Hacker News Reader

Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth. Gen Z and Millennials are two of the least religious generations ever in the US, with Gen Z being roughly 50% irreligious.

This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low. The total fertility rate in the US for irreligious women is only 1.4 children per woman compared to 2.2 children per woman for religious women.

The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.

View on HN

Of course. The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development.

No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”.

Bah… never expected such a comment here

Look at comparator countries in the EU with much better scores in all of those factors.

Almost all of those countries are also suffering from declining birth rates as secularism increases. Most have much lower birth rates than the US.

You could also look at the minimal long term fertility effects of pro birth legislation [1].

The material factors don't seem to be driving birth rates as much as many people seem to think.

1. https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fert...

While the argument is not implausible, the secularisation is part of such a huge societal change that it imho difficult to argue causation. A ton of things are changing about our societies, among them secularisation and drops in childbirth rates, is a more conservative view.

For example, increasing female access to career development probably drops child birth rates. Is that in itself driven by secularisation? I don’t think directly. And indirectly, everything is related.

The corollary is, that opposition to birth control while ignoring all the other factors you mentioned plays a huge role here - to the detriment of those involved, I would argue.

Yet, the poorest countries have the highest birth rates. People used to have bigger families when times were actually hard.

And when they did not had contraception and when kids started to work fairly soon. Even without contraception, in war time, famine, etc, people tend to have less kids.

> The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development.

It doesn't though; its been the consistent finding for many decades that, in the developed world, better economic security and stronger public social support networks predict lower fertility.

Children are a (unreliable, though, so it takes several to have a good chance of success if they are used this way) private old-age & disability support system.

Ouch, that’s so callous I hope you’re joking.

The OP was actually arguing:

> The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.

In other words, current youth is too busy with their avocados and lattes to think about breeding (“for the Fatherland” I guess, given the tone.)

Which is a laughable argument, as much as -although opposite in spirit - your own “I breed children so someone will change my diapers someday”.

But by all means, don’t bother having children. You’d make a terrible parent.

Young people today are vastly better off than young people were in 1950, when food insecurity was higher and things like Medicaid, the ACA, etc., didn’t exist. And birth rates are even lower in European countries with robust safety nets.

“Hedonistic godless culture” seems like a good candidate for the problem, or maybe BPA or phenols or something like that.

In 1950, the birth control was not all that much accessible and even illegal in plenty of places. Whole lot of women and men were in less of position to control when and how many kids they have.

Also, USA had post WWII massive economic boom.

Wages for men under the age of 25 peaked in 1958. Afterwards, the loss of good paying low-skill agricultural and industrial jobs lowered wages for the young. Wages went up on average but only because wages for skilled jobs went up dramatically after 1958. Strong labor unions helped with that.

1958 was the all time peak year for the ratio of average wage to average rent, people were paying just 22% of the average wage on the average rent. This was also the peak year of the Baby Boom, partly because the rents were so cheap and it was so very easy for an 18 year old male to graduate from high school, get married and get his own place.

In economic ways 1958 might have been the best year ever to be a young male, at least for whites.

My oldest brother was born in 1957. My parents didn’t have health insurance so my dad had to pay cash. The bill was $40. Health insurance was less important when hospital prices were so cheap.

> Bah… never expected such a comment here

Honestly, why? The religion cures social problems, traditional family with one income and homeschooling are pretty prevalent on HN.

Look at Africa.

Lower economic and social stability. Higher fertility rates.

I'm not sure if this is as another commenter points out due to "private old folks care" or due to the sheer survivability. Any species in dangerous environments has more offsprings than in less dangerous environments.

Making babies reminds me of the meth epidemic: When you have no economic or social stability, no jobs, no education, and consequently no hope, sex like drugs becomes an escape.

You are completely wrong. It's the other way. The numbers prove it every time.

As economic wellbeing and freedom increase, birth rates decline.

> This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low.

It seems irreligious people are slightly more rational about these things. Raising a kid is a huge undertaking, and a lot of work.

But a huge part of the problem with low fertility is religion. Western religions advocate for a fixed family structure: one man, one woman. Even most irreligious people still abide by that precept, we haven't been free from dogma for long enough. The end result is that the work of raising a kid falls into a family which is way too small and stretched, living alone and relatively isolated in a suburb. If a couple needs to commit 95% of their time together to their kid, it's going to be a hard sell for those two people. Grandparents can help, and they do, but the generational divide makes it so that most grown-ups don't want to live with their parents.

"Gen Z and Millennials are two of the least religious generations ever in the US, with Gen Z being roughly 50% irreligious."

Thank God!

The other fundamental issue is that despite increases in productivity, real wages have been largely stagnant for 30 years.

Our paychecks seem to grow much more slowly than our healthcare costs, housing prices, university tuition, etc.

Finances are a huge factor in whether or not people have children.

And speaking as someone who was raised evangelical, there's not much in that religion specifically encouraging people to have children.

Except birth rates are extremely low in some of the most prosperous places. My in laws in rural Oregon are having kids. My friends in NYC and DC are having few or none.

NYC and DC are some of the most expensive places in the world to live.

Moving to an apartment with an extra room to accommodate another family member is a big investment especially in NYC. In rural areas, housing prices are quite affordable.

It’s the poorest who have most kids in NYC or DC, though, more than middle (by NYC standards) class.

> Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.

Sure it does. But, secular (and open-minded religious) worldviews are more adaptable to present circumstances, adapting high-investment-per-offspring low-cardinality reproductive strategy in a stable environment near comfortable carrying capacity; whereas blind tradition-bound approaches to religion and culture more generally continue to apply low-investment-per-offspring high-cardinality strategies adapted to either sparsely populated or highly-insecure environments when not in such environments.

> One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth.

I don't think this is it. Religious opposition to family planning is something of an artifact of the counter reformation. You can also find news articles from the 19th century America complaining about low birthrates irt other ethnic classes.

It's a single observation, but I've noticed that a lot of behaviors and best practices that were originally propagated by religion are coming back into vogue in Millennials and Gen Zs through other venues. For instance, the financial independence movement is essentially a modern extension of Protestant thrift, and recent push to counter sexualization also has religious counterparts.

"a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive."

I think it might be a lack of education. People are still having children out of wedlock, without the resources to properly raise and care for their children. When scientists speak of needing population growth, I presume they mean responsible childbirth and rearing, and not just creating babies. Unfortunately people do not take proper care to insure that the children they are creating will be provided and cared for.

There just isn't an incentive for them to be religious I guess.

But what incentive religions are providing to get more believers?

Well it has to provide some, it is a market for people's attention nowadays after all.

In many places it's inextricably linked to most of the local social activities. Want friends? Want your kids to join a baseball team? Join a church first.

Not really, in nothern Europe religion has never worked well but they are the only ones having children nowadays, especially compared to the south. Family support and strong parental leave are the main reasons.

Almost all of Northern Europe is suffering from way below replacement fertility levels. The best, Sweden, is only at 1.76 children per woman.

And Poland 1.46 - Poland being more religious.

Measuring the fertility rate for Poland is a bit tricky since a lot of their most industrious young people leave the country. It's interesting to note for example that Polish immigrants to the UK have a fertility rate of 2.48 .

Unless it is religious people leaving significantly more, this is not contra-argument.

I said better than the south, not above replacement.

It has nothing to do with religion. It just so happens that population is self regulated. If infant mortality is high and the world is more dangerous people have more children.

This is also true for almost any species.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2723861/

> Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is “very important” in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.” Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater “religiosity”? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/12/chart...

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

> But there are plenty of other interesting nuggets in the latest survey two. One that caught my eye: the stark differences in fertility rates between members of various religious traditions, which I charted above.

The problem is that correlation is not causality.

The same thing that makes people religious (holding on to an old reality/world view) is totally in character with having more children for the exact same reason. Also religious people are more likely to want to preserve the status quo at all costs, which includes obsolete family structures.

The fact is most people are becoming secular by the day and most people are having less children.

Sampling from the laggards means nothing.

God is already dead. It just takes a while to get rid of the body.

Maybe we're just talking passed each other? I agree with everything in your comment.

Have you ever been to Scandinavia? If not, maybe consider to visit it would proof you wrong. Secular educated societies always have a smaller birth rate, but not all of them are created equal. Family friendly, social societies with humanist values at heart are simply a better environment to have kids in than religious, family-hostile, anti-humanist and/or anti-social societies.

Maybe this is why some hardcore fundamentalists are against birth control? Because deep down they inherently recognize that given a free choice nobody would like to have kids in their dream world?

One cannot on the one hand claim to be for "family values" and on the other hand take every political decision that makes it harder to plan a family: social security, health care, liveable wages, state paid day-care centers, birth control — these are all things that increase the number of families being created, yet coincidentally they are all things a significant number of (american) christians hate.

correlation vs causation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com