The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007
econofact.org
econofact.org
The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.
I see no mystery here.
I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.
Maybe there is some truth to the notion in developed countries.
> I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.
Yes, but wealthy technological society enables it, because modern birth control technology is what makes reproduction so much of a choice.
In earlier times and in less developed places, if you really wanted to be "child free" you'd have to take much more extreme actions, like adopting celibacy or being OK with infanticide.
It's only maybe last two-three generation or so we've tricked ourselves to the escalator life with dissipation of risk through social programs.
You can't have the sort of uncertainty about the future we have today without the progress we've had until today. The society-scale anxiety essentially boils down to this question: Just what is it we're progressing toward?
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.
>This implies that more people make society poorer.
Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.
It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.
Not at all, people don't create resources, we consume resources.
> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down.
As long as we believe in infinite exponential growth. Instead we are starting to hit the wall and it time to stop dreaming.
This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.
There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.
Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?
Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
As soon as you switch from the pyramid to the fat belly curve (of population vs age) you gain workforce with respect to burden and thus productivity as a country, as soon as it becomes top heavy you're screwed. Maybe it's something else but the baby boom after ww2 and impulses in the 50's 60's will become the baby burden quite soon (and has already started to be).
(And on economic arguments, I have been hearing the top-heavy-we-are-all-screwed slogans as long the climate crisis thing for what, 40 years (I think belly curve panic even longer)... however it seems only climate crisis turns out to be true (just observational :))
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
By all means build but you also need laws to prevent houses from being snapped up by those who don't intend to live them.
I disagree with this statement.
Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids?
* (economic) difficult to manage finances
* (economic) can't buy house, too expensive
* (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off.
* (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks
* (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this.
As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family.
But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with.
I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm?CDC_AA_re..., for rates since 1990.
I'm a DINK myself; I've watched the complexity of my friend's divorce with children and I perceive it as more evidence I've made a good decision.
They (conservative ones) seem to want to force births (against abortion & in some extreme cases, even contraception). But the followup on supporting kids is, like you said, not there.
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
And dont get me wrong - we arent climate change deniers, just... pick your battles
Why waste your life worrying about something you have tiny impact on?
But until I or you manage to meet at least one person with such approach, then I do recommend to do not take it seriously
Our kids are worried about it, more so than our generation, that's for sure.
1. Teach: humanity has done X to the environment
2. Teach: if we don’t do something Y will happen
3. Conclude: I was not alive to do X
4. Ergo: the adults in my life did X
5. Ergo: the adults in my life will continue to do X which will cause Y because I can’t affect meaningful change
I don’t automatically assume they start at step 5 at school. I’ve seen his math homework. Is that a normal way of thinking though?
To automatically assume that with my son would teach him (likely, inadvertently) that what he learns at school may not be right (which isn’t true, for the most part). Rather I want to teach him that he takes ownership of the words that come out of his mouth. That his opinions are his own and he has to defend them, and further learn what is an opinion and what is a fact.
Wait, you don't teach him that?
This is a 100% attitude and filtering issue.
I don't want to teach my son that him misunderstanding something is someone else's fault. Obviously, this wasn't taught in class. He was taught lots of things and was a conclusion he came to on his own. Like nobody ever told me that a McDonald's hamburger will cost around $50 when I retire, I simply did some math based on the average inflation. Will it actually? no idea. But I know that I should probably have that much more in my retirement account.
No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude. Nine year olds are not famous for their critical thinking and deep research skills.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35975422
> No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude.
Do you know us IRL or something?
Yes, I may be seeing a bubble - but that is across three different countries, and clearly reflected in car-ownership statistics (down dramatically in younger generations) and in voting preferences.
there's an entire Voluntary Human Extinction Movement...
In 20 years not, but it's reasonable to believe for anyone outside America and Central Europe that wide swaths of the planet - particularly the entirety of Africa and lots of Asia - will be unable to support human life.
Hell, we're already seeing issues with water supply even in Central Europe, with France restricting water consumptions because of drought [2], and Germany's water reserves are dwindling as well. India is suffering from a massive heat wave [1], and last year's devastation in Australia should still be in living memory.
Anyone who is not worried about the future of the planet is either ridiculously ignorant to reality or completely incompetent. And the worst thing is, politicians in power play down climate change, act like future technology (anything from nuclear fusion to desalination plants) will save us, or deny it entirely - and wide swaths to outright majorities of people believe that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/17/weather-...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/10/southern-france-re...
Worrying here was reflected by drastic actions. Not worrying didnt mean not worrying at all.
Do you happen to remember the global wildfires/rivers drying up/massive heat waves in 2020? About a few billion people worldwide / 100m Americans sure do. A larger and larger portion of them are starting to understanding what the cause to that is and are acting accordingly.
Every year, we keep hearing how even the most aggressive estimates for climate change were underestimated. That's terrifying and existential to a lot of people including me.
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
That argument seems rather doubtful to me.
This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.
I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
> I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
So the climate "birth strike" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973163) strategy would necessarily have to have two parts to be successful: 1) refuse to have kids, 2) indoctrinate many of the ones that remain to reject their parent's outlook and adopt the strikers' outlook (e.g. through control of the school curriculum). I would expect the second point to result in scenes like this, where a kid comes home from school mad at his a parents for having him in a world with climate change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973070.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/birthst...
If your goal is to pass your life outlook to more people in the next generation, I believe you're probably likely to be successful without kids than with them. Without kids you have much more time to reach more people.
many such cases
(the reverse happens a lot too)
1. There is no scientific reason to believe the world is doomed. Go read some serious climatology papers and see for yourself. They're unreliable and exaggerated but even so, no doom.
2. State pensions and benefits might actually be doomed though given demographics. If the state can't take care of you in old age, you'd better hope you have kids who will.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
But why should my standards be just better than most times in human history? That seems a low bar to me, most times in human history were miserable for the majority of people compared to the living standards I've become accustomed to.
To be clear, I don't feel there is any moral duty to continue my particular genes and the world population will continue to increase for the foreseeable regardless. If I were to have children I personally would feel guilty if they had it significantly harder than I have and I think the likelihood is that will be the case - it's really as simple as that.
If you could be born in America in 1925 and live until 2015, would you? Or would you decline because the standard of living dropped right away with a Great Depression followed by a world war?
I agree with you that if I knew, with certainty, that my children’s lives would be filled with nothing but suffering, I would make the same choice. But a fear of a theoretical drop in a standard of living, and which may not even impact an American over the next 100 years all that much, does not seem to me like it should reach that threshold, and I suspect it is starting to for others because of the media playing into their anxieties. There are people living that lived through the holocaust and are still happy to have lived and, over their lifetime, have had fulfilled and happy lives. I suspect your children could likewise carve out a happy life, even if their standard of living is somewhat reduced.
I agree you have no moral duty to have kids, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. But if you want them, but are not having them because you find that to be cruel to your unborn kids, I question whether that is really a rational choice.
I'd agree there's nuance to this. For your cherry picked scenario, no, that wouldn't affect my decision. I can accept a single person having a reduction in living standards. However, when most of Western society (I'm British, not American) is struggling to attain housing at a rate similar to the generation before, when the middle classes as a whole aren't able to become as financially secure as the generation before then it is enough to give me pause.
So ignoring any climate worries I already think things will be much harder. When you add on that it's estimated that billions will be without sufficient water in a few decades it's not hard to imagine that there will be significant problems of which I have very little confidence that we will be able to handle well as a species.
Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. But as I say, this isn't the only factor we've taken into account, it's more a tertiary concern.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/land-of-lessees_swiss-continue-...
Weirdly, the dominance of renting in Switzerland doesn't stop the Swiss having children. So this is really very much a media induced anxiety disorder of some sort. It's not rational to decide whether or not to have children based on whether you can get a mortgage.
https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Switzerland/Home-...
As you can see, Swiss single family house prices were stable since 2016. It's a different lifestyle, there's a lot of apartment living with shared gardens for example, but it can be done.
Jokes aside, I have heard both points made. Yours and the one from the parent poster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Yes, the current temperature shift now is greater but it has been ongoing for a much shorter period of time.
That's worse, not better! https://xkcd.com/1732/
Temperature has varied drastically throughout time. There were Vikings growing barley in Greenland, something completely impossible today. The reason you believe otherwise is because climate doomers lie a lot.
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.
I'm not religious or anything, so a wedding in itself doesn't mean a lot to me, but my wife and I got married in no small part so we could share health insurance, help with her immigration, and lower our tax burden. I don't regret the marriage, I trust my wife, and we've been pretty happy for the last eight years.
(Also, few of the posters in this subthread are looking at the woman's side of the game theory)
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
I can't even imagine working a minute longer than 8 hours per day, and 12+ hours is woow. Is this common in US?
I work 8 hours my whole career (IT). My wife works 6 hours per day. (central Europe)
Family and children are entirely 100% impossible in this lifestyle without a stay-at-home partner. And unlike previous generations, stay-at-home partners are no longer a thing.
(Edit: to make it clear, I am not making a judgement, nor wishing for a stay-at-home partner - I'm entirely in favour of everyone making their own choices in life.
I am just pointing out that younger generations are now living in a totally different environment from previous generations, where a stay-at-home wife was the default. Which is yet another component in the birth rate equation.)
I can't compete with them in any way. "Don't work hard, work smarter" doesn't apply here, because I am surrounded by smart people, who also do smart work, when baseline is same, you just need to work more.
Guess who will be liked/praised more and have less chances to be laid off when conditions get worse?
I am lucky though, its not easy to fire people here, can't imagine what's happening in US
That might not mean much - you'd see the same from me, but I don't work more than 8 hours/day (on average), I just work very irregular hours.
Do you also come to office and spend 8 hours, even if you do nothing? I see those people in the office almost regularly
I often come to the office for just a couple of hours and then do more work afterwards from home, and other days work entirely from home.
Hard to live together with your partner if you're living with roommates (or worse, parents) because you can't make rent or can barely afford a 20 m² micro apartment.
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
Indeed. There's been decades of "TEENAGERS: DO NOT HAVE SEX AND IF YOU DO ESPECIALLY DO NOT GET PREGNANT, PREGNANCY AND LABOUR ARE DANGEROUS AND UNCOMFORTABLE" messaging, and now we're surprised that it's working?
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
> Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
I get what you're saying, but I mean nowadays it's not like they grow up as a purely sunk cost... A fairly-average-in-all-industrious-matters child will get a job and make an income, and there's a good chance the child will produce more than the input cost. It's up to the family if they're going to share that total wealth with each other though.
In fact, compared to before, there might be even more opportunities for children to increase that "return on investment", if you really want to think that way.
Economic conditions (real and imagined) in urban and suburban areas not unlike those seen in 1920 (automation resulted in massive economic gains capture) have caused total replacement fertility to drop in those areas to rates similar to 1920 (total TFR 2.3 at 50% rural -> likely urban TFR much lower).
This isn't so much as "long term trend" as it is "returning to the post-industrial baseline"; doomerism doesn't help, but their choice to not reproduce will improve the climate and resources available to my children so I find it rather difficult to see this as a problem.
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
Add on top of that the rising drug epidemic, the removal of access to reproductive and mental health care...
[1] https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/03/child-and-teen-mortalit...
[2] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/firearms-are...
It's one thing if society learns something from incidents like we did with after the mass murder at Winnenden 2009. But in the US, it's "thoughts and prayers" and that's it - utterly dystopian.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
The elephant in the room is inner-city, largely gang-related violence. Stopping those kids from obtaining firearms by restricting legal purchases makes about as much sense as keeping criminals away from encryption by restricting E2E encryption on WhatsApp.
For some reason, Hacker News thinks the former is absolutely possible, despite knowing the latter is not. Weird.
"Protecting children" is only ever brought up in US politics for dumb controlling initiatives that do anything but protect children. Actually protecting children is taboo.
You need at least two with modern medicine. You have a limited time period to have children, after which you can't have more without significant consequence, and you won't know ahead of time about the risks or need.
There are increasing mortality rates, and increasing unmanageable risks (i.e. regulation, and other aspects of government working against parents).
If you want your family line to continue and survive, you need at least 2 children, if not 4 or more. 4 is better.
There is cost, but that's what needs to be possible that no one talks about. That actuarial all death discrepancy during the pandemic is most likely attributed to lack of general availability of medical care during that time. The risks change without notice. During the pandemic, in my role supporting our IT support staff (System Engineers helping overflows) I heard from people across the country.
Some families were nearly wiped out, imagine if 3/4 of your family died and it was a large family. One man I spoke with was just crazy with grief, he had to help with funeral arrangements for eight of his family members in the span of a few weeks.
Yeah what the hell, of course it can. How blind do you have to be to write something like that?
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Seems pretty unique to US.
Thus I conclude that most of the speculation in this thread is not backed by the facts.
1. EU countries sees a lot immigration from Middle East and Africa, who has more kids and there is still a cultural difference towards having kids, give some time to those people to notice the environment and you see similar trend
2. but also EU countries have stronger labor policies which impacts birth rate. Not easy to fire, even when they don't have a job, they get support from government, cheap healthcare (I pay ~250-300 EUR/month for a family, no payment for kids), free dentist until 18 years for kids.
It doesn't cancel what I have said about the impact and reasons, if same conditions exist in EU countries as well, you would see similar decline, which also means this is a political and economical issue
Real reason(s) could be even different, e.g. chemicals used in foods or a plastic? we need a research. But expecting single reason is probably wrong
[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/199958/number-of-green-c...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US tracks this. Average weekly hours worked as of April of this year is 34.4, or 6.9 hours a day: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
There are so many reasons for it (economic, social, political, religious, etc) that are just ignored when the thought terminating insults come out.
Both sides play to their audience, but all of it is ultimately about cheap labor.
Mostly Republican? Very likely, based off what we know and observe.
We're getting pretty in the weeds on this tangent here, so I will just say that it's obvious that "we" "know and observe" different things which is why "we" disagree on certain things. You're not "right", you just believe you are, just like everyone else. Including me!
"what we know and observe" is completely subjective and meaningless on its own.
Well then, we're both right! :)
Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).
BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the...
Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people.
Anecdotal evidence, I'm in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.
Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare.
But as I said, not an economist.
The age at which pensions are paid out has been creeping upwards and is now heading towards 70. What should have happened is that pension payments were ring-fenced, but of course government finances don't work like that.
Most pensioners vote Tory, so the government is literally robbing its own base.
And most haven't realised it.
Unfortunately if you do the numbers it doesn't work, financially. The number of years you have to pay out to people is so large that you need a very high ROI to keep the fund stable, but ROI sometimes wasn't high enough and the funds fall behind.
This isn't a Tory or UK or even a government problem. It affects pension funds around the world and private funds too.
Or just cut to the chase, and realize the money is only a unit of exchange, and not a store of value. This idea of a society saving/investing money to pay for retirement is just nonsense, if there won't be enough people to pay the money to for job to get done.
Ultimately, retirement is paid for by spending a fraction of the current economic output, which can't be banked.
All of that doesn't add up even in the slightest to anything that makes sense.
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations.
Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid: "You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid"
See: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negativ...
It requires being very frugal, moving to a low cost of living area, taking a lot of time, manual labor, and getting help from friends. Also, you have to live in 3rd world conditions for quite a while.
At least, that's what my grandpa did. I know a few folks-- who are quite poor-- who have done it in the past 10 years. But maybe 0.01% of the population is willing to do anything like it. I know I'm not.
Housing is pervasively unattainable, and yet you would still claim that "real wages are up"? What the crap do "real" wages mean to you? Our parents and grandparents easily purchased homes to keep them safe in as they grew old. What "real" wealth do we have that can compare?
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “””
Will have to check back on this in a few years.
Source: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+r...
Part of the issue is the infertility cliff happens in the late 30s to mid 40s, so those age categories are a little wonky in terms of capturing the phenomenon.
Having bumped up against this myself, the problem in the US isn't that women are more often waiting until they are 32 to have kids, it's that they are waiting until they are 39.
The figure here illustrates it well:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat...
There seems to be a much bigger decline in births among younger than there is an increase in older, but if those women are delaying rather than abstaining completely, they'll run into infertility issues later if they wait late enough. There will be a certain number who intend to have more kids than they actually do.
I don't think this is all of it, as it doesn't address why women are increasingly forgoing children in prime fertility years. I also in general think it's part of a set of demographic trends that point to societal problems (stalling or declining life expectancy for one).
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.
This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change.
Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies.
But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
For Europe? It's not as bad but still bad - we share the same issue, too many gerontocrats in power and the Boomer generation will dominate voters for the next 15-20 years given they enter pensioner age now and will probably live to age 80-85.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)
Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.
> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).
And yet, despite all of that, a blue collar wage was enough to own a home, a car for the breadwinner, a second car for the stay-at-home wife, healthcare, two children and their education. The economic base indicators were just way better than they are for my generation.
Also, politicians actually did something about all the crises you mentioned. The threat of nuclear war and other weapons of mass destructions got tackled by non-proliferation programs or outright bans (on chemical and biological weapons). Threats to the environment such as lead, acid rain or the ozone hole got combatted by banning lead and sulphur in fuels and CFC gases as refrigerants. The islamist terror threat got combatted by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and a number of other hellholes, as well as upgrading airports and planes. The oil crisis got under control by introducing consumption limits and an expansion of domestic production to a point the US is a net exporter of oil.
In contrast, none of the modern polycrises got tackled. The financial world has deregulated to the point that we have yet another impending collapse, with actual giant banks like Credit Suisse going down. Migration and its causes aren't addressed, instead we build borders and threaten people with deathly conditions on their travel. Pandemic prevention has gone down the drain so hard that wearing masks and getting vaccines got politicized. Climate change is outright denied. If you don't get top degrees you have virtually no chance at getting a halfway decent paying job. Would-be parents, even young children can see all of that deliberate inaction.
> and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media)
Social media is an useful scapegoat - the mental health crisis (and I'd say also the drug abuse epidemic) is a direct result of our hyper-competitive, individualist everyone-for-themselves environment and the above-mentioned inaction of leadership to crises.
I'm not sure a blue-collar job in the 1970s got you two cars; I'm pretty sure it didn't in the 1950s. I'm not sure it got your kids through college without working, either.
Afghanistan and Iraq were in response to a later wave of Islamic terrorism. The earlier one got handled... I forget all the details, but I think there was some hunting down and killing of the responsible parties, and a (non-carpet) bombing of Libya.
Today, I think you can get a "halfway decent job" - or even a pretty good one - with a degree that is less than a "top degree".
So, overall you have at least something of a point. Leadership seemed a lot more competent then, and infighting was a lot less of an obstacle. But you're also looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and at the present with gloom-tinted ones.
In case of pregnancy/delivery it is not a truly random event so society will have to pool for a planned event. For such events we need government support proxying for society not some insurance company.
That may be the way the contracts and laws are currently set up, and if we want to have a child without going bankrupt, we have to play the game. But it's simultaneously possible to recognize that the system produces some deeply ridiculous cases such as this one.
I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80:
---
(100) Year 0: 100 births, 0 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(150) Year 20: 50 births, 100 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(175) Year 40: 25 births, 50 twenties, 100 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths
(187) Year 60: 12 births, 25 twenties, 50 forties, 100 sixties, 0 deaths
(93) Year 80: 6 births, 12 twenties, 25 forties, 50 sixties, 100 deaths
(46) Year 100: 3 births, 6 twenties, 12 forties, 25 sixties, 50 deaths
Year 120: 1 birth...
---
Various observations:
- Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric.
- A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation.
- By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths.
- The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium.
- The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models.
So in 2012 they understood they'd really screwed up and tried to reverse it by starting an equally hard push back towards big families. In 2012 their fertility rate was 1.89, as of 2021 it's down to 1.69. [2] China's even worse off. In 2016 their fertility rate was 1.7. It's now down to 1.08. In general it seems much easier to reduce fertility than it is to raise it.
That the West is just ignoring this is crazy, especially because in the West fertility is strongly inversely proportional to income. So not only are we failing to even sustain our population, but generational poverty is spreading like a virus.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german...
Today we can read in the newspaper, that 25% of our children in school can not read. Elephant in the room.
Do you need to sustain the elderly? Have 100% wealth tax at age 60 and use it to pay equal retirement for everybody above 60. Let elderly sustain elderly.
100% too much? Ok, let's say it's only for the money above 10 million. Or 50, or 100, whatever.
Cloning?
Can't or won't?
What are companies doing: training people or just hiring externally and expecting those new hires to hit the ground running? The same strategy is applied everywhere.
Could this be saying that future dystopian megalopolises should sustain own existences by capturing free-ranged humans roaming wastelands, promise them successes and citizenships, and then letting them die without offsprings?
1. Fewer productive taxpayers to pay for old-age pensions
2. A drop-off in available investment capital as private pensions are converted to bonds and cash
3. Fewer workers for an economy with soaring demand for specific fields e.g. medical
This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy.
The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
So the future with less workers is just a future with poorer billionaires and they don't like that which explains why all the media owned by them are trying to scare us about againg population scenario.
I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio).
A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management.
Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution
If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem.
But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) would probably allow the current number to get by fine.
Talking about how many people can be sustained by earth is talking about the wrong thing. It only leads and HAS only lead to the eugenetics part. Because it's always poor people in different countries who gets sterilised.
The real topic is that capitalism and consumerism is 100% unsustainable, right from the start. That is the real debate to be had. That this world is not about human well-being and happyness, but about GDP and growth, making a tiny number of people wealthy at the expense and misery of the majority.
Unfortunately this site - Hacker News - and everything related to it, Ycombinator, Paul Graham, is only fueling the capitalist game.
You talk about "sustainable population", there's nothing not to understand about this. Sustainable implies it's now unsustainable, but that notion isn't true.
Why do people insist on making this an eugenics talking point?
The number of people is not the problem.
For instance, when we're told we need to eat less meat, we'll it's not so much that meat production is a problem, it's that meat production for billions of people is a problem.
So all the constraining measures we're seeing either being suggested or enforced "for the environment/climate" are constraints to fit so many people on the planet.
For what it's worth, I would be delighted to live on a planet of 10 billion people who have found a way to live in a way that can persist for millenia, but we don't seem to have done so. Although, living in a well-insulated flat made with renewably-grown timber (a great carbon sink!) walking and biking distance from all of my daily needs where my meagre energy needs are met with 100% renewable energy (when I lived in San Diego I worked from home and our apartment's average load was 100 Watts so this can be done!) on a mostly-vegan diet and working 20 hours per week or less sounds pretty nice to me.
Edit: Not only are there natural corrections that occur, there is also a lot of room for human-made "corrections". Is it ugly? Yes. Is it unfair? Yes. Will it ensure that the local economy continues to function? Yes. The vast majority of us in such a scenario would live in poverty.
(This is where I go off the deep end) Imo, the proliferation of LLM's will truly lead to massive amounts of people being displaced from meaningful work. I foresee that in the not-so-distant future "normal people" who didn't attend elite institutions (or who are otherwise not extraordinary in some sense) will only find "flesh work" available to them - i.e. prostitutes. As long as human flesh exists there will always be work for humans. It's dark, I know, but ask yourself if it's true.
Disclaimer: I find prostitution appalling and sad, but its existence is no secret. In my experience the people who are okay with it are either socially inept people who can't manage to hold down a partner, or socially competent people who are bored with their partner(s). In the latter case I wonder, why not just get a new partner? I didn't ask them about it because the answer doesn't actually matter to me. To them I say, "Do you", just as I would say to the poor souls who know no other way. Who am I to question how someone feeds their kids? I don't even have kids.
"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".
Indeed, who is to say that the perpetuation of one’s family tree is at all desirable or necessary?
Maybe the best outcome is not to play the game at all.
How many families are large because the person who had to be pregnant had no real say in the matter?
Like working into your 70s