Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study | Hacker News Reader

Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

japantimes.co.jp

34 pointsPaulHoule138 comments

I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland.

A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially in urban areas. Between birth control and lots of other avenues for women to spend there time, it's not that surprising that you always see plummeting birthrates whenever a society urbanized and moves up the economic ladder.

Some people want kids. Many simply do not.

I ponder this question myself on the edge of Gen Z and my life is simplified tremendously if I just essentially pause it in high earning young person mode.

Money is abundant for travel and anything I want. I don't need to figure out dating. Means I don't need to figure out everything from conflict resolution to clothing. I don't need to struggle to buy a ton of housing. I have friends/a sister who will have kids I can just play rich uncle to. I can retire decades early due to overemployment and spend an absurd amount of money every year doing whatever I want.

The Peter Pan life has a lot going for it. I am in my mid 20s and my life can essentially be on coast with a ton of fun for the rest of my life.

Many people feel this way in their mid 20s, it often changes when you hit your early to mid 30s.

Most of us don't believe that it'll happen to us either. :)

Maybe, but between dating skills and allocation of spend I may otherwise be committed to the strategy whether I regret it or not.

A skill is something that you can train! We've all been there...

neverland doesn’t have a need for geriatric medicine.

you can have a ton of fun for a large portion of the rest of your life, and hopefully something happens such that later life care won’t be a concern. robot caretakers, clinical immortality, or otherwise.

this isn’t judgement, that may be the safer gamble. but it is a gamble.

>The Peter Pan life has a lot going for it.

Trust me, this feeling passes. You want to be prepared for when it does.

It's strange that other people will pay the burden of raising children that support your retirement.

You might think that your earning and savings supports your retirement, but no. It will be the next generation of workers that actualize it. Money is just unit of account, it by itself does not give you a retirement. Only working age, working people.

We've found ourselves in a very strange moral hazard. You spend your money to raise kids that will work to earn my savings in my retirement. Hopefully the state can afford your retirement too, but that's unlikely, because no one had children. Because this society sterilizes itself.

Seems like old age social safety nets are a net negative.

You'll feel different when you are old.

Developed countries will always have immigration as long as somewhere remains a totalitarian hole. But yes, economically there is significant moral hazard. It is dependent on somewhere being unpleasant enough for people to want to live in a completely different culture.

Immigrants are carrying the child rearing burden

I agree with you. Now that women are not required to have children due to cultural or economic reasons, many choose not to. I don't see why many politicians think that is surprising.

There are too many demands in modern societies. Ironically, a kid may actually require even more work now than in the past. In the past the kids were less dependent on their parents. Now they need to be followed up closely at school and activities outside of school as well. I don't have children myself but I hear others have a full schedule at home where they spend a huge amount of their time helping with homework, driving the kids to activities or working for their local soccer club.

The parents basically end up as as part time managers of their children's careers. In some cases they barely have any personal time. The day is full of chores and activities. Not everyone wants that.

The only way we can change this is to make sure that it is possible to have kids, career and enough free personal time. I don't know if it is possible to do that without the government spending lots of money on these initiatives.

I agree, it's not surprising given birth control and economic pressures to join the workforce, but it is new and distinctly modern, and writing it off as "some people just don't want kids" isn't a satisfactory explanation.

Something is deeply wrong in a society if it has all of the social safety net tools, like Finland does, to ease the burdens of childbearing and people still choose to not do it. It's a society in a slow, generations long suicide.

The future looks bleak for humans. It might not be in fact but it looks that way. Climate change and “AI” disruption or worse…it takes a special individual to want to bring a person into these situations.

People do, I did, but it’s not easy.

The future always looks bleak for humans, which is just part of the human experience. But today, we have the most material and technological abundance in history and people gesture vaguely at a long term time horizon problem and think "it's over". It was "over" during the Great Depression, and it was over before that during Spanish Flu. And before that during the Thirty Years War and the Black Death, and so on back to the Great Floods of mythology. Luckily, they didn't give up.

If society is already committing a fast suicide by destroying the habitability of the Earth, then doesn't it seem rational?

Like imagine a meteor was going to destroy the Earth in a year - would it make sense to have children? 10 years? 100?

>If society is already committing a fast suicide by destroying the habitability of the Earth

This sort of absurd hyperbole is a good sign you've been propagandized into believing something for the benefit of others.

Fast is a pretty relative term when it comes to geological and even civilizational time, so I don't know how absurd the hyperbole is, but I would say that I harbor deep sorrow for the children born within the last few years.

I don't know who it benefits if I believe that making significant alterations to the carbon content of the atmosphere of the Earth will have significant consequences (I don't feel much benefit from believing it; I wish I didn't), but I do see parties who stand to gain by denying it. I'd also love to believe in god and that there is meaning to any of this, but that does not mean that it is so.

Already where I live (South Texas) I can feel the effects - I've lived long enough to see the summers go from hot to dangerous, and the droughts become more severe; my co-worker's well literally ran dry a few weeks ago and he is far from alone. Running out of water will focus one on what is important.

I take zero joy in it, but the more I learn, the more I understand that humanity is living on borrowed time (not that different from an individual human I suppose), and we should try and enjoy the time that is left.

I had kids relatively late in life (42) and it's been amazing. I love being a dad, far more than I thought I would. It wasn't really about wanting kids or not wanting kids, it felt more like...puberty in that for most of human history you don't really get to choose to do it or not, it happens pretty naturally. I guess that's unfashionable to say. Perhaps some would say it's irresponsible. But the opening montage in Idiocracy looms large, I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.

Yes, it's hard work, and I was very happy to change my last diaper. But the rewards far, far outweigh the costs. Children are on balance a true joy, their laughter and smiles so pure and wonderful, that I can't imagine life without them.

This is good except for two things: (1) women lose their fertility at "a certain age" and if they put off childbearing for too long they might lose the opportunity and (2) if you have children late your life will overlap less with them. For that matter there is the issue of chasing a toddler around when you are 50 and less energetic than when you are 30.

It's probably not so good to have children when you are very young and not so good to have them when you are old, there is some optimum in between but unfortunately many people who put this off find the choice is made for them.

Luckily mom was 10 years younger than me. And yeah I have some concerns about being "the old dad" but I'm not that old and at least right now I'm pretty active. Had to start using reading glasses last year, so I know that won't last. But it will last long enough.

Stay fit, I’ve had 60-70 year olds ride last me in XC MTB races when I was in my 30s haha

> I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.

I cannot think of worse advice.

Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.

But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.

Poster did not say to “stop thinking” entirely but to avoid over thinking / over rationalizing about the reasons not to have kids.

You are on a tear in this thread, you may want to get some fresh air

Having kids was, effectively, not really a decision until the mid-20th century.

Would you say that all of your ancestors, prior to your parents, were utterly irresponsible?

I don't think people really know what "the consequences" are. There's a lot of flak in the zeitgeist about how awful, expensive, and horrific kids are - but precious little about how wonderful it is. It's false advertising! There is nothing you do with your evening that is better than mine reading bedtime stories to my kids. And your morning cannot be better than mine waking up to the smiles and laughter of my kids, ready to play.

A lot of liberal (in the classical, broad sense) young folks simply shrug their shoulders at this fact -- not everyone wants kids, so what?

I think it's worth considering, if you're one of these people, that without children being born to liberal parents, the "extremists" of the world -- fundamentalist muslims, christians, and so on -- will inherit the earth. Of course some of their children will grow up to be liberals, but that number will inevitably decrease as the total number of liberals does as well.

If you believe that equality, feminism, human rights, and so on would suffer in that world, then I think you should consider if not having kids is really a big deal after all.

>Of course some of their children will grow up to be liberals, but that number will inevitably decrease as the total number of liberals does as well.

This is particularly true because political views are to some degree heritable. And it's not just a hypothetical thing: many conservatives believe they can "win" if they just manage to have children and hold out for a few decades as the liberals slowly breed themselves out of existence.

...so then they inherit the earth?

I wonder if this sort of thing is cyclical. The next dark age, caused by the earth being overrun by the fecund and illiberal peoples of the world until they can only eat themselves. Maybe a plague wipes them all out and they are too poor/illiterate/unlucky to survive it. 600 years later, someone re-invents the internet, for people to use to post that they don't want kids.

I don't think "let's make some babies to keep those extremists at bay" is the sexiest of pillow talk. But then again, I have dated individuals with severe enough views on the world where I could see that actually working. :)

My lifespan is too short to worry overmuch about any of it.

Haha, yeah it does fall apart on the individual level. I don't think I would convince my girlfriend to have kids by talking dirty with population statistics ;)

And for the record I'm just another childless, un-married late-twenties tech guy that wants to travel and hang out with my friends on the weekend. So I'm definitely part of the "problem" not the solution.

I just mean to say -- we've inherited a really rich intellectual tradition that has borrowed from thinkers around the world, and really we are torchbearers for that way of life. It's not a guarantee that progress will march forever onward. So we need to think about how to keep our societies going in a way that still produces families.

Maybe that means the government steps in and says that every workplace has to have a day care center. It seemed to work for Patagonia. Maybe it means we start some crazy scheme where companies hire married couples as a package deal. Maybe it means we have to rebuild our cities to have denser neighborhoods with lots of families clustered together. Maybe we all have to start living in hippie communes. I have no idea.

I don't want society to go backwards, but I don't want our values to die out either. So it's clear that we need radical change.

A lot of it is explained by rising marriage ages. Women lose the ability to have children at around 40, so the later they get married, the less chance they have of having children, even if all other things are equal. E.g. if we assume an even chance of having children per year, then we'd expect an increase of the average marriage age from 32 to 36 to halve the birth rate (as in the former there are 8 years in which the woman could give birth, while in the latter there are only 4).

This means that even if people's biological fertility and desire to have children didn't change at all, people delaying marriage to later in life would still potentially result in a big drop in the number of children born.

Clearly, it's impossible for women to have children before getting married.

This is a good point. The average age of menopause in the US is, however, 51, not 40. That does not undermine your argument in principle, though.

Probably, a woman's chance of getting pregnant decreases the older she is, even if she is still menstruating. That would complicate the numbers but would not contradict your argument.

This is why a province in China is offering a cash bonus to couples who marry before the woman is 25.

It's true, and fair enough.

It is also true that societies are brutally darwinian. The ones that prevail are the ones that can produce the most offspring, and bring it to economic maturity.

This is the story behind the enormous success of China and India, per capita they are relatively poor but punch well above that weight since they have enormous populations. If they can sustain that population dynamic (which seems problematic actually) then it doesn't matter that they are per-capita poor. They are still nuclear superpowers with lunar missions. It doesn't matter if they are illiberal, there are more of them.

It feels like for all its faults, the global West has values worth preserving for the future, and that involves, well, going through with it and making babies.

But then I suppose, the burden of childcare should be better socialized. It used to rely more on grandparents, who would live nearby and be a good 10-20 years younger than nowadays.

But then again, you're saying, where that is in place people still don't want to have children. So maybe that doesn't work either.

You realize China is having its own demographic crash, yeah? And India's birth rate is at or below replacement?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

Bluntly, whether you meant to or not, this comment is full of coded bigotry. It invokes images of a foreign hoard, bang at the walls of the west, threatening to dilute or destroy "our" way of life.

1. The comment you're replying to explicitly acknowledges this fact in an aside.

2. It is not full of "coded bigotry." These are simple fact that almost everyone agrees on. India has explicitly made it a goal to reduce their fertility rate over the past few decades because of the problems of overpopulation. China's economy absolutely benefits from a high population. And yet I doubt you would characterize their humans rights record as stellar. It does not mean that Indians or Chinese people are in any way inferior to Westerners. And I highly doubt that the OP would agree with that either.

3. Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument. It just means you find it distasteful. So what?

> Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument.

Yes, it is.

The core of their comment is "oh noes western values will be lost!" (Or as they put it: "the global West has values worth preserving for the future").

My point is, no, they won't, because fertility is dropping everywhere. We're not that special. And that this purported fear is simply rooted in age-old racist tropes of a loss of cultural identity to scary foreigners, nothing more.

You're drawing connections, but you're not making concrete arguments.

Perhaps China and the West will both face population collapse. The argument still stands that Western values (and Chinese values) will be lost.

But humanity won't just vanish in a puff of smoke. It just means that societies that do not share "our" values will live on.

Do you believe in human rights? Feminism? Racial equality? Well too bad, because, at the current going rate, very few people in the 22nd century will.

> full of coded bigotry

Baloney. The comment might rely on some outdated information, or if you want to be uncharitable, outdated stereotypes, but that isn't bigotry. There's no need to moralize.

Having a huge population is extremely beneficial for leaders and for the so-called elite that profit from the pyramidal effect.

But at the average individual level, I am not so sure.

You need a large population to support big industries and it helps tech innovation as well.

Taiwan population is not that large (23M), and yet they can support a pretty convincing semiconductor industry.

I agree that we need a reasonable amount of people to build and maintain large projects, millions, not billions.

They sell to a much larger population. If they could only sell to themselves they wouldn't have built such a large industry.

If there are a lot of working people when you retire it is easy to pay for your retirement, both in the sense that they can pay taxes and in the sense that the growing economy makes the stock market grow up which makes private defined benefit or defined contribution plans work better. Billionaires benefit from it even more than you but you do benefit from it.

> per capita they are relatively poor but punch well above that weight since they have enormous populations. If they can sustain that population dynamic (which seems problematic actually) then it doesn't matter that they are per-capita poor.

This is a line of reasoning I don't get. I mean I understand it, I just strongly disagree.

Countries are made up of people, individual people. How important is it really that a country is a "superpower" if the average person eeks out a horrible existence. To take it to a further extreme, look at the Russian empire of the late 18th/early 19th century. Russia was definitely a Great Power at that time, while also the majority of the population were slaves (there really wasn't much of a difference between serfdom and slavery) who were borderline starving, or actually starving, during that time. But rah rah Russia definitely got some nice palaces out of it at the time that certainly make great monuments today.

I'm much prefer to live in a "non-superpower" with a much better quality of life for me and the people I love.

Yeah, true. But I think the argument holds also for this utility function.

There is something about your society that you like, else you would be somewhere else. And, bluntly, if your society doesn't make babies, today, then in 20-30 years time there won't be people brought up in this culture. Either your society will go into decline for lack of said people, or will rely on immigration (assuming it's attractive to expats), eg people with different values to your society's.

It's not saying one society is better than another, only that if you think there is something good about your society (liberal rights? nukes? hell, maybe you're North Korean and like dictators!) then it takes babies to sustain it.

The default is you will get people brought up with values of most populous societies, which may or may not align with yours.

> It feels like for all its faults, the global West has values worth preserving for the future, and that involves, well, going through with it and making babies.

As someone childfree by choice, I care about the preservation of the global west for, at most, the next 40 years.

Fair enough.

Continuing on the thread of my argument, you could argue that in 30-40 years time your reliance on the society and any shared values will be very high - possibly at its highest in your life (though of course I'm just guessing, I know nothing about you). And elderly care seems to be among the most commonly outsourced. So even having a fixed horizon of caring doesn't invalidate the argument.

Wanting to raise children requires a giving mindset. In US, at least, we have a very self-focused culture. From a perspective of self-actualization, children don't make sense. Unless it turns out that nurturing and developing others is part of what it means to be human...

This line if reasoning is such bullshit, sorry. The underlying tone is always "childfree people are selfish", with the underlying message "parents are such giving people", as you pretty much explicitly say in your comment.

Except I have known plenty of parents, including some with gigantic families, who are some of the most selfish, narcissistic people I've ever met. They basically saw their children as an extension of themselves, like they were building some "noble family" bullshit or something. Simultaneously, I've also seen people without children who have dedicated their entire lives to public service and helping others.

Of course not all parents and people without parents are like this. I personally have never seen any evidence that those with or without kids (voluntarily) differ in their giving nature towards others.

Then why is this a worldwide phenomenon when standard of living rises to a certain level?

I think this thinking tries to obscure an immense yearning that is buried within people who may want families, but do not feel it is realistic for them. I know this because I post a lot about my own children on twitter and some of the DMs I get are essentially confessions from men and women saying exactly that.

In survey data completed fertility is usually way lower than desired fertility, and even then on surveys we cannot expect people to necessarily say what they really want if they do not think it is achievable for them.

Just make life harder for singles but way better for married couples especially those reaching having children stages. Higher taxes for singles. No subsidies for expensive homes. No benefits. Reduced healthcare.

These threads pop up here just about every other day.

It's not just Japan, though the media seems fixated on Japan to an unusual extent.

Here are some 2023 TFR estimates, source: CIA.

Japan: 1.39. Poland: 1.41. Spain: 1.29. South Korea: 1.1. Taiwan: 1.09. China: 1.45. Canada: 1.57. Germany: 1.58. UK: 1.63. Cuba: 1.71. USA: 1.85.

Italy: 1.24. This is noteworthy as Italy has been under replacement TFR for nearly 50 years. (Since 1975.)

Hungary: 1.49. Despite best efforts.

Just about every developed country on Earth is presently experiencing sub-replacement TFR, and a handful of large countries are worse-off than Japan, or in comparable positions.

Why all of the articles about Japan, when the situation in Italy is more dire? Go figure.

What is to be done? What's clear is that only radical solutions have any chance at working.

>Why all of the articles about Japan, when the situation in Italy is more dire? Go figure.

It's more dire in Japan because Japan has very restrictive immigration policies, so the decrease in working-age people there cannot be offset to some degree by immigration, unlike in western countries.

If people in a country are just substitutable like that by people from other countries without anything of any importance being lost, then we don't need to care for per-country replacement rates, just global ones. Except if the concern is purely economic.

Japanese old people are healthier and more able to take care of themselves which is a big difference and in my view preferable to mass migration.

Now do the TFR numbers for the "native" populations and you'll notice something quite interesting - that Japan is actually doing quite well.

Yeah, I know. The number for "Ethnic Germans in Germany" is probably comparable to South Korea's.

The birth rate for indigenous Canadians is 1.5x the rate of Canadians overall, significantly above TFR.

Do you mean First Nations Canadians or people born in Canada?

Not trying to PC-police you, just sounds like there might be some confusion here. It wouldn't surprise me if the First Nations people of Canada have a much higher birthrate than the rest of Canada, for many reasons.

> Why all of the articles [in the mainstream media?] about Japan, when the situation in Italy is more dire? Go figure.

Japan is further along in the process I think? Compare [1,2]. Plus, they have cool robots, that gets the people clicking. [3]

I have seen a lot of articles about Italy's 'dollar homes' which is a symptom of the same problem. [4]

Maybe the promise of cool robots or extremely cheap homes or something similarly evocative is necessary to get masses of people to click a boring story about old people and babies.

[1]: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2023/

[2]: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2023/

[3]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-au...

[4]: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-10-27/italy-...

>I have seen a lot of articles about Italy's 'dollar homes' which is a symptom of the same problem.

If I may, as an Italian, those are symptoms of a different problem, there are a number of (small) villages that are simply inconvenient (because they are difficult to reach, offer no "entertainment" nor jobs, often miss a number of services, etc.).

I.e. there are reasons why they were largely abandoned in the last few decades.

If you are (Italian or foreigner) retired or working from home and interested into living a life outside the chaos of modern life those places are just fine (and are often beautiful), but you need to take into account the drawbacks.

Well, YOShInOn thought this article had an 83% chance of having a large discussion and I agreed and that was one reason I posted it (it was in the "people want to talk about this" queue, scored just 9% on "will get upvoted" model (the model for which is not so reliable), and just barely missed the "I think you will like this" queue at 47%.)

Pluses of this article are that it is factual and not inflammatory.

Minuses are that someone could say (as you're suggesting) that it is not really "news" in that it does not represent a major change in the situation and doesn't go into a lot of depth.

"Inflammatory" is a model I'd like to develop but looking at 5000 inflammatory posts on a weekend will not be good for my mental health. ("big discussion" unfortunately often means "inflammatory")

A "really news" or "duplicate" model is my holy grail, the most sources I add to YOShInOn the more articles I get for a given event. I have a a model for that but it not aggressive enough at removing duplicates but I'm afraid if I increase the sensitivity it will get more false positives.

That means about 1/3 of male population may never have any of them as well. What haunts me most is to ponder about the world we get when a lot these 18 years old become 75+ years old people with no close living relatives and their social support network mostly gone before themselves. A world of single or no children also leaves people with no uncles, aunts or cousins.

Doesn't take much imagination given that substantial parts of the developed world haul their parents into nursing homes where care is outsourced to the market. The communal, familial support system is already gone.

Nursing homes still need to be staffed, and staffing them 24/7 requires a lot of staff.

Whatever happened to Toyota's palliative care robots? Remember about 15 years ago when they were doing all those demos and said they'd have them out within 10 years and would be $15,000??

Honestly, even if they were $50,000 it'd still be a lot cheaper than a nursing home and would allow people to live at home.

Why not just killbots?

Much less dystopian than a future of elders left alone to be tended by palliative care robots.

These things need to be handled delicately. There's no reason a palliative care robot can't become a "killer" robot when the time is ready. It can be very friendly about it, too. Of course we'll leave it to rumors whether this ever actually happens, as nobody should ever really know that soylent green is people.

You think that, given a robot, it’s more dystopian to have it care for someone, vs kill them? Weird.

I "think" that I was being sarcastic, the point being that a future of elders left to rot in the care of robots is dystopic in itself, and might even be less preferable than euthanasia for some, and that a future that doesn't involve care robots or kill robots would be preferable altogether...

It’s worse than that. Historically only 50% of men reproduced, and that hasn’t gotten much better. There are plenty of divorced men with more than one family, yet this is rarer for women.

I’d estimate if 30% of women aren’t having children at least 50-60% of men won’t. God knows what kind of issues that will cause.

We'll just normalize MAID, and people will volunteer to shuffle off this mortal coil. Insert a WSB meme, drawn in mspaint, about a cheap handgun being your retirement plan.

I have accepted it. Work until retirement. At that point get whatever society pays me and take reverse loan on my property. Run out of savings and end it all.

This is obviously sad where it is counter to the womens' hopes, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for men.

Previously discussed reports about the imbalances in dating market dynamics (a significant number of young males being without sexual partners) would imply potentially more childless men, but they aren't mentioned here.

Women are the limiting factor in reproduction.

Potentially a man could donate his sperm to a sperm bank and father thousands of children, a woman takes a minimum of 9 months and probably needs some downtime and it all has a big physiological impact.

The reason why women have always born the brunt of efforts to regulate sexuality is because if you control 90% of the women you control 90% of the reproductive capacity, if you control 90% of the men that last 10% could impregnate all the women.

This classic covers the social breakdown and feeling of crisis in the 1970s

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Origin...

(which we are doomed to feel the echos of from time to time sense then) but also has a good review of how different cultures have regulated sexuality from time to time such as the gay-positive Mesopotamians who were contemporaneous with the ancient Hebrews who definitely were not.

There is a convergence of reasons, and Japan is only ahead of the curve.

People who have been raised as a single child are unlikely to have more than one children, this is simple pattern reproduction.

The cost issue is mostly related to cost of space, with today standards we need one more room per child, not everyone can afford that.

Culturally, the pressure on girls and young women has relaxed tremendously, education and financial freedom have a very measurable effect on natality.

Overall, I don't think this is a bad thing. We can adapt.

Also, population is a huge variable in energy/resources/pollution.

This is a problem that'll solve itself eventually; the desire to have children is to some degree inheritable, so the people with genes that make them still likely to have children in modern society will outbreed the people with genes that make them unlikely to have children in modern society. Similarly the cultures that make people more likely to have children will outspread those that make people less likely to have children, so maybe in a few centuries the Amish, Orthodox Jews and Muslims will rule the earth.

This is not clear at all. Perhaps people who don't want kids will die out, but if this is a cultural issue that affects our basic human instincts, it could be something that is extremely hard to fix. Perhaps in modern society, whatever you do, people only want 1-1.5 kids?

If that's the case, without a radical cultural change, humans are basically going extinct.

> whatever you do, people only want 1-1.5 kids?

This is definitely not true. Look at the fertility rates of any of the aforementioned cultures. Humans will never go extinct because they're making the conscious choice to do so...

>Perhaps in modern society, whatever you do, people only want 1-1.5 kids?

This clearly isn't true because the Amish and Ultra-orthodox Jews still want/have 7-8 kids, and they live in modern society. I'm not sure about the Ultra-orthodox, but the Amish are certainly capable of sustaining their standards of living even if the rest of America dies out, so humanity wouldn't go extinct, it'd just become 100% Amish (and whatever other cultures are able to maintain persistently high fertility rates).

Amish do need to expand to new land though. They're priced out of the Lancaster homeland. But they don't want expensive urban real estate, so it's ok. Down side: They're apparently involved in deforestation of remote parts of the Amazon for that reason. Up side: They're bringing life to some remote parts of the US you wouldn't think of.

In upstate NY they seem to be creating new "colonies", I used to see them with their horse carriages in the area around the old Seneca Army Depot, now I am seeing them around Marathon (which really is about 26 miles from Ithaca.)

> This clearly isn't true because the Amish and Ultra-orthodox Jews still want/have 7-8 kids, and they live in modern society.

Give Amish and Ultra Orthodox Jewish women financial independence and see how many kids they have.

>This is a problem that'll solve itself eventually

If you include the option of extinction, sure.

I think it's a sign of a development we see in other countries as well. The governments are too slow when it comes to keeping up with social changes.

Historically, women had little choice and was (and still is) under social pressure to have children. In addition to social pressure, they also had a very real economic pressure. Without social security and free health care, the children was a way to ensure that you had someone to look after you when you got sick or old.

It is not surprising to me that as living standards rise, many families are less dependant on children as a safety net. It's also more socially acceptable for a woman to choose her career over a child. The classical role of a mother where she either stayed at home or had a low paying job is gone in modern societies.

The only way governments can stop this trend is to make it more attractive to have children AND a decent career. This will require both changes in financial support and culture (we men have to contribute more at home)

I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids.

I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot afford to put a roof over their heads or feed them that's one thing. If you can't get the latest iphone or go buy a new Tesla and maybe have to sacrifice your yearly vacation to The Hamptons... well then you're just making up excuses. Kids can be very very happy with very little and sometimes it's even good for them to not be raised in a household where they believe everything just comes free and easy because that results in a lot of entitlement.

I think this is a surface level explanation but there must be deeper reasons why people aren’t having children.

Maybe our lives are so comfortable we just don’t want the inconvenience of children.

Maybe we’re so obsessed with momentary hedonism that doing something extremely hard for 18 years doesn’t seem worth it.

Maybe there are so many generational traumas built up over thousands of years that now that we have some awareness of mental health issues it’s really putting people off children before they are resolved.

I don’t know what it is. But I definitely feel like we don’t know the answer as a society deep down.

Edit: and the topic is so controversial I don’t know how we can find out. This whole issue might be about women in the workforce, or contraception, but touching these topics is insanely risky. Which is really bad, because we really need to understand in the next few decades.

I suspect many more are blisfully unaware of what will happen to them when they inevitably end up in a nursing home.

I'm not sure what you mean by generational traumas but if you mean what I think you mean they can be overcome. My grandparents vehemently hated certain specific ethnicities till the end because their brothers and sisters and parents were executed ("disappeared") by their soldiers and secret police. My parents are a product of being raised in their post-war hellhole. I was able to see past all that and grew up normally with friends local to my country. I suppose if my parents spoon fed me hate and persecution stories constantly I would develop some sort of PTSD.

I don’t think having children is protection against ending up in a nursing home.

It depends which culture you live in. In the American ultra-individualistic culture, you may be right.

There is a friend of our family who had his father die of Alzheimer's disease.

For a long time lived with his wife: she was of sound mind, he was of sound body, and together they did very well. She died recently and he got a lot of help from him adult children.

He was fortunate in that he had worked as an English professor for a lifetime and had a lot of retirement funds and had bought long-term care insurance.

He moved into a long-term care facility once his wife died and had all sorts of misadventures in the COVID-19 period (went to the hospital, the care home wouldn't take him back, he moved back in with his son who was driven nuts by his father getting up in the night to pee, getting lost and urinating in the waste basket, eventually ended up at another care home, ...)

His son was able to get him a lot of extra help, hire a bunch of aides like my wife who would come around and make sure he still got some socialization. It really helped that he was not anxious at all and never got belligerent despite being confused all the time.

So far as getting support this is about the best case you can image: having the financial resources to pay for care, and having family members that supplement it and make the most of it. He spent his last few months in a real nursing home and in a place like that the staff is always making mistakes (sometimes serious, often not so serious) and if you have family members watching out for you you will get much better care than someone who isn't.

In some jurisdictions, the adult children of elderly people are absolutely on the hook for their care. At least this is from a financial standpoint. They could put them in a facility, or care for them at home, but they cannot abandon the parents or leave them to their own devices. I believe that this sort of regulation lay dormant for a long time, but is now being more actively enforced, because of abuses and problems that arise when children don't care at all.

I think you're largely right, but there is also the fact the expectations for childrearing have significantly increased. Several generations ago children had jobs. One or two generations ago children were allowed to roam the streets until dark. Now parents have the police called on them for letting a child walk to the park alone, and are expected to curate a list of extracurricular activities they then chauffeur their child to.

I'm very much not in the "it's too expensive/hard to have kids camp", but I do think we've raised the costs in many ways, at least in the US.

>Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids.

Historically (and in very undeveloped countries today) kids were assets; they could work in the parents' farm or shop, clean the house, tend to the animals, etc. In modern culture parents get essentially nothing from kids in a financial sense, so there's much less monetary incentive to have children.

Also it was pretty easy to lose them. Specially young, but even later. Wars, disease, accidents. So you also wanted a backups. Going even back to beginning of previous century, having 5-7 kids and losing 2-4 of them was common.

Why would people make up excuses? They simply don't want them.

My “excuse” for not having children is the same “excuse” I have for that I'm not a firefighter: I have no interest in it.

Even when it's your own house that is on fire?

I would absolutely not as an untrained person try to firefight my own house rather than rely on trained professionals for that, no.

Curious: have you ever considered going to a therapist about this? It's not psychologically normal to never want children. I wouldn't be surprised if it was also co-morbid with other psychological issues.

Have you ever considered going to a therapist? Telling strangers that they need to procreate is not psychologically normal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also co-morbid with other psychological issues.

They don't need to procreate, but not wanting to at all is a sign something is off.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/childfree-study-confirmed...

Apparently it's very normal. On top of that “abnormal” does not mean “unhealthy”, but then again, that's something psychologists very often don't understand either.

Having an I.Q. above 145 is certainly not “normal”, but not a cause for concern either.

Perhaps it's culturally "normal", but it goes against evolutionary psychology, and it's probably unhealthy as well.

Unhealthy in what way? Given that studies repeatedly report that childless persons report a greater life satisfaction? Why is it bad if it goes against “evolutionary psychology”?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...

Agree that col is an excuse.

Exhibit A: Husband works for less than a dollar per day to buy food for wife and four kids: https://youtu.be/_9Eopzpa6QY?t=1476

Exhibit B: Abdala has two wives and two children and makes less about a dollar per day as a boat captain. https://youtu.be/_9Eopzpa6QY?t=541

Exhibit C: Huge families abound the community despite extreme poverty. https://youtu.be/_9Eopzpa6QY?t=1736

Exhibit D: Mother with two kids survives despite losing everything in a hurricane. Total net worth probably under $10. https://youtu.be/_9Eopzpa6QY?t=2080

Exhibit E: Me. I am poor and I have three kids.

It was different in premodern cultures.

Back then a child could be contributing positively to the farm in a few years and don't need a lot of training because they want to do the same things people around them are doing. Power tools require a certain level of maturity and judgement, my son was able to pick up a hoe when he was a toddler but our tractor has a weight switch in the seat and we had to make him wear a backpack with weights in it to drive it for the first time. (We even had a small adult woman living at the farm who was too light to trigger the switch.)

(My son didn't make a positive contribution, however, to the family business, a riding academy, until his mid teens. Until then he was always a little resentful of the horses since they were the reason his mom was often not around. Then there was that day he was roughhousing in the barn, a behavior the horses can find a little offputting, and he realized that one horse was taking an interest in his activity and that got him to recognize the social intelligence of horses... Before then we were worried about who would cut the hay when the farmer who does it retired, now we are not.)

Contrast that to the current day where children are an economic cost up to high school graduation if not college, grad school, etc. and whether or not kids go to college they often seem to have an adolescence that extends into the mid 20's.

Back in the day a huge family was your retirement, now we have social security and stocks and bonds (which are still dependent on demographics.)

I've known a few people who have had huge families (10+ kids) in the modern day and they have a very different mindset. It's not as much work and cost once you reach a certain point as the older kids help take care of the younger kids and that gets around the "parents are not gods" problem that are talked about in

https://www.amazon.com/Parent-Effectiveness-Training-Respons...

also there are a lot of hand-me-downs and other synergies. (Although my dad was quite bitter about getting hand-me-downs and sharing the bed with his brothers...)

A lot of the increased "standard of living" is not the things we think are optional (and "consumption") like the iPhone and the vacations, but rather the things that we think are necessary (and even "an investment") such as health care, a house in an expensive neighborhood with a good school district, etc. Remember this Liz Warren classic

https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...

Raising kids is difficult and time consuming. As people gain more opportunities to do other things than raise kids they chose to do those other things instead. It's an opportunity cost issue, not a literal cost issue. That's why the birth rates goes down rather than up as you climb income percentiles. People with more money have more opportunities.

The only real force to counteract that is cultural/social pressure to raise kids which has also fallen off pretty hard. It might be less obvious to younger people or people with younger parents but having kids was much less of a "decision" for couples not that many decades ago and was much more just an assumed fact. If you didn't, people assumed there was something wrong with you.

> having kids was much less of a "decision" for couples not that many decades ago and was much more just an assumed fact

To your point, oftentimes the marriage wasn't considered valid if there were no children, after all, what evidence was there that the marriage had been consummated? In fact, that we used to talk about a marriage being "consummated" shows how our views on marriage and family have changed in a very brief timeframe.

> To your point, oftentimes the marriage wasn't considered valid if there were no children, after all, what evidence was there that the marriage had been consummated?

No, I don't know what culture or religion you're referring to, but this is absolutely backwards to what the Catholic Churches (and, by extension, other Christians) believe and teach.

First of all, every marriage that is going to be valid, is valid without consummation. Remember, Joseph married Mary and they never consummated: she retained her perpetual virginity, so that is our gold standard.

Now, traditionally for the Catholic Church, if the bride and groom were alone together after the wedding, consummation is presumed. It might be difficult to disprove a consummation, children or no children, because a married man and woman will naturally wish to do what is natural to their state in life, and will indeed be encouraged to have as much sex as they wish. Interestingly, if the man or woman is fully impotent and unable to complete the marital embrace, then the marriage is invalid from the start. The ability to consummate is vital to validity, but not the fact of consummation itself.

Christian marriages (and natural marriages) are valid from the moment the spouses exchange consent. The consent makes the marriage. Full stop. Of course, consent must be given by qualified persons, in an approved ceremony, before the proper witnesses, too.

Now, a consummated Christian marriage (between a baptized man and baptized woman) has a special property: it is absolutely indissoluble. There is nothing in Heaven or Earth that can separate the marriage bond in this case, except the death of a spouse.

Now it follows that if a consummated, sacramental marriage is indissoluble, then an unconsummated marriage may, in certain cases, be dissolved, and this is correct. If the couple finds trouble and procures a divorce, then the Catholic Church may grant a dissolution of the bond. This is different from a declaration of nullity ("annulment"). A dissolved marriage recognizes the validity of what came before, but for some reason it was broken up.

I hope that helps; Christian marriage law, and Catholic canon law, is rather confusing and surprising to most laypeople.

I was painting with a broad brush

Well, no, you seemingly invented something out of whole cloth, because I can't really find any evidence that non-consummation makes a marriage invalid, in a secular sense: obviously I've proven the religious aspect of it.

So [citation needed] for your broad brush: if you can prove otherwise then I'll stand corrected. The history of marriage, and the diversity of jurisdictions and regulation for it, is certainly a large haystack to search.

It's about time poverty, not material poverty. The Japanese work too many hours to care for children, and the cultural expectations for mothers are very traditional and unpopular.

Some of it may be cautious attitudes re: the next few decades on Earth.

Climate change may make it even more competitive to survive in areas where the weather is pleasant. People are already being displaced by climate change. Horrible for the displaced people, and may contribute to crowding somewhere else.

Increasing numbers of people and increasing expectations for material wealth may lead to more frequent and widespread conflicts over resources.

It's possible I'll get to live a full life before things get too bad, but I'd only be adding to the troubles by bringing more humans onto the planet. If we can get fertility rates low enough, and find ways to adapt economic systems to cope gracefully with declining populations, maybe our troubles can be mitigated.

> I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood

At the heart of this people want to give their kids the same or a better life than what they received. People have trouble accepting a lower standard of living even if it leads to better non monetary outcomes. Just like some people choose to stay in a high paying job they dislike, rather than take a pay cut for a more satisfying job. It is unfair bar we place on ourselves.

The collapse of fertility is a universal, cross cultural outcome of economic development.

It seems that birthrate only rebounds after some sort of catastrophic society meltdown - total wars or famines - which reset the board at country level and maybe also reset priorities at individual level. Government interventions have a very poor record of success, though we can watch Hungary under Orban with interest - his plan to give women who have 4 or more kids lifetime freedom from income tax - is the sort of radicalism worth trying.

For investor types, might be worth looking into tech eco-system for artificial womb technology. Seems like a solid bet that we may need to start manufacturing humans at some point, sooner rather than later

The lack of sub-replacement rate fertility is happening almost everywhere. It's just hidden in many western countries by mass immigration, but even that is a temporary solution as the source countries face population decline themselves.

The knockon effects from this are hard to anticipate, but the known ones are pretty scary. Modern economies don't work when there are more elders to care for than there are working adults. Young men without mates are a direct predictor of civil unrest.

These are major issues that will need to be faced very soon. Population collapse may be the headline of the century if we can't figure out a way to turn it around.

>Population collapse may be the headline of the century if we can't figure out a way to turn it around.

It will turn itself around eventually because some subsets of society keep having large numbers of children in spite of the pressures of modernity, such as the Amish and ultra-orthdox Jews with fertility rates of around 7-8. These cultures will eventually come to dominate as the lower-fertility cultures die out. It's the law of natural selection: genetic and cultural traits that lead to more children will eventually result in those traits becoming dominant in a population. Right now we're just in a temporary situation where lots of people exist whose genes/culture made them have more children in the pre-modern era but not in the modern era, and natural selection hasn't yet finished eliminating those genes/cultures from the pool.

I think you're essentially dead on. The concern is the transitional phase. If population collapse leads to collapsing economies and mass civil unrest, there's a very real chance the still-reproductively-healthy cultures are dragged down with the rest. Not to extinction, but to the point if major civilizational regression. Luckily, and perhaps not coincidentally, those cultures you pointed to also happen to be distinctly insular.

Economically this is a problem so it’s not like there are physical limits, it’s a relatively easy problem to solve comparing to hard resource issues like lack of energy/supply of food/wars/pollution

There is no highly-developed country with replacement-level fertility. And, in fact, the only places left with fertility rates that are above replacement (and not rapidly dropping) are sub-saharan African countries with a median income below 5k USD. On the other end of the spectrum, you don't see fertility rates tick up again until you get to the 500k USD and above bracket.

My personal hunch is that this is a form of market failure. If you're a young woman, delaying childbirth in favor of more education and a higher income makes perfect sense, on an individual level. But the more young women take that path, the fewer are available to form communities of care. Consider the economic cost of replacing that network -- neighborhood moms, grandparents, immediate and extended family. Raising a child with one parent working is strenuous, with both it's only possible through expensive and sub-optimal childcare programs.

One typical response is that we should simply subsidize those childcare programs. Fair enough, but the countries that have taken this idea the farthest -- the Nordics -- have still not achieved replacement-level fertility.

Another response is that the earth is too overpopulated already, and we should have fewer children due to climate change. However, we know exactly how many people will be alive in the latter part of this century -- given relatively static mortality rates -- because those people have already been born. Crashing the population after 2100 won't really help anything, and will in fact only introduce more economic challenges and crises for our descendants.

> One typical response is that we should simply subsidize those childcare programs. Fair enough, but the countries that have taken this idea the farthest -- the Nordics -- have still not achieved replacement-level fertility.

Childcare is built around taking care of the kids only when their parents are at work. When they parents comes home from work, they have to find time to take care of the household chores (dinner, cleaning) in addition to taking care of the child's needs. Today's societies put a lot of pressure on parents that were not there before. Nobody want's their child to be a loser, so they have to follow up on homework and after school activities. The pressure is much higher than 20-30 years ago, and many opt out.

Childcare programs in the Nordic are a necessary first step, but they only cover working hours. We either need to reduce social pressures that forces parents to push their children to be "perfect", or just face the fact that we need to pay for organizing the after school activities (no more volunteer work at the soccer clubs or driving kids to swimming practice). This will make sure that the parents can focus on spending quality time with their kids and still have time for a personal life.

Yes, exactly. This is what I'm trying to get at with "market failure" -- the total economic cost of doing all of that is drastically higher than even the cost of just childcare.

In the past, many of those duties would be distributed throughout a community. And on isolated farms, parents would intentionally have big families so that the eldest could help raise the younger kids.

Doing it all with two people is a huge burden. Doing it with just one is a heroic act. Throwing in the extra burdens and expectations of the upper-middle class professional world -- homework help, extracurriculars, etc -- makes it virtually impossible.

So it makes sense that only the 500k+ income crowd is having big families. That's probably a good approximation of the income required to afford the total cost of replacing all of the childcare benefits of an informal community with paid labor.

The idea that men and women should operate independently from each other i.e. not be mutually reliant is the root of the market failure.

We should unapologetically be celebrating long term monogamous heterosexual relationships where the duties are shared.

The other stuff (hook ups, childless, LGBT, etc) is all fine and dandy as long as it's consensual, but it's a distraction - and it's taking up far too much of the societal conversation given its' relevance.

As economies get more advanced, people begin to realize they don't or can't have kids who grow up to become farm workers or blue collar laborers. To raise a kid to become wealthy and white collar requires immense resources -- two full time working parents, real estate in a good school district, and child care for working mothers.

Does any of this sound easy or feasible for the current generation in the United States?!?

What happens if parents lower their standards? They live in the wrong school district and their kid busses an hour each way. Having more kids so instead of childcare you have the oldest raising the youngest? Our parents spent less, and our grandparents less still. Our grandparents somehow did fine without even having to pay for Internet or a monthly smart phone plan.

Why cannot people drop their standards to what their grandparents or great grandparents expected?

The simple answer is that most of the folks who have more kids will give rise to a generation of have-nots, and they will be on the unhappy side of an ever-widening gap between the super educated elites, and the merely educate plebes.

It's silly to think that people in the states can simply drop their standards to that of their grandparents, when most of the "grandparent generation" of boomers grew up before most manufacturing jobs were either outsourced or automated.

The mass automation of white collar industry that will happen withinin 20 years might reverse the dynamic IMO... where industries with ample training data for AI (mostly white collar knowledge economy stuff) will begin to automate as well, and blue collar jobs like construction (which may take longer to automate) will take much longer.

At least in the West, sexual liberation seems to have gone so far that a lot of people have lost sight of the fact that long term commitment is valuable in later life. Childbearing seems to be one aspect that's being pushed aside there, but it's far from being the only one.

Children have always thought that they'll be young forever, but the age at which that changes seems to be increasing.

Anecdotally, people still want kids, they just think they can wait, and then for many it's too late when they realize they don't have time anymore. Fertility clinic demand is through the roof while birth rates fall...

It seems to transcend culture so it's logical to think it's economic, but I think one factor is that we're indoctrinated about how bad it is to get pregnant, the importance of birth control, availability of abortion. Pregnancy is something that is framed as life-ruining. And so young people have to take the time to get over that indoctrination, and it often takes too long.

I generally agree. Having been there, I think that young people often overlook the timelines.

You ideally want to assess compatibility, move in with someone, get married etc before having children. Depending on the people that could be a fairly long process. Maybe you didn't assess compatibility properly or weren't committed - you're young and naive after all - so maybe there are a few takes.

If you put off all of that, mess about in your 20s, and only start thinking about it when you're already 30, then yeah, it's getting really tight.

Particularly so if you're a woman.

I know that commentators won't like this but people will start have kids again when they'd be able to once again instill a degree of service-ism in them towards parents.

As things stand a successful kid is essentially a socialized commodity and the taxes they pay are used for all sorts of stuff in a socialized manner, whereas back in the days a successful kid would be a good news for themselves but also to those who got him there , being the parents who'd be able to retire early and enjoy the monetary income stream and make a profit of their investment.

It doesn't make sense to invest in a kid nowadays, from the moment they are born they become property of the State.

I don't think we can do much and I am not sure we should do much either.

Things that contribute towards people not having kids (in any order):

Prices are more expensive as a result of having more people (remember that for a long long time population was stable until artificial fertilizer allowed for pop boom) so people cannot afford to live off the father alone or with the mother having a small job only.

corporate culture reduces the window of time where mothers can have children, often they wait until their 30s rather than start at 18 or 20, meaning less than half the time to decide to have a second or third child, people haven't recovered or passed enough time to decide to have more kids.

Housing is expensive, way too expensive in many places to afford to have a family.

(This I have seen and have heard women say this), in many cases (don't know the reason really as I am a guy) women date men and say they love them but don't want to have children with them, then sometimes divorce and decide they wanna have children with someone else, It might be related to men getting overall less "manly" or something, I really don't know how instincts work but may be related, if a guy is (what they call in Japan a grass eater) they might not want to have children with them even though they are in a long term relationship and in turn it might reduce the birth rate (as if they divorce and remarry that happens later on and they might only have time for one). but this last one is pure speculation, it's just a phenomenon that I've seen happen often.

Bad outlook for the future, if things look bleak or seem like they will stay about the same, it might not incentivize people to have children.

Either way, is it so bad? a lot of systems in the west rely on it, yes. but there's also over harvesting, look at the regions with the best dirt in China, they are extremely over harvesting their land and may run into a crisis at some point.

On the other end, population crisis in China is sort of a meme as well, because if you look at statistics 20% of young people are unemployed in China, means that a drop in young people won't really cause a gigantic crash, they are automating a lot of their industries and may continue to increase so.

I think we need a reduction in people to stabilize the world and the resources that we use, I don't think 8 billion or 10 billion as its projected is healthy for the world, we are over consuming natural resources to an extent where nature cannot recover in time

I think that fertility and immigration are tied at the hip. And that most countries are not like Japan so if young people cannot afford to have kids the bureaucrats will just import the next generation. There's an idea that when a country has no easy fix to fertility through immigration, they are forced to hard fixes for difficult problems blocking young people from being able to afford to raise the next generation

Does this also mean a third of 18 year old men will also skip children ? Sadly it’s very typical of conservative Japanese society to single out women.

What is the point of life if we’re just going to work at Big Tech, transform our salaries into anti-aging remedies and airfare, then demand an ever dwindling proportion of young people support us while we expire? How do we reconcile this lifestyle with the fact that it means life on Earth has a due date? I don’t mean to antagonize but it all seems so inhumane to me.

This means that an even bigger share of men may never have children. But that isn't important of course.

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