Falling birth rate not due to less desire to have children

My wife and I have one infant, and want another. I make around 117k/year pre-tax. Rent for a 3 bedroom townhome is 2500/month, that's roughly half my monthly take-home pay. Everything else comes out of the other half.

I contribute enough to my 401k to get my employer match, but no more. I'm putting $250/month into my daughter's 529 based on similar calculations for what a decent 4 year degree will cost (a little north of a 100k). I max out our HSA to make the high deductible health plan worth it. We don't eat out that much. I drive a 23 year old hand-me-down Toyota. Things still add up fast if we don't keep track. There's not much left over at the end of the month. And there's going to be another $250+/month when the other kid comes along.

We're not living in poverty by any stretch, have no debt, and can afford some minor luxuries. But it's a lot tighter than it was for my dad working essentially the same job at the same age. I'm curious as to the levels of credit card debt in your moderate income neighborhood, and how prepared they're going to be for retirement at their current savings rates. Or perhaps they just don't expect to pay for their kids' college at all, and are just hoping they don't get sick.

We've already sacrificed the vacations and expensive restaurants. Should we sacrifice our HSA and kids' college funds as well so we can have 3 instead of 2?

I'm not really mollified by liberals arguing that we need more immigration to address this. I'm not anti-immigration by any stretch, but it feels less like a policy to fix low birth rates and more like a bullet point on a list of "good things about immigration".

The EU has generally tried to incentivize getting pregnant and having kids with social programs, but if it's having an effect it's pretty slow going, and my guess is that spending will have to increase pretty significantly to get back up to replacement rate. Even so, I think this is the correct policy because I buy what the World Economic Forum wrote about this [0]: urbanization and women having careers puts pressure on having kids. Your choices here are: make it even harder for people to live in cities and for women to work so they give up, or make it easier so they feel less pressure.

The US politics here are weird. Liberals are trying to do things like write a right to day care into the Constitution, conservatives are doing the same with the 50s housewife dynamic, no one's sure urbanization is an unqualified good but it seems unstoppable. I think the EU is making progress because they have broad agreement on socialism; the US can't move forward because they have this mostly unresolvable argument about what kind of society the government will invest in.

But, and now I'll get on my partisan horse for a second, the kind of social engineering conservatives are engaging in is pretty odd. In a liberal, democratic society your government ought to support your lifestyle unless it's demonstrably damaging, and I don't think things like being a same-sex couple or being a woman in the workplace are demonstrably damaging. I guess someone somewhere might make religious arguments or something, but being gay is super accepted in the US as is working as a woman, so those arguments seem pretty fringe. Consequently, I don't really see any justification for trying to achieve this kind of social engineering through public policy. It feels deeply anti-liberal, and downright homophobic and misogynistic.

[0]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-...

There’s nothing stopping them from shoving more kids into a tiny dwelling or moving back in with their parents or cohabitating with other people. People at these lower incomes tend to not be the best judgment makers - otherwise they likely wouldn’t be at as low of an income.

They don’t think about the quality of life hit that comes with raising the kid because they’ve never known anything else.

My "spending habits" are homes that cost $550K and upwards. The majority of income does to non-discretionary spending by a lot. I honestly thought I made that point quite clear above.

Glancing down the list, here are a few standouts:

  Hawaii: $1.05M
  DC: $826k
  California: $816k 
  Washington: $640k
  Massachusetts: $612k
  Colorado: $604k
  Utah: $589k

Good news and amazing things like "Grandpa drives stray dog 1250 miles to surprise grandkids" or "World's Fastest Shoes Invented" don't do much to offset the bad news like "All water on Earth now poisoned and toxic" or "1 billion climate refugees to be displaced by 2050".

Maybe shootings were commonplace in the wild west, and politicians were always shitty, but you can't blame people if they don't want to raise children in the wild west, or a crumbling democracy.

Probably because of school shootings having become commonplace even in "regular" neighbourhoods. Wikipedia lists 102 "incidents" in two years.

Also needing two cars is impractical for a lot of activities. It means you need 2 parents for everywhere you want to take all your kids to. Also road trip (which is BTW a lot more economical way of traveling when you have a large-ish family) is much more complicated/expensive/exhausting if you need to drive 2 cars.

If anything they're going to decline further, Republicans are back to their "obstruct literally everything" agenda that they always have when they're the minority. Any potential pro-natalist government policies will almost certainly require government spending, which will now die in the house. So we're stick with the status quo, which is low birth rates.

A liability, not an asset.

You only have them if you have money to burn and either intrinsically value the luxury or want to signal your social status to your peers.

Could consolidation and mechanization have reduced the need for labor on farms? (I don't know how advanced farming in India is, but that's been the pattern in developed countries) Or changing laws or opinions on using child labor on farms?

Countries that still have “largely rural” populations are generally also urbanizing, in many cases more rapidly than those that no longer have largely rural populations.

In any case, “urbanization” is, to the extent that it is part of the explanation, sill only part of the explanation, there are a lot of other factors (social safety nets being a big one, along with evolution in social expectations of minimum levels of necessary support for children, etc.) While these things may all very loosely correlate with each other, they don’t move in lockstep.

A child is almost completely helpless to travel and roam in a modern suburb until they turn 16 and get their drivers license and access to a car. A suburban home is an island of isolation that keeps a child locked under its parents control and gives very little opportunity for a child to develop a strong sense of independence in the real world.

Thus, the total number of females willing to be daycare providers is going to be less than the total number of women with children. Thus, demand will always outstrip supply. Thus, the cost of daycare will rise to be the median wage of the highest-income cohort for which the supply meets demand.

For example, if there are ten working women and two are day care carers who can look after four babies each, including their own, then they can look after six non-related babies all together. Assuming each woman has one baby, then of the eight non-carers, only six will have their babies cared for. The other two have to make alternate arrangements. Due to how the market works, the two who have to make other arrangements are going to be the lowest income. The cost of daycare will rise to be the median wage of the six working women, because the substitute for daycare (the women staying home) costs the same. Thus, perpetually, for the bottom twenty percent in this example, daycare will forever be out of reach. There is no getting around this.

Note, I'm not saying anything about whether women should work or stay at home. I'm just pointing out that the whole system boils down to a Ponzi scheme of care, and withdrawals are constantly being demanded.

For example, I 'want' a farm. When I think about owning a farm, I'm filled with happy thoughts of a pastoral life surrounded by nature, animals, etc. When people ask, I tell them 'yes, I would love to own a farm'. Of course, a few months ago, I had an opportunity to purchase one, and you know what I thought? Well, when I thought about the details... owning animals, caring for animals day in and day out, leaving my current home in the city, etc, I realized what I said I want and what I actually want are completely different things.

Similarly, it's quite useless to ask people what they want. Most people have no idea. In particular, children are considered the default and there's plenty of marketing to show happy pictures of families with kids that make people biased to say they 'want' this, but for many, it's similar to my own idealistic view of what that desire actually entails. Many chicken out when it comes down to it. There's no way to measure this by self reports. If our ancestors were more desirous of children in reality than us or not, this study's methodology is unable to bear this out. Both generations may have said / may say they 'want' children, but there's many meanings of 'want.'

I have to balance the potential for good memories as a bigger family with wanting to have the best for the kid(s) we do have.

Also the US military budget is not standing in the way of increased domestic spending. We just need to treat other areas of government with the same reverence as the military, and we partially do (look how badly every attempt to cut Social Security fails).

The world has never been wealthier than it is at the moment, so clearly, there is a different metric to make this connection.

Merely being willing to live in a small house, with broadcast TV, etc. would get you nowhere near the affordability of having children ~65 years ago.