The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.

In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.

It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.

My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.

Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.

Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did. But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.

If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.

1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.

2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.

Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.

But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.

There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.

I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.

0: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/how-to-have-grandchildren

But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.

Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce.

I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.

Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.

Why would people even exist if they weren't going to contribute to shareholder value?

I completely agree that more people is not good, but for completely different reasons: there are WAY too many already.

Our primate species has so overpopulated the planet that every single "environmental service" (to put this in the money = purpose in life perspective) is massively over burdened.

My personal opinion is that there is no such thing as "purpose in life", we just grew from the mud here. But I think there is a general awareness among people with some exposure to the state of the planet that we're trashing the place, and that's mostly due to there being way too many humans.

Even if a person can't put their finger on it, there is a general feeling that the future holds a dubious opportunity to flourish.

Therefore less kids.

I also believe that raising a child takes a lot of time and effort, and modern first world youth just aren't interested in spending that much time away from their phones.

The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.

Skilled professions were likely to remain useful after the war. AI makes their future value seem uncertain.

The results would also likely be skewed by Germany quasi-forcing people to have children in support of the party.

Catholic?

I think this is the key insight, on this specific topic and many others.

It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible.

(Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)

That's comparing apples to oranges. People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries who rose to be developing countries, no? Then there's also completely different cultural norms and expectations between India and western nations and how multi generational families interact.

I had a similar discussion with someone form Africa who was shocked to hear that in some rich European countries you could have a full time job and still be homeless due to scarce housing and crazy rents. And then he replied "what's the point of a country being rich if the people are poor?". Good question mate. It's because the point of rich countries is to be tax havens and economic zones where worldwide money is funneled to the top 1% and the workers who enable that have to fight for the scraps while those who can't, get left behind for the welfare state to pick up or fall through the holes in the safety net and end up on the street.

>People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.

The reasons have been written in this thread. If you don't like them or don't resonate with you, doesn't mean they're mysterious and undiscovered. Just go on the street and ask 100 random people, they'll tell you the same.

which has a different culture than the West.

Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)

Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.

Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.

It's the liberation of women, we can all stop now guys it's directly correlated with women's rights.

Turns out if you just give women more of a choice over having kids then a lot of them say "uh... no thanks".

Cultural shifts, in this case due to the availability of birth control, take time to materialize.

The Pill was first used in 1960.

Yes, condoms existed. But they were stigmatized, sometimes criminalized, and substantially less effective than hormonal birth control methods developed and popularized during the 60s and 70s.

"Hey, it was unfair of us to bring you into this situation, so we were thinking maybe we should kill you."

This does not follow. A person's resistance to having their shitty life terminated doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin it.

I work with a lot of high-end CS graduates, and some are great, but few of them blow my socks off.

Our education is just messed up right now.

(By the way, it is possible for a high school student to graduate with an entire year's college credits via AP classes)

The millennial generation has seen repeated waves of economic crises and layoffs and the invention of a gig economy.

Mere stability is lacking. At least the people in mud huts know they can afford their mud hut next year.

Maybe people don’t want to be economically corralled into a large city a thousand miles from home and then to have their children in that city where they moved for career advancement, particularly as the social contract between employees and employers grows increasingly vacuous.

Nothing to see here.

And something people mention without mentioning everything else.

The existing system 'worked' because we grew from a few million to 8 Billion. If we 'stagnate' at 8, its no longer sustainable, therefore it was never sustainable if its only sustainable with constent growth.

Nonetheless, automatisation is not stopping anyway. We will solve a lot of theese problems with robots and ai. The bigger the problem, the bigger the pressure.

I was looking for the perspectives of others, not to conclusively answer the question. I thought it would be polite to offer my own first.

Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund.

Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.

People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.

As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now.

I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.

C'mon you have the whole answer right here.

Its a prisoners dilemma. People aren't stupid. For any one individual, it makes sense to wait and defer having kids until they're more economically secure. They know that. So what happens when _everyone_ is under that same incentive structure? Well, some people eventually pull the trigger and just yolo it, if they _really_ wanted kids. They probably aren't as economically secure as they wanted to be, but make the personal sacrifices to do it anyway. But you probably also have a lot of people/couples who are depressed that they didn't reach the position they expected to and depressed people generally don't want to have kids.

Right now, the future has very very few signs of promise. Humanity is behaving attrocious, being a menace and a monster is amazingly popular, science and free thinking are being cancelled and rounded up by government goons. The very rich prey ever more on everyone else.

People don’t measure happiness in aggregate. Just because I can fly anywhere in the world in a few hours, doesn’t make up for something like loneliness.

There’s categories of “happiness with life”, and some of them are much, much worse than a century ago.

It could very well be that those carry a lot more weight than tech.

If you frame this from an economical standpoint, there simply isn’t a single country in the world that adequately compensates parents (especially mothers) for the costs of raising children. These costs are numerous and not just financial — there’s also massive opportunity costs, and that’s to say nothing about the tradeoffs a parent is forced to make (“do I spend more time with my kid or spend more time working to help ensure they have a stable childhood and bright future?)

Simply put, if we want people to raise families it needs to make economical sense to do so. What exactly that looks like can be debated, but it’s likely something along the lines of one of the parents receiving a midrange part time or full time paycheck (depending on if they decide to stay at home or not) on top of the other parent being able to work an hour or two less each day without taking a hit to their paycheck.

Otherwise, it makes more sense to either accumulate wealth until the last biological second and then only have 1-2 children or simply have none at all. That’s what the current system incentivizes.

Second is universal education which rapidly advances, means that women are no longer content with being a nanny plus housemaid forever, and often want to have something more meaningful, leading to no or much less time for kids.

Basically kids require at minimum one adult taking care of them during most of the awake time. And due to various reasons gaps in that coverage can be a deal breaker. For example kids going to day care until 15:00, but parents busy until 19:00. 4 hours gap is not a lot but at early age can be a deal breaker. Etc.

In my opinion we won't reverse this trend until next world war (after such event humanity will partially reverse development and due to loss of life and work, many people would have time for kids). So in the mean time countries need to attract skilled educated immigrants while suppressing housing prices, and the most successful countries in that would win in the long run.

That page says 11% of the population is under 15.

Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"

Without data on the relative affordability of living and having children in Israel, and on how parent-friendly (especially mom-friendly) life actually is there - that's 95% useless for comparing to other countries.

(Yes, I get that a very pro-child culture could translate to very pro-child policies.)

If the numbers start dropping to the extent that opportunities open up, I believe that people's views might start changing.

We see localized depopulation of e.g. small Italian or Japanese villages as the local economy dries up. But Korea still has a real and growing economy! It's just perhaps not evenly distributed.

> find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

"Mother of the Soviet Union" or "welfare queen"?

It might work, but a lot of people get really, really mad at taxpayers money subsidizing other people's children.

Do you mean more like surrogacy, or more like teacher/personal tutor?

The former… I'm told is medically inadvisable over 5 births, even if humans used to have 10 in the hope of 2 surviving to adulthood. But that may be confounding variables given 5+ is unusual.

The latter is, I think, a good idea that people will object to actually paying for — "teacher" is not as highly respected a profession as it ought to be.