The declining U.S. birthrate has implications beyond Social Security
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We have a massive problem here. Our welfare systems, generally one of the most generous on the planet, cannot cope with the greying of the population.
We also seem to be attracting the "wrong" kind of immigration for that purpose. Highly qualified people tend to prefer the US, Canada or Australia with their lighter tax burden, while our borders are crossed by mostly uneducated young men from the Islamic world whose employability is limited. The resulting societal conflicts are nontrivial, both between the migrants and the natives, and the "refugees welcome" vs "fortress Europe" camps. The trend seems to be towards "fortress Europe", but that is not an easy objective either.
Having a child is extremely expensive if you are an urban professional, because prices of real estate have skyrocketed to insane, unprecedented heights. There is a talk of negative interest rates, slow abolition of cash and higher taxation of property, which would turn the middle class into rats racing for life, owning nothing. Impoverished middle class tends to vote for devils just to stop the pressure. Which usually does not work anyway.
And we are heavily indebted. To be precise, some countries are heavily indebted (Italy, France), with some others, called frugals, joining a common debt scheme after Covid, but with their populations hating it. The next generations will have to carry the debt burden somehow, and the cohorts are projected to be smaller.
Unless we have a real breakthrough in robotics and kind and universal robots start caring about us all for no remuneration, this won't be sustainable. Too much of our current system is based on the fiction of constant growth.
All of these expenses share the same trait that they are influenced by interest rates and nominal prices.
But having kids is very expensive in urban areas, not just in Europe, but in places like Tehran or Singapore. To some degree, the fertility problem is a problem of runaway urbanization. We might be witnessing the moment when urbanization hits its limits.
Another interesting complication is natural fertility vs. length of education. Women get less fertile after 30 and much less fertile after 35. Long education pushes the age of first birth upwards, where it starts to hit against the biological limits. IVF is a huge business in Europe.
(Undergoing IVF right now - yes, we were fools for waiting that long.)
Everybody, not just the rich have been using land as an investment for decades. Many cities are priced out.
This land burden becomes a weight on businesses and people. Businesses that need to be located in a central area must pay high rents and high wages.
Declining birthrates absolutely make sense. We just don't have enough room for all of us, and it's clear in the prices.
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati...
It seems that the gap in fertility between the "no education" and "8 years of basic education" cohorts is extra pronounced.
This has also happened in the US, even in what would be considered secondary cities like the one I live in. I have seen my house triple in value in 8 years. (My definition of a secondary city are those that are large cities that are not LA, San Francisco, NYC. For example: Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Austin).
Part of the issue is the percentage of population that lives in cities is higher than at any point in the past so competition for housing is fierce, and seemingly always increasing. I was hopeful that with folks being able to work from home due to the pandemic we might actually see a reversal of this, unfortunately that didn't really happen, although maybe it will require 5-10 years to really take hold and change buying patterns.
I also think raising the interest rate is long overdue, the interest rate was finally raising a little bit until the pandemic hit and was slashed to effectively 0 again. A rising interest rate would likely also lower housing prices, the problem though is that there are likely a number of companies servicing lots of debt that if the interest rate were to rise would be in trouble.
Outside of India and sub-Saharan Africa, this is a worldwide trend.
Replace existential dread with optimism and economic security, and you might increase the birth rate.
I have a child, and one is enough. We’re not a threatened species in terms of numbers, and I argue we’re less threatened if we scale back “progress” and then redefine it towards supporting a long, healthy, unbroken story until survival is out of our control. Much of this comes down to what we value.
If falling birth rate upsets you, what are your concerns?
Related opinion piece: Why we shouldn’t worry about falling birthrates https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/02/why-we-sh...
I have no kids thanks to a decade and a half of being beaten down by the economy and people who would rather see me suffer because I look like people whose ancestors did bad things. I'm not complaining though, the next few generations will suffer compounding consequences.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/biodiv-clearcut/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/06/phosphat...
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/sea-runni...
[4] https://www.siwi.org/latest/the-worlds-natural-aquifers-at-r...
[5] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/groundwat...
[6] https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/the-meat-indust...
Edit: Your comment has radically changed since I left my comment. My point is the same.
For historical purposes, my previous comment revision was a thesis without links, and I replaced it instead with links to make the same point. My entire kingdom for HN comment version history support.
In short, very few will willingly forgo resources and give up quality of life, and for those who do will have those resources consumed by others (China harvesting the world's oceans, Brazil clear cutting the rainforest, etc).
There’s no perfect time to have a child. We eventually decided to just go for it and scrambled to make it work. I reckon I’ve grown up more in the last three years than the previous twenty, and I’m olay with that. When I was heavy into videogames I couldn’t imagine not being so, and now I’m more free to shed/change habits since I focus on the wellbeing of someone other than me.
Regarding huge areas/acres of unpopulated land and “largely empty” states: there are other, non-human persons living there, and I think that’s grand. We may not agree on this. I’m all for rewilding (see E. O. Wilson’s “half earth” idea and George Monbiot’s book Feral) and letting a lot of land be relatively empty of human settlement (with room for stewards, and tourism).
I’m thankful for this life, and I feel the amount of resources I consume does not scale well, given my values.
Yes, in that I was unlucky to have been born with a physical trait where I'm the "oppressor", when in fact I'm an immigrant having nothing to do with U.S. history. This affected my social and economic life in ways that I feel are unfair, but FML I guess.
> the amount of resources I consume does not scale well, given my values.
So you're solution is to scale back on humans instead, when other countries are scaling up their population with impunity. Where is the outrage at China's child policy update (unless you're Chinese, in which case, good for you I guess)? Is that side of the world somehow immune to over-population?
I’m not outraged, but saddened by what we’ve done and continue to do. I’m also excited/interested/awed by what we’ve done and contribute to do, and curious about our potential. I’d like for us to stretch our collective story unbroken (unlike what my ancestors did to indigenous groups in North America, for example, significantly reducing language and oral-history diversity) for another ten thousand years or more, why not?
I try not to be outraged (nor to dwell in sadness) over things I have little to no influence over. I’m practicing letting the waves of emotion crash and subside.
The US has had below-replacement (2.1) birthrates for at least 50 years [1], yet its population keeps increasing. A low fertility rate by itself does not seem to solve the "there are too many of us anyway" problem.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/raw-data-the-...
SS is paid for by higher wages, which happens when there are less workers, not more. And then there will also be less to support in the future. The solvency of a fund depends on future outlays, not just cash flow. Do they think we should increase population exponentially forever?
I see a lot of shilling for policies to increase mostly low-income populations. I can’t imagine that they believe their own theories. But I can imagine that they benefit from them. Fancy that; somebody wants you to work more and get less.
SS is paid for by wages in aggregate, not on average.
Either of more workers paying into social security or an increase in average wages (assuming that the increases are below the threshold at which income taxes fund SS) will increase the amount of funds available for SS.
What is so hard to understand here? Decreasing average wages makes the system less sustainable. This should not be controversial.
So, as usual, we just turn it into an externality for Mexico and India to deal with.
members of my family are Canadian citizens and collect US SS benefits.
Social Security taxes are capped at the first $142k earned. Any income beyond that is exempt from the tax, which means that the top end of wages provide nothing to the program. Those income earners also happens to be the ones who can most afford an additional tax burden.
SS was originally sold as a personal savings plan, not a wealth redistribution plan. This is why payout is tied to contribution, and elders who didn't contribute are left to suffer in poverty.
If we want it to act as to redistribute wealth, we should simply scrap it and replace it with an income tax and means tested benefit.
In my situation, the cost to feed/clothe additional children isn’t preventing me from having more kids. It’s the cost of childcare, and the cost of college. Assuming it’s $10k/year per child for childcare from the age 0-12, and you have multiple children in the age bracket, your income needs to be extremely high to afford. Even a state college at $20k/year, with multiple students, is going to strain parents anywhere in the bottom 99%.
As unfortunate as the lack of economic mobility between bottom 20% and top 20% - it exists. So, children born to the top 20% are more likely to have future incomes in the top 20% - and more likely to be net contributors to Social Security.
It’s hard for politicians to fix the mobility between income brackets, but it’s easy for them to alter the tax code to incentivize higher income families to have more children.
It's not as expensive as you think. I'm no 1%er, yet I have a dozen kids. Dual enrollment provides a nearly-free AA degree, knocking 2 years of a BS degree and eliminating all the general education requirements. With a spacing of 2 years from kid to kid, it's usually only one kid in college at a time. That assumes no scholarships.
Now on the other side of the coin, expenses. Some expenses grow linearly with each child. College education funds, pre-school, diapers. Most expenses, however, don't grow much or at all.
With a 1st child everything needs to be bought. Car seat, crib, changing table, clothes, toys, etc. The good news is though, if you plan on having multiple children, the 2nd child can reuse most of those same items. I am a younger sibling, and constantly got hand-me-downs from my older brother, and sometimes I wasn't too happy about that, but as a parent it is crystal clear to my why my parents did that, and they did buy me enough new things that I never had any resentment over it.
Now 2 to 3 has been a lot more expensive for us since we had to buy a bigger car to fit 3 car seats, but we're expecting everything else to be reused.
That money has to come from somewhere. Given that a $100k salary is above the median, I would be unsurprised if you end up paying somewhere close to $5k in taxes to get your $5k benefit. It goes down a little bit because not everyone has kids and they subsidize you, and then up a little bit so you can subsidize people who don't earn enough to have contributed $5k.
That's the problem with trying to subsidize things for the higher end of the earning spectrum. Those subsidies have to come from somewhere; either the even higher earning side of the spectrum, or the poorer side of the spectrum. We might recoup those costs in time through a more productive economy, but someone has to pay today for the benefits later.
The problem is the ratio of old to young. In real world, the population isn't going to decline all of a sudden with declining birth rates. We are first going to have inverted age pyramids. Which means fewer young people will have to support a growing old population.
The simplest way to imagine this is imagine you live in a small agrarian village. Your village's ability to feed its old depends on the number of young to hunt/grow crops. If there are fewer young people, there will be lesser food. Who's going to do the backbreaking work of bringing food? Not frail old people for sure.
In modern world, this manifests in local manufacturing, local agriculture and local industries. The fewer the local industries (because of fewer young people), the lesser the economic output, the lesser the food (social security) for the old.
All this is to say, rapid declines have never been easy for societies and this time is no different.
The decline only appears as slow because we're counting it annually. It appears fast when you realize there is no real way to turn it around. We will not have women producing more children all of a sudden. No policy change will take us there.
The only time the decline will stabilize is after the huge mass of old die off.
Seems like that may not be the case. Anecdotally - my peers are 25-40 and are mostly in the top bracket. The only ones having kids also have the lowest incomes (probably sub 100k household income), which is sort of puzzling to me. I don't want children but if I did the amount of anxiety I have around having the financial rug pulled on me from basically just living through the past 15 years of bullshit makes me feel like the only way I'd even consider it is if I had enough capital to provide for myself, my partner and any child on interest alone.
The couple interested in having children have made major quality of life sacrifices (think moving to a cheaper city and still having 2 hour commutes) and also come from more conservative families. I can't help but think at least some of this is pressure from family and also friends/family back home having (multiple) children starting in their early 20s.