The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
After going through pregnancy, she decided she was fine with never doing that again. Her's wasn't an especially difficult pregnancy, she simply didn't realize the toll it would take on her.
So we have one kid who is about to leave the nest.
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
The rich people take all of the money, do none of the work and pay none of the taxes.
The middle class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes.
The lower class is there to scare the shit out of the middle class.
He was wrong about the taxes, the rich do pay most of them but in proportion to their wealth it can look like not much.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
Being raised by a single dad, I know this more than most. People are always surprised because it's NOVEL.
When the program was put into place it paid for itself with the amount of mothers that entered the workforce.
And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.
But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.
Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.
Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.
This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.
And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate.
How do you square those facts with your view here?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
No amount of climate change today could compare with the threat of war and famine in the past, and yet they still had kids.
Louise Perry even goes so far as to hypothesize that the distinct lack of threat contributes to low fertility, under the term "mortality salience": https://x.com/Louise_m_perry/status/2014296167262126192
Wtf... totally the wrong tool to change the calculus of intentionally having children.
This is the most casually psychotic thing I've read on HN.
You're advocating forcing women to bear children they don't want and taking away control over their own body.
Clearly we are way too on the individualistic side of the pendulum now.
How about we set up society in such a way that choosing to have children is a more appealing option.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates. - "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
Second, it’s hard to find a good nanny. Parents live in fear of not getting a good one, having something go wrong and need to scramble for a replacement without missing too much work, etc.
It’s possible but it’s not going to move the mainstream averages because only like 5% of the population does that. If we want to materially change national averages, we should be talking about government daycare filling in the gap before public schooling starts around the country.
"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?
Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.
If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.
Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.
Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice.
But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
That plays some part but in most conversations I've had with Indian and Chinese nationals, the bigger issue for them was that it would take them decades to naturalize in the US. It's not worth spending your entire career and starting a family at the mercy of an employer.
So it's not all roses, it's one of my wife's main concerns about having kids, the lack of family support and them growing away from family.
Definitely a paycut compared to the US but still pretty great for MX. Timezones and cultural overlap were pretty good, and there was a vibe that the folks coming out of Universities in CDMX were genuinely good, compared to iffy paper tigers in the Indian call centers.
The TN visa was also attractive, since we could just bring them north for a rotation or two. The Mexican workers love it since there was a big pay bump, but also the expectation they could continue their job back in MX later; bring em up to the RDU or Austin, put em in a few leadership roles, and then have them run a unit in MX, or help coordinate other LATAM efforts.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.
Kurgezat video on South Korea fertility explains this.
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival.
In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex.
They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
Christ, that is a lot of dead children for every woman. Your heart just breaks over and over.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
Same in EU
Too late. We already have the eyes/muscle and nascent legal justifications; leadership will eventually force the issue.
PR comes to mind. They managed to convince millions of people that smoking is 'cool', we just need another Bernays to do the same for having kids.
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
TFR has been falling in the US since the 1800s, long before birth control.
Easy.
In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor.
Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.
Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...
Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.
Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.
Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.
The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
Per the above, it seems that the change in spermcount worldwide seems to be flat.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo
Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect.
1. i.e. FAANG employees
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
"it takes a village" is an old saying that isnt going anywhere
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
> such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children
To a certain extent I agree with you that lower standards in parenting made the whole project more doable.
However, when my great-great-grandmother's brother's wife died, my great-great-grandmother had to quit school (about 14 or 15 years old?) in order to stay home to help take care of his baby. Shaped the whole rest of her life.
Responsibilities being split often meant others had to sacrifice in addition to parents, and those expectations of sacrifice often fell hard on women (whether young unmarried or past their own reproductive years).
Not at all. Behaviors can be emergent based on environmental conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
is one example.
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
This is literally the definition of selfish? You see what you must give up for the sake of someone else (children), see the lack of support you will receive, and decide that you don't want to make that exchange.
That's literally a selfish decision, because you are deciding you want to keep that energy and those resources for yourself.
It's not inherently bad to make that decision, but it absolutely is selfish.
I think it's the affirmative action, the choice, that makes the difference
Why?
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
If you're calling not having kids selfish, that's just completely weird. You are going to have to prove first that your opinion isn't also one of these invented ideas.
If we're talking about taking care of them, I kind of agree. Excluding extreme circumstances like rape in a country without abortion, you kind of know what you're willingly signing up for when you have kids. You forced them into the world, they are your responsibility.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.
90% or more wanted to have kids. But the ones that started after 35+ or didn’t have a partner until that age did struggle a lot, and many never managed even after investing 10a of thousands of euros on fertility care.
They prioritized lifestyle and career before family. Then it was too late to have both.
There might be many metrics to measure fulfillment in life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably stick with love. And nothing fills my love cup more than having a large family. YMMV.
Let's call it out specifically - few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now and for every 1 woman who has "wants kids" in their profile, there's probably 2-3 women who say they don't want kids or "aren't sure".
And these aren't young women either, the age range is roughly 29-35, so even on the older side of optimal age for having kids.
Regardless of what men want, if so few women want to have kids - fertility will drop like a rock.
At 29-35, aren't >70% of women already in relationships?
Presumably, the majority of ones that want kids, already have them or are in the process.
Additionally, the apps tend to attract more people in hookup culture. So even from the remaining pool, 33% could be misleading.
Also, whether or not you're in a city / high-cost-of-living area makes a difference. That's less than 50% of the total population (in the US at least).
33% for that age group honestly seems high to me. I'd assume it would be lower.
I am on the apps too and have my range set to 29-38. About 80% of the women I'm seeing have selected as "wants kids". I don't want kids and I can barely find any women to match with who also don't want kids...
I think we both have anecdotes though and unless we have data from the entire company, we can't make any real accurate claim here.
I'm on an app where you can discuss wedding dresses and most women are interested in having children!
I'm joking of course. But a dating app embedded in hookup culture isn't a representative sample of women.
Besides, that's how people match these days. If you say the culprit is hookup culture, then most people are into that culture and don't want kids.
No, what I'm saying is that an app to hook up isn't representative.
Neither me nor the women I've dated have ever been on dating apps, yet we're together and want kids. We're not in your sample of potential app users. Neither are my parents who had kids. Or virtually every parent who is in a relationship with kids. None of them are in your sample of potential app users.
Yet everyone who doesn't want kids and wants to date, is possibly in your sample of potential app users.
It should be obvious what type of user is likely to join this app, and what type of user isn't. Far more people join for a hookup than for a relationship.
Even if 50% of members join to find a partner on the app to have kids, and 50% just want a hook-up, the former leave as soon as they're successful, leaving the latter group. By definition you're not expected to find a large pool of people on there who want a partner and kids, compared to the number of people who just want short-term hookups.
So are the people you see on this app representative of society? No.
Coincidentally, TFR was higher when women had to be paired up with a man and have sex without the use of birth control.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Very different things
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
Why not ask Israelis?
Even ignoring Haredim and Arab Israelis (both whose fertility rate has fallen dramatically), secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work much longer hours than Americans (South Korea is the only developed OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working) [1], live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms low rise brutalist apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, pay San Francisco level prices for everything, and have almost nonexistent government benefits.
But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.
Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on self-centered.
[0] - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
[1] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
You seem to be supposing a model where most people naturally want kids, but are just discouraged from having kids because...other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
Yes.
They are much more tolerant about having kids and making sure to give space to people planning to have kids.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
The more likely you and your peers are to have kids, the more likely you are to live in a society which will accommodate you.
---
Heck, Germany gives significantly more monetary and subsidized childcare benefits than Israel (which gives almost nothing), and Israel remains significantly more expensive than much of Germany, yet secular Israelis continues to sustain a much higher fertility rate than similar Germans.
It is hard to describe how kid unfriendly Western society has become.
Some cultures actively celebrate children and families. They center them in social life in an inclusive way. This covers inclusion in social events, institutions, and civic design.
Kids are not only FUN, but interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
I would be very interested in a breakdown of how the American perception changed over time and what the drivers were.
Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children, which necessarily includes foregoing many or all of the adult things due to lack of funds and time.
This is exactly what I am talking about. Is the obviousness of this statement constant across time? Would someone in the 1960 or 1980 have found it equally obvious?
Alternatively, is it the emphasis on prioritizing fun that changed?
Alternatively, has both the perception and reality of fun given up changed?
Im mostly interested in breakdown in America because I am an American. Some countries match, some dont. If the underlying drivers are common, I would still find them the most relatable and interesting in the American context.
What used to be normal teen rights of passage like hanging out with your younger extended family, holding a baby, babysitting the neighbors kids, being a summer camp counselor, helping with youth sports, etc.. are less common.
Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college.
So are Israelis. Getting into the best IDF units is much more difficult and stressful than getting into an Ivy - it's both academic and physical. But if you get into those units, you will be set for life financially.
Otherwise, your just an infantry grunt who wasted a couple years with no discernible skills and facing a future of (best case) working a dead end job that pays $40k a year in a country with a CoL similar to the Bay Area.
This is why immigrating abroad is still somewhat popular amongst non-techie Israelis (Zohran's electronics store [0] still hits somewhat close to home).
From when I was young, I'd see my extended family at least every 2-3 weeks or more, every other holiday was hanging out with people from newborn to 90 years old. Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
By comparison my mom's side which had been here a few generations, I never really saw kids other than when I was a kid myself. I don't think my wife ever held a baby until she was an aunt in her 30s.
In many cities in india, there is somewhat of a revival of this setup. What happened was that people weren't able to get homes with their aspirational square footage in the location they want. So what they end up doing these days is taking their family, the wifes family and the kids and buying 2-3 apartments in the same building. It's the closest you get to a multi-gen home. Will be interesting to see if this trend affects TFR.
Note that the recent +10% increase in TFR in rich indian states (you would expect a decline) is mostly due to better IVF availability/affordability, not due to any of the reasons I mentioned.
> Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
Yeah, this exposure also blunts some of the fear&uncertainty that puts people off of having kids.
Yes, absolutely.
I used to work in a big city where friends, neighbors, and coworkers with young kids had to sacrifice their career trajectory, friends, hobbies, savings, personal space, and more. Most couples we knew had no kids, some had one, a few exceptional folks had two. A few couples we knew even commented that they ended up having fewer children than they were planning to because of the difficulty with the one(s) they had.
Then my partner and I moved near relatives to a small, family-friendly town. Most of our neighbors have two kids, some have three, and a few exceptional folks have four or more. Almost everything here revolves around families -- even my company has family events and taking time to take care of kids is normalized.
True, living here did not change our decision to have kids, but it actually did change how many kids we ended up having.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
That's a plausible model, but my model is that people alter their goals based on what they observe happening to other people who pursue those same goals. If young people see their friends, coworkers, and neighbors struggling due to their decision to have children, it seems reasonable that they would reevaluate how important it is to them.
I barely know my coworkers kids names half the time. I certainly don't see photos of them or see them popping into zoom backgrounds. Growing up my dads company had picnics and his coworkers had parties and I'd meet his coworkers & their kids.
And while theres obvious things children limit.. like 4am clubbing on a Tuesday... a lot of public spaces are less child-friendly than in the past.
Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
There's very little overlap in 20-30 something singles & family public spaces anymore. It's like the entire world has self segregated.
I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
Pretty much!
> Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
This isn't bad if there are other parents doing the same thing too. Increasingly there are not (or at least not among the demographic who uses HN).
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
I don't think so. I'm from around that generation, and that didn't stop Asian, Eastern European, and Israeli American parents from having multiple kids here in the Bay Area when growing up in the 2000s.
If nothing else, it's yet another area of increased expense.
In the early 90s when I was a child, it was pretty normal to shuttle 3 kids + parents around in a cheap little late 80s used sedan or station wagon. These days 3 kids + parents looks more like a big expensive 4Runner or Highlander.
The car thing is also limiting on who can perform extra childcare, and how/where.
As a kid, I used to hang out with my 10+ years older cousins who could drive - taking me to mall/movies/arcade/sports games with them in their little 2 door coupe.
Sure they were babysitting me, it wasn't some tremendous chore of being stuck in some kids-only space. They were doing stuff that they might have done without me, and probably got $20 from my parents.
We'd go see a Jim Carrey PG-13 film, not some Disney movie with they boyfriend/girlfriend/buddy, and they'd cover my eyes when their were tits on the screen. Or I'd sit in an older cousins lap at a ballgame while they drank beer (and smoked) and shouted at the players.
Can't imagine this is acceptable or normal now, lol. But it meant different generations commingled in ways that they just don't now.
Cheap econobox starter cars have disappeared from the market, used car prices are through the roof for anything that's reasonably safe and not basically dead already, and there's nowhere for young people to go anymore even if cheap cars did exist.
It's simply a matter of the social position of mothers, or, what defines the social status of women in a given society. In much of the world it's educational attainment and professional status, so it surprises me very little that most women in these countries don't want children, or can easily find an excuse to not to.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards?
Thats kind of the point.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...
All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.
'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.
I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.
But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.
Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.
So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
Further if either parent loses their job you can quit daycare until they get a new one. Single income families are far less resilient.
Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.
And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other side of the country/world. Anecdotally the loneliest older people I know are ones who have put it upon their children to keep themselves from loneliness.
> And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them
As a parent I always find it funny that we need to add this to every statement of frustration of family life (I'm not critiquing you, I also say this every time I mention any frustration about parenting). It is worth recognizing that saying the contrary is fundamentally taboo. I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
My mother was giddy when my father died; so I have strong boundaries in our relationship.
My brother moved to colorado after the service and never returned.
I'm not convinced having children is the answer alone. (I say as a childless 35yo)
There are many reasons this could be the case. The internet (and Reddit in particular) is abound with AITA type discussions around boundaries within families.
and life is beautiful.
Because there's no point in thinking about it. Your wife will ask if you want to leave, your children will hate you, and society will hate you, it will make you feel depressed, and meanwhile it won't accomplish anything. It's a dialogue only for yourself, once you acknowledge that, it becomes far less challenging to deal with and you can move forward with dealing with challenges in solvable ways.
You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near impossible to miss the "pregnancy will ruin your life" propaganda.
Consequences. They exist. Some are life altering and expected to last a long time.
Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former)
But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought publicly!
<< This is a hilariously narrow view of family life.
Quite the contrary, it allows for a very broad range of outcomes, because it deals with reality of the human condition.
<< which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former
Everything always is. Why, tomorrow I could quit my job and start a bar in Hawaii. As arguments go, this one was pretty weak.
<< Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between
Why am I getting this feeling that you completely misread what I wrote.
that's the exact reasoning why parents who complain about how hard it is to be a parent get no sympathy from you. You blew a load in somebody (or had a load blown into you) and another human popped out. That's a choice you made for yourself, nobody forced you to, and there is a big giant swath of people out there who couldn't care less.
You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research. Most people just have kids because it’s just “what your supposed to do” and don’t give much thought beyond that.
I don’t know what they thought to themselves, but outwardly they projected rainbows and unicorns until reality eventually hit them.
I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.
i only started learning about that when i had kids, so i have something to leave them when i die.
If that's the attitude it renders virtually every discussion about the topic moot and the people in question better stop trying to give life advice to anyone else.
My wife and I don't want kids and we've heard our fair share of (unsolicited) opinions on the topic from people who clearly weren't always happy. I've only ever known one woman I worked with, who was a brilliant scientist, tell me straight up she regrets having children and wished she could have focused on her research.
If that's not something you can honestly say without being berated then clearly the 'propaganda' still works mostly in one direction.
Unfortunately, my soul brought me into that bucket :-( I can speak about it with other (men) friends without children, and to some women without children. But if you ever say that you didnt want children when others with children are around, they see you as an alien.
Esp it gets hard if you are single (what happenend to me now) and you meet new women and tell them that the only reason for the last breakup was that I couldnt bear the stress with out children.
I knew from the beginning of my life on, that it will totally crush me if this happens - coming from a "not supportive family" makes it really hard to >actually want children<, esp. if the same stories now repeat :-(
COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just people going crazy in isolation. Trading random stocks, or ordering crazy nonsense off of Amazon. Being alone is literally psychological abuse and a lot of them were subjected to it for months at a time.
It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs.
Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.)
Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-person events - cities are filled with concerts and music festivals, you name it, more Michelin Star restaurants than anyone could visit, etc. etc.)
Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
Not to mention that parents have all kinds of new social stigmas.
Having children used to be: free labor, send them off to do whatever (now you'd be accused of child abuse)
Basically, the problem is single life is too good now. We have smartphones, internet, and the economy revolves around the single experience.
The minute you have kids, you lose access to the exciting single life that the modern society has built itself around and catered itself to.
Society glorifies single life, and the signalling is so strong you know you'll lose it if you have kids. It's not like you have time anyway with the doomscrolling and dopamine addiction.
Why would it be easier today?
You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.
Still works this way in my suburban Ohio world
> today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
though yes I see this in the childhood sport arena, club teams, traveling teams, etc.
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion... but to be blunt I've only seen this in black and impoverished neighborhoods. There needs to be enough working single moms releasing their kid out of necessity that the Karens can't snitch on everyone and the police/CPS fatigue of fielding the calls after investigating and not finding anyone they can force into keeping the kids inside.
This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.
No fluke. A deliberate policy
Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.
And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:
Housing floor space per person, same trend.
Life expectancy, same trend.
Leisure has increased.
Tourism has increased.
Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.
The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.
As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.
Deopends on country and social support Id say?
In western EU countries, parental-costs are estimated to 180.000 - 200.000 EUR per head that parents will pay for the first 25 years.
That's the whole point in these affordability discussions.
Take homes, We often speak of homes being so expensive, $1m average in Silicon Valley or whatever. That's not because it's unaffordable, but precisely because for the people who bought these homes, they were able to afford $1m or whatever the number is. If people there could only afford $500k, they'd be 500k.
If it's 200k it's because that's what we can and believe should spend. And that's completely different from the past, when we could spend less, and decided we should spend less. My grandparents generation for example who had 5-10 kids certainly wasn't spending 1-2m on their children.
Fact is that median income has gone way up, while children per person went way down. We thus have more to spend per child, we can afford MORE, to spend more. And the fact that we do (evidenced by the 200k per child figure), is not evidence of unaffordability, to the contrary!
I completely believe that’s been your experience, but want to highlight that his is a difficult asymmetry in these friendships. I in no way mean to imply that the below is the experience your friends had with you, just that the challenges are not one-way.
In my own circle, my wife and I have often felt like it was our friends with kids who vanished. We knew they were busy, we kept extending invites or asking for time. Things often didn't work especially as new parents are figuring their lives out, things are changing all the time, etc. We'd meet up here and there, but it was - necessarily - always on their terms. And so of course, our outreach tapered down incrementally but consistently.
But I do wonder: do they feel we detached from them, or do they have any inkling that we feel they detached from us? We've discussed it with one couple who we were always closer to, but it doesn't feel an appropriate topic to resurface uninvited at any given moment.
Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.
And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.
And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.
So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.
The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.
Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
At any rate, I'm never too proud to reach out to old friends even if the time between attempts increases. Relationships may change again!
It's simply hard to relate. I have some very good friends who we've stayed in touch. I'm forever grateful for them. But when you're out and about and you meet a random person and try to strike up a friendship say at a conference. The second I mention I'm a dad I feel I'm relegated to the back of the bus.
Similar to what I wrote in the other reply: How far went _your_ initiative to stay in actual contact with them, in a way it's not a boring duty call, but something _actually_ nice?
If I have friends with children, sure I'm also interested in them. But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved - and they mostly expect from me that I constantly want to see the kids and "help in any way", well, where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily. My guess would be your friends would love to spend some time with you but can't, because logistics.
> where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
You can't, sure. You shouldn't at least. But what does it mean to me? It leads to the fact that the friendship is pointless. So why should I take a lot of initiative, when I don't get anything back anymore? For a reason that they've actively decided for (typically), btw.
> Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
I'm not talking about commercial/monetary/material profits. I'm talking about profits in terms of social lives. If my wording is unfortunate, I hope that it's still clear what I mean. One important (not the only one) currency in that regard is: Timeslots in the calendar.
PS: If the other side shows at least some remote awareness of the situation and indicates a little goodwill, it's already a different thing. In my personal experience, even that isn't common, though.
In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.
If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.
Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally every single time we go to e.g. the park. The kids want to play with other kids, we meet their parents, and it's basically an endless source of friendships - even better because it's other parents who probably live relatively close to you enabling you to start setting up aforementioned ideas.
LOL, this is my income after taxes before paying anything! :-X
It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your children to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.
There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.
---
One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
It's totally fine that you've chosen a nanny over daycare. I did for my first, and I think we'll go with a nanny for my second, but you're presenting a wildly misleading perspective here.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Experienced nannies in high-cost-of-living areas do. Many charge $35 to $55 per hour [1][2][3] and at 45 hours a week, that is $82k to $129k a year or $6,825 to $10,725 a month.
> What was your experience with bad nannies?
Not wanting to pay the aforementioned prices and dealing with strong cigarette smoke smell on clothing, strong perfumes, buying them age-inappropriate toys, issues with timeliness, general messiness in our home, questionable unemployment claims, even a DUI. All the problems of an employee and roommate rolled into one.
All of them had prior experience, first aid training, and loved children so in retrospect I may have been overly harsh to refer to them as "bad nannies". But I still think it was absolutely worth the time and effort it took to find a good nanny.
[1] https://www.lighthouse-careers.com/blog/complete-nanny-salar...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NannyEmployers/comments/1irv28o/nyc...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanny/comments/urmmqj/its_apparentl...
You're now limiting your price to high cost of living areas with extremely experienced nannies (even that 'hire for your yacht here' page you dug up only gets into these $72k+ prices at 8+ years of experience and specialized skills), and working overtime every week. And in those conditions - sure, but that is quite atypical. A normal search for 'us average nanny salary' turns up about a million hits in the $19-$23 hourly range. I imagine off the books is rather lower yet still on average.
And yeah it sounds like you had some remarkably bad luck with nannies. I take most of those, like showing up on time, completely for granted, and would certainly never hire a nanny who smokes. And it's not just the stink. I mean I don't even understand how that's supposed to work - how do you even nanny while also taking smoke breaks? Yeah, just ridiculous.
I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.
I completely sympathize with the challenges, though I don't understand (and might completely misunderstand) the word "now". Do you meant 'in the current world'? What is different that makes it harder? And what defines now - the social media age? Post-WWII?
First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.
And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.
Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.
EG when we bought the house because it was closer to the in-laws, the previous owners were moving to SC to be closer to their family. It's just a decision you make or not bother to make.
And then to make an extreme point - before this I used to live in Hell's Kitchen in NYC. When I visit my old hood now, it's basically one continuous giant Grindr date going on. That was totally fine when I lived there as a single person but as a family person it would be a tough situation (e.g. businesses not geared to kids, most neighbors aren't parents - eg there was no kids in my old building). Now I live maybe 30 miles away and it's all parents all around me. The idea of "go where parents are" and "go where other young families are" is relevant to absolutely anyone in the world, so I don't understand why whether I live in the US is even a question?
My experience so far with a kid is most people will just tolerate your child. I'm surprised your running into that attitude.
Other new parents I know that are in the suburbs aren't all surrounded by family's either. I think aging people aren't downsizing their houses and moving around. Careers scattered and cheap homes scattered everyone around.
Maybe NYC is just different. I mean I'm 100% sure it's different. I'm grew up in a NYC suburb lol
To me that's like going to a badly reviewed restaurant and then complaining about the food. If you knew you were moving to a place hostile to kids, why move there?
Like literally a starting point could be -where do your friends and coworkers with kids tend to live? Or ask a realtor which parts of town have turned over with young families.
When you are checking out the house you can literally tell which houses have kids and u can ask about it.
The housing market it what it is but you get a very different outcome if you search in a a family friendly town vs not to begin with. Obviously?
yes me too
> My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. .... I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
yes me too absolutley
> If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation.
Total opposite for me, no way. Whilst i dont want to do them now, I am so SO glad i had those experiences. I know I would be deep in a mid life crisis today wondering "what if" if i had missed the fun and gone straight to having kids in my 20s. Like, id probably be blowing up my life over it now, doing something stupid, out of FOMO for never having tried living other lives. Different people are different, but it would have been a TERRIBLE choice for me. (im also not the only one - witness the commonality of the old mid-life-crises sportscar and mistress trope that was born out of a period having kids young)
Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.
You have the agency to make it happen.
Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointless contact.
There's often the expectation that you're super interested and excited about their children. But even if you'd try. You'll never get something back. Not because they turned into bad persons. But because there are just no spare resources for it (e.g. in terms of calendar slots) on their side anymore.
Do I have to be infinitely sympathetic with them? Or is there some limit at which I am allowed to say: This friendship just doesn't give me anything anymore.
really depends on what you call friends. i am not very social and have very few friends (i don't have a "contact list"), but these are strong friendships.
That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.
So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.
Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.
Today, you need 2 top tier salaries to make childcaycare and rent even possible
Raising kids is hard, I have 3 but it’s not sad. Blowing off some steam is something every parent needs. But it sounds like you are in desperate need of some perspective on life.
You talk about your children as if they're a burden and that's sad.
Perhaps they don't like the fact that someone is equating pet struggles to human struggles.
Doesn't sound like they are talking about them being a burden, just how their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
This is true of people with pets, too.
Everyone's struggles are equally their struggles. I too get a little miffed when someone invokes the struggle Olympics, especially when their struggles are the consequence of their choices.
"There's a sucker born every minute!" - P.T. Barnum
I feel a big part of what you experience is based on where you live. Having a family seems incongruous to the fast paced corpo world, sadly.
I moved to a small, uninteresting town years ago, mainly to escape the hustle and crowds. Honestly, I don't like it much, it's a bit too small and dull for my tastes. But more on point, the people here have all been so mind bendingly kind and patient with the kids that it makes it really hard to leave.
I wish every place were so patient, but there's probably a pretty direct negative correlation between that and 'getting ahead', whatever that means.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.
At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.
> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.
> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.
> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area, he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.
> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.
> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”
> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.
I'm praying for you, internet friend!
1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.
3. As a result, there are fewer babies.
OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)
Outside of lower-class men (who tend to have more machismo/less to lose) and presumably unusually attractive men (who can get away with it), I have literally never heard anyone express this even once. Maybe lay off the smut?
> Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men
You absolutely should not engage with "entitled" men, insofar as they aren't a figment of your imagination.
> Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex
Lol, you are projecting again.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and if I am let me know, I just feel like it describes the ideal situation as one's partner entirety is open to the "public", and where setting boundaries itself is abusive, which I feel like is not really how most people feel nor what they want in a relationship.
I'm not the author, of course, so I can't say for certain that I have the most correct reading of it. But, if I'm reading your interpretation right, here's what I'd say:
The story analogizing women to land -- which has no voice, no agency, no mind -- is the critical part. If one is consensually "limiting public access" with another sentient human being, that's wonderful -- because you'd be doing that in dialogue, in true partnership, on the same footing, etc. "Hey, we're in a marriage now, that means we agree to not sleep with other people. Deal? Deal." I think the author (and certainly I) would heartily endorse that sort of "wanting some space that is public and some that is private".
The key word in your comment, to me, was "healthy" -- as in "healthy boundaries," and honest communication etc. You're right, it's not boundaries as such that describes abuse or even the entitlement on which abuse rests. It's the kind of boundaries.
What Bancroft is saying in the parable is that, if men see women as pieces of land -- private land, at that -- that they have a god-given right to, then anything healthy between men and women is by definition impossible. That's why, in the parable, the boy's compromises and concessions are in fact no such thing: because they're still founded on inhuman premises.
There are aspects of the parable here that the book goes into a lot more detail on -- male jealousy, in particular -- that overlap a lot with what you and me are talking about. I urge you to read it! The boy limiting public access on these entitled premises is what a lot of men will do, on either side of the "abuse" line: losing their shit when their attractive girlfriend, who they chose in part because of her attractiveness, goes out in public looking attractive, and he sees other people (other men) looking at her. Maybe next time he tells her "you're not wearing that outfit", thus "limiting public access" but not in the healthy sense that you mean it, because she's not treated as sentient, she's not part of a conversation. She's just coerced. (This is excused or minimized as "culture" or "values" by many!)
But again, if I'm reading you right, I think the part where you got lost is just that. Ironically, it's probably because you have a pretty healthy view of relationships that just how fucked up the boy in the story is confused you!
(If I haven't read you right, let me know.)
Sure, women having to deal with a few "entitled" "predators" sucks and we should do something about that but the vast majority of men have no such entitlement - although obviously this is different in the context of a marriage.
There have always been certain rights granted to and duties expected from men and women. Leftism and feminism have weakened the expectations placed on women (and to a lesser extent men) and now the scales are unbalanced.
But that doesn't explain why many countries that rank higher in terms of egalitarianism have even lower birth rates than the US.
Birthrates historically increase when the world is burning. They fall during times of peace and prosperity.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
It truly is beautiful.
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.
But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.
Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.
Is life mostly good?
Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing. After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.
Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.
If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.
Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc. This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.
70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.
I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).
Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.
Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)
Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
Oh you still need them for all of those. It just so happens that developed capitalist countries figured out you can use immigrant's children for this, rather than paying to grow them in-house, since with outsourcing children you bypass a large chunk of the cost.
Developed countries already sold their own children's futures in exchange for short term equity gains, now it's being done to countries where outsourcing happens.
Capitalism is eating fertility.
> Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Aye, agreed. It will swing back one way or another.
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
and the rest of the comment still applies. The issue here is trying to make sense of any of it on Twitter.
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she?
I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
Basically all of the things the current administration is sabotaging. Not going to end well.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
Certainly not having children allows one more time to pursue other matters. Mankind in general might gain (or lose) from such behavior, depending on whether one is an Einstein or a Stalin for example. Most anyone who participates in society has some set of interests and pursuit of those interests is nonetheless very real and the results may dominate our perspective.
I see no clear way to judge whether a person contributes more through his/her work or through his/her children. Nor do I think "contributing" (whatever that means) is a known evaluation anyway. And what one man considers useful another might judge detrimental. All the more b/c history is "unfinished business". IMO in summary we simply cannot know.
Aside: there's a T-shirt that shows the sinking bow of a shipwreck through a telescope lens. It's labeled thusly: "MISTAKES - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Yet another viewpoint.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
I think that's really unfair, people deserve to enjoy their lives. If they actually enjoy it that's fine but nobody should be pressured into having kids.
This is true for many people. I know a few childfree couples that you could offer them a hefty salary to raise kids and they would decline.
However I know even more people who ended up having fewer kids than they would have liked, especially when I lived in a big city. Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids, found raising their current child(ren) challenging enough that they didn't think they could handle another, or reevaluated their preferences after watching friends and neighbors struggling.
> It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
For many, sure. But for other people addressing the root causes (of which cost is one) can move the needle.
You then brought up cost as the reason. Cost can basically be removed as a reason. There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
To be clear, I said cost is one root cause, I did not say it was the root cause.
> Cost can basically be removed as a reason.
How have you come to this conclusion? From an empirical standpoint, Pew Research finds that financial concerns rank among the top reasons adults say they are unlikely to have more children, the US Census reports that a substantial share of women who expect to have fewer children than desired cite economic constraints, and OECD fertility analyses find that financial insecurity and housing costs are closely associated with lower realized fertility in OECD countries.
> There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
Can you provide more detail about these studies? At least when it comes to paid childcare in the US this seems to run counter to the data. Before the 1940s paid/institutional childcare was less common in the US, with most childcare provided by mothers, extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and charities. From 1990 to 2025, the Day Care and Preschool CPI index increased ~280%, outpacing the ~150% increase in overall CPI during that same period.
Not to mention that double-income households are much more common, especially in high cost-of-living areas, and this raises the opportunity cost of having a child compared to a couple with only one income.
And not to mention housing costs outpacing inflation, and for many people stable housing is often a prerequisite for considering starting a family.
Again, I'm not saying spiraling costs is the only reason, and I would not even claim that fertility is highly elastic, but the worsening economics of child rearing do seem to be shifting behavior at the margins.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
Here is the fertility rate in Bangladesh: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/bgd/ban...
That's still a high fertility rate for a country with stats like this: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/bangladesh.html
> 25.1% of children under five are stunted, 10.7% of children under five are wasted
And the country had even higher fertility rates when it had higher frequency of famines, and much higher rates of hunger and malnourishment.
The point i was making however, is that parents don't truly - at a deeper level - consider the quality of life they are subjecting their child to.
Natural selection doesn't maximize for quality of life (it doesn't care for it), it selects for procreation and survival.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
In principle I agree, in a darwinian sense the purpose is to pass on genetics. That's not really a matter of opinion I'd say, although perhaps I'd have chosen a different word than 'purpose', I tend to agree.
But what's the point of saying that? What larger point are you making? If I say water is wet, sure you'll agree, but why did I mention it in the first place? I didn't understand your post in that sense yet, perhaps you can expand.
W.r.t. the darwinian 'purpose' though: I also agree with some posters in this thread noting accurately that our darwinian sexual drive can be satisfied without passing on genes. (ample birth control & pornification of just about any sexual niche you can imagine). So while our sexual urges are to support passing on genetics, the world around us can pacify that urge to the point it's satisfied without passing on your genetics.
As such our darwinian instincts aren't effective in the same way as they used to be. Plenty of men are satisfying many of their urges, ultimately dying childless, much more so than in the past.
Second, plenty of parents satisfy their urges with 1 or 2 children instead of 8 in the past, insufficient for replacement-levels, but sufficient to pass on genes.
The problem is composed of multiple factors. However, I would say that there is a unifying element, a master key, that explains all of these elements, and that is consumerism. I mean "consumerism" as an ethos and as a matter of culture.
1. People are creatures of convention. Very few people operate or live life outside of the conventions of their times and of their culture. Culture creates the grain of life most people will follow, for better or for worse. In general, people are terrified of swimming upstream or going against the grain.
2. Subjectively speaking, culture determines conventions, sensibilities, patterns of life, purposes and goals pursued, and what is valued. Culture, whether explicitly or implicitly, imbues people with a sense of how life ought to be lived and where energies ought to be spent. It shapes attitudes toward the facts of life.
3. Inevitably, culture is institutionalized in law. As law is a teacher, culture is partly perpetuated through law.
4. Culture is also replicated and reinforced through media and education. It is usually insinuated.
5. Consumerism construes human nature and human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The obvious case is economic consumption. We believe buying things will make us whole. We believe money is the root of happiness. The life is the market and the market is life. Everything is for sale, for the right price.
6. This already creates an opposition. If consumption makes us whole, then children are antithetical to wholeness. After all, children are consumers! They are competitors. Given the choice between a new luxury car and another child, many couples would choose the car. People routinely make this calculation. They will limit their brood, because children eat into budgets and into time that could otherwise be spent on luxury items and vacations on tropical islands (mutatis mutandis).
7. If consumption makes us whole, then everything else that might be desired is recast as a matter of consumption as well. Even human relationships are reconsidered in consumerist terms. Sexual relationships become consumerist and transactional. Sex itself becomes commoditized, and becomes an instrument of the market. Beauty is desecrated and exploited to push products and services. A functional prostitution and an exploitative stance invade and pollute relations between the sexes, rendering them totally dysfunctional.
8. Contraception enters the picture. Contraception is the paradigmatic expression and cornerstone of all sexual consumerism. It is the incarnation of sterility and physical manifestation of a "NO" to life. It is a manifest contradiction of the essential and core function of sexual intercourse, which is procreative (the other end, the unitive, presupposes the procreative purpose, and so the denial of the procreative is a denial of the unitive). Its acceptance and normalization dethrones the procreative and elevates the pleasurable in its place. Thus, sex is no longer pleasurable. Sex is now for pleasure. The paradox, of course, is that doing this destroys the pleasure of sex, producing a pathological hunt for pleasure that is increasingly bizarre.
9, By denying the procreative, we undermine the significance of the deep complementarity of the sexes. This destroys sexual normativity and opens the door to a consuming and obsessive pursuit of an increasingly unhinged and dizzying array of erotic perversion. Children again become opposition. A child is a wet blanket thrown on the hot fire of deviant eroticism. This way enters abortion as a solution, and the pursuit of intrinsically sterile sexual gratification.
9. Consumerism propels careerism. The career is underpinned by the presupposition that you will need money to consume. A career is your path to making more money so that you can be more happy. Universities are reconfigured away from fuddy-duddy old school liberal arts education to job training centers. Woman are now taught that to be a fulfilled woman is to seek a career. Marriage and childbearing are postponed, not only to attend university, but to spend one's most fertile years shoring up one's careers after graduation. One must justify that expensive education (expensive in time and money). Careerism sacrifices the family for the mirage of consumerism.
10. Now, human life is also commoditized. When women do come around to wanting children, whether for good or bad reasons, they often discover that they are too old, having made a sacrificial offering of their fertility to their corporate god. But we believe we are entitled to children. We believe we are entitled to other human beings as instruments of our fulfillment. So we pursue fertility treatments like IVF. IVF is consumerism on steroids.
12. Consumerism reshapes social practices and life patterns. It created friction and impediments that make having children more difficult, because the assumptions that underpin it maintain that you won't have children, at least not until later. The implicit support, the social and economic architecture of the world and its operations and customs, become hostile to family life. Bad habits, like living beyond one's means, are fed. We demand a standard of living we cannot afford, and view children as hostile elements that rob us of our birthright.
13. A culture must justify itself. Thus, each failed generation rationalizes its bad decisions to soothe its own collective ego by re-presenting its failures as normative to the next.
The solution really is simple: women ought to marry in their mid-20s on average and start having children immediately. The obstacles are cultural and habitual. Our culture creates friction and our cultural programming causes us to deviate from the successful pattern. Instead of ordering the patterns of human life around human nature and human development, we strap human beings into a Procrustean culture, torturing and deforming them to suit weird and arbitrary standards. Instead of conforming our desires to reality, we deform reality in an attempt to conform it to our desires.
This is human arrogance and human folly.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
Mean age was 21.5 in 1970.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
Super anecdotal and totally non scientific observation.
Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing.
Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering.
If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need.
Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life.
Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
For me it's different. For one it's like you said: friends that never left the rural areas have kids more often.
But also friends that I grew up with in urban environments, left to rural environments around the time of having kids. Those that didn't, stayed.
It seems that those who preferred to spend more for the cultural offering of the city stayed and optimised their time to enjoy that cultural offering by not having kids (bars, cafes, museums, hobbies, sports, travel, career).
While those that preferred family life, chose to optimize for that by moving to a place where housing was more affordable, allowing less time spent on career, more time spent on family.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I have tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
It’s not that simple.
This is why I love the internet because this sentence alone holds so much treasure.
Seriously, the issue is more our economic system. It is certainly not humanity in danger of dying out with 8 billion people, on the contrary...
Some argue the wrong people procreate, but meh...
Personally I just think less people want children because they find other things to do.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
The politicians have made it seem like there is a lot of there is so much threat but realistically normal people just exist. Stop filling for fox news and maga hate messaging.
Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.
Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.
The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
It was never only about that. But they weren't saying the quiet part out loud.
Don't have kids myself, but this aspect seems incredibly obvious just reflecting on my childhood in suburbs of Chicago through the 80s-90s.
But the causes for what's keeping the kids indoors now instead of literally running the neighborhood are manifold. In the 80s there were far fewer indoor forms of entertainment to occupy the kids without driving mom batshit insane and making a mess of the place. Now the kids have tablets and gaming consoles, the outdoors is such a scary place when it's not full of gangs of children who know all the backyards better than the parents ostensibly owning them.
It's all rather depressing and the longer I live the more convinced I am that not adding my own kids to this state of affairs was the right move.
Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, because they need to put kids to sleep. So, they have to try much harder to have any social contact.
I work at faang and have no friends from that. I’m surrounded by thousands of people every day I’m at work. Everyone is there to work - not be social or hangout or be friends. People show up to social events to grab food and take it back to their desk.
The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
> The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Same. As long as you don’t literally stay at home, being a parent with kids is such an easy way to meet more people.
So...don't do that? Let the parent who works in the office come home and spend time with the kid, and go out for drinks (or hiking or the gym or whatever) with other friends. Do all the chores beforehand during the day, so that the working parent only has kid duty.
If both are working, both have chores and kid duty after work.
Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.
It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness.
So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.
I mean church people love to think of this as a decline of society but this is more about the destruction of the church itself as an out of date institution that was using itself as a control mechanism and that broke the moment we discovered the world wasn't made on hocus pocus.
The thing is the essence of the church could still maintain a huge amount of social control because people need to socialize.
There are plenty of volunteers at community events in my area that have prestigious jobs, and the strivers working to maximize opportunities for themselves actually seek these out as another opportunity for accolades and networking.
You just need to find people who actually have an interest in their community. You know who those people often are? Parents. I suspect the decline in birth rates, especially in urban areas, amplifies this in both directions.
Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.
A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.
It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of forces keeping people solitary and anti-social. This is just one of them. I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choose to isolate themselves. Sometimes the kids in these cars are literally yelling out the window to my son because they're friends. I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Sure, school drop off is just one small aspect of life. But because of drop-off culture, there are certain people who I may NEVER have a chance to interact with. Imagine if those parents instead walked with their kid. Maybe I would make a new friend. Maybe we'd have a nice conversation.
Last year there was another woman and her son waiting with me. They walked to school every day. We became friends just through school drop off in the morning. It brought some happiness into my life and made me feel a sense of community. She could have chosen to get in her car and wait in the long line of SUVs like everyone else, but luckily she didn't.
By essentially saying "stop caring about school drop off and look for other opportunities" it feels like you're missing my point: building community means showing up in lots of different ways, and consistently. The school drop-off example is just one example of many. A woman who lived on my street since the 80s said that back then nearly everybody walked to school. By switching to a car-based morning drop-off feels to me like we've lost something, even if it's just a small thing
social-interaction problems aside, why are the cars idling? seems like the school/city would have an ordinance prohibiting that
Early morning in the narrow time between getting the kids ready and going into work is not the time to expect people to be social.
Yes, I'm sure there's absolutely nothing you're doing to engender the general atmosphere of distrust...
Last week I arrived by car right near the beginning of dropoff time. Pulling in right in front of me was the mom of one of my kid's classmates, carpooling with another kid who lives in the same apartment complex. The three of them met up as soon as they got out of the car, and then another one of their friends (who lives across the street from the school and usually walks) joined them from his driveway. They met up with a 5th friend before they crossed the street.
Then I walked - well, more like ran - with the 5 of them down the 111 steps that take us from the street level to the schoolyard. When they reached the bottom, they met up with 3 more friends who had just been let out of the drop-off zone in front of the school itself. Said a quick goodbye to my kid, but he wasn't really paying attention, he was already ensconced in his pack of 8.
I've gotten there with my kid before drop-off time, walked down the stairs with him, and there's been a pack of about 20-30 kids and 2-3 parents usually milling around before the school gates open.
I realize that this is somewhat atypical in 21st-century America, and we specifically chose this community because, well, it actually has a sense of community, but it's not unique. In preschool I'd take my son over to his preschool bestie's house (she lived about 2 cities away), and there'd be a whole pack of kids roaming the neighborhood going over unannounced to each other's houses.
But yes, it sucks that they have to exist, and that my kids have active shooter drills and the school has a plan for what to do in a mass-casualty event. Though so far, every time they've triggered the secure campus protocols, it's because a baby coyote likes to hang out on the stairs.
The community in question was put on our radar screen when we attended a party that one of my wife's business school friends threw. It's not well-known; even in our metro area, most people probably wouldn't recognize the name or be able to place it on a map.
But then when we were house-hunting, I just drove through all the residential neighborhoods within commuting distance of our jobs. And took note of where I saw people a.) out walking and b.) talking to their neighbors. Reported to my wife (who thought this was a nutty waste of time, but really values community) "I think you'll like it here", then paid the exorbitant home value to actually buy a home in the area. Indeed, we did like it here.
I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).
Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.
We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.
People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids. If you want to translate that as "speed and comfort is of the essence", then fine. I could say the same about someone with no kids who prefers living in a highly urbanized area because their definition of speed and comfort is different.
And virtually no one is thinking "I need to demonstrate my belief that traveling on foot is only for weirdos OR exercising" when purchasing a vehicle, both because not many (to be generous) people think that in an area with sidewalks and because it's just not relevant.
but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
> People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids
It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
My kids can (and do) walk around our neighborhood. You chose to live somewhere that didn't support that and lament it, for reasons that are not clear to me.
We also drive our SUV when the number of passengers exceeds 5, which is not uncommon at all in our household. Occasionally, we drive it solo or with less than 5 passengers, because it makes sense to do so.
> Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
Large vehicles are "dystopia"? There are plenty cruising around my town yet a kid has literally never been hit in the 20 years I've lived there.
And kids walk to school alone or in small groups on the sidewalks, with crossing guards protecting them at intersections.
> I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
Okay. Are these cars all from the 1970s, before any modern emission standards were enacted?
> It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
Good for you. I have zero interest in spending an hour plus biking my kids to and from the grocery store, so we just drive and then play in our yard when we get back. Or we just walk if we have the time and interest.
> I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
Sounds great. We have these too, without the irrational fear of cars included.
> I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
"Need" is a relative term. I don't "need" indoor plumbing to survive, yet it's nice to have and most people would consider it a need (including my wife and kids).
I see no reason to reduce my standard of living by basically taking up cycling as an unpaid part time job. If you enjoy it or just feel like it's time well spent, again, good for you.
> Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
Again, using "dystopian" to describe a place that is car dependent is a pretty fringe view. It's not surprising that not many people agree.
As I said, I don't believe those are very widely held and they certainly don't reflect my thoughts, so my criticisms would be quite different.
We can also look at the facts, which do imply a more recent disregard (if not disdain) for pedestrians:
> Drivers hit and killed 3,304 people walking in the United States in the first half of 2024, down 2.6% from the year before but a staggering 48% above a decade ago, according to a new analysis from GHSA. [0]
[0] https://www.ghsa.org/news/early-2024-us-pedestrian-fatalitie...
I don't need to "admit" that, because I agree it's true.
In your rush to prove a point, you completely missed mine, which was: At least 99% of families buying SUVs to transport kids around instead of a car or minivan (which is why single occupant use didn't come up, as it wasn't really relevant) aren't intentionally firing a shot in an ideological war, they're just picking a car that works for them, they can afford, and they like.
Obviously a lot of that is subjective and has been shaped by regulation, marketing, and an interest in conformity with peers, but what will definitely not change anyone's mind is endless hostility over what is a generally benign decision.
There is research on how car cost (with SUVs being the most expensive vehicle type) impacts driver yielding behavior [0]. There is also research on how being in a car changes your perspective of pedestrians and others not in the car [1][2][3].
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8758047/
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233520099_Acoustic_...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227874062_Territori...
Best of luck to you.
You clearly stated your opinion that "SUV-drivers looking at pedestrians with disdain" isn't widely held. I then provided actual data and studies that disagrees with that opinion. I'm not sure why that was so upsetting.
The data you provided isn't upsetting, other than it's sad that people are being needlessly killed.
Interacting with insufferable transit "enthusiasts" is exhausting though, especially when they jump into discussions without reading the entire thread (as you did here apparently).
You and your peers seem incapable of doing anything other than attacking, insulting, and looking down upon anyone who isn't as "enlightened" as you, making you zealots, which is why I want absolutely nothing to do with any of you even if I agree with many of your positions.
If you all ever figure out that the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know. I won't be holding my breath.
Is an eye-opening comment from a person who called me "insufferable", "incapable of doing anything other than attacking", and a "zealot" just in this one comment. Further up thread are plenty of other insults you have lobbed at anyone who dares to challenge you. All while continuing to claim that everyone else is attacking, insulting, and looking down at you.
This conversation is over, you can project on someone else.
You're the one who chose hostility, and of course you fall back on a display of offense when you get it back in kind.
Enjoy tilting at windmills for eternity.
If the goal was to carry more people, a minivan would have been bought, as they are more spacious and comfortable.
An SUV's goal is to use up more space and have the passengers sit higher up, to project more "power" or "status".
You may be shocked to hear this, but not all SUVs are less spacious than minivans and comfort is very subjective.
You have to define SUV to determine its goals. Most "SUVs" are basically cars that are slightly lifted and extended. The ones I assume you take most issue with are significantly larger than minivans, have 4WD (which is actually useful where I live), and also are seen as more luxurious.
I would say the primary goal, especially for parents, is occupant safety, which does come at the cost of the safety of others. Good luck convincing anyone to change with your attacks though.
Rewind the clock a few decades and there were a lot more reasons to go outside.
My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.
Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
I think we understatement just how hostile western society is to children these days. It's the small things, like an unwalkable and unbikeable neighborhoods, flights that force you to pay more to sit together, and the endless liability waivers.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
I think the explanation for lack of children is much simpler, but one that most cannot really admit: there is an opportunity cost to having children. An entire class of lifestyle will no longer be available to you realistically. Children are not expensive for the value they provide, but there are things you cannot spend a large amount of your time on.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...
My experience having kids is that we walk around with our baby and people love her. Random people will look over and say "oh my goodness, what a cute baby"[0], people will hold doors for us, airlines let us transport car seats for free and discount a seat for the child. In fact, I'd say the actual reason for a lot of things is more structural.
e.g. home regulations like double-staircases, or height restrictions, and so on constrain the form factors of homes that can be built; car regulations and market demand in a few-child world emphasize form factors that constrain family size; things like that.
Besides there is a great deal of social contagion in this subject. A friend of my wife's texted her saying (paraphrased) "to be honest, after seeing how cute your baby is I changed my mind on wanting kids"[0].
0: And as the father, I definitely think my baby is exceptionally cute, but in reality this is likely everyone else's experience.
This is so far removed from present day US. A large portion of the country enthusiastically/fanatically/religiously supports someone who thinks exclusively of himself.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
Perhaps.
GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.
There are a lot of non-criminals who are here legally, but still very concerned about their future. If I were one of the Haitians in Springfield, I would be looking for another country to take me in.
If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.
We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.
> No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. ... They are simply worse people...
You should apply to the DNC to help with their messaging efforts, clearly they're missing an important voice!
Anyway, do you have a source for that? My understanding of American evangelical protestant theology is that they don't view rapture as triggerable in nature. Not being one, I can't state that confidently, so I'd love to see your source for your stats, and understand your definition of what it is they feel they can do to trigger rapture.
And I live in a place single digit blocks from multiple places where ICE agent behavior has made national headlines. I have no financial reservations.
It has/had nothing to do with ICE.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.)
Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accordingly.
Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you. The likelihood of feds accidentally executing you in your hometown is on the rise, and we don't know when it will stop climbing.
That was fun.
They have murdered people in broad daylight and allowing many more to suffer and even die in their facilities.
People are not being hysterical, and the people who are downplaying or ignoring this are showing that they are in fact evil.
A source would be nice
There's an important distinction here.
However, since you're here: etymological arguments are really not the win you should be chasing.
All this is about expanding the reach and normalizing abuse of the power of law enforcement, just like back then after 9/11.
It's like Germany in the 1930s again when Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their clothes, but the other way round.
You already did it:
> They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
That is taken away.
Someone in my network - a US citizen - was detained, taken to a city 3 hours away, and held for 10 days before being released. Was quite a while before her family knew where she was.
If you're an American who is visibly Hispanic, it's not at all hysterical. If you're in one of those cities, you do have to worry whether you'll return home when you leave your house.
you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.
you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).
It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest...
As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...
These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.
My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.
I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
Physical comforts are a small piece of the equation.
312 shootings in the past 5 years [0]
that's an average of ~ 1 shooting every 4 school days (across ~ 120,000 schools)
that is not incredibly rare; you can try to rationalize it, but if you're a parent and your kid is going to school every day for 12 years, that's about 3000 opportunities for this rare event to happen to them
If I'm computing this correctly, that's approximately 4 * 120,000 = 1 / 480,000 chance of it happening on any given day, or a 1 / 160 chance of it happening to your child in the course of their lifetime; compare that with a 1 / 15300 chance of getting struck by lightening over your lifetime, or a 1 in 800,000,000 chance of dying in a plane crash (this is according to Gemini, I didn't research these numbers thoroughly).
And yet, look how much effort we put into airplane safety.
> existed 25 years ago too
sure, but it's so much worse: [1]
55 shootings in the '70s 80 in the '80s 157 in the '90s 121 in the '00s 260 in the '10s 312 so far in the '20s
the fact that we know this has been a problem for 50 years and instead of doing something about it, the problem is actually getting worse. All so that some grown men can play with their guns (please don't tell me that it's about 2A ability to "resist tyranny"; that hasn't been true for a very long time)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
There are ~74 million children in the US. Even taking your number at face value, it's 0.00000081 shootings per child per year. This is rare.
I don't want my child to be traumatized by a school shooting on their school even if they themselves are not killed. That's pretty basic. If multiple people were shot and killed at your workplace, how would you feel about continuing to go there? You think that survivors of a plane crash where other people on the plane died are ready to get back on a plane the next day because "the chances of it happening again are small"?
And I don't care whether it's targeted gang violence or some other type of shooting, it's still an event where someone with a gun is on the school and kills one or more people.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any.
But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity etc. are the barrier --- this isnt some "indictment of our culture" -- a sentiment no better than "we're being punished by god"-thinking which turns every weather event into a didactic lesson on people's pet peeves.
But now that I think of it, there might be solutions. The problem is, they're incompatible with individualism. Imagine passing a law that everyone is obliged to take care of a child. Sure, this would cause issues, but would instantly solve the population crisis. The problem is, such a law will never be passed in a democratic society, because everyone votes according to what they believe is their own best interest, not the best interest of the group. But an absolute regime could potentially do this.
Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
This however is something I agree with, fully.
And lower birth rate -> smaller young population -> higher ratio of retirees to taxpayers -> less free money to invest in new businesses/infrastructure/etc. That means a worse quality of life for everyone. Worse pay, higher taxes, less city/state/federal investment.
That's called a death spiral and eventually ends a civilization, if it goes uncorrected. There's no fancy monetary trickery that magically fixes it either. The only real hope is alleviating the burden completely - via something like incredibly advanced robots powered by real AI (not LLM garbage).
That would free up the resources to allow each new generation to do new things, instead of being less and less able to just maintain status quo.
Unless the life-expectancy also falls significantly, the rising dependency ratio would become an even larger problem.
I am 45. I have fairly big* chance of making the global population curve actually drop!
*OK, not really, but you get the point I hope....
If you look at the actual trends of those rates, peak population is ~2050, maybe sooner.
Nothing like this on Wikipedia. Do you have a better link?
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away.
What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone else.
They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.
Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.
In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.
One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.
[Surface - The Town Square]
The transporter beam hums and fades. Riker, Spock, and Counselor Troi materialize in the middle of a bustling intersection.
Riker immediately reaches for his phaser, expecting a reaction. A panic. A scream. Nothing.
A native walks straight through the space where Riker’s arm is raised, correcting their path by mere millimeters at the last second, eyes never leaving the blue glow of their palm.
"Captain," Riker taps his combadge, voice tense. "We've landed. We are... invisible."
Spock raises an eyebrow, scanning a nearby human with his tricorder. "Incorrect, Commander. We are simply irrelevant. Their optical sensors are registering our presence, but their visual cortex is filtering us out as 'non-content'. We are pop-up ads in a physical reality they have deprecated."
Suddenly, Troi gasps. She stumbles, clutching her temples. Her knees hit the pavement hard.
"Counselor!" Riker is at her side instantly.
"It’s... it’s too loud, Will," she whispers, her face pale, sweat beading instantly on her forehead. "It’s not voices. It’s not emotions. It’s... flashes."
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears leak out. "A billion images of felines. Dancing figures. Arguments without context. Tragedy mixed with absurdity. It’s a scream, Spock, but it’s a scream about nothing."
"Motion sickness of the mind," Spock observes, looking at his readings. "A precise description. You are attempting to find a focal point, Counselor, but there is none. The signal is not radiating from a central broadcast tower. It is a mesh network of pure dopamine."
He turns his tricorder to the crowd. "Fascinating. They utilize a tight-beam UHF protocol—what the archives call 'Bluetooth 17'. It ensures that no signal ever touches an unintended recipient. They have achieved perfect privacy, and in doing so, created perfect isolation."
"They could have warp drive," Riker mutters, looking at a mag-lev train passing silently overhead, filled with slumped, blue-lit figures. "Look at this infrastructure. The power efficiency alone..."
"They do not want warp drive, Commander," Spock says, closing his tricorder with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet street. No one flinches. "Space travel requires looking up. Warp drive requires a destination. This species has already arrived."
Troi looks up, her eyes bloodshot, trembling. "We have to leave, Will. Please. It’s... sticky. The thoughts... they want to be thought. They’re hungry."
Riker taps his badge. "Enterprise, three to beam up. Now! Lock on to my signal, not the ambient noise."
[The Bridge]
Back on the ship, Troi is in sickbay, sedated. Spock stands at the science station.
"Status on the planet, Mr. Spock?" Picard asks, looking at the viewscreen. The planet is beautiful, blue and green, peaceful.
"It is a tomb, Captain," Spock replies, his voice devoid of judgment but heavy with implication. "They have not been conquered. They have been optimized. They have traded the chaotic inefficiency of exploration for the streamlined certainty of simulation."
"The Great Filter," Picard murmurs.
"Indeed," Spock turns. "We often theorized that advanced civilizations destroy themselves with fire. It appears, Captain, that it is just as likely they destroy themselves with a warm bath."
Picard stares at the screen for a long moment. "Helm, engage. Warp 1. Get us away from here."
"Course, sir?"
"Anywhere," Picard says, adjusting his uniform. "Just... outward."
The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.
He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.
He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.
I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
While 0.1% of the population live like God kings.
Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sure as shit don’t feel the effects of “inflation”.
It’s 2/3rd of all federal government spend today, and doesn’t even included all the state and local government spend. There are cities and states spending double digit percentages on paying for pensions and retiree healthcare for labor that happened in the past.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
You can liquidate all the equity rich people have (which will cause its price to drop precipitously and so you won’t get as much you think it will), but it won’t make a lick of a difference, because the numbers show the wealth transfer from working to non working is far, far greater than it was when prirun’s parents were young.
That is one of the reasons prirun’s dad had much more purchasing power. The president just said the country’s goal is to make sure the people who own land are prioritized over those who don’t, by keeping house prices high.
That would not have helped prirun’s dad buy a house out of high school. Everything we do is to benefit the asset owners and the old, at the expense of the young and yet to be born. And it’s happening all over the world.
We don’t want young people to have more fruits of their labor, we want the fruits of their labor to be eaten by old people to meet their expectations of quality of life because they are a bigger voting bloc.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G-p2hvebQAEkEBg?format=jpg&name=...
Edit: To be clear, I think there are multiple contributing factors. It's just that, in my view, the time/labor shortage is the core of the issue. Everything else feeds into it in some way. The factors eventually start stacking and problems that contribute to the time issue get exacerbated by their own contributing factors.
Economics pressures, for instance. Bad housing economics means couples work maximum hours to afford daily expenses, decreasing available household labor. It also fractures extended family systems when people have to relocate for cheaper housing or better jobs, eliminating the traditional labor-pooling arrangements for childrearing. Generally poor median household economics keep parents in constant anxiety too, which then requires time to be spent on coping routines.
Social atomization has further taken away the kind of pooled childcare labor that used to absorb overflow. Media has displaced churches, bars, parks, and bowling alleys with private screen time, shrinking social circles with scarce opportunities to rebuild them. Car-based infrastructure further reduces local community interaction and subtly dehumanizes neighbors into obstacles who steal parking and slow you down. Remote work and online shopping accelerate this deterioration. The result of all of this? Parents who already don't have extended family, also don't have friends, neighbors. or community to cover childcare needs. The sort of "Hang out at the neighbor's house while I go to my book club meeting." scenario has largely gone extinct because of this.
Even if a couple does better than the average bear in these areas, and they have options, ambient paranoia bottlenecks their outsourcing of childcare anyway. Our media environment has normalized constant fear. Fear that every blade of grass conceals a potential predator, so every adult is regarded as a serious risk to your kid(s). This compounds further because it's gotten to the point where children (and teenagers) can't play outside or otherwise exist independently without supervision. This increases the time parents must spend on daily childcare needs. So not only can they not decrease the time spent, but they now have to spend even more because of it.
On top of all of this, the fraying social fabric creates an effect similar to cellular breakdown. Where those who become disconnected from the larger biological system stop acting for the collective benefit and further prioritize the self, becoming cancerous. This leads to growing numbers of extremist, anti-social individuals with poor mental health. Individuals who both compound the scarcity and isolation of parents, and justify their media-sourced fear of other adults. This is an example of the contributing factors to the contributing factors.
You get the idea.
This seems like a good place for a study using matched subjects. Do 23 year olds of a certain generation spend more time with 7 year old children than another generation? Etc., etc., then you can calculate the baseline and excess for each generation
Both immigration rates and population gain were halved between 2024 and 2025.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.
I actually don't think I've ever read anything that made as little contact with reality as this. Its actually impressive. If you actually think this is in any way true, you need to deeply deeply reevaluate the way you perceive the world.
But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Having a kid is just an unfathomably large commitment. If you bring a kid into the world, I believe you're responsible for creating the conditions where that kid can grow into a healthy, well adjusted adult, and that's seemed like an increasingly impossible commitment for the past few decades.
To enjoy this life you need free will aka be provided with options.
So there is definitely a lower bound of conditions that a parent should be able to satisfy.
So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?
We already allocate immense resources to the elderly (over 50% of US federal budget is for old people + national debt, where debt accrues for fungible reasons but the biggest explosion is money transfers/healthcare to the old). We have a few levers we can pull there - we don't have to give money transfers to the wealthiest members of what are, in fact, the wealthiest generation by taking from younger people. We could maybe means-test some of it. But they are politically hairy and come kind-of late. All that debt is essentially already borrowing from people who don't yet exist to pay off the old of today.
So it would be somewhat nice to have more people in the future because we have already borrowed their money (or if you are 30, our money).
That makes things difficult. Even if we did not set up the entire USG to do this, having more retirees than workers makes it hard economically. You could imagine a decade where every 4th person is working in a nursing home, basically.
But other than the massive looming financial crisis and the care problem, yeah, its not so bad.
Japan seems to be fine? Japan, which created its own lost generation [0]? Japan, which has a word for "death by overwork" [1]? Japan, which has 9 million abandoned homes in ghost towns [2], the highest public debt in the developed world [3], and healthcare system under strain because old people are being left there for no other reason than there's no one to care for them? [4]
In what way is Japan doing fine?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
[2]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/15/in-japans-ageing-co...
[3]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/123015/3-eco...
I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
People don't gloat at privatization but aforementioned wealthier retirees rely on corporations squeezing ever more money out of customers, employees, and vendors.
A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot.
---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled -----
yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
a) make younger female family members do all the work
b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity.
I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night.
Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-...
More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
People say "Oh, but GDP isn't everything" - but it's correlated with almost everything good, so might as well be.
At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.
The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
Only if we don't explore and colonize the stars. From what we know, the universe is infinite.
And, before you suggest it, no, there will never be faster-than-light travel, and even relativistic travel is super unlikely.
But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?
Realistic solutions look something like: - we increase productivity of the working population - we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees - we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired
Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.
But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.
for a contrast, look at South Korea - https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/
That tells a quite grim story, with an outcome thats totally inevitable but will take 20 years to play out. the die is already cast, and I cant see how the country survives.
The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
Sounds lazy to me
Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
You can imagine a steady-state population where the age structure is stable and productivity is high enough to sustain the retirees, trainees, and disabled.
we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
How do you know if an organism is thriving in its environment? You count the offspring over generations.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
The article "The End of Children" (published in The New Yorker, March 2025) explores the global phenomenon of plummeting fertility rates, examining why traditional explanations and policy solutions are failing to reverse the trend. Here is a summary of the key points: * Economic Support Isn't Enough: The article challenges the popular liberal argument that fertility decline is primarily caused by economic insecurity or a lack of childcare. It points out that Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden—which offer generous parental leave, "baby boxes," and flexible work cultures—still face declining birth rates similar to or lower than the U.S. Even in places where childcare is free (Vienna) versus expensive (Zurich), fertility rates often remain identical. * The "Achievement Culture" Trap: The definition of "affording" a child has inflated significantly. In many wealthy, educated circles, raising a child now implies providing a suite of expensive advantages—individual bedrooms, travel sports, private lessons, and organic diets. This "intensive parenting" model means working mothers today actually spend more time on active childcare than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations, making the prospect of parenthood feel overwhelming. * Political and Educational polarization: There is a widening fertility gap based on politics and education. Democrats and those with higher degrees are significantly more likely to be childless. This is partly attributed to the extended time required for education and career establishment, pushing childbearing to later years when it is biologically more difficult. * Failed Government Interventions: The author highlights various aggressive attempts by governments to boost birth rates, such as Hungary's tax exemptions for mothers of four and South Korea's numerous "happiness projects" and subsidies. Despite spending fortunes, no modern nation has successfully reversed a low fertility rate back to replacement levels. * A Shift in Meaning: The article concludes with a philosophical reflection on how children have transformed from a natural part of life into "variables" in a high-stakes lifestyle choice. They are increasingly viewed through the lens of identity and personal fulfillment, leading to a culture where parents fear judgment and non-parents fear being seen as selfish, intensifying the anxiety around having children at all.
"Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."
We certainly take advantage of things like free preschool; but if we look at it objectively (and ignore benefits to the child) it consumes more time than if we didn't use it - getting him ready, walking him to school, picking him up, etc. Since it's free, we look at "time spent" and it's something like 2-3 hours spent to "get" 3 hours.
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
Childcare in/around Zurich is (was 2 years ago) 2500 - 3000 CHF / month (lower prices after ~18 months). This is and isn't expensive. The list prices are high, but so are salaries (and taxes are low), and this is cheaper than rent (for 1 kid). Not subsidized.
In Slovenia, the full price is about 700 EUR / month, subsidised up to 77% by the government (i.e. by high-earners, effectively a double-progressive taxation with already high taxes).
What you get for that price in Zurich? A lot! Kindergarten starts at 3 months and can take care of kids for the whole work day (7am-18pm). Groups are tiny and lots of teachers - 3 adults per 12 kids. Groups are mixed age as well, which I think are preferable. You also get a lot of flexibility - e.g. half-days (cheaper) or only specific days per week (e.g. Mon-Thu). Jobs are equally adaptable, a lot of people work 80% (so Friday free, spend with kid(s)).
In Slovenia, the situation is much worse. 2 teachers per 12 or even 20 kids (after age 4), age-stratified groups, childcare finishes at 5pm (but start at 6am, if someone needs that...). Children are only welcome after 11 months of age. No flexibility at all. This is all for public childcare - we also looked at private, but generally you pay more (1000+ EUR) but get ... not much more. Maybe nicer building (not even), but groups are equally large (IMO biggest drawback).
So as far as childcare is concerned, Switzerland is IMO much better.
But where Switzerland fucks you, is elsewhere. As mentioned, tax is low, so that's a plus. But there's minimal maternity leave (hence kindergarten starts at 3 months). If women can, they take more time off work, but not everyone can. What I wrote above about "kindergarten" only applies until 4 years of age, after which "preschool" starts, which is government-funded and hence free. Well, "free". It ends at 12pm after which you need to move your kid back into private childcare if you have a job. After that, school starts, which has a lunch break around 12pm as well - children are supposed to eat lunch at home - which again isn't really compatible with 2 working parents.
I'm not in Switzerland any more so I don't know how people actually manage when kids start school...
At 4k-1st you often have shortened hours, so if you're a working parent you need to arrange for transportation or be able to take long lunches, etc to move children from one place to another.
This "gap of annoyance" happens right about when you'd naturally be looking at a second or third kid as a possibility - I wonder how much effect it has on people.
I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.
Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.
I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.
(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)
There are plenty of longitudinal studies from various geographies, which I would summarize as “childcare subsidies increase birth rates in some contexts, but the effects are complex and depend on program specifics.” E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2917182/ and https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-07...
---
The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.
1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.
Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.
2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).
Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.
3. Myth: Women working is the cause.
Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.
4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.
Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.
e: moved TL;DR to the top.
This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.
You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.
Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)
> Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
That doesn't address the "myth". You can keep bringing more migrants and eventually replace the population.
World population in early 1800 was around a billion. As recent as 1928, it was only 2 billion. We added 3x that number in the last 100 years!
I see population decline as a good thing. Nations should focus on managing the decline gracefully. It's good for the environment. It's good for distributing our limited resources equitably.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.
And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.
There used to be an underlying theme of "humanity will figure it out, even if we make mistakes".
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
Don't agree with the supporting statements though.
Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidde...:
> "all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses." ...
> "Many demonstrations—particularly the biggest ones—were triggered by the injury or death of a child. Against any tendency to blame the parents for permitting their children to have a life of their own beyond home and school, demonstrators consistently demanded streets that local children could use safely. And while the demonstrations were nearly always nonviolent, they were vocal and insistent, and sometimes confrontational. They included some degree of traffic obstruction, sometimes even full blockades that barred all motor vehicles." ...
> "Women bearing signs picketed streets and intersections, or set up folding chairs across the breadth of streets and sat in them. Children often participated. A mainstay of the demonstrations was baby carriages, occupied or not, which rhetorically associated the demonstrations with motherhood and with the safety of children. The technique was common enough to give the demonstrations a name: Some newspapers called them “baby carriage blockades.”" ...
> "the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was the mother’s fault."
I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.
I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.
If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.
The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal value?
The attorney representing ICE to the courts in MN admitted it directly, admitted that ICE does not believe it needs to honor orders of the federal court system, and that they do not comply with orders to release legal residents of the united states.
You should educate yourself. Here's commentary that directly references the lawyer's responses and judge's commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o-_2thaI8
Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate". For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law. But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
> And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
There's nothing bizarre about workers being angry at a system that is being abused to drive down wages. The reality is that there are segments of workforce in the USA that will only hire H1Bs workers because they know they can treat them illegally. This happens all over the place but is particularly prevalent at larger orgs (both in tech and finance). The behavior is implicitly authorized by the companies as they outsource the "being the jerk" to those managers.
The non-H1B workers rightfully feel angered by this because it directly lowers their wages. It's like scabs flooding a union shop. Only worse as the scabs are scared of not only losing their jobs, but their visas.
> And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
Ok, let me make you aware of it and then you'll be unable to continue to use this excuse.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26871634-19-ts-of-02...
> Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country.
Quit burying your head in the sand of what is happening around you. I urge you to actually read the reality in the court records of what is actually happening.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
You are wilfully unaware.
> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.
The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.
Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.
Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.
When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.
> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.
The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.
> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.
ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.
How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.
What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.
I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....
State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."
"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."
"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.
The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
As an aside, it's hilarious that they try to brand themselves as "Heritage Americans" since "Native American" is already taken.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.
Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
If instead we say this is a biological imperative that we have interrupted and many people don’t rationally want children no matter how perfect those conditions are, then instead of looking back to previous states, we can ask what new conditions must occur to change this behavior.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
[0] https://governor.wa.gov/news/2025/washington-california-and-...
[1]https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-mdhhs/newsroom/2026/01...
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
[/s just in case it goes over someone's head]
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
Median family income $87k
Cost-of-living ~$36k excluding housing
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
When you say housing, are you excluding utilities or just not direct rent / mortgage / property taxes?
Either way, that's a good example of how different things are without kids and maybe why folks are choosing not to have them.
As someone without kids who lives in NY (not NYC), I couldn't even imagine spending 36k / year (minus rent). Even if I took a 3 week international vacation every quarter I wouldn't come close to that amount after factoring in my normal costs.
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
-Good job market
-Not high cost of living
-Good quality of life (commute, amenities, etc.)
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
[1] https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/hungary-to-spend-6-2-o...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hun...
"We need to flatten the curve..."
(Comedy writing mode OFF: )
You know, to re-quote the powers-that-be and the mainstream news media...
What, no takers?
You know, "flatten the curve... of population increase?" -- what, still not funny?
Hey, I'm just re-quoting what other people said... (a whole lot of people, incidentally!) but in the context of the article, above!
What, still no takers?
You people have no sense of (dark, very dark, let's be completely honest about that!) humor!
:-)
Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.
Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.
I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
I am a parent and have definitely felt very stressed on account of children. But as for feeling like my "self" was destroyed, I can't really say I ever experienced that; and I'm not even sure about the idea of a fixed immutable self anyway. I'm not advocating for having children, or against having children; but I don't think I was crushed as a human being because of my choice.
My last child is graduating from high school this year. She's a violinist and I'm a pianist. I've always accompanied her since she was 3; and we do a lot of musical collaborations. I definitely feel like my sense of self is expanded by all of this. But maybe I just got lucky.
However, "those third-world ones with current fertility rates above 4.0" probably have a ways to drop before it actually becomes a problem for them, couple few generations or so. In that time, the context for all of this could change (50 years ago, people were more worried about too much reproduction? Who knows in another 50).
In fact, for whatever reasons, the most predictable trend seems to be that fertility rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. As standard of living goes up, fertility goes down and vice versa. if those "third world ones" actually drop their fertility to "first world" levels, it would probably mean that their standard of living is such that immigration to the USA won't be so appealing either.
At that point, it seems the global social political context is changed enough that we will have an entirely different set of problems and solutions that are hard to predict now.
The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
If the US gets back to 150 million people, it will look different, but I don't see why it has to be any worse than it is now. And I can think of a lot of reasons why it might be better.
You can mess with assumptions and see how it projects out the population of any country/continent/the globe (based on 2024 data and trends).
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
Especially with modern medical care and support, it's relatively low risk (assuming you are of an healthy young age without prior conditions).
Pregnancy is not classified as a disease and within a year the body recovers quickly (Tokophobia exists however).
Low risk of death, sure. But ripping pelvic floor and getting diabetes is not a low risk.
"Associations between number of children, age at becoming a parent, and dementia risk were similar for both sexes. Lifestyle and socioeconomic factors are more likely to explain the observed associations than normal pregnancy-related physiological changes."
Caring for elderly depends on the role of family in society. In my country family still plays a huge role so having no direct descendants has it's impact.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-tr...
I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
This would also solve the "competition" problem, because it would tend to equalize wages.
Sudden changes cause too much chaos, and you don't always know what works until you try it. Avoiding entitlement abuse is always going to be part of the conversation, and it seems to me the fix for this (and nearly any other issue) needs to be approached carefully from both the supply and demand sides until what's effective is more clear.
The same thought formed in my head listening to that the other day. He even talked about how, as an independent contractor with his own business, he couldn't hire help. He refuses to pay undocumented immigrants under the table (kudos to him), and recognizes that hiring people legitimately would raise his costs too high above the competition. But then he latches onto the idea of deporting the immigrants instead of punishing businesses violating labor laws.
It's not that he apologized for the shady business owners. He didn't seem to ever consider it an option.
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
The key is always internal, personal, once you right yourself, the world starts feeling much better.
* kids are and were always born in severely underdeveloped places like Africa and during hard times like famines or wars
* worldwide in the last 100 years and maybe throughout all history the education level and social freedom of woman severely impacts her fertility
Draw your own conclusions about the causes and solutions of the demographic problem
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
Yes, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
https://baptistnews.com/article/remember-the-first-goal-of-p...
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead, downward. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
The hope is that this drag will either generate higher cash flows later (i.e money spent on education now will allow them to create value for economy later) or reduce outflows later (i.e a child that gets braces and dental health care now won't spend their whole adult life dealing with teeth issues on taxpayer's dime).
For illegal immigrants though? They are not regularized to the C-suite but to Uber Eats and construction work.
Why have Danes turned against immigration?
...
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
...
2015 | 1.83
2016 | 1.80
2017 | 1.75
2018 | 1.71
2019 | 1.68
2020 | 1.62
2021 | 1.63
2022 | 1.67
2023 | 1.62
2024 | 1.62
2025 | 1.62
2026 | 1.61
Politizacion of long term trend wont help here.
Perhaps we can try and take care of each other, and many other things will show signs of improving? There needs to be more access to things like healthcare, childcare, education, entertainment, leisure, arts, recreation, and so much more. There needs to be more love in our societies and the numbers that indicate well-being will follow. After all, what is the point of all of this? To get a promotion?
Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).
Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
Why would you expect income increases to track productivity gains?
In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
If there is such a labour shortage, what explains the layoffs?
Also the lack of knowledge about the existence of the fantastic and generous H-2A visa for farm workers is maddening.
The stipulations are incredibly generous with unlimited renewals though have to leave the country for 60 days every 3 years.
There's also a pathway to citizenship for specializations in agriculture such as the dairy industry. And they can bring family members too. It's an uncapped program too.
At least on paper it's an incredibly generous visa compared to other types of visas with more restrictions for family sponsorship and immigration.
I agree it's expensive though, that's a big reason why there so many illegal immigrant farm workers. A few reforms and that can be legalized through H-2A
Why a debate - we are not allowing enough immigrants, VISA class is just hiding that fact.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
Take a look at the fertility rates and population growth rates in African countries.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.