Then you will see 1001 theories about why the population is declining. People in their 30's can't afford a house, let alone raising a family. A whole population inside a certain age group seems completely unable to grasp this basic reasoning.
If you gave a population a $10k raise (in a hypothetical world with no inflation) the birth rate would probably DECREASE
It couldn't possibly be that the causal arrow points in the other direction, that kids are an economic burden, cause hardship in an already economically strained population, and those who escape do so in part because they choose not to have kids. Nah, couldn't be.
https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and...
There's a massive gulch between "too poor to have ubiquitous access to birth control and healthcare" and "rich enough to provide the upbringing I desire for my child". Most Americans exist in that gulch.
> But something happened to the American family over the last three decades: that downward slope became a U-turn. Women in families in the top half of the income spectrum are having more kids than their similar-earning counterparts did 20 years ago. Women from the very richest households are now having more children than those less-well off.
https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...
Give people enough resources and they'll have more kids. But it takes a lot of resources, and an increasing amount year by year, to hit that mark.
Not sure I buy that - I know plenty of couples, each of them with good 6 figure salaries, who have no interest in having kids, ever - if they had 7 figure salaries, I don't think it would change their mind one bit.
> More and more American couples are choosing not to have children or choosing to have them later in life, according to Census data. As of 2022, 43% of U.S. households were childless, a 7% increase from 2012. The idea has become so common that the term “DINK” — double income, no kids — has emerged, often in regards to marketing and sales.
https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/dink-s...
https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2022/demo/cps/cps-asec-...
> And it turns out that going childfree is paying off: Couples with no children have the highest net worth out of all other types of family structures. The median net worth of a couple with no children is around $399,000 — over $100,000 more than it was in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
> Meanwhile, couples with children — who have the second highest net worth out of all types of family structures — have a net worth of $250,600, per the Survey of Consumer Finances.
https://www.businessinsider.com/net-worth-dink-child-free-co...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
> Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey. Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids, virtually unchanged since 2018.
> Among parents and non-parents alike, men and women are equally likely to say they will probably not have kids (or more kids) in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, adults in their 40s are far more likely than younger ones to say they are unlikely to have children or to have more children in the future. Some 85% of non-parents 40 to 49 say this, compared with 37% of those younger than 40. And while 91% of older parents say they probably won’t have more kids, 60% of younger parents say the same.
> A majority (56%) of non-parents younger than 50 who say it’s unlikely they will have children someday say they just don’t want to have kids. Childless adults younger than 40 are more likely to say this than those ages 40 to 49 (60% vs. 46%, respectively). There are no differences by gender.
(Emphasis mine)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...
So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation.
People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening...
Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor.
If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births.
It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious.
There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex.
Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries?
There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s.
That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring.
This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing.
Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
That's me; I don't really know what reason everyone else has (though increasingly I find I'm not really such an outlier), but the more practical stuff like health insurance, cost of education, housing, childcare, etc... sure looks like death by a thousand cuts. Perhaps as you say they are excuses. I've been told that I must be bitter when I point out all the money I saved since I never wanted children, but really the main thing I've felt is relief - I have plenty of anxiety over the state of things, and knowing that I don't have to try and provide for dependents for a few decades is one of the things that keeps me from over-worrying. I've literally known people to kill themselves over such pressures, and I don't think I'd handle them that well either.
I don't want to tell you not to worry (when has that ever helped anyone?); you have the right to your feelings, but I think your timeline is quite a bit more aggressive than most current population projections.
Plus back then, anticonception available to everyone was simply not a thing. Sex meant kids.
You cite a cultural thing, religion, but birthrates are down exclusive of culture, it is why I mentioned cultures quite foreign to the West.
You mention costs, which is why I mentioned historical birth control, for example, plenty of children were born during the great depression!
Let me put this another way. We know that tiny changes in the chemical balance of the brain, can turn a calm, cultured person into a raving lunatic. Just see what happens with an excess of calcium in the blood, for example!
We have a myriad of treatments for depression, for psychosis, for other issues often derived from more than pure genetics.
We know that levels of testosterone in males have declined.
Yet when I mention that the problem could be biological, most scoff. I find this, in my opinion, delusional stance to be quite concerning.
People love to believe that their actions, in their entirety, are the outcome of their rational thought.
But this is procreation, the most powerful, primal drive a species has.
What environmental factor would correlate with fertility? My understanding is that Africa and Israel as examples still have high fertility rates - what environmental factor are they missing that affects most of the rest of the world?
If you want to see a highly-divergent culture, go to Afghanistan or parts of Africa.
The fundamental "problem" I see is that, in developed nations, women have rights and agency and are able to make decisions about their lives and bodies. This is fundamentally incompatible with a high birth rate. In traditional and religious cultures, it isn't this way. So I think we have 3 choices:
1) Continue on our current path, where women are allowed to be full and equal citizens, and see continued drops in birthrates, though some policy changes (financial assistance for parents etc.) might help a little bit.
2) Revoke women's rights and make them second-class citizens. Ban contraception and abortion. Don't allow them to go to college or have real jobs. Adopt a state religion that promotes having lots of children, and force everyone to follow it, or else. Basically, emulate the Taliban.
3) Adopt some rather radical change to society (and maybe human biology) that avoids #2 and allows for equality and freedom while still having the effect of birthrates over 2.1. I'm not too sure about what this might be, though I have some ideas that have variously appeared in sci-fi.
But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often).
It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).
Of course, people in their 30ies could easily afford a house pretty recently, too - before post-covid-printing spike (when the fertility was already low), price-to-income ratio was only slightly higher than it had been historically; before even accounting for increased sqft of the new houses.