Because for most rich countries this graph applies:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/oc_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/oc_...
- Many urban areas have even worse shortages of family housing. Availability of 2+ bedroom apartments is even worse than studios and 1-bedrooms. Many new multi family buildings have plenty of low-income units but no family units.
- Car seat laws are well intentioned but make it very annoying to transport children in car-dependent areas unless parents use their own car for everything.
- Childcare and education prices are very high. Of course, part of this cost is the cost of living of educators.
- Many industries are geared toward people with few or no children. Hotel rooms with capacity for more than two children are unusual, and most travel sites barely understand the idea of searching for such rooms. Even rooms with comfortable capacity for two children are a bit unusual — the common two-queen-bed configuration requires that kids share a bed.
One kid was doable for us. Two kids really stretched things and basically destroyed our savings (2 kids both costing £1k a month in nursery fees was not sustainable). A third kid would have meant either moving to a much cheaper house or some other significant financial compromise.
The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:
> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/com...
So it’s not as simple as housing is not affordable… it does feel like it’s very much cultural/social I can more than afford to have children but I’m at almost 40 and I don’t. And speaking from the pool of a rented villa in Greece I got on whim for 2 weeks because I got annoyed at work I can’t even begin to think about having them…
That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
The population density at the time was much, much, much lower than it is now.
Unless you're proposing mass de-urbanization and rolling back 100+ years of societal evolution it's practically just not all that relevant that this worked fine in an earlier era and humans could hypothetically just go back to slumming it medieval style.
> It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility
Find some 20 somethings in a major 1st world metro and ask them.
Which brings us neatly back to dropping fertility is driven by the divergence between salary and cost of housing. Bunch of young people looking at their budget and concluding society has made it impossible for them to provide said good life to a potential offspring
Being unable to afford a home isn't the major factor here, that has pretty much always been a factor. It is standards, priorities and options changing.
Also, ffs, it's called resource crunch and wealth centralization, and I'm not entirely convinced we aren't staring down the smoldering barrel of some serious shit Stateside over the next decade.
Have 12 children in homelessness and prove to us that it is a better way to live life.
If you want it for others but not for yourself, you are just being hypocritical.
> this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history.
Oh wait, that was you.
If you think it is acceptable to be homeless with plenty of children because evolution, you should do it yourself. Be the change you want to see.
Since I have little interest in keeping up this cycle with someone that is incidentally (or worse, purposefully) too dense to understand basic contradictions, I'll leave you to have the last word.
Have a wonderful weekend.
1) I never said that it was acceptable to be homeless with lots of children. (1a) You've tried and failed to find a quote where I did, so I know you've read what I wrote and can't source that belief to anything I actually said; even stripped of context.
2) Misreading a comment is something that happens, so y'know, ok no worries maybe I wrote an unclear one. But I've explicitly told you I don't believe that. And it is a crazy belief that nobody holds so I don't know why it would be a hard thing to accept after a few clarifying words.
3) Third time a charm. In the article we've got a 100-word abstract that lays the position out nice and clearly. The major factor here is not house prices, it is changing - shifting if you will - priorities. We've had situations where house prices were absurdly high in the past - for most of our evolutionary history a house has been an unattainable luxury and fertility was off the charts by modern standards. High house prices are obviously not a root cause.
Back then it was probable that most children would just die before reaching maturity, and most humans would not live much past their early adulthood. Life was fulfilled by the most basic subsistence, and that was all.
I don't think most humans nowadays, be them rich or poor, would want to live in such an environment.
Am I soft because I enjoy playing videogames or watching a movie after my daughter is sound asleep in her girl's bedroom in a house with proper heating? Probably. I still wouldn't want to team up with my neighbor to go into the wilderness to hunt a boar while the wife and daughter freeze in a mud hut.
> That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
When given a choice, people enjoy some mild comfort. Oh the horror.
They looked at economic influence and found it does not account for the drop in child birth