not the main goal.
Thinking of the Amish, or Orthodox Jews, or Trad Caths, Quiverfulls, etc. If they're averaging 4+ and everyone else is down below 1, how quickly does the world turn over?
- There is abortion option. And adoption. But to me it has always sounded like that most make it work somehow. So once there is a kid economics can in many cases workout somehow. Maybe not optimally but somehow. With even more kids later.
- This. Which is why evolution will work very rapidly to correct the blip.
- Yeah. I think there's a couple of reasons why people think this way:
1. There is still shame associated with wanting sex. We're not ashamed of wanting food or sleep, but sex, oh no,
2. People change after having children and it's permanent. They forget what they were like before. It's kinda like taking LSD or something. These things can fundamentally change you as a person.
- What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
- If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.
Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.
- I don’t know what the right number is, but 8+ Billion doesn’t seem sustainable. It might be, if humans respected the environment, are nicer to each other etc. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the next best option might be to just have less humans, which hopefully might lead to less pollution, less exploitation of the environment etc
- We only have one modern example of demographic crash to study... Japan.
Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.
- Japan, a country famous for no one knowing what its culture is.
- Reading about it in books and watching anime won’t prevent them from going functionally extinct in less than 200 years.
- No one cares. Japanese culture today is nothing like it was 200 years ago.
- I care. I don’t want the country of Japan to be a bunch of starving geriatrics a few decades from now.
- I care
- I don't believe that will happen.
- It will if nothing changes. That’s a certainty. But yes something might change.
- > Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
And this was in a developed country well resourced to take the hit.
- I mean, if Japan is the world's future, isn't that kind of... good? It's not the first place I think of when I think of a failing country.
- Japan is not without problems related to a shrinking population i.e. https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/21/japans-immigration-poli...
but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.
- > but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants
This has been tried extensively e.g. in Germany, France, Sweden, Canada, …. It did not work out great.
- Canada has always accepted immigrants. Rapidly increasing the number of foreign students to goose the slumping post-secondary education sector did not work out great. Even with the reductions, there are always immigrants coming into Canada.
- Except the fertility rate is declining worldwide
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- Not decline, but Australia considered its population too small after the Second World War and very successfully integrated immigrants from an increasing diversity of source countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_immigration_to_Austra...
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- there’s a lot less to lose when your native population is a bunch of criminals and convicts
- Both New Zealand and Australia have about 30% of the population born overseas. Immigration does lead to some stresses but it also has bonuses. Immigration seems to clearly help in the short term.
But yes, immigration doesn't solve the demographics issue, because immigrant citizens also get old and expect government support.
Immigrants do often have good sized families so that brings in a fresh generation of New Zealanders. Plenty of my married friends are from mixed cultures.
In some cultures their children give more time to care for their own parents or elderly family. New Zealand born children seem less likely to do so.
The local born often whine because whinging is a significant part of our colonial heritage from England.
- Japan is already accepting immigrants! It's right there in the article I linked! It's just a question of raising the quota slightly.
It's hardly going to solve every problem, it will keep restaurants from closing.
- "allowing to enter the country" and "accepting" are two very distinct things.
- In English they can, in fact, be used, at times, interchangeably!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accept
Accept: to give admittance
Why is every argument against any level of immigration that the people of Japan are unchangeably xenophobic? Japan is bringing in more immigrants than ever: https://soranews24.com/2025/08/13/foreign-population-in-japa...
- It's causing massive issues in Japan, unless you read those Instagram posts that tell you everything is perfect.
- Ah yes, the hellscape that is Japan. The Japanese are currently fleeing to South Sudan and Darfur in hopes of a better life.
- The 42.7M tourists that went there in 2025 just enjoyed seeing the incredible decay of a dying country, a morbid fascination or sorts. /s (obviously)
- You can actually see it if you know where to look - edges of big cities but it is most visible in the countryside and smaller towns.
And if you want to see how real Armageddon looks like, go visit Yubari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABbari,_Hokkaido
The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.
Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.
Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...
- Seems somewhat better than Detroit.
The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat).
The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife as a suburb of a nearby city).
- Cancun has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But I guess we shouldn't care about it because thousands of Americans fly there for vacation every day.
- Tourism != real life.
Or are you joking? I hope so, because it takes a certain kind of stupid to not understand the very very bad things that a shrinking population would cause.
- The impacts haven't really been seen yet because Japan is still on the flat apex of the population curve, but the rollercoaster is about to start diving.
https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...
- The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.
- The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
- > if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down
Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.
- How does almost everyone pay for food at the grocery store? If stores don't have a good way to get money from customers, how do they pay the next step up the line?
- During COVID we all saw how the government can just override all this and ensure what needs to be done is done and what cannot be done is avoided - something we always thought was impossible. Yet we all quickly forgot this happened and now we're back to assuming it can't happen.
- During COVID we saw all sorts of insanity (semi trucks dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk into the drains because they couldn't travel to the closed packaging plants).
Food distribution will still continue until the raw resources necessary crap out. Shelves won't go empty immediately, but once there's no gas for the trucks and tractors, then you'll be happy to be near the Amish.
- You don’t think goods are acquired on credit?
Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?
- If OP hadn't said "credit cards" I wouldn't have commented.
- This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.
https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
- Uh no?
The fertility crisis is an entirely individual crisis. You are a parent and you raise children
Your children's pension contributions are paid out to someone else, leaving less for you.
Having your own children no longer ensures your retirement, so you don't have them in the first place.
The problem couldn't be more individual than that.
- You're describing a systemic problem. An individual problem is: my paycheque is next week but I need to pay rent this week. That's a problem specific to me. A systemic problem is: paycheques aren't big enough to cover rent any more. It's a problem that affects a large number of people. Systems are comprised of individuals but describing a systemic problem from the perspective of one individual doesn't change the nature of the problem.
- Having children in no way guarantees they will provide for you in old age. Stop by your local retirement home and ask how many kids stop by to see their parents. Free will is a thing, children are not assets.
- Corporate profits are good, they help companies make new things.
Do you think they should lose money? How would you be typing on a computer if that evil, evil company didn't make a profit?
There is a reason every communist society has failed.
- There is a huge gap between capitalism and communism.
Just like how pure communism doesn’t work, neither does pure capitalism.
- I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear.
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
- The free market is a very good starting point indeed, but it shouldn't be confused with Capitalism. Ironically, the free market best embodies the Communist slogan "let a million flowers bloom". Capitalism is more like giving Elon a lawnmower.
- Europe has done fairly well imho balancing socialism with capitalism and free market mechanisms, good patterns exist today I argue, even if they need tweaks and improvement. Importantly, these demographic curves are locked in for decades into the future, so might as well get comfortable with forward curve of change, we aren't going back to the historical demographic growth curve in anyone's lifetime, if ever. Plan, forecast, and model accordingly.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
- Europe's "socialist" only works because they depend on the USA for military protection and tech innovation. Or oil revenues.
- > What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?
300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.
It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.
- Until you get cancer.
Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
- It’s 30 minutes to the nearest town with a hospital. 2hrs from a moderate metro city with a large hospital. It’s isolated, not hundreds-of-km into the boonies.
- I don’t think anyone is going to be working at the hospital if they have to start dedicating their time to survival?
- That's disproving foobiekr's point though.
>Until you get cancer. >Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
"I have a survival plan"
"if you get a terminal illness, you will die anyway, checkmate"
"Ok fine I will go somewhere with medical infrastructure"
"Idiot, there is no medical infrastructure"
At this point the whole discussion is illogical. If there are no doctors, then the survivalist strategy gives up nothing.
The initial strategy obviously works. If you get ill, you just need to make sure you've had children and that your children are healthy.
- Being able to punish and control others, especially sexual exploitation, is a huge part of the draw. You need lots of slaves for that.
- If the "cogs of the machine" freeze up and economy tanks the top 1% will be fine. You might not be.
- Depends what we mean by freeze up. Revolutions usually mean some part of the elite class gets killed or exiled. Happens all the time.
- Isn't that what AI and robots are intended to be for? As for the customers, B2B could still work.
- Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.
- >a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
- I think it means, for example, the stock market collapses if there's no more growth, that means everyone loses their pension fund, and may try to save more to compensate, that means no more consumption and no more economy (paradox of thrift). It's a tall house of cards society rests upon.
- There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
- Here is what it actually means.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
- > When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.
- > Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
Soon we will discover. I suspect the answer will be no, at least not for long. Markets are made of people. Can the economy grow despite a shrinking market losing economies of scale everywhere? I hope, but I don't count on it.
- I think I read several economic metrics are now worse than in the Great Depression, but I can't remember which ones. Probably something to do with energy prices.
- You've given a good explanation of how it works -- under a mode of production concerned primarily with the exchange value of goods, not their use value. If what you want to do is to provide adequate/growing use value, you can do that instead and allocate resources based on need rather than on investment value.
- Use value and exchange value are highly correlated for basically all goods other than collectibles and luxury items, and even then their "use" often is providing an emotional boost to their owner.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
- > more taxes are needed
Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.
- Jetson style, we should all be complaining about our 3hr workdays. We produce enough. Distribution is the problem.
- > What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit;
It’s very simple.
If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.
To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.
Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.
- That's not actual growth though, that's just measuring the same business in a different unit worth 0.97 of the old unit. The business can be the same size.
- The question asked was “Why is it bad to earn a constant (in nominal terms) profit rather than an increasing profit.” The size of the business is irrelevant to this question. I answered the question, the short answer is ‘inflation’.
When responding to a question, I choose to answer the question the person asked instead of another question they didn’t ask.
- They didn't say "(in nominal terms)" and businesses are expected to grow in real terms.
- There is this thing called a zero lower bound. Then there is this thing called liquidity preference, which is basically the minimum fee someone accepts to part with liquidity.
Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.
Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.
You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.
Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.
Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.
The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.
Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.
The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.
You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.
Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.
So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.
It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.
In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.
- Is the zero lower bound still true? You have effectively negative returns on cash due to inflation (and infinitely negative returns if the economy breaks so hard we have to switch to a new currency) and physical capital depreciates too. There may be a zero nominal lower bound on cash but that doesn't mean anything due to inflation.
- Honestly great question. I think of it as:
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
- But isn't this just a more abstract example of the 'circular explanations' thing that OP mentioned? The reason why we need compound interest on our savings accounts instead of just being able to put away some money every year is a product of having to counteract inflation, which is the result of policies trying to induce growth by making saving less appealing than putting the money into more companies making more things for more profit. We need infinite growth because everything around us is designed to expect infinite growth. But what happens as we start running out of headroom? Is there really no other way at all?
- We are going to find out. See Limits to Growth.
- There existed ways to build a family/home/retire before the financialization of everything - those ways still exist and still work, even if disadvantaged.
- Do they? Is there a way to get land without buying it from someone who currently owns it? I'm totally fine with building supplies costing money since you can scale that from a tiny shack to a mansion (or a sleeping bag in the dirt) based on your wealth, but the price of the smallest parcel of land seems to be a lower bound on how much you can spend.
- Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers. As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.
Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.
- > As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...
- I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline
- > Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.
Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.
- Except for outsourcing, of course. The labor pool isn't limited domestically for many kinds of work. And for tech specifically, the labor pool is highly mobile. So if another country becomes the best place to go, then the labor pool will move there. The simple analysis probably results in, counter-intuitively, the opposite of what you want, which is a decline in the competitiveness of American tech
- Growth has 2 parts, producers and consumers. AI might be able to take solve production due to lack of workers, but it cannot solve lack of consumers
- Terrible thigns like....cheaper housing and....higher wages.
The horror.
- What is your case at all? AI could usher in a post scarcity world so why not have more humans who can enjoy better lives?
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
- I love how "post scarcity world" is tossed around as if the earth has infinite natural resources.
- With renewables and nuclear we have basically unlimited energy, which can solve a lot of resource related issues.
What are you concerned we would run out of?
- Topsoil (the oncoming train nobody has noticed yet)
- We can make topsoil; we know how, we just don't have the will.
- We do know how, but it’s very slow compared to the rate of depletion.
- Helium? Rare earth minerals? Having to mine ever deeper because there are essentially no easily accessible mineral deposits? The fact that mining has enormous costs and the potential to permanently destroy sources of fresh water?
- Rare earth minerals are not particularly rare or needed in huge quantities.
Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.
Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world
- Yeah, see those millions laid of last 5-10 years, everyone got better, more fulfilling jobs. Companies are falling over each other with ever more outrageous perks and salaries. Excellent healthcare, plentiful housing, unlimited education opportunities, nothing is scarce any more.
Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.
- Maybe if AI becomes deeply embedded enough in society/ government it will tell lawmakers "You should let people build housing in urban areas where there is demand" and that would be a nice step in the right direction!
- it could. but it won't.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
- Well, when we get there people can have more kids.
- Well, isn't it already difficult for the not-rich to add to families? Add to that the uncertainty with income and future. Unless socialism is widely adopted, I am not sure humans can enjoy better lives especially with additional burden of kids. Hell, people can't afford homes now. I don't see a widely agreed upon or convincing positive ending. I already see (read about to be accurate) effects of AI on young graduates. I'd assume people hope for better ending, but would prepare for the worst.
- When people say "people can't afford homes now" your referring to places like NY, MA, and CA where people can't afford homes because the local governments have made it basically impossible to build to match the demand in the areas? I.e. Massachusetts despite being one of the most desirable places to live ranks 50th in housing production per capita.
You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?
- That's not a weird one-off problem with those local governments, it's a symptom of something fundamental to human society.
- The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available.
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
- e.g. how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million, and can hardly afford to buy 1 (and certainly not more than 1)? this leads to layoffs
how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs
more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.
less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.
how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.
- So, the economy of scale is still there whether the finances are there or not. If I make 10 pizzas for me and all my friends, Bob fixes all our bikes, Carol goes to fetch water from the well, Dave tends the sheep, etc... All 10 of us are doing our own little economy without money and benefitting from it. What I'm trying to say is there can still be people selling pizza in a collapsed financial system, if we can somehow trust each other to deliver (which is what money does). Maybe we'll end up making our own currency.
All this relies on a basic subsistence right though, us all living in harmony on some commune. If the housing rental system remains in place and demands dollars even though no dollars are available to be gotten, then our landlord is probably going to choose to escalate to violence and won't take pizzas as payment. If the government is going to mandate rent payment in dollars without actually making any dollars available, we have a problem.
- > how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million
You don't. You only sell 50 million.
> this leads to layoffs
Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.
> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services
Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.
> most stocks will tank
By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.
- The population doesn't just go from 100m to 50m instantly. It gradually changes over time, 100 years from now the smaller population will work itself out, but none of us will be alive for that. We still have 100 years of discomfort to get through.
Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.
Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?
- Pediatricians - not enough of them now. Teachers - also not enough. Toys & Games companies - can switch to adult games, no problem. Children Furniture - can and do make adult furniture too. School Supplies? Electronics? Can also switch to adult products. Fewer people means fewer companies as well - not a problem.
Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.
> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.
Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.
Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.
You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.
Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?
- Potholes are indeed a problem
actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.
- That's not how potholes form. It depends on wheather, not traffic.
- Road wear (including potholes) is almost entirely proportional to the number of large trucks.
- weather, mainly rain, is only responsible for weakening the soil under the pavement, the actual holes are created by traffic. so as long as there is no traffic, holes would not form. especially holes getting larger also depends on traffic.
freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.
- This is backwards.
Heavy traffic causes depressions in the road. Water collects there and seeps into tiny cracks. Then it freezes, expands and makes the cracks bigger with every cycle.
It's also possible for potholes to form if the roads are continuously covered in snow that is compacted into ice. There is no direct damage from traffic. The expansion of ice creates tiny holes throughout the road.
- I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.
- Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.
- You need consumers to buy whatever an economy builds, regardless of AI involvement. As people retire they consume less.
- Yeah but logically unless people start matching the replacement rate at some point it’s a lot of pain until you go extinct. Isn’t South Korea supposed to be functionally extinct in less than 100 years at this rate?
- The problem isn't if the population gradually shrinks, it's if there's an uncontrolled downward spiral in fertility. If the birthrate gets below a certain point, then most people won't have any experience whatsoever interacting with babies or young children in their day-to-day life, and cultural norms will shift to make childlessness the default option. This marginalizes people who choose to have children, which pushes the birthrate down even further. This has happened in South Korea, where children are barred from many public places and it's hard to find housing in urban areas if you have children because the noise they make will piss off the neighbors. The birthrate is currently ~0.7 births per woman, meaning that every 100 South Koreans will have around 12 grandchildren. Here's a good article if you're interested: https://archive.ph/bM4Ff
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
- Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself.
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
- The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.
- You can see this in a microcosm at churches - the ones full of families and exploding children will continue to have such; and the ones that are newly wed or nearly dead will chase families with children away even if entirely unintentionally.
If it happens on a societal level it's tremendously powerful.
- Well, in the extreme case, human extinction seems like a pretty bad thing.
- a large organism (human populaton on earth) reaching equilibrium and ceasing to grow does not equal to human extinction... it far more likely is just a temporary contraction that will then reverse when the conditions are set for it.
- Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
- > They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
- Has any organism ever extinguished itself as you describe ? This whole human extinction thing… isn’t that catastrophising? We are a 7-8 billion individuals away from extinction.
- All plausible theories I've heard for the cause of humanity's unprecedented, historically low birth rates are things that could not occur in less intelligent species. (Birth control, women's rights, hedonism enabled by modern technology, etc.)
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
- Neither the fall in birth rates nor its rise is intentional. I struggle to understand why people think a mega fauna of 7-8 billion people takes intentional decisions. An individual takes intentional decisions. Humanity … not so much I think.
- Correct, but my point is unless we find a way to intentionally fix the problem we're going to unintentionally walk into a disaster.
I don't fault your logic, but I don't want to accept that disaster is inevitable.
- What disaster is this that you foresee ?
- Usually it boils down to "future humans won't agree with me".
- Yes. Read through https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941 to see that, given a good enough environment, mice can wipe themselves out. Here is a particularly telling passage:
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
- Lack of personal space is certainly not the cause of our declining birth rates. People in wealthy countries with lots of personal space actually tend to have lower birth rates than poorer countries with less. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
- > People in wealthy countries with lots of personal space
How did you reach that conclusion?
- That means we're outstripping some kind of invisible resource that's hard to measure.
- The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.
- Maybe the equilibrium is below the current level. People didn't think the population rise would stop, either.
- How can you say it’s not temporary if it’s just started?
- Because all plausible theorized causes (birth control, global reduction in poverty enabled by technology, women's rights) are not temporary conditions. (Or at least we better hope they aren't.)
- Those are just hypothesis. Here’s ankther likely hypothesis - isn’t this is a mega fauna arriving at capacity?
- The problem is that's not a likely hypothesis. There's no evidence lack of capacity is the cause of declining birth rates. In fact there's strong evidence for the opposite: countries with more resources to go around tend to have lower birth rates than countries with less resources. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec... There's no equilibrium here, if anything the feedback loop is positive rather than negative. That's the concerning part.
I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.
- You’re right. I mean that’s certainly interesting, I just keep struggling with the question of - why is this a disaster? Seems like it’s only a disaster under a narrow set of conditions - capitalism, economies that need to grow to survive, lack of robotisation of elderly care.
- Well, like I said, if the trend is caused by something that's not easily reversible, and there's no negative feedback loop which would naturally cause birth rates to come back up in the future, then unless something happens to reverse the trend then mathematically speaking the end result of global birth rates below replacement rate is human extinction.
Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...
- Why are you concerned about something that’s so far away from your lifetime ? There are so many problems - this one might even be self correcting - yet you seem prone to seeing it as an imminent catastrophe where you have to focus your attention on?
- I literally just said it's not imminent. I'm focusing my attention on it in this thread because that's what this thread is about. Not like I walk the streets proclaiming our doom on my days off. :P
Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.
- It's a disaster from many quality of living standards (healthcare worker availability, funding for social safety net and social security and elderly care/retirement, ability for a society to fund new infrastructure or maintain existing infrastructure, etc).
Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.
- I mean "capacity" isn't some magic barrier. Usually it involves increased chances for the organism in question to starve to death due to reduced availability of food. We don't seem to be that close to reaching that.
- We seem to have reached, maybe, the point where more human beings is not necessarily a positive. Capitalist society through supply and demand seems to be signalling this - we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries, without increasing our already fairly disruptive footprint.
This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.
- > we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries
Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.
> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.
I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.
- That's... not how equilibrium works. A self-balancing segway or robot doesn't reach the balance point and then freeze in place. There are oscillations. And it isn't a pretty sine wave either. Considering the massive number of factors that go into something like "global population growth", expect a VERY chaotic graph indeed, like the stock market, but worse.
- Yeah fair so what.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
- Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)
- its unlikely that will happen. If you read Arrighi, his hegemonic cycle narrative says that the interregnum between two hegemons is decades of chaos as the system reorganises. We seem to be heading for a US to China transition.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
- Yay.
- I mean you can always be a farrier, lineman, septic sumper, cobbler etc…
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
- I feel like this is a joke but honest answer: I worked ocean rescue for 4 years then lived with some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary.
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
- > some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary
Don't worry. It's temporary.
- Not a joke, I tried to start a trash company and be a handler on the back, but unfortunately my epilepsy got in the way
- [dead]
- human extinction is far more likely if we keep reproducing than if we slow down. See: climate change etc
- Humans are the second most populous animal on the planet. We are in no danger of extinction.
- I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens).
If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
- Humans and our cattle are something like 95% of all land mammals, maybe they're thinking of that.
- "Land vertebrates", #1 is chickens, #2 is humans. But colloquially "animal" does not include ants or fish.
- Insects I'll consider fair enough, but fish? Are you leaning on "fish isn't meat"? Otherwise, this isn't a colloquial use I'm familiar with.
- In terms of biomass humans are much larger than ants.
- If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
- It's not a problem. Go look at a graph of historical world population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File%3...
It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)
This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon
> The pigeon migrated in enormous flocks, constantly searching for food, shelter, and breeding grounds, and was once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3 billion, and possibly up to 5 billion.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
- > other than supporting aging population?
Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.
Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.
Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.
There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.
- People are replying that it'll lead to uncontrolled population collapse, and it'll disproportionately affect the poor. But the alternative is to keep growing the population until we run into a much harder problem to solve (water, food, climate) and then collapse. And won't that disproportionately affect the poor? And won't it be much worse, because the population will be much larger then?
- Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?
- Forget even the finances, the allocation of labor is a problem. Imagine 1 billion young people and they're all farmers, the next generation is 100 million young people, but they still have to feed 1.1 billion. No amount of financial shenanigans will avoid facing this basic fact.
- >What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
- Why do you think nothing will change in 350 years? Where were we 350 years ago? We thought population was stable back then with less than 1 billion people. Is it plausible that things will change again in the next 350? I think so. I think at least one thing changes about the world in every 350 years.
- > Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.
So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
- When you have only a few thousand people in an area you can hunt the wild animals that are breeding more than humans. Resources will be abundant again. Today we need all this infrastructure to feed so many people as if we all just started hunting there would quickly be no deer left, but people back then could treat deer as an infinite resource, and if the future is like back then, so will they.
- Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.
- >At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.
The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?
>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium
All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.
>Total extinction seems unlikely.
Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?
>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,
Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.
When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.
When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.
- This is NOT human extinction. Just the collapse of global modernity.
Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm? "Guess we wont try to live like people have for the last x million years, here is a good place to lay down and die."
- >Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm?
Why would they be able to reinvent that, when none of their ancestors for how many generations did so? Is that something a person can do well, do you think, with no prior experience or expertise? What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
We could ask why they could reinvent all the technologies that people from prior eras of agriculture could manage? Will they instantly be able to make their own ropes, do you think? Have you ever made rope? Does it not count as technology if it's not a transistor etched into a silicon wafer? But previous eras of history did utilized that quite a bit for their agriculture. Are they supposed to make due without? There must be a hundred different things they won't know how to do, but were necessary for agriculture in any era of history you might name, but that you can't name because you know nothing about it.
Technologies, ones so mundane that you don't even recognize they exist, permeate the world. They're lost and then they're gone because a replacement was better. But when the replacement disappears, those lost technologies don't spring back into existence magically. Civilization is "path dependent", it doesn't get knocked back to previous tiers because those previous tiers cease to exist once we've moved on to the next. And it's really hilarious to me that not only are you ignorant of this, but you're snarky about it too.
- They don't need to reinvent it - the Amish are doing it right now to some variation of "Amish on a tractor" if you want.
Insisting that negative population growth necessarily means extinction is as silly as saying that positive population growth necessarily means people standing on people from coast to coast.
- > when none of their ancestors for how many generations [farmed]
Because they'd still have books and seeds and farming implements lying around? And maybe some actual farmers to learn from?
> What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
Probably, yeah many will starve. Early English settlers in North America had very little farming experience and many died. Enough survived to build colonies.
- People live in the alaskan bush. QED
- Does a full, capable, lively civilization live in the Alaskan bush? Or is just a few grizzled assholes doing it to prove that they can?
And do those assholes have enough spare time and effort and interest to raise families? Any women of reproductive age out there with them?
If not, this probably isn't the model that proves that human extinction is an unreasonable worry.
- You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology .. moreover there are people alive still hunting and gathering.
They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself.
Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
- >You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology
Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands, which is silly on its face. It's not just the bronze/iron/steel work. Now we're back to "can you make a rope?"... can you? I think with an hour or two you could make something. If I brought the tool for you to use. And if you had the fiber for it. But it takes quite alot of practice to get good at it, I'll never get there. And even if you had the tool (haha, sandcast one in iron for bonus points!), and had the practice, now you're a fucking hemp/jute/sissal/something farmer just to have enough fiber to make the ropes to plow, but you're no longer growing grain so you don't need the plow. Why is this minimal technology so uncooperative, do you think? Why do you need so many fucking specialties just to do subsistence farming? Maybe you should go out there like they did 12,000 years ago with a stone hoe and plant the seeds stooped over, one at a time. I'm sure the yields will be high enough with that that humanity's numbers can start growing again instead of shrinking.
>Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
Cute, someone who watches video instead of reads. That's... I dunno. Maybe if you read, you'd understand how centuries ago this continent was so full of game that those Europeans who saw it were astounded, but now there's practically nothing left. Not enough to feed a recovering civilization with anyway. Even if they used firearms instead of the spear in that video. I'll even forgiven that now you've stepped back even further from the subsistence agriculture thing to hunting-and-gathering. Maybe humanity should crawl back into the ocean and become fish too... that's how we'll beat extinction.
- > Actually, I know alot more about this than you do.
So you say.
> Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it?
What, another one? We used oxen and draught horses rather than mules.
> you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands,
I live in Australia, I know where many working old ploughs are - most of the farms here still have them on display - there are several on this very property.
> Now we're back to "can you make a rope?
Sure - been there, down that, have you?
Look, this is getting dull - I'm 70, I grew up in a remote location, my father, still alive, born in 1935, fed his family as a child while his father was away at war - I've often spent months in remote areas.
In the event of the collapse of the modern US tech sphere some humans will get by, others will not.
- This whole line of argument has been incredibly entertaining to me, given those I know who could build a functional plow out of the ruins of damn near anything made of metal - even freeway signs can be made to service.
That's not even counting those who can keep old Farmall tractors running on whatever they have laying around. It's not the greatest, but it's functional, and a mechanical horse is way more powerful than a real one - and even then, real ones are still quite capable of supporting more than subsistence.
- Yeah, I kind of take it for granted that humans can survive on what exists around them ... essentially everybody I know in rural W.Australia can do so. Most farms here keep a back log of every bit of kit they ever had, going back to the 1880s and earlier in some cases - I've helped strip down and rebuild a couple of Allis-Chalmers tractors in the past four years and the local small town car museum has a crazy number of historic vehicles (three wheels, steam powered, one time speed record holding, etc) that are kept in working order by locals.
I've renovated old old houses in Fremantle and flipped them with very few contractors (while working on bleeding edge code bases) and built air strips in the PNG highlands, worked with wood workers, glass blowers and metal workers, etc.
I suspect some people have spent a little too long behind screens and forgotten how to shear a sheep, draw, card, spin, and knit a jumper.
- There's also this insane (or amazing) drive towards productivity that we don't notice - we build roads that not only support 80+ MPH 18 wheelers, but do so durably and safely!
You can build a road an 18 wheeler can transit with manual labor, just slowly. And if you don't need to support more than a Jeep, the road can almost build itself.
Or another way - building a modern house with modern conveniences and efficiencies is pretty dependent on a ton of things.
Building a sufficient house in many parts of the world is dependent on manpower.
- Being W.Australia, where the Pintupi Nine popped into the modern world during the 1980s, there are a few people happily getting along with no house at all, as they and their families ever did for a few thousand years past.
But on that matter of road building, here's a vague relative kitted up to travel and take photo's in 1920 or so: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/1d5472eb9b8a4e3e...
and here's one of his images taken much the same time of a road and railway being built: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/20d3070e95eb924a...
It's all manpower and horse drays - the really tough bits are dropping, chopping, and moving those trees, they're a bit bigger and tougher than they look.
- That's the same question I have as well. We're a cancer that's spreading on the earth and we're worrying we aren't spreading fast enough. Yeah, I get that we want to support the aging population, but at this point we're doing it at the expense of humanity as a whole.
- Instead of such generalizations which are meaningless anyway ( if you had cancer you'd get treatment to kill it, hence if you claim to be part of a cancer with the capability to kill yourself...)
Choose to be the change you wanna see in the world and find other who want to do that and stop saying "woo be us" in public as it just doesn't help.
The world is the way it is because we complain and consume too much and act & care too little. But change always starts with you and first your attitude. And then well inspire others with your actions to make this world (one of ) the best versions it can be
- Not having kids is choosing to be the change they want to see in the world, no?
- Not religious at all but... "To those who is given much..."
If all they do is not have kids and claim that we are a cancer the minimum they could do is that other classic
Speaking is silver but silence is gold...
And well I firmly believe the biggest problem is the pervasive desire to be weak and complain by those who have the possibility of actual impact.
The battle is lost before it's fought and all.
But yeah we are being led by people with "inferior" visions for the world ~ Plato... But calling ourselves shit ain't gonna help it's just giving yourself and easy exit.
- You might not like it, but by choosing not to reproduce they ARE having an actual impact on the world (as this debate about their actions demonstrates).
Maybe we, as a species, would have better long term outcomes if we reflected more before blindly charging forward exactly as our parents did (and their parents before them).
Maybe they feel we should choose a different course and look for better/different ways of living and being as a species. There is no such thing as infinite growth, we should probably act accordingly.
- If talking is impact there is an impact. But it makes the word kind of meaningless (a common issue).
All I know from them is their words... Which I hope we can agree where kind of negative (I personally prefer not to be a cancer hbu ?)
There is no such thing "as a species"... It's not like we are ants... Some groups of humans/individuals are net neutral, some net positive and most net negative.
The question is always about incentives and externalities... and not what we as a nation/city/... Whatever prefer but what we are willing to stop doing...
At the end of the day the world is the way it is because the people who choose the game are the ones who keep playing it.
The thing that got me with his comment is that he based on his website is relatively succesful... Unlike this fake belief that billionaires hold all the power it is in general the 0.1% that hold the power... With the consent of rhe 9.9% and he's most likely 9.9% ...
This not having kids as a noble sacrifice is just choosing to be weak tbh unless he's actually tried but if that is the case it's definitely not in public.
- You are using so many words to tell a person they should just kill themselves without directly saying it. I flagged your comment anyway. I hope the moderator understands the context.
- If that is the (logical) conclusion you come to maybe the answer is that the person should be more careful about their choice of words because of the conclusion it leads to ?
Not that I expect too much deep thinking of someone who chooses to call themself trumpdong...
- FT's "Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once" was published, and discussed, recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168928
https://www.ft.com/content/fba35eca-df3a-4ad6-b42d-eb08eb7c9...
Spoiler: smartphones, social media, housing.
- Also it’s not ok anymore to rape/get married to 13yo girls.
And now with a smartphone every girl knows that it is not ok.
- but then how do you get elected by Republicans?
- It has become so tribal lately, do you even have to care about this? Just scream loudly, ragebait 24/7 and you’re good.
- Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?
- Not that I disagree with you, but as US society, and AIUI many other modern societies, are organized around a growing population. In order to have Medicare and Social Security in their current forms, you need n increasing number of working age people to keep the programs solvent.
Changing this, and moving to a society where AI and robots solve the problem of letting people retire (presuming that's possible, technologically) would require a massive shift in how people are, for lack of a better word, valued by society. Right now, we assign a lot of value to individuals based on their level of economic productivity.
It would be a change of considerable magnitude to let AI and robots create the economic value and then distribute it to individuals on some "fair" basis. I suggest that based on the current situation, finding agreement on what constitutes "fair" would be challenging, at best.
- Let’s say, it’s extremely unfair to the new generations. They bear crushing social benefits for a majority of old people and are outvoted by the same old people. Until population stops reducing, or social benefits are severely reformed. The latter being the more likely, but not before the economy crashes.
- But they’ll be able to live in a recovering environment that doesn’t bear the overpopulation strain.
- LOL. The environment will be destroyed but it won’t be getting any worse anymore. They will be delighted. Just a couple thousand years, maybe a million, to wait out – doable.
- Probably less than a hundred. We're not talking about a nuclear winter scenario. Look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone (most of which is not radioactive and is closed off as a precaution)
- We’re talking climate warming by 2-3°C at least, no one knows how bad it’s going to be. I wish I would share your optimism. At the moment, scientists keep revising their prognostics for the worse each year.
- Earth's ecosphere can adapt to tolerate that shift. It's better that we don't fuck it up, but earth has tolerated much hotter and colder periods just fine. It's us and the ecosystem we rely on that we're destroying.
- Sure, life will not die out. It won’t be pretty for us humans though.
- AI and robotics will still need maintenance. The expertise for the maintainers will be quite expensive to develop (longer years of schooling). Larger portions of society will now be necessary dedicated to new tech.
More people are needed to fulfill future needs.
- The robots will maintain themselves. AI will be dedicated to new tech.
- One issue is that the wealthiest most advanced countries are having the fewest people, while the poorest countries have a the fastest growing populations. Pakistan or Nigeria alone will have more people than the whole of Europe. They may become wealthier but more realistically there will be an even tiny minority of people living well with most of the world in slums.
- Good question.
With a lot of old people, healthcare costs go way up. In practice that means taxes go way up.
(Maybe smart AI can magically cure a lot of degenerative diseases like dementia and atherosclerosis and COPD and osteoarthritis and cancer and diabetes and kidney failure. Let us hope.)
The infrastructure we have (roads, bridges, water supplies, power lines, etc.) need maintenance. With a falling population, a greater percentage of the population needs to be dedicated to these tasks, so career choices get restricted.
(Maybe robotics can help here. Let us hope.)
With a falling population demand for any given product is falling on average.
When the population is growing, there is an implicit cushion for investment. 2% growth means that the population (TAM) doubles in 36 years, making investment less risky. With falling population, new investment is taking market share from existing vendors: competition is zero-sum at best, mostly negative sum.
Every investment is more risky so the rate of interest on loans goes way up.
With falling GDP, wages are stagnant or falling. At present young people take on debt to buy houses and things, partly in the expectation that their wages will rise so the debt gets easier to pay off over time. Falling wages make debt repayment harder, not easier, so people will not take out loans. so sales will be lower, leading to a downward spiral.
- We can't do anything, because in almost the entire world, the only thing stopping you from having a baby is your biology and your willingness.
- > But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
- Well, the welfare state for most nations will suffer. The reason it's a massive sin to scale down is that with a scaled down economy you can't sustain the old without greater sacrifices by the young. So you need someone to pay the price and neither wishes to. For my part, I think. one way or the other my Millennial generation should probably give up the US welfare state. We can still save the next generations.
- why not just eliminate the $170K payroll cap? that gets us most (certainly not all) of the way there.
- The world is not even close to 1% "overpopulated".
The 1% indulge? The greatest thing a person can do is raise a child and build a legacy. No class warfare or nonsense about climate change can change that.
If you want a smaller world, fine. Then give up your 401k, retirement funds, and government care in old age. Because my kids are the ones paying for 100% of that. Think of someone other than yourself.
- >The greatest thing a person can do is raise a child and build a legacy.
nice opinion, but it seems you are increasingly in the minority.
if the older generations can't find it in their hearts to take the long term view on social security funding, housing, climate change... why should we feel obligated to breed so there is a nice conveyor belt of wage slaves for them the pull the ladder on?
you sound very entitled.
and i think about myself because in the US, if i don't, no one else will.
- Well, government care doesn't exist in India government pension doesn't exist.
Govt schools are under fudned so if you're serious about education and have money your kids go to private schools.
Even healthcare is private and costly as the free govt hospitals are chroniclly underfunded.
Public transport doesn't exist except for a few handful of cities
So I'm sorry, your points don't apply to India.
It's good that India's population is going to reduce
- > Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
- What about the pain from overpopulation and a glut of uneducated labour? Doesn't that shit roll downhill, too?
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
- What overpopulation?
- Visit Jakarta
- The kind you'd find in any place with a housing or food shortage, (or a job shortage if you are the sort of person who has #firstworldproblems) or really any other shortage where some public demand cannot be met by limited supply.
We don't see a lot of food shortages these days, but with climate change fucking with agriculture sufficiently, regular famines in the global south might make a comeback... Or might not, if population growth and degrowth projections solve that problem before crop yields are seriously impacted.
- What’s the problem? We’re committed to destroying livable human habitat for 100M’s to 1B’s of people via global warming.
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
- There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
- > A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Not really, just a stable ratio of workers/retirees is enough for this system to work. But what we're seeing is a rapid shift in that ratio, with both less workers and more retirees.
- > retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
- You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free.
No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.
- > Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population.
Source? In a growing market, one can spread their investiments to get safe returns that approach the overall economic growth. In a shrinking market, the same logic should lead to small losses, year over years, making investiment much riskier and unactrative. Markets are made of people.
- That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year? Better to spend it while it’s whole.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
- > That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year?
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
- Depends on implementation. For example, a wealth tax that has a "cap" at some ludicrous amount of wealth, like $10M, would effect very few people and therefore be insignificant for the average worker. So 99% of people would continue saving with no change at all to their behavior. The externalities could be nice though, since it'd distribute capital more efficiently. Sort of a general stimulant to the economy.
- This line of thinking though assumes it would have no impact on the largest players though. It hinges on a "calling their bluff", that high NW individuals won't change anything despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes. And this doesn't even touch on the immense impracticality of annually valuing assets. Or how to manage assets in illiquid markets, or how to sell 30% of a painting to cover 1% of it's mark-to-market value by year end.
The reason wealth taxes never go anywhere is because when you sit down and learn what wealth is, how it works, and what is practical, it makes the most sense by far to just tax things whenever they go back to cash.
Really the only genuine tax loop-hole is the step-up basis on inheritance. Everything else is just an elaborate deferral to pay taxes later.
- > despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes
Allow paying the tax with assets. Put the assets into a black box sovereign wealth fund that's controlled by some mechanical algorithm which sells things at random as needed to fund the government budget. At scale this will be indistinguishable from a whole-economy index fund.
The best part about this is rich people can't beg off by saying "I have to liquidate stuff".
How do you pay with assets for real estate or boats or paintings? An IOU that can be cashed in when the asset is sold. Oh the boat is owned by an LLC so it never changes hands? No problem, the government has a share in the LLC too. (IANAL, IANAA so working out the loopholes is left as an exercise for the reader).
A second benefit is startup shares don't have to get hit with a capital gains tax before the startup goes public. Right now people sometimes pay taxes on shares that are eventually worth zero. Instead if this tax could be paid in startup shares, then there's no unfair tax bill.
As a condition of paying in assets, forbid the government from exercising any control over the assets. No shareholder voting, no board seats, not even choosing the paint color on the boat.
Additionally, this tax can't be on top of income tax. The whole point is to fix the worker-funded tax pyramid scheme. It has to be revenue-neutral with respect to income tax.
- The bigger issue is, at least in the US, roughly 2/3 of assets of the wealthy have no meaningful liquidity. There is also no mark-to-market because in many cases these are idiosyncratic goods that may only find a buyer once over decades. Even some real estate markets only clear a single transaction on the scale of decades so any valuation is mostly fiction -- there are no comparables.
You could pay for these using the 30% of the assets that have some practical degree of liquidity but now you are putting massive downward pricing pressure on those because it is essentially a leveraged liquidation. Effectively, the total percentage of assets that are non-liquid would increase.
People tend to underestimate just how non-liquid the assets of the wealthy are. Most of that wealth isn't in stocks and bonds.
- Real estate is a bad example because it's already subject to property taxes, which is a form of wealth tax. Maybe it doesn't need another wealth tax.
Private businesses are a better example. They don't trade on markets, sometimes don't have multiple shareholders. There already exist methods for valuing businesses (discounted cashflow, for example). Let the taxpayer pick one and make them stick to it.
> You could pay for these using the 30% of the assets that have some practical degree of liquidity
I already said "no liquidations, pay with assets". For non-liquid assets pay with IOUs on said assets. The government cashes in the IOU when the asset changes hands - whether it's by sale, gift, or inheritance. Yes that's an inheritance tax; who cares? If you want to add a wealth tax to real estate, this is the way to do it.
- There are a surprising number of edge cases out there.
Quite a few assets can never clear a market — they have value in some abstract sense but no concrete sense. For example, assets that are legal to own and transfer but illegal to buy or sell.
Some commodity assets have value that it is nonetheless not always transferrable. A common example relevant to wealth taxes is intangible assets where value is bound in who owns it and not the asset per se. Most of the value vanishes the instant you transfer to e.g. the government.
Another common issue is that wealth taxes can directly conflict with existing load-bearing contracts. As a practical matter, these government can’t just void most contracts, including contracts the government is a party to, for the purposes of generating tax revenue.
All of which is why most real-world wealth taxes limit scope to a handful of liquid, legible securities and similar. But as a percentage of wealth, these are pretty small so you don’t collect much revenue.
- While I agree with "it's more complex than it seems", some simple things are not done because of FUD and politicians.
There are countries (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands#Bo...) that do tax wealth assets (maybe not all, and maybe not perfectly) and they seem to be doing just fine.
- we have property taxes, and its taxed every year. and somehow people keep trying to buy yet more property.
plenty of incentive to put money there, ditto for saving.
a saved dollar does not stimulate the economy, either. the whole idea of microloans is that the money gets spent ASAP and goes straight into the economy
- > Better to spend it while it’s whole.
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
- Who's 'we' in this context? USA? China? Developing nations?
- Global economy. You cannot shift the consumption blame onto the country producing the good for another. The pollution in China created to make phones for Americans is part of the same transaction.
It's like when the US used to ship our plastic waste to China, and China stopped accepting it. China only had a plastics pollution problem because it was a cheap buck to sweep an American problem under a Chinese rug.
- most retirement systems assume at least stable population growth. if the system can't sustain itself, debt borrowing can be done but eventually creditors will come calling.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
- You are so delusional
- [flagged]
- What indicators do we have that we care enough to solve the problem? It may be doomer to think we must slow down, but "the other side" just hand waves all the problems and says we'll magically fix them with future technology magic - its not reassuring.
- Ah yes let's "make progress" on a planet where people refuse to consume less and we have finite resources.
- a true outlier in this, even though other developing countries are mentioned in the article.
most of society is not in productive labour nor have significant female participation in non-agricultural work in the macro level.
almost any theory we apply for population slowdown melts down here. also, there are few regions (also populous) which have still significantly high birth rate.
in urban areas, a lot of asian peers go through a similar situation. crazy high costs to raise a family to stay "competitive": from inception to job market.
handouts will not help as the current social net is not sustainable nor effective. probably for the first time in recorded history would food availability not determine population growth.
- The problem with society is that people are commonly selfish, so the majority of people only do things that benefit them. Children benefited ancient societies.
The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficult.
To reverse the trend, we need people to understand that the difficulty of life isn't a bad thing, that struggle and suffering aren't bad, they are essential for growth in becoming a better, happier person in the long run.
Would you rather be an ever-weakening wimp? Most people unconsciously say "yes", afraid of the world. Kids are afraid of the chaos in life - suffering that happens when life throws you curve balls, like "what would I do without monetary support?". Even "adults" now are really kids are heart - afraid of losing social security, medicare, etc. "Welfare" programs don't end the dilemma - they only reinforce the childishness and dependency on gov for support.
We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. Courage separates the men from the boys.
- I am guessing you are from some reasonably developed country, you are so well unaware of how deeply biased the system is against most people in third world countries, the amount of suffering they experience is not for the faint of heart.
- GP is a pampered 1st world baby simulating „difficulty” in his life because of decadent boredom, likely spending tens of thousands of dollars per year unnecessarily, living in an oversized dwelling with access to education, healthcare, plumbing, a robust justice system and a social safety net.
- The downvotes explain why the world is declining in population. Most people fail to see this is the problem.
- I'm so happy people are rejecting your masochism (assuming your comment is not sarcastic) and are not falling for this scam of suffering anymore.
> We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road.
At "the end of the road" there's only death, so it's pointless to suffer just so you can make more people which will also suffer.
- > At "the end of the road" there's only death, so it's pointless to suffer just so you can make more people which will also suffer.
But sitting 8 hours a day in front of a rectangle emitting light and prompting llms to generate code for your overlords for the next 45 years definitely is not pointless
- A cash incentive in other places may not work but it’ll definitely work in India. Most of the country is still poor, offering $100 per child will drastically increase the birth rate, at least in the short term.
Of course this doesn’t incentivize the right people to have kids, but population grows none the less.
A state in India is already trying to implement this (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/why-andhra-pradesh...), $300 for 3rd child and $400 for 4th child.
- If they have the freedom to choose otherwise, they will. The global fertility "crisis" is simply individuals exercising their choices.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
- Rising kids also has a time, effort and opportunity costs which are not easily offset with money. I don’t think there’s a way to frame modern parenting in a way where it „pays off” in the same sense as it did in the past. As of now, it’s essentially a hobby.
- I mean, it can be offset with money. - Kids take time - Yes, so does working. If you cutout the 90h my partner and I spend working, that's a lot of time to put into raising children. - Kids take effort - Yes, so does working. If I didn't need to work this becomes much easier. - Opportunity cost - Yes, just pay me for the opportunity cost. Pay for my PhD after my kids are in grade school.
It's just that these policies are very expensive, and right now we allocate our money mostly to make rich people richer and maintain very high QoL for our elderly population. That's a choice we make in setting up our society.
- Exiting the workforce for a decade (Replacement fertility rate is 2.1 implying some people will have 3 kids, spaced 2 years apart plus 5 years of child-rearing until kindergarten) has an opportunity cost that is potentially in the millions of dollars, depending on the industry, and the time costs of child rearing doesn't suddenly end at 5 either.
- It just has to be a "Job" you get paid to do. People will absolutely sign up.
The problem is that there will be far too many people wanting that job, so you have to filter somehow, and that's basically eugenics which isn't the most fun, so I guess you'd have to have a lottery and deal with the fact that like 10% of the population will constantly riot about someone who "doesn't deserve it" getting paid to raise kids.
- there will be far too many people wanting that job
i don't think so. you can control it with how high the pay is, or only pay for the first two children or something like that...
- the state hates, hates, HATES paying for children, to the point of occasionally forcing victims of rape, infidelity, or fraud to pay child support.
https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2006/2006_05238.h...
>In October 2000, however, when appearing before a Family Court hearing examiner to answer Shondel's petition, Mark{*7 NY3d at 325} requested DNA testing. The hearing examiner ordered genetic marker tests, which revealed that Mark is not the child's biological father. The hearing examiner then dismissed Shondel's paternity petition, and Mark abandoned his petition for visitation, having severed his relationship with the child. Shondel objected to the hearing examiner's order, expressing doubts about the laboratory tests and stating that she would be able to show that Mark had always recognized the child as his. Realizing that the hearing examiner had exceeded her authority in dismissing Shondel's petition, Family Court sustained her objection and appointed a law guardian for the child.
>...
>Family Court entered an order of filiation and awarded child support retroactive to the date Shondel commenced the Family Court proceeding. The Appellate Division affirmed, concluding that "Family Court properly determined that it was in the best interests of the subject child to equitably estop [Mark] from denying paternity" (6 AD3d 437 [2004]).[FN1] We agree, based on our precedents, the affirmed findings of fact and the legislative recognition of paternity by estoppel.
and that not just the US, Europe is equally batshit, with France in particular fucking banning paternity tests outright.
they aren't going to pay anything resembling a livable wage for child rearing. firstly, that defeats the purpose, secondly, it would be expensive as fuck.
- That one's about someone who acted as the father for almost five years before suddenly questioning it. It's not about paying for children, it's about seeing a responsibility you took on through to the end.
Mandatory DNA testing at birth would solve a lot of these, and bring in new problems.
- There's no amount of money (that society could ever afford to pay) that could convince my wife to have children.
- Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice. Similarly, my wife wanted children, and there's no amount of money that could replace the joy of having our child.
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
- I wish society had taxed me (desired path zero children) more in some way that would have routed the resources to my friend who would have wanted to start having kids earlier and have more. Instead, the combination of regional housing crisis with contemporary parenting standards meant she and her husband waited for career progression to have the money for the space to start.
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- > Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice.
Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?
Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?
- An alternative take is that we've endured thousands of years of propaganda aimed at keeping women as child bearing, house keeping slaves, and we're finally starting to see the end of that in at least some cultures.
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
- On one hand we have propaganda not even a century old, only possible by the invention of birth control, the creation of tv, radio and newspapers, which itself required the invention of many things such as communications faster than horseback, the existence of strong centralized states which guarantee welfare to the elderly even if they don't have children to maintain it, and technological advances and social changes which make children an expense instead of an economic asset. And this propaganda leads to societies slowly economically collapse and their populations go extinct.
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
- Appeal to nature + Appeal to antiquity
- maybe it’s not propaganda if it’s been around for the entire human existence until the last 50 years
- I will assume that she has the same ability to reason and make an informed choice as you.
- Thank you for bringing up this incredibly rational, and not at all offensive or infantalizing presumption - one that hypothesizes that my spouse is incapable of thinking and deciding for herself.
You are, of course, the sole free-thinking, unpropagandized person in the world.
- FWIW, I think we all (I am including myself here) underestimate the degree to which our beliefs are formed by the culture we inhabit.
- Other Global South countries show the same trend. At roughly 1.6, Brazil is now in a similar range to countries such as the United States (slightly below replacement).
- Brazil is under 1.5 at this point and not nearly the worst off, thailand has a tfr of about 0.7 this year.
- Nigeria's is also declining, but about 4.5.
- Infinite economic growth depends on women having babies above replacement. Therefore, the economic value of a woman having three babies is virtually unlimited, and the economic destruction of a woman having less is also unlimited (when projecting far enough into the future).
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
- That's the basic background in the book The Handmaids Tale, but ironically the book might be used to fearmonger against anyone trying to incentivize births.
- Maybe economic struggle is not letting people take such a delicate and demanding responsibility. It's getting very difficult everywhere. It's not that just cost of living or housing affordability is a Western problem.
- There seems to be a lot of discussion on economic incentives (harder to raise, stronger pensions and less personal involvement) and other modes of entertainment being the reason for this trend, but I wonder if it could be attributed to more understanding on proper upbringing and awareness of such, and self-doubt on people to meet that demands.
Maybe the TV and schooling discussed is indirectly related, such as better understanding of proper upbringing, or more ways to see how things can be messed up, and having larger support group beyond family (and children) for said women in poorer countries.
In general there is more focus put on raising a child better and more involvement beyond hedonistic, time or economic reasons and better parenting expected that some don't think they meet the needs or find it harder to do the same for more than one child.
This is a bit of extrapolating from a small anecdotal group, but I wonder how statistically significant said group is.
- I know its not an acceptable view in 2026, but if women had to leave school at 16 and thus couldn't have a professional career I'd think many more women would have multiple children, like 5+ would be normal.
- At that point, you might as well formalize requiring them to have children or punishing them for not? Preventing them from working isn't any kinder.
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- There are a few constraints facing policymakers who try to incentivize people to have babies.
People can only drive or commute a few hours per day without being unable to care for children due to schedule. But the best opportunities cluster in small urban districts.
Throw money at the problem and it just gets used to fund housing, driving up costs and absorbing the money, leaving things back where they started.
This combination chokes population growth.
- One interesting factor about India is the minimum age of marriage. For males, it’s 21. For females, it’s 18. There have been attempts since at least 2021 to increase the age for females to 21, and I’ve talked with some that thought it was 21.
Marriages below the legal ages definitely do sometimes occur.
Personally, I think setting it to 21 for males is unwise, and setting it to 21 for females would be sheer madness. There are definitely some men and women that are quite ready for marriage before 21, and not many will marry at that age even if legal. It feels to me (a white Australian who moved to India a couple of years ago to marry an Indian) like they’re reacting too strongly to some of the problems that have historically existed with child marriages. But I definitely don’t grasp the full complexity of the situation.
- It's not only reaction against child marriages. Thr prevailing culture is to marry off girls as early as possible, affecting their higher education. It also causes lower workforce participation among women as at the point of marriage they typically neither have higher education nor they are employed. Then immediately after marriage there is demand for bearing child, after which they no longer have time to look for employment.
Early marriage basically kills job opportunities and subsequently female workforce participation is lower.
- "In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs."
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
- Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
- > The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
Interesting, guess our cavemen ancestors were much smarter and more capable than us since that seemed easy for them.
Hint: Imagine cutting defense budget and foreign meddling in favor of supporting families at home. Genius idea right?
- There's a certain other country that has free education, free healthcare, free childcare, heavy tax subsidies for having children, has the highest birthrates in the region, and it's all paid for with American tax dollars.
- > We need universal childcare services
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
- The worse the primary-caregiver's job prospects are, the cheaper the opportunity costs are to have kids. My wife quickly realized she didn't want to be an English teacher, and couldn't do a whole lot of other things with that degree, so her staying home to raise our 4 kids was very affordable for us. If she had been a software developer, the opportunity costs would have been higher.
- > It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
- Sounds more like it's a matter of attitudes about personal economics than attitudes about having children. If you want to wallow in poverty (and don't mind if your children do as well), then of course you can "find a way."
- As per usual arrangement, the internet can't stand a nuanced opinion, but instead jumps straight to extreme conclusions. Nowhere did I say anything about wallowing in poverty.
- Of course, "If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them." is a very nuanced statement for you to have made.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
- Sorry for wanting my children to not grow up in poverty with immature young adult parents.
- > societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend.
Absolutely impossible to do in the modern age, not just in India.
Everyone is set in their lifestyle.
This reason and cost of living crisis + AI + pollution + lack of any support whatsoever is causing this baby bust but govt thinks it van give a one time $ 300 money grant for the 3rd kid! It takes about $ 1.5k to get delivery done in a good hospital in the cities. Checkup and pre delivery costs are above $ 500 at the least over 8 months.
- >but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
you won't solve it with them either. all of that feel good crap would bump the TFR of an average civilized country by 0.2. how can you have access to all the data in the world and still believe that the reasons are economical and not cultural?
- I agree it's primarily cultural. I wonder whether there's anything that a non-totalitarian government can do that would significantly change the cultural side of it.
- I don't think even totalitarian governments can do anything about it now. with few exceptions, the only places on Earth with TFR above replacement are undeveloped countries or underdeveloped areas within developed countries. what could China or Russia even do, undeveloped themselves? dismantle their cities and uneducate their people?
- Communist Romania did it simply by outlawing all forms of contraception. TFR jumped from 1.9 to 3.7, nurseries were very busy, and the rivers were full of dead unwanted babies (as that is the thing humans seem to be hardwired to want to do with unwanted babies). It didn't last as people found ways to get contraception anyway within a few years.
- > But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
Interesting, they mention JUST education as the deciding factor. Would it not be education AND birth control?
- I think the point is, birth control usage is dependent on education rather than how hard it is to get. And maybe it is easy to get in India, I have no idea.
- Difficulty accessing birth control is greatly overstated by UN and other development agencies.
In surveys by far the dominant reasons for not using it are "my husband does not want me to" or "my family does not want me to". Those are included in "unable to access".
- Traditionally, female years of education, child mortality, and GDP per capita (in order of importance) explain 85% of fertility, and the residual is not biased in either direction.
source: Lant Pritchett, long-time development economist.
Edit: I don't think anyone outside the Taliban seriously wants to reverse the trends in any of those 3 factors.
- Robin Hanson on the first, incentivized with the ability to sell shares in your child.
- As communication increases the perception of competition also increases. The cost of raising a child that can compete in the world is now known to be higher. Eg cost of tutoring, after school activities, college etc. People who now know they dont have the economic resources to compete at a high level opt out of having children alltogether.
- This has a religious angle. Some religions believe in having as many babies as possible. Other religions are seeing the effect and realizing their mistake.
- I keep hearing some religions push for this. I don't understand how it benefits them
- It's significantly harder to convert an adult than it is to indoctrinate a child.
- you need to look at the origin. if we accept that this is written in the holy scriptures of the espective religions then the question is how did it benefit the people at the time it was written. never mind today because religions aren't free to just change scripture.
if we further assume that those scriptures were actually inspired by god or some other non human entity then the question is practically unanswerable because the benefit for that creator lie beyond our human life experience.
there are however a few potential theories for why it makes sense. for one god is described as existing beyond space and time. so god would know that birthrates were necessary to spread humanity across the planet, and maybe that was the goal. god would also know that the birthrate would eventually decline, so this would help be to counteract that decline.
we can also ask ourselves, what would be the benefit of a growing population today?
if the purpose of humanity is to push forward an ever advancing civilization, that is, to develop and to thrive, then maybe the goal is to maximize the potential of this planet to feed that many people, or to challenge us to be more efficient at food production. isn't population growth one potential driver for innovation?
or thinking beyond, maybe the goal is to actually push us to colonize space.
- It perpetuates the religion. The anti-breeding religions died out like dinosaurs.
- Why does it have to benefit them?
- If you invert the question "why aren't people having kids" to "why did people want kids in the first place" then the fertility crisis makes more sense.
Kids were free labor and old age insurance.
Now they are extremely expensive pets. Materially they are a net negative in a modern society.
- This is almost correct.
The way the pension systems are set up, you're donating your children's labor to the pension system as a whole. This means any investment into your children is purely an expense. Meanwhile if you don't have children, you can save money for retirement and let other people's children work for you.
This means children are a net positive to society as a whole, but a net negative to the parents raising them.
- I'm sorry your kids hate you so much they wouldn't support you if you needed it?
- Kids are definitely a net positive for society. They're future taxpayers.
But that's not relevant to couples choice to get pregnant. I've never heard a parent say they had kids so they can pay into Social Security.
- Anecdotally, every single family member I have in India has 1 or 0 kids.
- Totalitarian societies of the future will solve this with technology, with all the unfortunate side effects that will entail.
- a non popular theory: the more people become civilized (not using the traditional meaning) the less basic / animal they become. Animal are programmed to follow one goal : replicating one genes. Some (few) human manage to follow more elaborate (and less selfish) goals than replicating their genes.
- In a farming culture, children are a profit center:
1) Production of children costs nothing. People married young and children just happen, there are no expensive fertility treatments, etc.
2) children are free labor for decades, helping their dad (family?) expand the acreage. More land = high status for dad. Even today, children can work in the family business without any pay. A child can be free labor, but only for family.
3) After the children become adults, they don't automatically get any share of the land, they have to wait and be loyal to get their share of the inheritance.
4) Children are expected to take care of elders until they die. (free caregiving). Compared to taking care of an infant, which just lasts about an year or so, taking care of old people is extremely resource intensive. People used to do it because thats how social/cultural expectations were set.
5) Religions/culture standardize this by creating the culture/religious texts/etc -- women must produce more children (more followers for the religion) and children (specifically young) must obey their parents.
Now, children are a cost center. They cost a lot to produce, raise, don't confer high status (no free labor to expand production or acreage), and most critical factor no more free caregiving. Adults in these generations are realizing they are on their own when it comes to taking care of them when they are old. Then, why children?
The second thing is divorce is extremely punitive on men. Children happen, a man needs to be punished for the rest of his life and lead a significantly degraded life for decades. Decent men suffer the consequences of the toxic/abusive partners who are enabled by the state to steal as much as they can. When the laws change to be a bit more fair, magically divorce rates plunge. Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/the-equal-custody-experiment...
Some people point to poor people have lots of kids --> kids don't cost anything. Yes, poor people do have more kids, because divorce is divorced of disastrous consequences. If you have nothing, the state can't transfer/take much from you. As soon as you surpass the subsistence levels and have a job that pays above min wage, you have to worry about the inevitable consequences of divorce. You lose the primary home, pay a TON in child support, alimony, lose half your assets, pay for childcare, childrens health insurance and activities and still be the bad guy who gets to see his children only for a few hours. Women get most everything. Charlie Munger's on incentives: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." This site has some examples: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
If there is one thing Americans need to think about, work with your elected representatives, change the divorce laws. Young men are watching whats happening to their dads and
Note: Some of this is US specific, but largely applicable to most countries. Other countries are copying the worst divorce laws of US.
- Maybe I'm crazy but I think I'd be fine paying a tax to raise all kids - if that's what it costs to keep society alive, so be it. It would probably work out in the neighborhood of child support i.e. pretty high. The problem you're talking about with child support is how it punishes the one individual man and so the rational decision for each individual is to not have kids. A collectivised tax wouldn't have the same problem.
- I forgot to add these two dimensions: technology and fictional growth.
Technology is hijacking biology. Biology uses sex as pleasure to make more. But FAANG companies have hijacked biology: https://cwcp.ca/blog/limbic-capitalism/
Entertainment technology, first as TV, now as mobile phone (the worst kind of technology) has provided continuous low grade drip dopamine. This with contraception is a killer combination.
Automobile is another technology that is anti kids. Kids used to roam freely. Now they need to watched at home all the time. This is super exhausting and consumes all available time of parents. Kids used to go out, play, socialize, get hungry and come back home to be fed and they sleep (because they are tired).
The economy is another 'technology' and the 'growth' idiocy is another dimension. All countries are using one neat trick to boost 'GDP' growth, make real estate super costly and create elaborate financial structures for a basic need: housing. Magically, you add some growth, while restricting supply and making things worse for everyone. Making housing an asset class is making everything worse. Similarly, financializing healthcare to boost GDP growth, which is now 20% of the economy and growing!
There is no consequence free growth or technology. There are always consequences and they will eventually show up.
- The desire to procreate above replacement levels is probably heritable, so it will all work itself out naturally.
- Given that intelligence is ~60% genetic, if well-educated people are having kids less, then are we going to start getting dumber?
- Yes, definitely. Or at least there will be negative evolutionary pressure on intelligence; it might still go up from other pressures.
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- For anyone interested in really digging deep into this trend, I recommend picking up the book “After the Spike” by Dylan Spears and Michael Geruso.
It opened my eyes to the mathematical inevitability of short-term population contraction. Seriously, there is no way to avoid short term population contraction at this point. None. Zilch. Zero. We made our proverbial bed in the 1980s.
They convinced me that population contraction is almost certainly bad for people alive today, but also probably for our species as a whole.
Finally, they present a dozen or so hypotheses about what might be at the root of declining birth rates and what we might be able to do to stop reverse current trends.
The thing that made the book a true 5/5 for me is that they end with questions, not false certainty. Basically, demographers aren’t completely sure what’s driving the trends nor do they have fully baked conclusions about how it can be solved or if that’s even possible.
- "It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile." Yes, good to know the "rich places" are not alone.
- >But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
- Right. That will just turn the clock back. Because people are so clueless, stupid, they don't see around and notice this endless overcrowding is making their lives living hell. They don't read or see about lack of jobs, constant layoffs, housing shortage or anything else.
Just a warning about lack of cheap labor for 1 percenters in India should make every boy and girl in India to fulfill national duty to make more babies.
- I think the Chinese discovered that because they lowered fertility rates at a time they were naturally lowering anyway (as we see everywhere else). They can accelerate or, probably, slow down the natural progression but can't reverse it.
- I have written about this before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098431
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
- > One study showed how the arrival of cable television in Indian villages in the 2000s led to a moderate fall in fertility. Soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families may have changed norms (though some wonder whether people were just watching TV rather than having sex).
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
- > Sex is a boredom activity
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
- This has a background and actually was done intentionally in Brazil: https://publications.iadb.org/en/soap-operas-and-fertility-e...
- when there is a power outage it is most likely that the cell towers are down, too
- Cell phone towers and communication systems have backup power for emergency communication during power outages.
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
- ACT terminates the fibre outside (possibly terminating a few services at once), and only spec their backup battery for 1–1½ hour (I have observed about 1½ hours on what should be a fresh battery).
Other ISPs I’ve used in Hyderabad (Hireach, Airtel) terminate the fibre inside, so you can put whatever backup you like—I have a small ₹1,000 thing which kept the Hireach one going for around 4½ hours, and the Airtel one for 1¾ hours. (Still haven’t got a proper inverter, not so convenient when renting.) The connection always worked until my battery ran out.
- I live somewhere with two nines of utility power reliability, I mention that to say everybody's backup (or lack thereof) is well tested. I've got UPSes on most of my computers and a standby generator that pops on after about 10 seconds. DSL from my ILEC has zero backup power; sync drops when the power drops. I don't know about the cable. Municipal fiber doesn't drop so far, but I haven't had a long outage since I got it; my ISP has a generator where they route customer packets. We get cell coverage for about 4-8 hours, depending on which network you're on and if the outage started overnight coverage usually lasts until people wake up.
After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.
- Most power outages are local, not regional. And cellphone towers will work at a surprising distance.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
- In the US, cell towers have battery backups so emergency calls can still go through. I imagine most countries do too.
- My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
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- We're becoming people that care only about money and career, and kids are not exactly helping...
- One thing that is often not discussed when talking about declining fertility rates in the world is the change of the role of women.
I've seen multiple numbers showing that women 26+ have as many kids as they had 50 years ago.
It's the teenage or very young pregnancies that are disappearing.
But if you start having kids much later, you're likely to have much less.
- So many theories for why people stop having babies. I haven't heard anyone talk about romanticism as its cause. The second millenium began this trend of valuing more "feelings" than "duty". What before was considered madness (falling in love) became a core value. As everyone knows that feeling doesnt last long. We have been conditioned to think that anything "wrong" in the way we feel can be fixed with changing the externalities of our life: a new marriage, a new car, etc. God forbid we tell people they are having less kids or getting divorced more because they avoid their duty and are too self centered. The tragedy is that everyone is so blinded by themselves that it's far easier to tell them it's because the gov't doesn't pay childcare or xyz. Breaks are off and we are close the bottom
- Will this result in Indian immigration slowing into western countries?
- No. Immigrants are brave people. Whole of the human history is full of people leaving their known circumstances towards unknown circumstances with hopes for a better outcome.
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- Not a surprise. It has been below replacement rate since 2019.
- > But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
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- > I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men revealing recessive neanderthal genes, that will say that this is a bad thing, but I'm afraid those genes seem to have skipped me.
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
- If you think that was a comment on indian genes, take a step back and read it again. Its a farcical comment about how men do not treat women equally and those who don't are recessive morons.
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
- I think he's making a sarcastic statement about the revealing of sexist men, who think that, "because they are men, they are superior" when reality is just balancing out the ingrained sexism in all of our societies.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
- Racist? I agree that it's not a particularly nice thing to say, and I'll change it, to avoid triggering people, but this is a new definition of the word "racist." Thanks for educating me.
- It's racist to say that people who don't believe women should have equal rights and opportunities and are equally capable as men - are neanderthals?
- You're right. It insults neanderthals, who we are learning were surprisingly advanced.
- A big part of people having lots of kids was infant mortality, the need for physical labour (farming) and lack of old age security (kids take care of parents). All 3 of these issues are mostly gone so now parents try to focus resources into ensuring their children are as successful as possible instead of as numerous as possible.
- ... as predicted by demographers for the last ?10? Years? Longer?
- Every single population goes through a baby bust when a certain level of development is achieved - women education seems to be a particularly strongly correlated sub-component.
- Could be easily verified in wealthy societies where women are still delegated into mostly keeping household & raise kids roles (I don't think I need to name few samples).
- They've tried nothing and it didn't work!
- Is this a surprise to people there though? There was a big boom around independence and people wanted to give their own children a better life. India doesn't have a free national public school system like other countries do, which I believe is a big factor.
- India has a large public school system. It is managed by each state .
- The purpose of life is reproduction and having your own kids is the greatest joy in life. I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur who can do anything I wish with my time and I have done everything; travel, rock climbing, super cars, wine tasting, etc etc. Time with my kids is all that matters to me.
- > The purpose of life is reproduction
There's no "purpose" of life, it just happens, it's physics.
> I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur
So now imagine you're not, and your life sucks because of such "successful and wealthy entrepreneurs" sucking all the wealth.
If your life is shit, you naturally don't want to make it even shittier just so you can produce people whose life will also be shit (thanks to the class society). Since we stopped forcing people to do this, they're naturally excercising their will.
But your wealth depends on them reproducing, so that's a nice middle finger they gave you by not doing so. You're concerned? You should be, that's the message.
- The first time it happened it was physics. The next several billion years it was the purpose.
- No, that's not correct. Otherwise grey tin would also have the same purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest
This is an allotrope (alternative crystal form) of tin metal that forms spontaneously at very low temperatures and can convert ordinary tin that it touches into the same form at room temperature. (It's not irreversible, as it melts into regular molten tin.). In other words, it's a metal that reproduces. At first due to physics, but after the first time it's purpose, wouldn't you say?
- Am I the only one that doesn't with about this "crisis". The world's population isn't going to fall, it'll level off around 2100, nobody is enough to read this will be around, our kids and grandkids can decide for themselves.
Local populations will see very different trajectories, yes. Africa will see population growth and many other places will see steep decline. Societies can choose to keep their current system and take in immigrants, or choose to keep their "national character" (or whatever) and rejig their societies so the remaining productive parts pay for increasing numbers of old people. Grifters (Brexiters, MAGA, Le Pen, etc) will attempt to sidestep such obvious tradeoffs, but they will fail, hastening the decline of these societies.
- Every single population growth and peak chart for the last 10 years (and maybe 20) has been wrong with growth slowing much faster than expected. It's basically the opposite of all the solar power growth predictions. I predict this article is wrong too and the growth continues to fall. Just wait until no kids becomes the norm for couples in their 30s in India like it is here in the US.
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- Lots of theories here. Industrialization. Wealth. Education. First world transformation. Kids' expense.
All of these are second-round of reasons.
Primary reason: Materialistic wealth or wealth in general is preferred over human contact.
Effect: People connection drops. Community drops. Independence and Individualism prosper.
Secondary effect: The seeds for family development (community, human connection, village camaraderie) go missing. Growing a family now requires artificial support. When family members grow up, their time is now spread across materialisms and career development. Career development goes up and takes priority. Wealth acquisition takes priority. Except everyone is doing this so basic needs have to be fulfilled with limited resources. All prices are now going up. What was the point of everyone working now? Wealth acquisition. hmm.
Tertiary Effect: Huge workforce looking for work. Wages diminish because supply went up. Businesses prosper. Market caps go up. Business becomes easier. Dominance becomes easier.
4th Effect: Debt goes up to fulfill materialistic quests. Interest locks in people into a debt that grows over time even if the supply of money does not go up. Now people are perpetually looking to complete paying off their debt. And they will perpetually need to work. And worker supply perpetually increases. Freedoms go away. Wealth centers on to certain people. They take over media, entertainment, recreation, and tourism. We end up with a tale of two worlds.
Edit: Before the primary reason goes into effect, I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism. And that replaced human connection.
- > I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism.
And reduced illness, increased education, increased access to better nutrition, increased lifespan, increased able lifespan (knees/back/teeth don’t give out as early), and lots more.
Like, even if I grant that this replaced human connection (and I’m not sure that’s true, nor am I sure if it is meaningfully true—access to water replaces thirst, too), some very substantial benefits were acquired in return.
- The theory that improved health and safety and lifespan will shrink the urge to procreate is so far fetched I find it hard to imagine. The longer you live, the more likely you seek connection. It would be easier to imagine that long lifespan and better health makes people less attached to their spouse.
- > improved health and safety and lifespan will shrink the urge to procreate
Not what I said at all. Note the “even if I grant … (which I don’t…)”.
- We went too far though, the main causes of death in the west are now all due to overconsumption, more than 50% of westerners are overweight, etc.
- Thanks ChatGPT
- I encourage anyone surprised that people would opt out of babies and raising kids actually spend time with kids.
Not just like for the holidays and pass them back when they start crying, but an actual extended period of time dealing with all the issues that they bring.
You've got to be a special kind of idealistic romantic to still see the appeal afterwards. Which is great for you of course if you do. But there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control.
- > there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control
I don’t think that’s because of birth rate decline. While authoritarians give lip service to that occasionally, it’s never their primary cited reason (which is usually some combo of religion, purported return to “traditional” prosperity via reduced promiscuity, aggression against feminist political opponents, etc). Also, most authoritarians aren’t that long-term in their goals.
- Extended period? How about 5 years? 15? 25?
There is literally nothing in the world that compares to the joy of having a large, loving, family that you helped create. The day-by-day crying or trivial complaints that you are so short-sighted about simply don't matter.
I encourage you to talk to some happy families.
- Basic statistics, common sense and dire poverty would dictate that there will be a sizable number of unhappy families.
If you're surrounded by only happy families then you're privileged.
I've seen families where husbands come home drunk and best the wives (in 2026)
- You are in the family you help create. It is not just thrust upon you. The existence of despair need not discourage others to thrive.
- Did the drunk wife-beaters intend to be that way?
- That’s assuming no disease, mental illness, unforeseen events, injuries, forced poverty, unexpected deaths, etc. A great deal of family dynamics is outside of a person’s full control.
- That's also neglecting the fact that Indian boomers are very nosy and the culture pressures adults to have kids but gives 0 support. Neither culture nor religion or the govt does anything to help.
- > culture pressures adults to have kids but gives 0 support.
Really 0 support ? I know many grandparents who entirely took care of their grandkids for 2–3 years. So their kids can work.
Mind you, Not by living in the same city and helping. But taking care of grandkids in their own village / town.
You clearly have no idea of culture nor religion of the country.
- I think you're too idealistic (or of right wing ideology). The culture aka parents inlaws and random aubties and uncles pressurize Indian couples to have 1 kid then 2nd kid then 3rd kid
But neither of them come to help these days with childcare. Just for the photos and for lolz
Very few couples have kids of their own violitin
Not to mention some religious sects/cultures who look down upon contraceptives due to religious beliefs
So yeah, loads of parents become parents by accident and not by their own choice. (Not saying everyone is like this but a large number is like this)
- Complete opposite experience for me. I wish I'd had kids sooner- I was too influenced by popular negativity about kids: the expenses, the loss of freedom, etc.
Most of that is bullshit. Having kids has made literally every aspect of my life more fun.
- Your body go through a lot of hormonal changes when it's your own kids, of course it does not work as well with other random kids...
But of course people on this forum believe we're basically machines and that machines are interchangeable, they're so far in the techno bubble they forget we're just some kind of complex apes
- there are several comments here contradicting you directly and talking about how kids are a great experience.
- Less children less taxing on the planet. Not everyone needs a replacement copy of themselves. The world population in 2026 is approximately 8.3 billion people. It is projected to continue growing, reaching around 10 billion by 2060.
- Especially when in India individual tax payers pay more % of overall tax collection than corporates since the recent tax cut of corporate tax 12yrs ago
- I’m always a bit confused by this, don’t we want this? If the end goal is to have ai and robots do it all, and there are no jobs left, what would children provide if they aren’t down payments on a future work force? Only people that wanted children would have children as all the old childless people would be taken care of by the states robots. I mean not exactly like that but something like that. Ai isn’t taken anyone’s job is there is nobody there to take it from. Or is that line of think too… something.
