The real underlying cause in the drop in birth rates is an increase in working hours, an increase in commuting times, an increase in college tuition and health care costs, and also an increase in divorce rates.
These days, even getting married is an expensive financial arrangement. Having kids is just another layer on that.
Housing prices have increased because of cheap loans and supply-restrictive regulations.
I am not precisely sure if they have less working hours. I mean, anecdotally, I don't know any Danes who have 10 minute commutes working 4 days a week, 6 hours a day or something like that, and making $7,000 post tax per month. Like, that sounds mythical in America and in Denmark.
I would just equate Denmark's birthrate either to cultural differences (white birth rates are lower than arab, latino, african etc), or to the same pressures that American workers have-- the Danish pressures are just slightly less extreme.
By most metrics, Denmark has one of the largest degrees of social mobility in the world. The US usually comes out worst or second-worst in the developed world (the UK is gaining on it lately).
in the USA we just have 100 million people that are literally in debt up to their eyeballs and die horrible unhealthy deaths every year.
im not saying this system is justified, im saying it skews our statistics. the US is like south africa-- a deliberately created class distinction between the rich and the poor which heavily skews along racial lines, but not always.
Well, at least we're openly admitting the US is a caste society by design now.
However, when you control for this group of people (aka remove them from being counted), the US middle class is basically the same as the Danish middle class, in terms of mobility, income, life expectancy and so on.
As an anecdote, almost everyone I know moves to a less expensive area and buys a larger house when they start a family. Live downtown, have babies, move to the 'burbs. My parents did it, and I will probably do it too.
This type of situation muddies the data because we are contributing the trend but the housing price isn't changing whether we have babies. It only changes where we have babies. It's unclear whether the data shows that housing prices affect the brith rate or whether people just move to cheaper neighbourhoods when they want to have babies.
In my family it seems that each generation is having less and less kids. My great grandparents had a 7-10, my grandparents had 5, my parents had 2, I had 1.
I think the world has enough people, so for me one kid was plenty.
I even see higher divorce rates as a positive thing in some ways. 50 years ago it may not have been a valid choice for a woman to leave an abusive husband and set up on her own. Now they have a lot more choice in that regard.
My point was more along the lines of criticizing 'correlation vs. cause' and providing equally weak arguments.
What I believe is that there are multiple factors at work here. So higher home prices are probably one reason why people are deciding against children, but most certainly not the only one. And 'deciding against children' doesn't mean they will never have any children, maybe they just wait a few more years before they get the first and in the end there will be one less for some couples.
The main cost of getting married is getting divorced. Legal fees add up a lot here, and the division of assets is costly.
Now, you could argue your marriage won't end in divorce, but 60% of marriages in the US do.
60% of marriages end in divorce, but most people who marry do not get divorced from their first marriage. The 60% number is bumped out due to the segment of the population that get married 3 or 4 times.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who are either divorced in their 30s, or still unmarried in their 30s. Considering the difficulties a woman has conceiving beyond their mid 30s, I think the explanation is here in our faces.
My grandma had 5 kids and was married at 19.
Funny that you've mentioned correlation and no causation, and then brought this up. How old was your grandma when she had her first kid?
We were going to use the church hall for the reception, but my parents wanted us to get another reception venue. That would have been free. A traditional cake and punch reception with some music would have set us back maybe $300, but even that could have been foregone. My wife's parents didn't do any of that. Just got married the old-fashioned way.