The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know
My understanding is that the only real correlation is years in education, but this is at the national level; the very rich and very poor (which imperfectly correlates with level of education attained) tend to have more children than the middle class, but fertility rates are down across every income level. What this means is that if you look at two countries and see that one has a higher level of education than the other, you would expect the country with the higher level of education to have a lower fertility rate, but within both countries you would expect to see a relatively uniform decline in fertility across every income level, with a more pronounced decline around middle income levels.
This is maybe what’s being referenced when people saying they’ll have kids when capitalism gets sorted, but this isn’t seen in countries where standards of living have improved considerably.
The simplest theory is that more people are using contraceptives because they simply don’t want children. Some people might subjectively feel like they can’t afford to have children, but by world historical (and contemporary) standards of living this argument looks incredibly silly.
I don’t even know if things like FMLA apply to college classes.
[1] https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/19487/1/WP-24-003.pdf
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344470
This seems to be an absolute epidemic across the state. Same with condos. It's like they assume that apartments of any kind are only for single people and maybe a couple with one child. In other words, people who are dragging the fertility rate down toward 50%.
When I pull up Zillow and look at rentals across a huge swath of the East Bay, there are 8,309 apartments listed (I filtered out houses and townhomes). I add one filter: 3+ bedrooms. The number drops to 784. Fewer than 10% (!) of apartments listed have 3+ bedrooms. (Also, a quick spot check of these seems to show a nontrivial amount that are actually just houses with faulty metadata.)
This puts a tremendous burden on low-income people, to have to foot the higher cost of maintaining a home and/or of an absurd commute, just in order to have enough space[1] to have more than one kid. That, or overpay to compete for one of the few bigger apartments, many of which are "luxury" oriented.
Meanwhile, the high-income can afford a house or a luxury 3br apartment, but they are mostly high-income because they've deprioritized family, putting in 10+ years of being DINKs. In my circle of upper middle class tech types, many of them are 35-38 before having their first kid. 1 kid is much more likely than 3 for people starting in their late 30s, so this drags down fertility rates even among the "high income" subgroup!
[1] I know opinions vary on whether it's good and healthy to have kids sharing rooms, though imho I don't want a son and daughter forced to bunk together as they get older, and calls to 'just share rooms' is giving "Own nothing and be happy."
My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house.
I wonder why modern people would be different?
Much worse than housing is the vehicle when you cross the 5 or 6 kid boundary, your available vehicles begin to rapidly plummet.
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is falling - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_... - September 19, 2024
> Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s only region with an above-replacement total fertility rate (TFR), currently estimated from 4.3 to 4.6. They’ve gone from 8 percent of global births in 1950 to 30 percent in 2021, headed to 54 percent by century’s end. While the region’s TFR is falling fast, any sub-Saharan population contraction is at least a century out. However, according to Macrotrends, Africa’s TFR (4.1) has declined an average of 1.3 percent annually over the last three years. Should this trend persist, Africa will eventually plunge into below-replacement territory. Demographers believe fertility decline is accelerating faster than projected, especially in sub-Sahara Africa. Statista, the European aggregator of figures, projects Africa’s 2030 TFR at 3.8.
Fertility rates fall as education levels rise in sub-Saharan Africa - https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-025-00026-3 - January 29th, 2025
Other poor countries lower than America: Mexico, Columbia, Philippines, Thailand
Source for TFRs: https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/67E402B3A81D9/media%2FGxYAq...
The correlation between wealth and fertility is quickly breaking down, both between countries and within (rich people have more kids, poor people have fewer).
No one is disputing that... We are talking about declining TFR RATES which are happening across the globe universally.
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...
https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
Happiness is reality minus expectations.
[1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 | https://archive.today/rY4WG
One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4104138-one-qua... - July 19th, 2023
On the flip side, for those childless, it's completely guaranteed none will.
> One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent
That sounds like a 75% success rate.
I’m more optimistic about non-western countries. I suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will still exist.
To me it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much. Since the emergence of modern nation states, government responsibilities have grown tremendously, and mostly for good reason:
- Infrastructure basically went from dirt roads to highways/railways/airports
- Tremendously higher benchmarks for services/regulation (education, pensions, food safety, crime prevention, drinking/groundwater quality, lead pollution, mining/heavy industry regulation, healthcare/-regulation)
A lot of those things are new enough that I would argue we are still stabilizing on their total costs, and current government budgets (high AND red literally everywhere) are basically humanity finding out that all those things are not free.
But I would also argue that for a big majority of people, this is still a rather decent deal; I would rather pay current (or even higher) levels of taxes than to suffer from lead poisoning, have children crippled from quackery/insufficiently tested medication or needing to pay protection money to the mob.
But I'm quite curious: What do you think is the problematic part of government growth? Do you think that Doge, specifically, is successful in identifying and quelling it?
I tend to agree with that. But there's no doubt it is dissipating vast amounts of wealth.
> it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much
There's a vast amount of waste in government spending, and waste as a result of heavy regulation. If you're really interested,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.
Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.
Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?
1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting
2) Lack of price/cost transparency
3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen
4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes
I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.
Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.
Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.
How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?
The leaded gasoline example is also a disaster. That does not generalize to every regulation being good. For example, regulations prevent victims of the Palisades fire from rebuilding. For another example, rent control.
Reading the article, the bit about Lasik eye surgery resulting in major reductions in cost is pretty illustrative.
Some years back, Frontline did an episode on dental care fraud. It seems the government set up a program to pay dentists to do major dental operations on poor people. Clinics then set up solely to do major dental operations on poor people, and raked in the government money. The trouble was, those people did not need dental operations. Frontline's "solution" was to propose heavy regulation. That won't work, either, because medical fraud to get government money is rampant and pervasive.
You might also consider the software business, which has pretty much zero regulation. It is also a gigantic engine of prosperity in the US, despite having driven costs down to literally zero. There have been many proposals to regulate it, but fortunately none have managed to do so.
I would argue that with companies, the expected outcome is that they accumulate and then stabilize at a "typical" level of bloat. For software, Google is a good example: Much more bloated than they used to be, but still competitive enough, and looking stable.
Governments also have some ways to de-bloat, mostly from internal and external pressure (like Greece).
I think that consistently getting services at no-bloat prices is just not realistic in general over longer timeframes; Netflix, Google, Uber, Amazon, ... give countless examples of excellent early price/quality ratios that got inevitably worse over time.
My hypothesis is that for our current understanding of what a government is supposed to provided (which did expand significantly since WW2, but mostly for good reasons) we have now reached a "bloat-stable" budget, and there is just no "easy" way to slash this budget without hurting the services (even though in a hypothetical bloat-free environment these could be provided for less).
Here is interesting data which seems to kinda support my point, with government spending as GDP percentage for the US, Germany (less GDP/capita) and Switzerland (more GDP/capita): You can see budgets rising post WW2 across the board, and then stabilizing in the 30-40% range (slightly higher for the poorest country, which makes sense). I would have honestly expected to see those trending up even for the last decades (which they don't really) and Covid was also less prominent than I would have assumed:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-spending-vs-gd...
Here's a reductio ad absurdum: a couple live alone on an isolated island, they have and raise one child, and when they reach 67 they stop working and expect their progeny to provide for them as they were provided for in childhood.
Two parents provided for three people, became three adults providing for three people, became one adult providing for three people.
And when that kid reaches 67 and also decides to stop working? Now nobody's around to provide for them, so nothing is provided.
(What will happen in the non-reductio case is much more complex and unpredictable, between the never-ending potential of nuclear wars, and the ongoing but never guaranteed promise of technological progress currently dangling AI and robotics before us like a laser pointer to a cat…)
The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
It was immigration, but next generation of all immigrants (native born) adopts host country total fertility rate in this context.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/26/5-facts-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19... visually nails this.
Now, would these people have had a higher birth rate if they remained in their LATAM countries? The data indicates no.
Latin America’s Baby Bust Is Arriving Early - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-22/latin-... | https://archive.today/EPMAU - May 22nd, 2025
Population Prospects and Rapid Demographic Changes in the First Quarter of the Twenty-first Century in Latin America and the Caribbean - https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc5... - 2024
It started falling to 1.6 around 2008 ( https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... ) which coincided with the millennials getting into the child-bearing age. And the millennials are much more likely to live in cities, even though they don't want that: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-livin...
The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it’s where the good employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their employees well.
For example try transporting a sleepy kid, or more than 1 young kid at the same time.
Cities are cars don't get along very well, which makes them less friendly to kids.
Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
> Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
This varies a lot depending on the suburb. There are many that are endless house-deserts where you’re not doing anything without a ride. The one where I live is much more broken up, but sidewalk coverage is patchy at best.
Yes, and now look at their fertility rates.
A lot of American norms don’t carry over.
https://www.communityplaythings.com/products/outdoor/kinderv... Things like this are 1% or so of the cost of a suburban house! That’s noticeable!
Remote work is a great option for many people but it simply isn't feasible for any job that can't be done through a computer. We should set economic policies that encourage job growth in suburban and rural areas rather than trying to squeeze everything into a handful of dense cities.
It's been eroding lately, but mostly because fewer younger people can afford to live in suburbs. By "afford", I don't mean monetary cost, but the lack of easily accessible jobs.
I'm investigating that, and I believe that it's even _worse_ than the simple fertility rate shows. If you look specifically at the number of parents with two or more children, suburbs completely demolish cities when you control for the average income.
Controlling for the average income is needed because of the two poles of fertility: desperately poor people, and happy content people ("reversed J-curve"). And cities in the US disproportionally concentrate desperately poor people.
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
Inflation is caused by the government via deficit spending. It's another tax on you.
In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more. They're using consultants and third parties to share data and fix prices, they're buying up the entire supply and dividing areas so they have monopolies.
Note how during the COVID "inflation" corporate profits soared faster than inflation.
I'm old, and I've heard that my entire life. Something's wrong with your assessment.
Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific.
> hoarding more and more of the wealth
In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".
That's a theory from economists. Economists have a lot of theories.
And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?
Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.
When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.
That's why I prefaced it with "free market".
Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.
Maybe both.
Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.
We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.
Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.
This 'free market' is a bit like clean matter-antimatter power stations. They sound like a great idea. We could build them if we knew how.
There is no such thing as a perfect free market. However, history shows that the closer we are to them, the more prosperous the country is.
BTW, when the Soviet Union was formed, the communists did away with the police because there would no longer be a need for them. Oops.
Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest.
It would be nice if everybody had somewhere to live for free, unfortunately, most people have to pay rent or interest on a mortgage to those that came before them.
Both of those are an exchange, not a transfer. Taxation is a transfer.
We are arguing whether wealth flows to people who already have it, rather people who "create it". My augment is both.
At no point was wealth "transferred" to the artist.
McDonald's creates wealth by designing and building a system to deliver hamburgers. McDonald's then exchanges that wealth for cash from its customers.
BTW, who gives money to people who already have it? Not me. I doubt you do, either. I don't know anybody who does. The transactions are always exchanges - you are getting something in return.
Also, yes, transaction are exchanges. Nobody is arguing that. You pay rent and in exchange you may use the land (productively or not)
My argument is that people are forced to pay rent to people who didn't create anything, but because they hold a piece of paper that says they own it.
The argument is, did the person who owns the land "create" anything. My argument is no.
The person who bought it then manages it, maintains it, organizes it, advertises it, pays taxes on it, etc.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
If rentable places were not allowed to be sold, very very few would exist. This is because people specialize - some build rentals, some manage them. Both are productive enterprises.
You can become a landlord if you want. Borrow the money, buy a rental, and rent it out. But you'll find out it's a lousy business.
The land was not created, it existed long before humans. It was taken by force and the strong began extracting rent from the weak.
Although developments of the land do improve the value, and thus land ownership has significant utility economically by incentivizing this, there isn't really an economic justification for the owner receiving value for the land itself- why should someone have exclusive rights to a piece of land they didn't create? They bought it, sure, but why did the previous owner have perpetual exclusive rights?
I'd advocate for a small property tax as a replacement for other taxes, because the component that does tax "land value" won't cause economic harm, but all of income tax causes deadweight loss. (Note, Land Value Tax is great in theory, but impossible to define practically- property tax good enough, much harder to game!)
Note that in practice, the biggest abuser of land hoarding is local governments with extremely restrictive zoning that stops productive development of the land- from an economic perspective they own the land, and have sold (or in reality, seized) some but not all of the rights from the 'landowner'. Although this can have advantages to help with coordination problems, in practice it's caused enormous economic damage to many cities by preventing development. At its heart, it's a problem with land hoarding.
"Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value. It only cares that some value was extracted out of the trees in the form of a new home sale, etc.
I'm sure all those slaves brought over to the New World created tremendous wealth, but I'm also pretty sure they would have rather preferred to stay in Africa.
Oh, but it does. It turns out that people who own land take care of it, so that it keeps producing. People who own timber land tend to manage it so it continues to be productive.
Destruction happens with government owned land.
For a related example, why are we not running out of cattle, hogs, and chickens, despite slaughtering them on an epic scale? And why are we running out of fish?
Madagascar is the obvious example here highlighting both issues, but it's certainly not unique.
No body (?) is contending that in a free market wealth is not created.
The contention is that when wealth is created it tends to head to other wealth.
When a bank lends capital and has a choice of lending to, say, Elon Musk or me, I think the bank will make that rational choice and lend to Elon. Thus once you have some wealth attracting more wealth is less difficult than from before you had wealth
This pattern is repeated over a d over.
See Captain Grimes' boot theory of economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
This is clear when one does accounting. Accounting is based on the idea that (Equity = Assets - Liabilities). When one takes out a loan, the assets go up by the amount of the loan, and the liabilities also go up by the amount of the loan. The Equity stays the same. That this balances out is literally called "balancing the books".
BTW, banks are happy to lend out money to people that have a track record of paying it back. This includes poor people. Poor people have credit cards, too, which is how they borrow money.
Let me explain.
Access to capital is key. If you have it you can do business, if you do not you cannot, in general terms
There is more than one way to access capital, debt is very common.
And to get rich you have to do business
So if you are already rich getting more money, in a free market, is easier than getting started, in a free market
That is the point, and one small example,e. This pattern repeates o er and over. Once you have money getting more money is much easier than getting the first money
So in free markets the wealth divides tend to increase.
This is very elementary, stage II economics
A Ferrari costs far, far more to maintain than a Ford, and doesn't last as long. I drove my used Ford Bronco II for 32 years before giving it to a scrap yard. Best bang for the buck car ever.
Expensive shirts wear out just as fast as cheap shirts. They just look nicer (and are often less comfortable).
P.S. I still regularly wear the combat boots my dad bought me 50 years ago. The boot black on them has long since disappeared, but they still keep my feet dry and warm.
That is the exact opposite of my (and Cpt. Vines) experience
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
(A relative worked out our family tree. Lots of families with 8 kids in them.)
In theory there should be tons of childless people and some balancing number of 10+ kid families. Then the average numbers work out, everyone is from a large family, but the means of production are centralized and efficient.
The free market hasn't figured out how to create more land. Especially arable land.
That is incorrect
In a free market wealth has a definite tendency to clump together, to concentrate.
A moment's thought will make clear why.
Take a moment and elaborate, please.
But another example, equity: If I am raising money for my startup, and I have no traack record (I'm poor in this context) and Sam is doing the same after Sam made a successful exit from their last startup, who would you invest in, all else equal, Sam or me? Sam if you are rational
Thus the rich have more access to equity than the poor
This is a pattern that repeats over and over in free markets
No
> Is it infinite?
Yes
> Are there any limits to its creation?
Government trying to crush it.
> Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
The only value it has is what someone else is freely willing to pay for it. There is no such thing as "inherent" value.