That's an interesting way to say "the West largely stopped breeding a while ago".
China outright banned having more than 1 kid and people aborted girls en masse. This one I grant an exemption.
The dynamic is that when markets are expanding, it makes sense to invest in the future, because you can capture a portion of the expansion and the reap indefinite profits off of it. When markets are contracting, your incentive becomes to grab as much of the pie now before it shrinks. This tends to make firms...well, militant. The incentive to cooperate only appears when people weight the future more than the present, giving value to future interactions; otherwise, the incentive is to kill off your rivals, take their stuff, and hide the bodies. Thus, during a contraction and in times of scarcity people tend to become raiders, scavengers, and conquerors.
To protect themselves against raiders, scavengers, and conquerors, people tend to band together into larger groups. Thus a hierarchy emerges - weaker groups pledge fealty to stronger ones, which in turn protect them from other strong groups that have not pledged fealty, and so on. Usually you get war in the meantime, but feudalism is the peace treaty that arises out of that.
Interestingly this dynamic tends to play out within the capitalist system. When an industry reaches maturity, usually there's a shakeout with a price war where many of the weaker companies go bankrupt, and then the savvier-but-weaker get bought up by the bigger ones, and so on until you have a few megacorps with hierarchical organization. The purpose of managerial capitalism is as much to defend firms against competition as it is to increase efficiency. In many cases, they are significantly less efficient than they were as startups, but at least they have hoovered up all the competition.
Haredi/Hasidic/ultra-Orthodox Jews are an interesting exception to that – a predominantly urban/suburban subculture sustaining a high TFR (over 6 in Israel).
A stringent religious doctrine which promotes large families may be the only thing which can overcome urbanization's encouragement of lower TFRs. In the long-long-long term, it is possible (not certain) that subcultures with that characteristic will end up numerically dominating the population.
> It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy
The obvious answer is a significant increase in immigration rates. Of course, for political/cultural reasons, some of the countries you mentioned don't want to do that. But, if the economic hardships of population decline grow big enough, they may become bigger than the political/cultural resistance to it.
In the long-long term, that strategy is going to fail, because the immigration source countries are on the same demographic trajectory, just further back on the curve. Still, the point at which it fails may well be long after we are all dead.
In a developed society, people are more likely to have many things they want to pursue and achieve, and due to various factors (financial and otherwise), having kids usually entails giving up on most or all of that. That probably seems like a pretty raw deal to a lot of folks, considering we all only get one life to live.
If it weren't so necessary to put off all of these things until the kids have left the nest and youth has been spent away, I'd bet a lot more people would choose to become parents.
There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.
Then, there is what some rich people do, outsourcing the rearing of their children to nannies, tutors and boarding schools, such that they rarely see them – but, that's not a recipe for raising well-adjusted kids, and economically is unlikely to be scalable beyond a very small rich minority
I think it is inevitable that cultures in which reproducing is just one option on the menu are always going to have significantly lower TFR than those in which reproducing is viewed as a religious duty, with those who reject it risking ostracism in this life, and the threat of punishment in the next
Reducing disadvantage to insignificance is indeed unlikely, but if things were structured such (for example) that working a part-time job paid a wage capable of supporting a family, that’d go a long way. It’d enable parents to work full-time for the extra cash for some period of time prior to starting a family to build substantial financial padding and then drop back to part-time once kids are in the picture, opening up time for parents to be both parents and be people.
We’ve seen incredible improvements in productivity in the past several decades, so there’s not really much reason why that shouldn’t be possible.
I can think of several people I know, who (I think) would have made perfectly fine parents, but probably (or even definitely) never will. Waiting for "Mr/Ms Right", who they never manage to find - he or she always seems to be already taken or chasing somebody else or being chased by more appealing options. In other cultures/societies (and even previous versions of their own), at some point they would have settled for "Mr/Ms Good Enough"–but, they've absorbed a culture which discourages (even criticises) doing that. Plus, many children of divorced parents are hesitant to have kids with someone less than ideal, because they worry it will lead to their own kids going through what they did. I doubt changes to working conditions can do anything to address those kinds of issues.
Replacement TFR is 2.1 for low mortality countries; in 2021, the OECD average was 1.58. If we talk about that shortfall, 0.52, how much of that shortfall is due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, and how much due to other reasons? (I don't know.) If it is mostly due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, targeting those factors may make a big difference; if it is mostly due to other reasons, targeting those factors might not make much difference at all.
Thanks to birth control and modern values, Western people can bring themselves to extinction.
Sounds like pearl clutching with bated breath.
It's a long way to extinction with many chances to stabilise before zero.
The only options are not continuous growth or death.
I read a statistic somewhere that it costs $2M to raise a child. Considering that it's considered a horrible imposition to ask your kids for money, or even to ask them to take care of you, it's easy to explain why urbanization, industrial development, and education, work against population growth.
i'd say that this is a clear sign that animals do have strong biological drive to care about continuing their bloodline
I sometimes ponder what would happen if we did discover the secret to substantial life extension or even immortality; if this phenomenon of trying to stretch that delightful halcyon glow of childhood wonder - what I've heard the Finns call lapsuus - would extend into decades or centuries or perpetuity as a result. It would if nothing else provide a plausible explanation for the behavior of characters like Q from Star Trek.
1. Decline in religious belief
2. Widespread, easy to use birth control
3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless series, or playing computer games
4. Strong anti-natalist sentiment that was pushed very hard post-war and persists
5. Higher rates of college attendance, which means people are studying and furthering their careers in their 20s rather than having kids
I think our culture of expecting/demanding that parents invest ever greater amounts of time and effort (with all the evidence suggesting that these increased investments do not improve long term outcomes) is a far bigger driver than costs.
Perhaps not as big a deal in the US, but in the EU where some form of car seat is required for the first 8-10 years of a child's life it's a big thing.
We are wealthier than ever. It’s not the money.
A lot of "college is expensive" is a US-specific problem, not one universal to the Western world. In many European countries, public universities are tuition-free. Even in those Western countries with non-nominal tuition, it is almost always significantly less than the sky-high US levels.
The fact that many countries have cheaper higher education yet lower fertility than the US suggests that, even in the US case, this is unlikely to be a big factor. It likely makes a difference at the margins, but only at the margins.
Suppose the top rate is 37%. Have one child, now for the rest of your life, your top rate is capped at 27%. Have a second child, now your lifetime top rate is capped at 17%. Third child, capped at 7%. Fourth child, never pay income tax ever again.
But, a lot of people will object to such a policy. Childless people will end up having to pay higher taxes as people with kids pay lower or no taxes–some may accept that as their personal sacrifice for the greater good, many likely won't. Others will object to the fact that the biggest benefit is going to be for the middle and upper classes – who are most likely to pay the higher tax rates – while having far less benefit for those on low incomes, who pay little or no tax already. There is the (difficult to quantify) risk that unsuitable parents may end up having kids just for the tax benefits, and then mistreat/abuse those kids. Given all these objections, I'd be surprised if it ever actually gets adopted. But, in terms of increasing TFR in wealthy countries, it might actually work.
This is such a mystery, why would people buy homes, I just can’t figure it out.
If it weren’t for housing costs, I would have 4 kids right now