Explaining Falling Birth Rates | Hacker News Reader

Explaining Falling Birth Rates

daviddfriedman.substack.com

14 pointspaulpauper21 comments

Seems quite clueless to open up this article with suggesting mate search norms.

The answer is birth control and deteriorating economic conditions. About half of pregnancies are unplanned today still.

Exactly, cost of living is the primary reason I am without children

I have two kids, I'll probably work until 70 as a result (probably not different from the average retirement age in 1950s). But my point is: it is worth it.

That’s great. But your situation doesn’t scale to everyone’s and you’re still below replacement rate (slightly above 2).

It’s certainly worth it, I agree. But I literally spent my entire 20’s getting financially ready to do so, and unfortunately suffered the consequences due to that.

Deteriorating economic conditions is wrong. Economic conditions are fine. The problem is basically one thing: housing prices.

Younger generations are better off than their parents until you include housing prices and tuition. Of the two housing prices are more significant and harder to avoid. You can skip college, go to a cheaper one, do base credits in community college, etc, but no way around housing especially with kids.

If you ask young people why they delay children housing prices will be in the top three answers.

Housing prices are an economic condition…

My post was a little badly worded. What I meant was that saying "economic conditions" is not specific enough. It is mostly housing prices.

High costs for college, health care, and child care are also factors but housing prices are the big one and the hardest to work around.

The economic conditions always feels weird. Aren't birth rates higher in places with worse conditions? And weren't they higher when conditions were worse?

There’s a few dynamics at different scales. Worse conditions are associated with subsistence farming and manual labor where children are more immediately valuable. Child care tends to be easier in more rural communities. Birth control access is lower. Land and housing tends to be cheaper.

Child mortality is much higher in worse conditions as well, and having more children the increases chances that some survive.

Another significant factor, perhaps even more influential, is the shifting priorities of the younger generation regarding child-rearing. Today's potential parents place a greater emphasis on providing an optimal environment for their children compared to previous generations. There's a growing consciousness about the importance of ensuring that any child brought into the world is guaranteed a stable home and secure living situation. And with increased living and housing costs now, it makes sense why lots of young people are delaying children until those conditions are met, if ever.

Personally, this is it. I had a rough upbringing. I will not put another soul through that. If my children happen, natural born or adopted, it will be with stability. People talk a lot about sacrifice. It's not for the child to make. Ask me how I know.

I probably won't get there, I know I have undesirable traits yet don't care to address them. That's a representation of how dimly I view things. Juice isn't worth the squeeze, the skull throne doesn't actually need more skulls.

I feel like measuring fertility rates before women finish menopause is misleading and underestimates projected fertility rate. If you look at actually fertility rates at menopause, it’s close to 3, well above replacement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147264831...

How does the US have a fertility rate of 1.7 then?

Because they aren’t limiting the counts to post menopausal women. they are counting all under 30 women who are just delaying having children. this even before accounting for egg freezing and other modern tricks that allow children even after menopause. Actually total fertility rate for women retiring from potential child bearing is around 2.4 in the 2020’s in the usa.

Have a reference for this?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr73/nvsr73-02.pdf

Look at table 2. Births for 35 and above women are increasing as births for under 25 women have decreased.

None of these are good explanations. They're all either red herrings or Western-centric. Birth rates are falling in all cultures among all races with all religions and all belief systems. Only the rate of decline differs, and not by that much.

Another post pointed out that it correlates strongly with urbanization, which is better, but it still couldn't resist getting lost in irrelevant culture war stuff that clearly doesn't matter else we wouldn't see such uniform declines across all cultures.

The depopulation discourse drives me nuts because it seems like everyone jumps on their favorite culture war or economic hobby horse instead of looking at what is actually happening, which clearly rules a lot of that out.

what is your analysis? Urbanization? chemicals?

I believe social safety nets and long term savings, in part, shoulder some of the blame. For most of history, there was no state or pension to rely on for medical care, goods, and services in your late age. You had to have children if you wanted to be supported at all and not die in poverty at 65. Now, people think it'll be ok not to have kids, because they'll still have their government health care or retirement funds to sustain them, assuming stability for the next 40 years.

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