U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low
wsj.com
wsj.com
Over the last 100 years: We've eliminated multi-generational families along with the affordable, appropriate sized housing they need.
Humanity's history of extended family support seems to have ended here. Two parents are now expected to have the same wisdom, experience and energy that came from many.
Over the last 50 years: We've wiped out free range area and adult-free time for children.
That ended critical peer-based growth - which somehow has to replicated by two parents (hopefully two). Parenting hours increase from dozens per week, upwards to 168.
Over the last 10 years: We've raised the cost of living so high that ~4 typical incomes are required to pay basic bills.
Modern parents are expected to replace 10 adults + entire child peer groups, perform this task 24/7 - while earning ~70% of their basic bills.
In the face of this, declining birth rates seem inevitable.
But even relatively generous countries like Sweden don't come close to bringing parents to financial parity with non-parents -- even though it's the state that's benefitting financially long-term -- so getting to replacement rate for any developed country seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.
But even if housing was cheaper, it would still be more expensive to have kids than not, if you want the space-per-person metric to stay at least somewhat similar.
Yeah, that's a good point. We have tax credits for families, but they're utterly pathetic.
Finding a spot for your child in a kindergarten in a big city is really challenging.
Phoning every pharmacy in town to find the prescribed drug for your child (simple things like antibiotics).
Leaving work 14:30 because you have to pickup your child from Kindergarten („can’t your wife pick him up“)
Being a parent is still great, but sometimes it feels harder than it should be.
Note: I live in Germany - might be different somewhere else.
My great grandparents had 8 kids, their kids had 4, mine 2, and me zero. There you go. Each generation in my family at least was financially better than the last.
I’ll go so far as to say many put sex ahead of kids, and when the sex dies so does the family. Kids be damned. Next level hedonism enabled by our advanced technology that we are unable to resist.
That said, the correlation within developed countries between income and how many kids you have varies IIRC, some places richer people have more kids, in other places they have fewer.
Obviously these are not true needs, but if people feel like they're needs, they can still become factors in how many kids you have.
But they really can’t due to economic circumstances. Unfortunately that’s something some people don’t want to acknowledge, often for political reasons.
I don't think this can be the entire situation. Anecdotally, both my wife and I have grandparents who lived for extended periods of time with three kids in mini camper trailers because they couldn't get into any other housing. They really wanted children, and it was a high enough value for them that they sacrificed a lot to have them.
Additionally, economic prosperity and higher living standards are typically correlated with lower birth rates. People who technically can most afford children, are less likely to have them. This is the opposite of what I would expect if finances are what prevent people from having children.
Having children now, I cannot fathom living in a camper trailer with them, and I am not saying that people should be doing that. My point is that different people (across different economic situations and different time-periods) have varying priority levels around having children. And that is ultimately what determines how many children are born.
The average person in their 50s or 60s financially better off than the average person in their 20s or 30s. The average young person can reasonably expect to be wealthier 30 years from now. Therefore many young people feel poor, and they feel they need to be in a better financial position before they can seriously consider having a family.
I think the rise of the middle class had a huge impact on birth rates. Ordinary people were no longer living from paycheck to paycheck. Instead, they were capable of building wealth over time. That made young people poor, both relative to the average person and relative to their expectations. And many started seeing family a luxury they could not afford yet.
Nothing economically prevents anyone from having children other than being unable to afford the food to grow one. But as one could imagine, very few people probably want children, if it also meant that they'd be homeless. In other words, someone's want for a house can be greater than their want for a child. And this can go for anything (from spouse, to life circumstances). Again, it's not that most people can't economically, it's more that many people don't want to sacrifice other things that they also want.
In most instances, the choice to have kids or not have kids are both driven out a selfish desire to get out of life what one wants (though of course married couples may have one person's desires more filled than the other's). My friends had kids because they wanted to have the experience, have dependable relationships as they age, have someone to ensure they're cared for in old age, etc. It's not out of some altruistic behavior to ensure social security is stable for another few years.
That the decision benefits our societal structures (though likely harms the environment and natural ecosystems) is a side-effect.
It can be as simple as having younger people to spend holidays with, or maybe take you to the doctor once in a while, or give a helping hand for a home improvement project.
A pretty straightforward fix would be to make pension eligibility contingent on fertility: no kids, no pension benefit. Of course, you'd still have to pay into the system, regardless.
Wow, you misunderstood that pretty badly.
Unless you can make a money-golem, a pile of cash can't take care of you in your old age, labor will. If you haven't had kids, it means you haven't paid into the future labor pool, and it would therefore be unfair for you to withdraw from it once labor becomes too constrained. To do otherwise would be like paying out full pensions to people who never paid a dime into the system.
Regardless, individuals must be empowered to live their best life (if they choose to be childfree) [2] [3] [4] [5], even if it breaks the entrenched system.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/young-adult-sterilization-i...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230208-the-adults-cel...
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...
The system I'm starting to conceive doesn't seem like a pyramid scheme, but rather something more balanced than what we have now:
1. You contribute into the pension system to support your parents (through a pension), as a societal obligation. After all, they more likely than not supported you when you needed it.
2. You contribute labor to the next generation of society, in the form of children, to make a claim to the society's, labor-dependent, old-age support programs (funded through point 1). Otherwise, you're on your own to support yourself, which would probably consist of working well into what we currently consider the "retirement years," and/or "choosing" euthanasia when that is no longer possible.
> You’re just livestock that didn’t consent to be here.
No one ever consented to "be here," and it would be impossible to do so. That's just a fact of life.
No, unless everyone who currently chooses not to have children is a sociopath.
And if it does that, so what? Is perfectionism really that important?
And honestly, my proposal isn't so much about increasing the birthrate, but preventing a certain kind of freeloading ("The pensions...they can all burn"). Totally make the conscious choice to go child-free, just understand if you do you may not be able to retire.
> and it’d be especially cruel to anyone with fertility issues.
And if that's really an issue, which I'm not convinced of, because policies are invariably "cruel" like that in innumerable ways, you could always carve out an exception for people who've attempted fertility treatments.
> As social policies go it’d be much easier to simply allow more immigration.
Except that probably would be even more cruel, since it falsely hand-waves that there's enough high fertility elsewhere to sustain a low fertility rich country. It turns out there isn't, so what you proposal requires is either: 1) export the labor shortage to poorer countries that are less equipped to handle it, or 2) maintain crushing poverty in many countries to turn them into baby factories for the immigration solution.
I really think deep down the reasons are social and societal. The decline of the family system, religion, and traditional values have all led to this.
Look around. People just don't want kids (no matter the money). They don't like to admit this but they find it burdensome. They want "freedom". At least this is my observation.
I find this to be more common in America than in other western countries.
As one American friend put it: "Americans love their granite counter tops more than they love their children".
It absolutely is an economic issue, and you get what you pay for. If people are not secure in their current status, they're not going to risk poverty to have kids. Children need to be cared for, and that means either professional childcare (which is expensive, since the professional needs to make enough to survive off of a handful of kids) or giving up half of a household's income.
For what it matters, here are my reasons for not having children. And yes, I'm in a heterosexual relationship and it was possible for us to have children but chose not to. The world is fucked, I couldn't bring a life in to this world where we are killing ourselves and the planet. Where the day to day is to hope you make enough money to just survive. We humans are selfish and fearful creatures. It's a gross world we live in.
Someone will come along and say, who will take care of me when I'm old? When I get close to that point, I'll follow Hunter S. Thompson's lead.
Seriously, I watched my grand parents slowly decay over the course of 15 years, it was not life.
If our primary goals as humans was to learn, create, explore and preserve; I would probably have a big fucking family because I would want my children to share in that.
Rather, we deny, horde, kill and build walls.
Are you sure it's false? I'd like to believe that we could just have the generation being born replace the generation that's dying. But when you're saving for retirement will the inflation adjusted price of your stocks go up?
There are a lot of interesting details to look at. For instance, housing: With population size fixed, once a country has built enough housing, you'd only build new houses if you're going to tear another one down. Maybe this results in better housing over the long run, and maybe it results in the construction industry diminishing.
Women pursuing "fulfilling" careers: One possible reason is greater financial need rather than desire for some kind of self fulfillment.
Student loans: We get told we need education to have well-paid careers.
Contraception: Cool, but you can also just not have sex as one strategy for trying to not have kids. (Granted women can get raped so it's not necessarily a perfect answer.)
For most Americans, housing is the single biggest budget item and homelessness is a horrifying scenario that is tough to escape once there. The best answer is just don't end up homeless to begin with, so I think a lot of people are doing their best to run faster to stay in place.
And children are a burden that would slow them down and have them fall off this treadmill.
However, as the article said, there are issues around the uncertainty of the future and economic issues that's contributing to depressed fertility rate. We should take of that. It is unclear if taking care of these problems will lead to income-fertility relationship that was shown in the Swedish population.
1. https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and...
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/daa97aba-en/index.html?i....
Italy and Poland were really tough on illegal immigration but gave out the highest amount of work VISAs.
European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson in 2024 said the European Union “needs a million migrants a year”.
That assumes birthrates elsewhere are high enough to sustain that, but they're declining everywhere. Immigration is basically just exporting the low birthrate problem to someplace less equipped to deal with it (which is par for the course for rich, western countries).
I expect we'll start to see emigration controls in the not too distant future.
I do not agree with emigration controls. At least not in the next 50 years!
I think China's approach would become the blueprint for third world countries eventually dealing with this.
Unfortunately China doesn't seem to have an approach yet, other than doubling down on more and more authoritarian measures to lock down the economy.
IIRC, they've only tried carrots so far, which hasn't worked. My bet is they'll turn to sticks, sooner rather than later, and have a lot of experience with them due to the one child policy.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start to fine the childless and/or limit childless women's advancement opportunities at work.
It's a shit show, at the end we're still in "need" of slave labour to work in tomato fields and to do unskilled jobs because almost no Italian would do them
[1] https://pagellapolitica.it/articoli/meloni-piantedosi-pull-f...
Elsewhere, the relationship is inverse. Earning more decreases fertility rate, such as in the US.
Modern dating kind of sucks.
And culture.
People keep talking about the birth rate like it's just an economics problem, but it's not. It's just that people are too comfortable with thinking in economic terms, and looking at it from the angle of culture is taboo in many ways.
I meet less than 2 women a year from dating sites. I've been on them since 93. Just rejecting relgious women easily removes 95% Of the rest, a large percentage write nothing in their profile so that I have no reason to write. And, personal preference means I'm interested in at most 1 of 20. no, I'm not looking for models, just something that suggests we might be a match
Fertility rates going down should be a cause for celebration, not concern.
But there's the mother of all ponzis sustain so...
Anti-humanist environmentalism?
With automation we don’t need that many people as in the past.
Infinite growth is not sustainable.
Doesn't seem like a slam-dunk case but rather one of tradeoffs?
I get that infinite growth isn't sustainable, but shrinking isn't the only alternative, correct? It can be slower rates of growth.
> less workforce over time
Manual workforce can be replaced by robots. We don’t need 4M+ uber drivers if we have 4M Waymos.
> less economic activity, less competition
Not if you compensate productivity with automation and AI. Work of 100 people done by one.
> less able-bodied men for your military
Ideally, you should have most of your army be robots and semi-autonomous systems. Military action should only cause equipment loss on your side and not personnel loss.
You still can have growth, just not the population growth, but productivity and quality of life growth instead.
A consequence of decreased fertility is increasing median age.
It's a compounding problem as you need resources and more young people to support older peoplevv
From this end, the pressure to work later in life feels more like our only chance to avoid homeless retirement.
I only say that because that is the pure reality for many of us.