1/3 of women < 44 have no children and the trend is rising. What is causing it?
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Probably other things, but at least those. This graph doesn't even say what country (or group of countries) it is about, as far as I can tell?
Also interesting is how does it vary within a religion. i.e compare the birth rate of Turkey and Iran to that of Mali.
My view is that income and median education dominate other factors.
It appears that women say they can't find a suitable partner.
The reason for that, in turn, is that men are now in the minority in university, and young women (23 - 33) have higher yearly incomes on average than young men.
The few men whom women do find suitable are deluged with offers from women, and see no reason to commit to any one woman.
1. Chris Williamson's Youtube channel has many videos digging away at the problem, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAmQ7Tcrh6A
2. Random NYT opinion piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-me...
-Mark Twain
- it's painful
- it's expensive
- it's a drag
- culture war stuff (who wants to deal with school issues, medical issues, community issues, etc.?)
Or at least nope out at levels less than the current 2.1 children needed for replacement levels.
> The sense of being eviscerated, the room going Technicolor. I did not know I could feel so much pain.
> The extra anesthesia kicked in, so I keeled over in the bed as the doctor explained that he’d performed an episiotomy while wresting the baby out. I was insufficiently anesthetized at the time. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. [0]
And the alternative is getting gutted and sown back up.
But I can't help but suspect that it's the time pressure that really makes it infeasible. We can only juggle so much and it takes a lot of time to keep up with the demands of modern life.
Lack of religion/purpose is also probably huge. With all the reasons not to have kids, you probably need a good reason to, but maybe there isn't one.
It all boils down to choice. And women are choosing "No thanks" in high numbers even in countries where you'd think most of the barriers are quite low.
being pregnant and giving birth aren't easy, but we literally evolved specifically do be able to do that -- hence the big hips and other body dimorphism, etc.
it's a function of stress, economics, and loss of social cohesion via things like "the third place" and large family groups.
all of the people I know having kids live in small towns and have tons of relatives nearby, while the doctors and office slaves living in a tech-bro city on the other side of the country from their family struggle to have a cat.
The reward is motherhood which is a 24x7 thankless job filled with dread about your kids. I'm obviously exaggerating and am happy with my kids, but I 100% get the people who choose not to have any. It isn't a bad choice.
Up until recently, many women felt they have no choice and the clock is ticking. The "you'll regret it when you're older" stuff, can be partially solved by freezing eggs (I know a lot of older mothers and we only started at 32).
Furthermore, in recent years there are many inspirational childless women who show it's perfectly acceptable to not go through that.
Pay increases not resulting in more income is an effect of a highly complex tax structure that essentially takes of as much as possible without people going on a killing spree.
Taxes help to fund society as a whole, corporate profits skyrocketing is not helping society as a whole.
But this argument might hold more weight in bigger companies, which don't really pay that much better.
Regardless, most of my taxes are not used to improve society. A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself. It would be trivial (!) to chop off half of the tax without a net detriment to society.
If you have a good trivial plan on how to do it why do you believe it hasn't been done yet? Political complexities arise quickly, as neat and simple as you might see the solution there's whole systems behind that make it less trivial, systems with needs that have to be catered for to any change to happen.
> A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself.
Is the chunk being sent far away really useless? Or cutting it off will have outsized consequences after the fact that you aren't able to predict? How do you go about finding that out and being able to balance what's necessary if consequences would appear after 10-30 years?
The system needs to work, it needs funding, what are you proposing? To just cut it all off?
I think you haven't thought deeply enough about this issue if you think it's trivial to solve.
I would be suggesting obviously massive changes in policy. Which is (I kid you not) illegal for me to say because there are several pieces of legislation in Germany that protect the government from critics. In particular there are laws to punish people who want to change the status quo.
The part I am allowed to say out loud is that the number of people employed by the state has to be drastically reduced. Their legendary low workload is an obvious sign that they're being employed only to ensure their vote. Also some of the wages in the public sector are ridiculous and need to be almost halved to put them back into reality.
But regardless of the specifics: It would still be very straightforward and obvious to anyone who has ever taken a cursory look at the national finances.
Not at all, I'm writing under the assumption that to change the status quo there's a huge political issue underlying it which is the core tenet for why it's hard to change and not trivial at all.
It's trivial if we ignore this reality, it's absolutely not trivial when you have to consider the political ramifications of getting rid of a huge chunk of public servants, changing stuff under a democracy is never trivial exactly because of the issue you mention: votes. If you harm a part of the population in most cases you'll lose their votes, which is a counterbalance for "trivial" changes that would cause some harm without any sort of pandering to those voters to not be left behind.
In that way, "trivial" it is only if we'd be living in an utopia or meritocracy where doing the right thing is what motivates action.
That being said the far bigger chunk of the money is not lost onto public servants, but to other parts I won't talk about. But changing that in reality also faces different pushback.
I have a feeling you might mean to the EU in general. It's not like Germany doesn't benefit tremendously from the EU if that's your point.
Germany both benefits from having access to a huge market to export its goods as well as being able to recruit workers from almost anywhere in the EU due to salaries being higher than most others. Those are just the basics, apart from that Germany has always benefited from the Euro since it made its exports more attractive to the global markets than if Germany had its own currency which would be stronger than what the Euro is.
The monetary policy of the ECB has tremendously benefited Germany over decades, just looking at the balances doesn't tell much of any story, I'd love if you'd expand on your arguments rather than leaving to me the work to understand what exactly you are trying to say because it simply doesn't make any sense.
The only illegal thought I can imagine in Germany is being a Nazi, I really do not understand what you are trying to hide behind "I cannot speak because it's illegal to say it". You can speak out against immigrants, you have a whole political party just based on that alone, so it isn't that. What is it then?
This'll be the end though as I don't think this is worth anyone's time. And I won't touch the other line with a ten meter pole.
With supply and demand, you'd expect a decline in workers would mean higher wages down the line. But the ruling class will always make sure there is endless immigration and free trade agreements to keep the average citizen broke and miserable.
Do you have data to back up this assertion? My understanding is that the poor still have the highest birth rate in the US.
(Not sure what makes you say “cheap and exploitable”, are future generations somehow more exploitable than current or past generations?)
Then change the economy to a more sustainable version of itself instead of predicating that people must multiply themselves to make another rich asshole even richer. Problem solved.
But this is the problem. We already know with climate, that there is limit to the growth anyway.
Basing success on always being able to find a fresh mark perhaps isn't sustainable.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, or that we can keep this game going forever. But let's not pretend everything will be better when we finally stop having future generations to build our cars or take care of us in our old age. And no, robots wont do it for us (maybe cars, but damn, I hope I don't have robots taking care of me in my dotage).
After spending time mapping entire countries for resources and having travelled through roughly two thirds of the 190+ countries I can report first hand that the earth is finite is size.
People familar with growth on a medium in a finite petri dish and increased cattle stocking on land, with fishing, and general consumption will be happy to tell you that infinite growth cannot be sustained from finite resources.
At some point metrics have to flip about and measure innovation and efficiency in a sustained economy.
Even should we branch out into space that still leaves the earth as a constrained system now exporting support to a outlier that needs time to itself become self sustaining .. Mars won't be suppporting Earth for many centuries to come, if indeed ever.
This is further complicated by modern medical science which is prolonging the life expectancy of people and making the overall cost even heavier. That's why countries are trying to raise the retirement age.
The solution should be a major leap in productivity coupled with a more progressive taxation system. Neither one of these seem to be happening right now, I hope this changes.
This morning (I'm in GMT+8) my father (born 1935) was out for five hours delivering Meals on Wheels to older people that have difficulty cooking for themselves.
Wow. My mother was born in 47 and is now wheelchair bound. Barely functioning. It's probably that clean farm life that keeps your father vital at that age.
My experience of Japan was that older people stay active longer .. and people like to have purpose and part of that can include looking after each other as people grow old and diminish in function at differing rates.
My experience of parts of some countries such as the UK and the US is that people get fat and relatively inactive some what sooner than I'm used to seeing in here in Australia and elsewhere (Vietnam, Nigeria, etc).
My father had a farming life early on, he's returned to a farm adjacent life in his early 80s, otherwise he's worked largely around minesites as a worker, foreman, manager but has stayed active walking about plants and constantly improving land they've owned by building walls, shovelling tonnes of literal shit for the garden, etc.
Fostering a sense of local community helps ease the changes as people age and there's a place for cross generational interaction in life also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_rJVvxx_g
Global replacement rate of ~2.1 is approaching (at the low end of estimates we're past it already), we're at 2.2 or so and population peak estimates keep getting lowered as models are updated with newer numbers, even with people living longer.
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
1. Assuming you didn't study economics or anthropology or sociology.
Being attractive doesn't demand money, it demands you to be an interesting, loyal, caring person to someone else.
I'd guess that believing in this worldview where money is an obstacle for finding someone is in itself a filter for potential matches.