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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet
Childbirth has been collapsing for decades before Mark had launched "thefacebook.com". Japan's TFR cratered in 1960 and never recovered. Did Japan have smartphones in 1960?
"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.
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.
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
One thing to remember is that “heavily pushing subsidies” needs to be more comprehensive than it tends to be when you look at the details: people decide to delay kids for many reasons and societies often fail to address all of them – e.g. if you subsidize childcare but still have a work culture which expects long hours or sidelines mothers, the existence of the subsidy lessens the impact but probably doesn’t get too many people to change their answer. It’s fairly common to find reports of gaps in the supports for even the more generous societies which lead to people stopping at 1-2 kids when they might otherwise have wanted more.
These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Pairing seems to be the primary issue. The old social technology we had to increase the amounts of intersexual cooperation have for various reasons been discarded, but they have not been replaced with anything.
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.
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. 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).
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!
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.
That baby boom was an echo of the first post-war baby boom and fueled by a record 274k newly built apartments in 1979 - a culmination of a decade of ramping up construction when Edward Gierek took over and started borrowing money on a massive scale[0].
As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:
-Companies insist every employee works full time.
-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.
-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.
-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.
Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.
My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.
[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
So you're saying that the median marriage was forced back then? I don't see why the same reasoning wouldn't apply to men as well or who was forcing people into marriages besides some vague idea about "the patriarchy or something".
I was responding to OP's point about how our bodies are better suited to have children when we're younger. I think that's scientifically supported. My main belief would be that having children when you have peak fertility probably goes hand in hand. Birth control is a good hypothesis, you could say it broke this link.
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.
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.
Then 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
Bruce Springsteen -- "The River" -- which was apparently a fictionalization of his brother-in-law
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus Christ! I don't have children, but if that is what it would cost, then I would definitely never have a child. It would feel like sacrificing my entire life, just to produce another generation. No, then I'd much rather just enjoy life, and melancholically look at the families who have to struggle every day to make ends meet due to their children. It is really quite sad. But I guess nature in its wisdom, transforms a person who has a child, so that that child becomes the only meaning in life for that person. If not, there simply would be no children and we would not be able to write this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A 60 year old man can reliably have children. It is essentially impossible for a 60 year old woman to have children. The risk of defects from poor sperm increase from about 2% in your twenties to 4% in your sixties.
However, men do have a biological clock and that clock is simply that they are proxied to women's clocks. Mick Jagger can get a young girlfriend and have babies in his old age because he is famous with lots of money. The typical man cannot do this and should not plan on being able to do this. The data tells us that if a man reaches 45 without children, it is extremely unlikely that he will ever have kids, even if his sperm tests perfectly in the lab.
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.
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 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
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
The familial support really is key - it is possible to have a large family "on your own" but it's significantly harder than if you have cooperative family in the area, or are already in multi-generational living situations.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
There are studies on this in both Sweden and the US. Young men who win the lottery have children at higher rates than the control group. Young women who in the lottery have children at equal or lower rates than the control group.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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?
Even if it is, there's never any guarantee that something which works at the scale of a tribe can be transplanted to a nation of millions.
To a limited extent, the school system itself is how we collectively care for the next generation. How far can it be pushed in the direction you ask about?
one idea is multi family homes. the idea is that instead if each family having having all their own space for themselves, you have a lot of shared spaces. consider that you need to be private, that's your bedroom and a bathroom. but you can share the kitchen, the living room, a play room, a reading room, a tv room. you don't have to share everything. there is a lot of flexibility in how you arrange the space, but the overall idea is that you have multiple families together, and because you share some things you also get to know each other better and kids can run around and feel at home everywhere. if you need a babysitter because you want to go out, you can simply check in with one of the other families if they are at home, and ask if it is ok if you go out.
the two main benefits are that parents get to know each other better, just like they would in a village, instead of being anonymous like we are most of the time, barely knowing who our neighbors are. and the sharing of resources. my dad loved books and music. i basically grew up in a library. it was nice when i had to make a school report that required some research, but it would not have hurt if those books would have been shared with a lot more people. ok, we have public libraries too, but you get the idea. by sharing resources you are able to get a lot more things that you would not be able to get if you lived alone.
I've lived in a few things such as you describe and… it's variable. We kinda need a culture that fits them, as people right now are all over the place in terms of responsibility for shared spaces.
Not saying it can't be done, only that this is harder than the Nike slogan (just do it).
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.