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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Germany might be a counter-example. Cost of living has steadily risen 2008-2021 (and dropped a bit since then), but Germany's birth rate has increased over that period, while birth rates in France and the US have fallen. Germany's birth rate is generally slowly rising ever since a low in 1995.

If you zoom out a bit more Germany's birth rate cratered in the 1960s/70s, generally attributed to the wider availability of oral contraceptives. Similarly in its peers. Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)

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> Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)

I'm not so sure about that. There's no law that says desire has to be aligned with needed action. For instance: up to the availability of oral contraceptives, it was very hard to avoid having kids even if you didn't want them. Kids would happen automatically if you desired a different thing: sex.

It's sort of like exercise: it used to not matter if someone desired to "exercise" or not, because they were forced to do lots of physical activity if they wanted to live (e.g. physical work on a farm, walk to the market, etc.). Now technology has enabled a previously impossible level of sedentary life for the common person, moving exercise from a necessity to a desire, we have huge and increasing levels of health problems in society because the desire for the needed thing itself isn't there.

I predict, after some period of time, "childfree" psychology will breed itself out of society, and the people who are left will have a lot more explicit desire for children.

Being able to trust that my employer would bring me back part-time in a comparable role (at the same hourly rate of pay) after a year of maternity leave and then decide if I wanted to continue working part-time up to my kid's 8th birthday sure made this whole thing less scary.

That's one of the big differences between having a kid in Germany and the US.

(the sub-500 EUR/mo daycare is another one - and that was for a 1.5 engineer income couple)

What are you talking about? Maybe I don't understand what you are getting at but Germany's Population Pyramid has them completely collapsing by 2100 whereas the US and France are actually the stars of population stability (in the west anyway)

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

[2]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

[3]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2023/

I'm purely talking about the change in birth rate and how that relates to outside pressures. The German birth rate is rising, but it's also true that it's very low. It has been below that of the US since about the 1920s, and the two are only now approaching each other with the German birth rate sharply rising (probably attributable to immigration) and the US birth rate falling.

And of course population pyramids are affected by both births/deaths and migration. Migration is a pretty big factor that is very different between the three countries (and that changed significantly over time as well)

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