Seems like some politicians are doing their best to arrange that
The war is the cause, but it has to end to do it.
Both sperm counts and testosterone are way, way down for who knows what reason. People are waiting longer and longer to get married, and the number of unmarried people is higher than ever.
I think war just leads to mostly broken, single men, as there's nobody to come home to.
The post Vietnam war economy implies this wasn't really true. Also our current post Afghanistan/Iraq war economy.
For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam.
Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others.
Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so.
WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.
Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.
WW2
>What Would It Take to Have Another?
WW3
There is no guarantee that a WW3 would even repeat this phenomenon.
If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.
It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
Stable populations are completely irrelevant at the microscopic levels; InBev would fold within a week if yeast populations were stable.
I know there's a joke in here about this being literally in the bible, with God using such an insect birth rate swing as a punishment for an entire state. That's how "stable" it is.
It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.
It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.
You need to know what the current population is, what the carrying capacity is, etc etc.
Generic statements sound and feel good, but are completely useless.
This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.
Yet we have made (hopefully this is not contentious) great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life.
Certainly there were some stable societies in that timeframe?
There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that
No form of civilization has ever had the access to automation we have today.
And in another 20 years, I suspect that'll be even more clear.
Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.
This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.
Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.
This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.
Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)
> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.
No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.
You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.
Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.
Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.
I am increasingly tired of arguments for the elites to do something for the betterment of society. They have repeatedly shown that they don't care.
You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.
I'm not talking about self-service kiosks, I'm talking about "talk directly to the machine" sort of things they're already testing out.
I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.
Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.
Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.
Etc.
I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
When you retire there will only be two. Expect less than half the care, because automation of elderly care is more expensive than a person.
It's not really clear to me what the point of this question is. Are you advocating for infinite growth? For eventual extinction? Perhaps for a slow, long-term contraction but not extinction (i.e. eventual stability)? The latter is certainly what makes the most sense to me, but I'm just some random guy on the internet.
Am I allowed to ask a question without having an agenda? What’s with the hostility?
Thru genealogy I see how families and extended families lived together to afford living expenses. MultiFamily housing was common and jobs were within walking distance. The automobile dispersed jobs and families, taking all the above away.
The needs we have now are no longer possible to fill.
"people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours."
will things still get somewhat bad, certainly yeah. but there's a very real chance we're on track to a mostly carbon free future in a ~ decade. Im pessimistic about a lot of things but there is a lot to be optimistic about here.
> If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them.
This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too.
I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.
The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon.
If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.
Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.
Many people get hyped up about their beliefs on social media, and when they go out into the real world they take some of that divisive thinking with them.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.
I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.
Yes, or just have your servants watch them.
Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.
> It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
Mostly women, and that helps keep the gender pay gap going.
Where are you at?
Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
The solution to "kids are expensive" being to just pay someone lower class to do it is absurd.
> You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
You're re-inventing daycare here.
Nannies take multiple children (up to 4 here in France) at the same time. So he/she can take his/her own.
There is nothing morally wrong with hiring someone to do labor for you.
There are two ways to hire a nanny. The "law abiding as a point of pride" way is comically expensive.
The "pay your neighbor's teenager cash" way is cheap.
If even that's too expensive for you then send your kids to whatever unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated daycare that some tradesman's wife runs out of her house.
> Have a parent stay at home and not work
> Hire a nanny
> Move (presumably farther away from your job) closer to your (assumed idle) parents so they can help
> Take a couple of years off of work
These options are available to a vanishingly small percentage of working people, at least in the USA. OP must know this, so why even mentions these outlandish options?
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
Being a mom just sucks.
I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.
I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.
Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.
I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.
Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.
My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.
Does that make it feel more fair?
I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
My anecdote: As a parent, when I talk to people my same age or younger without children they often greatly overestimate the sacrifices necessary to have children. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people (who don’t have children) make wild claims like having children means you won’t have good sleep for the next decade, or that they need a 4,000 square foot house before they have kids, or that it’s impossible to raise kids in a MCOL city without earning $200-$300K.
A lot of people have locked their idea of what it’s like to have children to the newborn phase and they imagine changing diapers, paying $2-3K infant care costs, and doing night time feedings forever. I’ve had numerous conversations where people simply refuse to believe me when I tell them my kids were sleeping through the night after a couple years or potty trained by age 2.
I think a lot of this is due to class isolation combined with getting a lot of bad info from social media. When you mingle with more of the population you realize most families with kids are not earning programmer level compensation and not living in 4,000 square foot houses, yet it’s working out.
Reddit is an interesting peek into this mindset. Recently there was a thread asking for serious answers from parents about if they regretted having children. The top voted comments were all from people who said “I don’t have kids but…” followed by a claim that all their friends secretly regretted having kids or something. If you sorted by controversial there were a lot of comments from people saying they didn’t regret it and loved their kids, but they were all downvoted into the negatives. It’s wild.
Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.
For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.
Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.
Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.
I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.
There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book
They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.
They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.
The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.
Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.
if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.
My mom would yell out the back door when it was time for dinner.
Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.
I'd also add that it may even be illegal in some places to let your kids outside by themselves at all. Even when it's not illegal, it just takes one busybody to call the police and you've got a potential charge waiting for you, all because you let your kid walk a couple blocks to school. And of course, this just exacerbates the problem further.
Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)
BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.
Yep. When typical wages equal 100% of rent, how is a new couple supposed to sustain themselves?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456
According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture back. The culture has fundamentally changed.
Just to cause arguments, some things which I'm guessing were an influence in getting her. Cars? (easy to get away from family/village, the culture that valued family). TV/Cable/Video-Games/Youtube? (infinite entertainment 24/7). Fast easy prepared food? (no needing to meet with others for meals). Computers/SmartPhones/Internet? (infinite entertainment and/or ways to interact with others but not actually meet). Suburbia? (the need to drive to be close others)
It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.
> According to that the issue is culture.
This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.
Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity.
Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.
1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce 2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees 3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer). 4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort.
It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.
As such it can be true or false, but I don't really see how it can be sexist.
If you think it's not true, it would be curious to hear why.
Some young women are waking up to the fact that even though their corporate overlords call them family a month before mass layoffs, it can be a lot more rewarding to work for your actual family instead of the family assembled by billionaires looking for a good return on investment and pension funds.
https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/back-when-america...
My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers.
My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation.
Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
It's bizarre to me that the piece doesn't mention the contraceptive pill, which debuted in 1960, the exact same year as peak fertility.
I'm not in the UK, but in France it seems that people generally won't let their kids outside alone until they're 10 or not even then. That makes a difference of several hours of free time a week which is quite significant. Luckily people seem to be fine to leave their kids alone at home, which amounts to a few more hours of time per week. Also luckily there are mandatory public schools starting from the age of 3, so France in general is not bad for raising kids time-wise and money-wise. However I do notice that amount of autonomy people entrust to their kids here is lower than what I tend to do.
The NSPCC says 12 is a minimum for leaving kids alone at home: https://www.gov.uk/law-on-leaving-your-child-home-alone
That's going to depend wildly on the actual child (my eldest is ridiculously responsible so we'll probably go out when she's younger, maybe 10).
I really don't think people are focusing on how busy lives will be in 10-12 years when they decide whether or not to have children. Obviously things like finances and childcare when they are young are way more important. Kind of insane that we're even debating that.
wtf... let the kids be kids. this is totally gross and government violation of families
Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.
It’s not hard to have 3 or 4 kids when the expectation is public schools then “they figure it out”.
Today the expectation is much higher on a per kid basis.
Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
We've got some really good neighbors that have helped out a lot, but it's never quite the same
Same story: my mother is not involved into rising kid. But she also often asks when are we planning to have more kids. But I barely manage one child
Two 30ish mums I know act really entitled about the Boomer (61 to 79 years old) grandparents not giving enough support. The mums are both working in full-time jobs, and one is a solo mum, so I understand why they need more help. Both mums get massive support from the grandparents (some working fulltime themselves), but they complain they just don't get enough support.
The mums compare with the support they received as children from their own grandparents, but often the grandmother was a "housewife" and their grandparents were relatively younger.
Being online is not the same as being in the real world.
You have to take risks, including speaking with people, face to face, and forming meaningful relationships.
Swiping right is not the same as approaching someone attractive in person.
Complaining on Reddit is not the same as talking directly with lawmakers.
Interpersonal communication, persuasion, is hard work that should be re-embraced.
Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
Seems to be working!
No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
(edit: added translation of unit)
It's weird how much happens for random, completely unrelated reasons.
We have none of those things at present.
Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.
So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually.
Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures.
So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons.
If you want actual actions congress can take:
1. Expand limits on the dependent HSA account to allow more than 5,000 annually. Daycare alone is much more than 5,000 USD, it seems making that completely tax free will help.
2. Subsidize the entire cost of daycare. This will never happen but by golly it will work.
It’s not just affordability, it’s one big piece but it’s not the only thing.
What would cause another baby boom would be a recovery of catholic cultural confidence.
Cultural Catholics in the United States mostly aligned with Protestant secular world views.
One of her memories is interesting and very relevant. There were a lot of soldiers trained in Canada and the government put on dances to entertain them. Had my gram or of her sisters asked to go to a dance with a bunch of soldiers in 1936, they would have been locked in a barn while he burned something down. But by 1939, it was his patriotic duty and he’d buy his girls dresses and take them to the dances.
When my Gram was in her nineties, she would talk about the soldiers, the music and the dances. Then she’d start to glow and her neck would turn red. Romance of the times is a comfortable euphemism. :)
Please make them feel good for it. Make it desirable.
Unfortunately the rapid global development means that even new world war wouldn't replicate this period. Train has left, bye bye, and won't return in our lifetimes. We need to adapt.
Everyone in the whole society was literally working on the same thing toward the same goal at the same time. There's simply no comparison with that to anything we've experienced since then. That kind of thing can't be measured in dollars.
Even though I have put zero thought into most of my political beliefs, I just repeat what my social media programs me to believe, that can't be true. I can't be full of shit.
Look how much I get paid to write javascript!
Also, the day Paris was liberated in WW2, there wasn't a soldier in the city who could not get laid.
But they didn't know how screwed they were.
(If you implied sarcasm I apologize, it's extremely hard to tell when dealing with HN posters)
I expect better, more thoughtful replies on HN than this.
Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.
I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.
The "immoral to have kids" crowd still exists e.g in Europe but their options are to either change their mind or to be gradually overrun by people who think otherwise.
Shockingly, declarations as if we are gods laying down "the one true morality" are not actually definitions of "the one true morality".
There was PTSD of course, a lot of grief and life altering injuries, but back then you didn't talk about it and just drank and beat up your wife and kids instead.
Anatomically modern humans exist for ~100,000-200,000 years. Reliable contraception widely available is something that didn't exist until ~60 years ago. So we can't just use past performance to predict the future.
It’s absolutely capable of changing demography.
It’s not capable of providing consistent timing of pregnancies.
But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.
I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.
Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.
But the idiopathic depression of the modern era is certainly interesting. Doubtful it can be studied before natural selection exacts its ruthless revenge
But still, we need to be teaching above all the other dumb shit thats happening in school: how capitalism hates them. How you need to eliminate middle men, having a regular wage means you are going to be an oppressed slave for life. You need to come up with your own thing, that you own and control and get to do some kind of negotiating for its value. You need to invest in things that can be used to make money in the future, little side hustles always. And maybe even deep dives on how crime really does pay, and if not figure one out yourself at least know the huge majority of people that are going to try and scam you. It is pure evil not to teach reality in high school
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
Being a mom just sucks.
I suppose the Nordic socialist democracies are pretty nice. They probably have birth rates below replacement levels as well though. It turns out if you offer women the choice to have a career, enough of them take it that you drop below the replacement rate.
I have a child, alot of what I read on these internet groups isn't relatable.
Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.
Men don’t want to take that risk, so many men opt out of marriage as well.
There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MediocreTutorials/comments/18lhait/...
As for a stay at home mom who doesn’t get divorced, she doesn’t need to be entirely stay at home for all 18 years.. kids go to school at 5 and can go to after school programs if necessary while she works. A couple years before that if the kids are in pre school she could get a degree or masters degree or work part time. So the career gap could be minimized.
Sure - a combination of a race to the bottom on working hourse and supply/demand for housing.
We need major tax breaks for single income households and to legalise building homes.
I have never expected to be paid for raising my children.
Drinking beer and playing video games for 10 hours a day AND WORKING A FULLTIME JOB would also suck.
From everything I hear, being a mom is pretty awesome and rewarding.
But there are only 24 hours in a day and you can't have everything and you have to choose what is most important. Welcome to life.
Then you don’t even read magazines, let alone mom forums, or attend playgroup, or basically hear anything.
Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.
I don't feel as though I wasted any of the "fertile years" of my female partners who ended up not wanting to marry me!
I had a couple of different long-term relationships in my 20s before I found a woman to marry and start a family with, which we did just fine in our 30s despite having two miscarriages in between kid #1 and kid #2.
The female dating coach Logan Ury wrote a book called "How not to die alone" which discusses this issue.
Women set expectation bar so high, only top 5% of men meet.
This seems like a rational decision to me. Better go it alone than risk becoming the sole carer of both a baby and a man-baby.
For example, being over 6ft doesn’t make you a good dad. Or being physically attractive, doest’t make you a supportive partner.
If anything, these characteristics make a man worse, as men in these categories tend to have the pick of the litter, resulting in many women frustrating and disappointed in men if they weren’t selected.
This does not make sense. It's not men taking birth-control pills, plan-b and having abortions.
Anecdotally, I see many women who want to settle down but never take the initiative to ask a guy out.
As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.
Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.
Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.
I'm 38 and the overwhelming majority of women I had relationships with had the maturity of a teenager well in their 30s. Barely able to take care of themselves financially, mentally, physically, let alone of a family. I seriously felt, except once, I had daughters rather than significant others.
Mind you, I might've been unlucky, but the narrative that women are more mature than men, might be true on large statistics which are quickly lost on an anecdotal level.
My last gf had a really high IQ and a very low EQ. I wish someone warned me about being single in your 30s.
Had you chosen women purely randomly, it'd be a different discussion, but you hadn't.
You've done the equivalent of consistently driving above the speed limit and subsequently complaining about the police being too eager to give out speeding tickets.
He's restating a complaint that's approximately as old as time. We've got records of roman male heads of household lamenting basically the same thing. He did not voice a novel or even close to novel-ish complaint.
>Had you chosen women purely randomly,
Have you met men? They're not exactly discerning except at the very tail end of the "yeah this one is worth giving a ring to" funnel. They don't necessarily have a perfect picture of what's available in the market but they're not wildly out of touch.
Heh, reminds me of:
”Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching,” attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.
Yes, I suspect that my mother being this kind of person, immature even at 50, made me feel at home with women like that.
In any case, I can't say that most of the other women I know is that much different in my area (Rome - Italy).
They are all more or less 35+ teenagers (the single ones).
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
[0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...
I will take a look at your linke tho
That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays.
I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble?
I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
omg... yeah, this author is not credible at all.
Instead of introspection men react angry- predictably.
You mean they're perceived to not offer what it takes. Of all phenomena, hypergamy is one of the best documented. And in my experience, as inequality grows so too does hypergamy.
But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This is written about quite a bit.
Go on.
There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website.
It just happened to easily show up in my search.
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-th...
"Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework."
Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension.
When this was equalised there were massive protests.
Measures of productivity didn’t count domestic labor at all for the longest time. That correction occurred in this life time.
A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is:
> fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.
> Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.)
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...
In 2025, some of that labor is recaptured by the man, as that improves the value of the family home or cars.
Also, if your family chooses to rent (which seems to be a trend now for millennials), the man doesn’t have a lawn to cut or a car to fix.
This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.
I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy.
Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.
Peter Zeihan, whose YouTube prognostications seem iffy, likes to call children "expensive furniture". They were useful labor on the farm a hundred years ago, but in small apartments they can be a real nuisance.
Modern parenting is wild - there are too many rules and regulations and things just have to be just perfect to have a kid. Our great grandparents just had them all over the place and would let them roam around in the wilderness. Today we have to coddle and bubble wrap, sign them up for classes, take them places. Just thinking about it seems stressful.
At the same time, we've got these little dopamine cubes in our pockets that are taking our time away from socializing and dating and meeting people. It takes time and deliberation to find someone to settle down and commit to raising "expensive furniture" with for the next twenty years. You can just keep scrolling your feed and filling life with experiences.
Perhaps instead it's that the modern life creates the perception that something different or exciting could be just around the corner - like a kind of hedonistic treadmill, or wishful longing. Our ancestors just accepted their fate and lived their short lives. We have too many things taking our time and attention, and everything has to be "perfect" before we commit.
Not making any value judgments here, just stating observations.
Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.
My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.
There's too much opportunity (good!) and too much opportunity cost.
We're truly gradient ascent explorers in the rawest sense. And our adventures take us off the evolutionary path. We've jumped the shark on our biology.
(It’s an actual if accidental strategy employed by some).
And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.
And cheap, reliable, birth control.
One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).
Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.
Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.
Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
Today, Tinder and Instagram gives you access to literally the entire planet of single people and the illusion that you have the chance to be with one.
I guess what I’m getting at is that, even if you describe men’s desires accurately, I don’t think it describes their behaviour in my parents’ generation let alone mine. But maybe this just varies a lot by country/income/education/social class and I see some weird sample. I know divorce rates have become super divergent by education in the US for example so presumably relationships are quite different too.
The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.
Maybe that is a good explanation for the baby boom though.
i have a long term spouse and let her make the call because i know it sucks too, i doubt i would sign up for it
theres always adoption. yes, i know the adoption process is rigorous and expensive
If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor. Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed. Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/f...
This absolutely isn't the reality I observe in my circle, but I acknowledge it was the reality for my parents and grandparents.
Not gonna lie: it just seems like you made a poor choice in picking a partner.
Don't blame it on the entire male population.
being a mum doesn't have to suck. choices are being weighed and made.
Breast pump is a thing, the husband can definitely do the feeding with frozen breast milk warmed up in minutes. Or just do formula.
Even if dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.
There is no longer a way to come up with a sane division of labor for the average couple. Both parents are not intended to be working full time. It does not work for either party.
Heck, humans are not designed to operate as two parents even. There should be multiple generations of help at hand for it to truly be a decent experience. Humans need breaks and our hyper scheduled existence is entirely unnatural.
I watch friends who have kids where both have professional careers and to be honest none of it looks like a fun time. I don’t think it’s good for the kids either.
15-20 years of “sucking it up” and dealing with a horribly overbooked and stressful life is not good for any party. Women have it worse on average, but no one appears to be having a good time.
So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”
Any way thank you for making me feel seen.
But, I don't share at all the bit where men just want to work, etc, that's really not the experience of most couples I know (Europe, non rural).
The only couple actually like the gender stereotype you invoke is a conservative one in their 60s.
I much prefer cooking, cleaning, and parenting. I would choose being a full-time parent in a heartbeat over my career if I had the option. But due to my particular skills, my earning potential is much higher than my partner's. It wouldn't make much sense for us. So I slog it out so we can afford what we need. She works too, but not full-time.
But so much of what you talk about is foreign to me. My partner and I have no concept of "my own money" vs "my partner's money"; it all goes into a joint account that we both control and we trust each other to spend wisely. And yeah of course we both share the housework and childraising (because that's table stakes for an egalitarian relationship). I don't just come home from work and play video games or something. Seeing my kid grow, play, and copy me is the biggest external validation I could ask for.
If you value your income more than your kids, then you either shouldn't have kids, or you should marry someone who prioritizes domestic work and parenting over their career. But then don't think they're not pulling their weight just because they earn less than you.
That said, I think if the government wants to encourage more babies, it should pay a basic income to stay-at-home parents, something perhaps comparable to the cost of daycare. Then maybe people like you won't consider it unpaid labor anymore and it will become a more respected option.
However, birth rates are through the floor even in countries with 2 years paid parental leave.
This is a sexist take. It is not universally true, and a like-for-like retort would be considered sexist.
Sports? Who will stay with kids during your trainings?
Current steps being taken include:
- Emphasizing family values via the Russian Orthodox Church
- Restricting abortion, which was cheap and easy in the USSR days
- Encourage teenage pregnancy (there's a "Pregnant at 15" TV show)
- Encouraging immigration
So far, it's not working much.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-might-be-losing-1...
The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85.
There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies.
They are matching people up who won't ever have babies.
What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.
There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia.
It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia.
There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing.
Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.
Raising kids is a full time job. I am doing both as a father and also as a founder. My wife does not work, does minimal contribution here and there. I dont know where she spends time but she is unavailable. I would rather do it myself than keep fighting.
I think from population front we are not going to have baby boom anytime in next 30 years. Technology will create more isolation than ever. Laws never favor men.
India, most populous country, recently dropped birth rates below replacement level. That is probably most fertile land (for food and reproduction) and yet they are falling behind.
I think unless we see dramatic change in policies worldwide (not going to happen) that puts men and families as center of policy making, it will be all doom from here.
Come back in 30-50 years when new generation is in charge and thinking patterns change.
This reads as deeply obnoxious sexism. Man as head of the household, sounds like religious fundamentalism.
It worked for centuries. No one is stopping women from working or doing anything. But, making whole world gynocentric and policies around it is how you get mass inequality.
For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood?
Decades of mistakes and yet you come here with sexism talk. Words are cheap. Life is hard.
Your solution is to enslave women again so they become baby incubators, exactly as right-wing theocrats want. The real solution is ofcourse 'socialism' and a rampant curtailment of capitalism, that is currently accelerating the migration of money from poor to rich.
The idea that women are their own person with their own agency and desires seems foreign to you.
It's going to take something like that.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
The cycle continues.
The cycle must be broken by admitting that boys can be raised to be self-sacrificing gentlemen who have no interest in bad women, and girls can be raised to be loving ladies who can discern between exploitative jerks and noble men.
When the baseline belief in society goes from “make it work” to “better to end the pregnancy” it shouldn’t be surprising that overall the number of birth goes way down.
That's probably not why the number of births is way down.
Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.
Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.
It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.
We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.
Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
We didn't really use contraceptives and we had three "oopses". Those three oopses are pretty awesome.
Nothing like a kid to help you get your head out of your ass. Probably why people report feeling happier, because you can't think about the stupid stuff you used to worry about.
Not all of those things were stupid, and not in need of being worried about and worked on. Though childless myself, I try to remind those who are currently rearing the next gen all those problems they "don't have time to worry about" are still there. Do your children a favor and maybe worry about problems bigger than you still. You, as opposed to me (the childless), have a materialized interest in the future. I get odd looks because I spend an awful amount of time worrying over everyone else's futures even to the detriment of my own; but if y'all aren't looking forward for them, someone else has to.
I'd just like discussions to be rooted in actual data instead of sentiment.
It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.
Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.
Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.
Ease of access to birth control and ease and safety of abortion will be having a very detectable impact on the birthrate.
Not saying they need to be restricted, just that they're very relevant data points.
But sooner or later it needs to be asked and acted upon. Should society structure itself to penalise abortions, and reward births of children.
Did our old religious and conservative societies where parents and grandparents helped together to give a great childhood to 2 or more children be something we need to bring back (for folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood, aborted children have NO childhood a death for themselves that they didnt choose). Should premarital intercourse be banned again or shunned ?
Religions have brought tons of miseries causing constant conflicts between communities, wars, allowing politicians and rulers to manipulate masses.
However, they also carried laws and doctrines refined over centuries, on philosophy, morality, and most importantly societal structure.
Monogamy itself and the construct of marriage was refined and finalized in all major religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc across several centuries (and in some cases greater than 1000 yrs).
One must consider, why did our ancestors come to certain conclusions globally regardless of faith around societal structure? What conditions did they want to create across society, to bring about prosperity or growth. Why were certain conservative and unpopular opinions regardless were imposed on men and women alike.
We should remove all the horrible stuff, things we can leave behind that our ancestors used to do sure. but throwing everything away is also not going to lead to anything good for us in the future.
Should abortion be readily accessible simply for the sake of liberty and freedom ? Should contraceptives be widely made available and promoted ? , should families force kids to be responsible for their actions again, and first try their best to give their newly born child a better life before allowed to just throw everything apart with divorces, single parent childhood, etc. Should premarital intercourse be banned , to encourage youth to form meaningful relationship instead of coasting between new girlfriends and boyfriends every new year ?
Im not saying we should do X, but these questions will need to be asked sooner or later, if western society or even asian societies want to survive (both have ultra low birthrates, china, japan, korea, russia, even india is now going the below tfr rate and will join them far sooner than was estimated within 20 yrs).
I really love european, american and asian societies and cultures, and i dont want them to die off, or perish away. Even my own culture's TFR is 0.98 for multiple decades and its perishing away quite fast too.
Hard questions will need to be asked in the future. It's not just a matter of what feels right to our emotional minds at a moment, but rather, whats best for society and cultures itself long term.
Not to mention, housing prices need to go way down, it needs to be removed from being a speculative asset or a way to whitewash black money, its wreaking havoc on whatever remaining part of society that does want kids, but cant afford to own a home by age of 30 even with double income household. We have enough land to house the entire world in each of the major countries, yet just out of sheer regulation, greed and laziness from politicians, policymakers, and banks who are afraid of the housing market crashing and causing problems for them, they are keeping this charade up.
There are many problems that need to be solved in coming decades, I hope each of our societies solve it.
If you count a 11 year girl child to be raped by and then married to her 60 year old (maybe wealthy) relative then yeah she indeed had a fucking fabulous childhood.
> penalise abortions, and reward births of children
For fuck's sake - there's a difference between a teen abortion and an adult abortion! But then you wouldn't understand why one "aborts"! Oh you do understand but you want that decision to be "society's" - not that person in whose body a fucking foetus is growing!
I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
Marrying under 18s with 30-40 yr olds is not a solution and diabolical, no major religion even recommends that.
We need to restructure our society so that men and women aged 20-25 yrs old, can have a easy access to owning their own homes, with sustainable careers and occupation.
We need to make children before college postgraduation studies or even higher studies like phd not only more acceptable but the norm.
Pedophilia should not be encouraged and most sane societies have been vehemently against what you're saying (including me).
This cycle of people having kids after 35 yrs old, needs to be fixed that is the disaster.
> I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
I agree with what you said, but abortion is also causing the issues, its been normalized that its ok if majority of men and women attempt to have their first kid after 30 (it should not be this way). Premarital sex, casual sex and one night stands has destroyed the whole notion of commitment between man and a woman. Our Instagram feeds that constantly glorify unattainable photoshopped beauty from select actresses and actors influencing the masses all the time, has made expectations of men and women delusional.
There are many issues, and some of the main ones are what you described correctly , with it being overworking people, not giving 20 yr old stable careers instead keeping them stuck in gigwork, internships, and no career growth or help. They must be rectified, our society has enough wealth to fix this.
It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not surprising so many people choose not to bring new life into it. Liberty and freedom aren't abstract ideals. Their real absence makes people find coping mechanisms in a world that often feels rigged.
If a society truly wants to persist, it has to give people a reason to stay - something more than survival, more than struggle, more than empty promises about meritocracy or bootstrap fantasies. Otherwise, the logic of self-preservation kicks in, and people will exercise whatever autonomy they can muster, including the right to say, "No, not this."
So, yeah, access to abortion isn't simply about individual rights in the abstract; it's a symptom and a signal. When people would rather not create new life than subject it to the current system, that's not a moral failure on their part. It's an indictment of the system itself.
TLDR; make a better society bruh.
Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.
Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity and energy. (and higher fertility and birth rates)
More things, "non meritocracy", "bootstrap fantasies", those things arent the problem.
People of our generation and the one before, are just always whining complaining, too lazy. I dont want to believe that either, but it is the truth.
Our freedom to do anything and everything, abort children easily, control birth planning easily, making casual sex the norm, etc, making housing unaffordable to keep this stupid real estate based bubble alive for banks, and politicians alive under garb of "Regulation" and "NIMBYism".
Are 100% much more contributing to all of this. Than nihilism, doomism, etc.
Give people better things, more money, better lifestyle, and more freedoms and no societal pressure to have kids, people are just opting for the "DINK" philosophy, Double Income No Kids.... , spend on expensive cars, better homes, more travel, but no... no kids.
Go observe every major society, the top 10% of each society in almost all of them have a pretty decent life with good savings and sense of security, freedom to not overwork too much. This is the top 10% populist politicians villify as having everything.
Now go look at the birth rates of that top 10% in EVERY major society its lower than the rest of the 90%.
More money, more affordability are not linked to birth rates at all, except for a teensy minority who overthinks things and calculates 1000 different decisions from climate change to their wealth to their partner's loyalty, to decide if they want kids. They are not the majority
No amount of motivation, higher incomes, etc will reverse this trend of birth declines, (however governments and society should strongly work towards giving people higher income, less overworking, more motivation to be optimistic not for boosting birth rates, because it wont, but simply because its the duty of public servants, politicians, policymakers and the state that serves the society in return for the society serving the state with loyalty)
TLDR; make better society yes, but even that will just lead to even fewer kids, make a more responsible society while improving people's lives.
World has never been that fair, its a work in progress that has been going on since 1000s of years heck probably 100,000s for humans.
First there was Anarchy / Stateless Societies (Pre-Leviathan), then came the notion of leviathan / Authoritarian Centralization the idea that letting a state get run by a ruler and his nobles would lead to a more stable state (the era of kings and emperors since last several centuries),
then came Theocratic or Feudal Orders : Society governed by divine rule or hierarchical feudal obligations. Middle Ages in Europe, dynastic China, Islamic Caliphates.
then Absolute Monarchy / Early Nation-States then Constitutionalism / Enlightenment Liberalism then came Democracy (but anti minority and primarily majoritarian with tons of political violence on minorities, still can see it in places like bangladesh, malaysia (singapore itself was born out of violence on such a non-malay minority) )
then came Liberal Democracy / Republic Which is what most western europeans, americans, indians, japan, etc live under or atleast the ideals its politicians promise to follow and do follow majority of the time.
Everything you and enjoy in our lives was created and improved upon by people before us, life has never been 'fair' nor will ever reach that utopian ideal of fair ever. Nor has it ever been the limiter on birth rates or growing societies.
It's just an excuse (sorry I'm not saying your concerns are invalid, but only that you share it with every human who has ever existed across time, and this has never been the bottleneck for our current problem with birth rates)
The problems are more behavioural in kind, and the norms that have arised rather than unfair system, psycological issues like that.
Make a society worth believing in.
Yes, I can get chicago, new york, italian, or tokyo style pizza from my phone, in about an hour in a city that is none of those places. Still even my weekends include work. A strong effort in high school, college, grad school and at my jobs has led to fairly regular weekend work and working after putting the LOs down for bedtime, not connecting or socializing.
The answer isn't fewer rights. Its more.
But tell me this, If society is overworking so much.
How is the average screen time of an american adult around 4-5 hours per day ? thats 8-10 hours per couple per day. Are you saying most of that time spent on facebook, tiktok, youtube and instagram overworking time ?
Do americans work hard ? absolutely way more than europeans who have a much better work life balance, tons of holidays, maternity leave, paternity leave, none of which america has.
Chinese and american workers are some of the hardest workers on earth.
Then tell me this. How is it that western europe with better work life balance has even worse birth rates (significantly worse for significantly many more years) than america ?
Western Europe already has more rights and it doesnt work. Whatever semblance of sanity they have in birth rates (as horrible as those metrics are) most of the children are born to single income regressive households mostly north african, morocon, and pakistani immigrants in western europe and uk. So, if you exclude those, the birth rates of families with more rights, more work life balance, is even worse than the official stats.
Rights or no rights isnt the issue, but a discussion on what’s promoted by society should be had, more rights doesnt mean more children. Coercion, promotion of ideals, behavioural nudging are standard things every single country and its government does, (a good book on this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State)
So More rights, more work life balance while are amazing ideals that society should definitely work on, like it has for thousands of years with on average significant better results if one sees growth in 100 yr cycles.
More rights is not the solution to birth rates, atleast its not the existing bottleneck in most western societies and cultures that’s for sure.
What’s your definition of our generation? What you described is true of multiple generations, and flat out wrong for things like lifespan in the United States which has been declining.
If the point is that the system will coerce what it needs from us, then it deserves not merely to perish, but to be destroyed, actively, deliberately, and ruthlessly. If births are the air it breathes, let us suffocate it by refusing to bear its children. Let it choke on its own demands.
Most people just have whatever morals the system gives them.
Conscription, poverty, illiteracy, I mean wow.
By almost every conceivable metric, the world is getting better.
Inequality isn't an act of nature. No volcano or hurricane is disrupting lives. The source is human, a system we built, the society we live in. If we can't change the system that binds us, then it doesn't deserve us.
The core conceit is, "When I win, it's merit. When you lose, it's fair."
The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.
(I strictly used the word culture and not anything biological or genetic since I'm not aiming at that line of talk in the slightest, to be clear)
These countries we discuss all have population decline. This is masked by multiple factors including immigration and increased longevity.
It's: ALL countries have reduced population growth in recent decades compared to their historical baselines. Including in "non-developed" countries, like in Africa.
Many (most) countries have also dropped to sub fertility rates or close above.
On top of cultural and other reasons, there are also objective fertility issues with sperm counts and others emerging (likely due to modern food, climate crisis, microplastics, or some such).
Combine that with looming issues emerging from population shrinkrage causing economic decline, pension collapse and things like that, and then add environmental issues and resource wars into the mix.
It's no consolation if some pockets of humanity here and there carry on the torch, if humanity shrinks down to irrelevance.
Adding, say, to a country an additional 10%-20% of its current population in people from another culture, to be the younger and more fertile group, in an aging domestic population, would absolutely go without issue.
At least, if we also ignore that immigrant origin countries all see fertility drops, many projected to reach sub-fertility rates themselves soon, of course.
When it comes to animals - species that refuse to breed have a tendency to go extinct.
This just goes to show how little you've ever considered the problem. I don't think you're stupid (probably), so let me get you started...
It's not "from 7 billion to not enough", because right now we don't have 7 billion. We only have the generation(s) that are from 0 to 40 years old... everyone older doesn't even count. 80 yr olds and 55 yr olds aren't potential parents.
We will still have many billions of people even once we become functionally extinct, because you were counting everyone even the octogenarians, when you should've been counting the people who mattered in this regard.
>We've rescued animal species from extinction with populations of <100.
But there's no "us" to rescue us in that manner, and we can't do it ourselves. Why? Because doddering senile geezers don't have the ambition, marbles, or energy to do such a thing and those are the only people who would be left at that point. Not to mention that any such rescue would turn us into franken-people, no thanks. We should all be terrified of the science fiction dreams of artificial wombs and gestation chambers and so forth because just as those might be used for good things, the CCP and North Korea will use them to churn out armies of replicants.
You really are the extinction apologist you think you're not.
But humanity almost certainly won't? Why? Because there are sub-groups within humanity who have much higher fertility rates. As long as there are groups of people which are large enough to have viable genetic diversity, and recognise that a high birth rate is crucial for the continued existence of their culture, there will be humans.
Realistically, that means the decline of western liberal ideas and the growth of more extreme religious groups.
It's not really considered a problem. A real problem is a wellbeing of the old people, that's why it is financed better then wellbeing of future generations.
Cut elderly support and make a free childcare and education, huge tax rebates for each child, etc.
A huge pile of government debt is another indicator that future generations are fucked.
"How can we be out of gas if the car is still coasting forward?" asks the fool.
https://populationmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Hea...
Below-replacement rate might be an economic issue around retirement, but as far as the human species goes, it’s a nothingburger at this scale. We’re not passenger pigeons.
Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.
It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
> Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
That's just how humans are.
It has to do with unknown unknowns.
At least the former doesn't pretend to be scientific or objective, it's just a story.
Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...
The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).
It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.
As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.
Obviously the downside to this was that just about any idiot from yesteryear saw themselves perfectly qualified to start a family.
The solution is somewhere in the middle.
I don't think so. I think it's because
A new couple can't support themselves when
rent=1mo typical wages. It is impossible to pair off.
Parenting time is up 20-fold from the 1950s.
Was a few hours wk. Now it's ceaseless, 24/7 adulting.
Childhood is effectively ruined due to
- eradication of free ranging area thanks to automobile
and trespassing culture.
- eradication of regular hours of adult-free peer time
where critical social and growth skills are learned.
Modern childhoods are spent in boxes w/ adults.
Poor mental health follows and kids cope using devices.
So adults predictably want to take that away as well.It's not like this only happened in the window between 1940s-1980s where the run-of-the-mill average job let you support your entire family and purchase a big enough house.
But if people cant afford kids they wont have them.
Its like super simple.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother
Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother:
* 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then
* 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century
* 40-44 is higher than the 20th century except the 1960's
Estimated number of births each year by the age of the mother. 1950-2023 relative change. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother?s...
Birth rate by women's age group, United States https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-by-age-gro...
My bet is still WW2. The fact that the boom started earlier than '45 is easily explained by his own quoted graph in which the birthrate plummets in the 20s (which I would assign to WW1), the first rise is merely a correction.
Why would one result in a bust and the other into a boom? For one, the economy followed the same bust ('29) boom pattern. WW1 ended unresolved, showed the evil of man in general, where WW2 resolved WW1 and showed the evil of particular man, and it wasn't us, but which we defeated.
WW2 learned a lot of lessons from WW1 which made post war society thrive for not only the rich.
Two other significant differences: the GI bill for returning vets (which made it significantly easier for them to get higher education) and the rise of automobiles (which in turn unlocked suburbs and mass home ownership) gave households somewhere useful to put their money.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs.
> I mean, it was a thing for most of human history.
During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place.
For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone.
Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.
This is how we started out too (mid 20s). Isolated rural area and no family. Both of us were youngest children and had never lived around babies. Not the highest odds to start with. We birthed at home and did cloth diapers - so that tells you a bit about our mindset then.
In our favor: This was >30years ago. It was possible to work multiple entry level jobs and scrape by. That's far from possible now.
Not so bad! I feel like "time for us" is all hours you can cut from 8h sleeping time.
Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
If you are old enough to have a child, you are very likely old enough to successfully raise one. Otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist.
Plus the need for such drugs itself is overplayed, most of the time the human body can take care of an infection itself. Things like clean water, hand washing, etc, helped for the rest many times over than drugs do.
Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that.
Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity.
*https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...
> Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
I’m fairly certain a teenage pregnancy in Japan would work out more or less the same, because society is set up to facilitate people working 9h/day and dropping the kids off at daycare basically from several months of age. Of course, that’s combined with massive social stigma, so it wouldn’t on the balance really help things.
You mean the kind of knowing better that led us to destroy the environment, and appears to be removing whole populations from the gene pool with way below subreplacement rates?
It's a bit tongue-in-cheek because of the multiple interpretations of "knowing better". On one hand, we "know better" in a way that we, as in all humans, constantly try to control nature and the natural flow of things. Our entire civilization and way of life is a result of that.
On the other hand, I mean it a bit sarcastically, because I'm not convinced on a philosophical level that this kind of living is morally, ethically, humanely superior than that of ancient people's living. Often it looks like that progress is just for the progress' sake, an eternal power struggle, a Prisoner's dilemma. In short, when I ask myself "is progress good", I don't feel strongly toward any answer. I meant to encapsulate this by phrasing it as "knowing better".
But the drive to "know better" is there for sure, even though the results vary. I do believe that good can come from it, and that many efforts actually resulted in lessening human suffering, which I consider a good thing. I mean here efforts like equal rights movements, reproductive health and education, and proper access to medical help (to stay on topic).
You are citing a source that talks about unintended pregnancies (often as a result of sexual abuse) in developing nations. With nearly half of those being prematurely aborted in some (medically safe or not) way.
I’m inclined to believe that the support system throughout most of history was better than what these girls get.
Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".
Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items
- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel
- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you
- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior
- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)
- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor
My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
These excuses sound similar to those made by the “prosperous yuppie couple” (who end up never having children)—contrasted with “trashy” couple, who churn out progeny without a care in the world.
It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.
Did you bother to check it out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
More than half a million in the US alone, per year. That's material.
The impact of other contraceptive methods is likely far larger. Social pressure not to conceive being perhaps the most effective contraceptive...
My wife and I had our first child while she was in medical training — the amount of absolutely vile commentary she had to push through from fellow trainees and program supervisors was absurd. But she also paved the way for other mothers at her program. In the ~two years since, she’s had at least five other women tell her that she proved it was possible and was the catalyst for their pregnancy.
I believe you, it happened to me as well. I'm glad you both pushed through that; it actually is a Level 0 attack, but at the right time it can be quite demoralizing. You are way better than those pieces of filth.
My best wishes to you and your family, may you have a blessed life :D.
I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary.
Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of safe abortions and readily accessible birth control methods, they have regained their bodily autonomy which allows them to skip unwanted pregnancies.
I think that ultimately, liberating women is a _good_ thing because child bearing is difficult and no one women should be forced to go through it.
With all that said, having children can be wonderful. Perhaps a better solution is to both celebrate and encourage families while keeping abortion and birth control accessible. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.
Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.
The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.
Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.
An unwanted pregnancy can remain unwanted for the rest of your life.
(everyone then walks back to "oh I didn't mean abortion should be banned in cases of rape or medical risk to the mother", at which point we have to point out that the religious conservatives very much do want that.)
People expected a married couple of grown adults to get an abortion by default rather than congratulating you on accomplishing what you were plainly trying on purpose?
I am disappointed at the hostile reaction it provoked in some others ... as if you, or your anecdote, reminded them of something that angered them and they lost track of the difference.
Take my great-grandfather, for example. 56, falls head over heels for a 14-year-old girl from church, and boom — 30 days later, they’re married. 8 months later, my grandfather’s born. They stayed married for 50 years. My grandmother was 16 when she married my 47-year-old grandfather after a chance meeting in the woods, and, guess what, smooth pregnancy again. My parents? Same song, different verse. Now, fast forward to today: I broke up with my girlfriend (late 30s, early 40s) because we wanted kids, but couldn’t conceive — and back then when were were younger and when we could, I couldn’t afford it. See, back then, the older man was not only virile but also financially set, while the young woman could pop out babies at the drop of pants.
Yeah, those “good old days” sound amazing. Make World Pregnant Again.
EDIT: typo
There are things we could do as a society to make this easier: socialized child care (like we do with school) for one thing. Better welfare, making it easier to go to college when you have kids, etc...
But we aren't really doing those, most definitely not doing those in the states, and even in other western countries with better social safety nets. If you want society to have more kids, maybe we have to socialize child rearing more than we do today?
I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?
Children are resilient, and so are parents.
In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
A lot of the "multiple generations of families under one roof" type thinking are only practical if you have a large property, which was more common and much cheaper before the industrial revolution, tract housing, high rise apartments, and $2000/mo. rent for 500 square feet. Even if you think it's OK for 3 generations and 20 children to live in a 500 square foot apartment, most others don't want that.
When you have people with more money than they could possibly spend in their entire lives who wouldn't have to work a day in their life if they didn't want to, telling you that people need to start having babies and oh, also they need to work 80 hours a week and "sacrifice" to pay for them as well, lol no thanks.
Does this add extra work? Oh yes, absolutely it does. But while having children means you sacrifice certain things, they are an incredible gift and more than make up for the trouble they cause.
It’s appalling to me how heavily we gatekeep parenthood and building a family. There is an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4 billion years from the very first organism to you. Your ancestors all managed to do it and they were no smarter, more gifted, or more affluent than you are. Chances are they were younger than you when they started and in a far more perilous situation to boot.
How do you explain that you miss your newborn so much, that when the baby is asleep all you do is look through pictures of him/her? i almost cried the first time my toddler ran up to me and gave me a hug. i cried when i picked him up after the first day of daycare and he said "i missed you" - i didn't even know he knew that phrase!
My (immigrant) parents never explained to me how awesome it is to be a parent. Also they are a 100 times more affectionate as grandparents than as parents. I hope to teach my son that being a parent is the best luckiest blessed thing ever.
For people still making only the mid 5-figures, that's a significant chunk of money.
That's what it cost 5-10 years ago. Today, it depends on the city, but in the Seattle area you are looking at at least $20k/yr.
Just imagine being the kid in that situation. Your parents are still almost kids themselves, they are working min wage jobs and had to drop out of college. Seriously, this isn't rocket science: we are having kids older because growing up in a financial stable household is just good for kids. If you have a trust fund or are somehow have enough time and money to have kids at 22, then go ahead and have kids. Just most of us didn't.
> Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?
You totally ignored the "financially not established" of my statement.
> In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
Did you just make a straw man? Because I didn't state an "idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life".
this seems very elitist, possibly racist, and certainly could indicate that your view might be wrong, given the literal billions chosing to do this.
Thanks for pointing out that the baby boom happened by accidental births and confirming it with your own anecdotal evidence.
Is there any utility to having social expectations or norms that push you to do things that you may not “want” to?
In the past, people had kids because that's just what happened between people. Pregnancy was a natural consequence of human life.
Making childbearing a choice means that you need some social framework to encourage it, otherwise it becomes completely gauche and impractical. In the absence of this supportive social framework, fertility rates will drop, and in many cases precipitously. The long-term consequence of that drop in fertility is, at its most extreme, the collapse of modern civilization.
Compare Israel with South Korea, for example. Both are mostly developed economies. In one of these societies, kids are a status symbol; in the other, they are generally considered a nuisance (e.g. kids will often be banned from restaurants or other social watering holes). Can you guess which one of these societies will survive longer?
You either got married to a man who protected you or you got raped. That's it.
Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high.
There were even worse alternatives, like the mass grave at Tuam or the Victorian practice of "baby farming". https://www.bbc.com/news/extra/4ko2zsk2tb/Tuam
The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent.
There are still lots and lots of shitty parents out there.
Knowing what I've been through, I'd much, much rather those people spend an extra 5 or more years working through those problems instead of having children that will grow up to regret being born.
And reality is, some people should never become parents, because they carry mental issues they will forever lack the self-perception to acknowledge and attempt to change. But they will become parents anyway, and the outcome is all but certain.
Kids are a phenomenal experience.
I concur with you, social pressure is a defining element on having/not having them.
That's why my father is against abortion.
Shame you didn't ensure the same for your own kid
But congratulations on shallowly judging people as murderers on a whim. Perhaps you might consider how that is a less than ideal characteristic, if caring about the lives of human beings is your actual goal here.
And whose fault was that, eh?
Make housing so cheap that people feel there's nothing risky about working minimum age job with 3 kids and you have the first leg of higher birth rates being societally supported IMO.
But that's not an easy place to arrive.
#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.
#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.
The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.
At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)
Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.
My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.
If you've ever seen pharmaceutical ads, they almost always advise against taking the medication while pregnant, or to advise your physician. It's because so much of human gestation is still a black box. We do not understand how it works, only that chemicals and medication can seriously disrupt it in ways we cannot yet grasp. There is so much inter-cerebral and hormonal communication between mother and fetus that is yet to be discovered and understood, and a lot of that will depend on mapping out general cerebral mechanics, something we also haven't yet done.
People act like artificial wombs are 10-20 years away, but we are so far away we don't even have a roadmap. We don't even have an understanding of all the things we need to understand. We are in a pre-renaissance of sorts, and artificial wombs are inter-galactic space travel.
I suppose it makes sense. It's not like there's any single place that documented where we're all agreeing about what we're supposed to believe. After all, nobody has a date where we all decided that hackers were really cool and awesome.
That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen.
It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
Unfortunately suspect this is the right answer.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?
Yet Indian middle class was still very distinctly one-income driven.
This has been the dream since the dawn of time (agriculture is automating food production to some extent). The gains in increased productivity is rarely if ever distributed back to the workers though. We have concrete data on wage stagnation when productivity has been increasing in the past few decades. What makes you think it's different this time?
I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.
I see her situation as a blocker, but other than proposing her to move part time I don't know what to do really.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
1. Fix Family Courts
Western Family courts are based on biblical punishment (divorce is bad and a sin, nuclear family is good, must punish sin). And extreme Christian crazy Judges falsify outcomes routinely, hence why they are hiding behind closed doors.
Leaving men broke and barely seeing their child means the next generations of men know not to marry.
2. Child Support
No sensible safeguards of how it is spent and even if the woman is a high earner the man can be asked to pay 100% of the child costs. So men are very cautious about getting the wrong woman pregnant, as women are financialy incentivised to ensure a child lives as little as possible with the father as that means more money for them. You want a balance between deterrence to unplanned kids and motivation to have kids.
Generations of men have seen what happens/been told this/social media and they are more wary.
Many relationships and marriages fail. It needs to be normalised and the lunatic Christian extremists need to be put away.
that’s it
so basically very few people - as in both partners - were consciously planning kids, they were just having sex, but the irresponsibility was curbed by nature, sanitation, as many of the resulting children died.
of the people that were planning children, they also has to hedge with many dead children, but suddenly they were all living
so now people had to plan for the consequences and post 1950s the planning resulted in real practical choices, where people realized they dont want children.
people never wanted the consequences of having children or many children. the history corroborates this. when both parties are now choosing
the incentives haven’t helped for that reason
the incentives are all based on the assumption that family planning is difficult and out of reach. merely delaying something desired, when they just won’t accept that most of has just don’t want children and never did.
we still have sex. the decline in that amongst always single people is new, just the last several years. couples do the things that make children all the time, and just don’t get pregnant or output children.
If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons?
For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?
Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement.
But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out.
The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.
It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
I feel like, primarily, the reason why our society isn't having children is because of a growing selfishness and entitlement; which happens to be the very thing that Rome was suffering from when their society was collapsing too.
No, I'm not rich and I'm not old. But I was brought up in a family that cherished loved ones and family. Love was agape, not eros.
While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.
Shouldn't people who think that parenting is not a glamorous job be allowed to express their thoughts on this subject?
> It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).
So other people's feelings and experiences are according to you distasteful but yours should be accepted as some sort of universal truth?
You had a great experience bringing kids into this world, that's nice but that doesn't mean that everyone should be willing to go through the same things you did.
Are you suggesting I should not have the right to express my thoughts about their thoughts?
It used to be about sacrifice and responsibilities. It's about giving up on choice. It's about not having cake. Our grandparents were defined by their responsibilities not their choices. Their identity was assigned to them as parent, it wasn't something they made themselves. It's horrific to think about for many (including me). How could I advocate for less of me?
A fear of the future of the world is about my future identity. Indeed we fear giving up our identity. We even want to die on our own terms. Many comments here talk about having babies as a kind of economic consumer choice and I imagine some parents do have children as a luxury good. "If only it was cheaper." It's still a choice of the self.
Our world is different in that it's hard to think about and talk of a world where the self is less important than the other and yet being a parent is usually about putting the child before themselves. Ironically therefore, babies are the best way to talk about not living in a selfish world!
Even if you have no interest in having more kids, it's an interesting look at how we can parent differently and have happier families.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Family-Unfriendly-Culture-Raising-Har...
There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Well in excess of its carrying capacity given current technological usage. A smaller population is, in all objective senses, a good thing. Desiring a larger population is a purely greed-based obsession.
The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible.
The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future.
And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.
But yes, obviously something will have to be done about taxation on wealth. But simply "tax wealth" doesn't really solve anything here on its own.
I'm wondering if a simple contributor is the fact that many people are moving away from their immediate family. Then you feel more on your own when considering having child, which is significantly more daunting. I think a network of friends helps, but is simply not the same as parents/siblings/cousins sharing the load and advice. Let alone the experiences.
Also, it seems there's a negative feedback loop, where each person that chooses to postpone or not have kids influences their network to do the same.
Doesn’t seem like the winning solution is to apply policies that directly reduce the amount of people that _can_ give birth
Romania’s abortion policy killed north of 200,000 women that died to at home abortions going wrong
This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty.
I hear concerns like the following, across social groups:
"I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft."
"If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?"
Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc.
I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from.
Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
It seems not. Wikipedia says it took 80-150 years (4-7 generations) to recover from a ~21% population drop [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
It's teenage and very young women virtually not having kids anymore.
Thus, the narrative that in order to stop population shrinking we have to go back to some past state is false. We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies, and we should support older women and men having child at later stage at higher rates than previously during humanity.
Why not? The statement seems very much derived from 'current culture' morals. For most of human history I would guess that behavior was normal human behavior.
Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.
On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.
What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.
Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.
Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.
Maybe that way wasn’t wrong.
Yes, obviously; there was a much higher reproductive rate. It seems like you're talking about enjoyment or something else, but that really wasn't the focus of this thread.
Gay couples can’t have children (outside of adoption or surrogacy), so I’m not sure how that is relevant to the topic at hand. Gay couples will not be helping with the next baby boom.
We made a change in the culture, from the standpoint of the species continuing to survive into the future. The change put us on what looks like a worse path. Would it not be wise to question those changes to see where it went wrong and course correct, just like we’d do if this was any other problem in any other domain?
The pleasure can and does still exist. It's not like it gets removed when sex is ends in a pregnancy. It doesn't have to be some mechanical act, the way you seem to be framing it.
Sex produced babies, 2% of women died in childbirth. Children need a father to help provide and protect, without that, babies were often just abandoned in the woods.
There’s nothing casual about that.
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.
Before contraceptives sex outside of marriage results in children born out of wedlock. This is catastrophic for the mothers, their families, and for the child.
In the past they used to build temples dedicated to Moloch for sacrificing unwanted babies. The Israelites looked down on this practice, and instead insisted on marriage with rules: thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. These rules were crucial for social stability.
Why is marriage and punishment for adultery universal? Because a two parent household is the only healthy way to raise kids and ensure wealth is preserved between generations. This has always been true.
(only half joking)
You forgot a couple of 0s
What if you are infertile? Is the government/state going to pay for all the procedures related to adoption/ fertility treatments?
What about gay people? Would they be forced to adopt kids or use surrogates to have children so that they stop paying this tax?
At what age should men stop paying this tax? After all, a man in his 60s and even later can still in theory father a child with a younger woman, so there is really no cut off date for men in this case?
Finally why not pay men as well if they are the ones doing most of the child raising? This would apply in cases where the mother died or left. Would that be acceptable?
I am sorry to say but your proposal is not very well thought out and on top of that your forget that people in relationships without children are already paying more than there fair share of taxes.
The Googles and Facebooks of the time were destroyed, and there was a vast green field on which people tried to build new empires.
Nobody cared if you went to Yale or Oxford, or were related to the upper management somehow, they just hired based on ability.
For a brief period the American Dream was real: work hard, work smart, and you'll get far.
So people worked hard, and rather than having their job stolen by ofshoring or AI, they get compensated well. They spent that money on houses, and then... they didn't know what else to do. They had everything they needed. Money in the bank. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Might as well have a big family, too.
So that explains what caused it. What would it take to have another? We're currently having one in another part of the world.
So perhaps the problem isn't increasing the number of births per woman, but rather increasing the fraction of the population that are women. Women already do better than men in college; perhaps if women are perceived as having better economic prospects, and if technical means of choosing the sex of children were available, parents would tend to choose female children.
Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]!
Secondly, social media, including onlyfans. This ideology of feminist power I believe has been a cancer.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.
But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.
Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.
I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.
Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
Millennials are historically notable for having both fewer children and less wealth than prior generations at the same age.
We have none of these things today. A small amount of cash is not going to fix it.
For most of us today this is horrific to think about! Our life is ours!
We don't want to give up our freedoms! We don't want to sacrifice our life. I include myself in this. We have made Human Rights about ourselves and our own choices. My body! Our responsibility is for ourselves not others. It's not money nor housing, it's how we think about what life is.
To argue for people to sacrifice their lives is completely insane. But that is what it would take, a kind of insanity in a selfish world. An argument against freedom is insanity in our culture of the self.
I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
Most younger people can't afford homes. People's money doesn't go as far as it used to. Academic qualifications are worth less than they used to be. Many people currently working now won't see a pension. Many won't see a good paying job, even with good academic qualifications and work experience. General health and wellbeing is getting worse, with businesses abusing human psychology to shift product that knowingly causes worse health outcomes. Many people are concerned about the political direction of the countries they live in, and many are concerned about the changes in the community and culture around them. Many might see the first shockwaves of climate change (climate refugees, more extreme weather, water shortages). War is growing, and will grow further when states start fighting over dwindling resources. All generations, especially the young and impressionable are becoming addicted to information (not in a good way) and media consumption, the only upside of which is an inverse relationship to alcohol and substance consumption.
And their kids will have it worse than them. The world is getting worse to live in, and we (or many of us) have just enough education this time around to not want to burden another generation with that. In the past, and in certain places today, a lack of education would mean people would procreate even as society collapsed around them.
We've lived through a very small golden age of being alive (in select places) the last 70 years. It was unsustainable, and we are now seeing the undoing of those times. We might not see such a boom of prosperity again.
Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents.
The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible.
An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.
In addition and in general, paying people to have kids is not a good solution. More often than not, it leads to less educated, less capable people becoming baby mills and ruining the rest of society with their poorly raised children. 2 children is fine. It's almost replacement level.
Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?
There's a difference between being able to survive and living a good life. The reason the more financially literate and educated people put off having kids is because they care about their own futures and the futures of their kids. They know they can't work forever and they know that the current political environment is one of removing and undoing every single social safety net out there. Meaning, a mistake today very well could mean homelessness/eating cat food/etc or ultimately starving to death.
My father-in-law is 72 and still needs to work to pay the bills. He can't retire. That's the future for the less financially and intellectually equipped parents and their kids in the current political climate.
It’s in Europe.
That doesn't change the reality of self-interest.
If someone is struggling to take care of themselves, why would they have children? Heck, if you have people working 80+ hours a week just to stay housed, when can they find time to have kids?
Cruel societies punish people for having kids. We have a cruel society. The 90s "welfare queen" talk caused the US federal and state governments to gut social programs specifically designed to aid and support people in having families.
For so many people, affording the necessities requires 2 incomes. Childcare either takes out an income or it incurs a huge new necessity.
And then there's always the impact of "what if the child has a disability" in that case most people are really truly screwed in the US if that happens.
This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.
Throughout the history of civilization, we have made such incredible progress in medicine, technology, science, the standard of human living, energy production, space exploration, you name it. The world is a very bright place. Any prophecy of economic or climactic doom or cultural doom is just pessimism. In the long-term optimism is the most rational strategy.
In line with this, you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults. Child care is accessible and affordable if you look in the right places and are willing to be creative. And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life. (At least this has been my experience; I had my first child at 24 on a small budget and in a small apartment with not all that much help.)
That is really not the case.
> And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life.
Honestly, they actually quite often do. You are not allowed to talk about it, but reality of it is that you loose a lot.
I have zero social media, don't read the news, and have a happy stable lifestyle. I can afford to raise kids and ten years ago, yeah go for it. I wanted to have children.
Now? no way. My generation stops with me and many others my age (36) echo the same statement. I don't want to push kids through the next up-generations of the shite that's starting to pile up now.
"it's you because of X" is a strawman argurement. The world is bleak it's not a happy place but your welcome to keep that illusion.
We have wars, we have povetry, we have divide. Will it get better? Maybe, the future will decide but with my history of life doesn't feel like it will be anytime soon, I've seen in the past twenty years; how long do I wait for?
I like to think the good will always outweigh the evil however until something does come along and dethrones the current evil, issue consquences for their actions we are stuck here in a swurling-black-hole of dispair. That's realism and will that be you? Because I like to think it will be me. I can walk outside my apartment and see how shite it all is.
We have achieved so much, people are more educated than past generations, vaccines, advance technologies and the rest which is great. And now have a text box where you can ask a silly question of your choice and some robot will spit out the answer. Amazing stuff, the caveat being those running these systems are those who are producing the dysoptian mist.
> you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults.
This is fallacy, i'm no father but there is much more expense then just feeding kids. What if your child get's ill? Need's special tutoring? Has a disability? Wants to learn to horse ride? Fair assumption if all kids were born equal but life isn't like that.
What if the "budget" ends up being cancelled, say losing your job because of some political reform and cuts? How do you raise children when themselves have no money; poverty is only increasing. Please tell because I'm sure their are plenty of homeless who would love to have that life hack.
The past didn't have rapid game changing technology like we have now.
Just because we are always evolving doesn't mean we can afford to in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next stage of evolution are desiginer-babies. Artfically created in a lab and ready to be posted to you to cradle. Some exec's wet dream and it's already in the making.
This isn't doomerism, this is real life, reality. Try looking outside the walled gardens and maybe you'll see the past, the present and the curtian of the future holding futuristic lies and corruption of the real world that shroud the real harmony of humanity.
We are at the best time in humanity but that can only be said by those who can afford it. Being pesstistmic is a downer, but being optistmic is bloody hard at the moment and to think some angel will come down from the sky and save us all, I won't stop you from dreaming.
To answer the headline question: find a way to make other planets inhabitable and the human population will grow to fill the new spaceships, but for now this one is too crowded.
As to why life is less affordable today and getting worse, I would start here: https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.
Quick google shows some support for this idea:
"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...
ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
HPsquared•1d ago
pavel_lishin•1d ago
AnimalMuppet•1d ago
I'm not sure that the idea is right, but I'm pretty sure that, after World War II, the parents of the Baby Boom generation definitely had that.
Modified3019•1d ago