No Babies? Blame Capitalism
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
It's not just rich places that are becoming less fertile.
"Demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions." - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise...
Any efforts to improve socioeconomic systems to make having children a more attractive economic proposition (and thereby increasing the fertility rate) will take years to implement, perhaps longer, if at all. Like a furnace warming a room, it’s getting colder faster than the thermostat can ever raise the temperature back up.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp...
Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
In the context of improving systems to make the idea of having children more palatable, my thoughts are a four-day work week, fully subsidized childcare, universal healthcare, etc. Outside of a few countries who may have some pieces of these policies, I don’t believe there’s any political appetite to implement these policies at scale.
Broadly speaking, the economic and time burden of having children in the current macro is simply too high for many. They are luxury good.
US data: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
Of course this fact isn't mentioned in the article.
I will say, one of the very few things that the Soviet communists should receive credit for is indeed their rejection of traditional social norms. Equality for women was much further along on the other side of the Iron curtain. Women became doctors sooner. Women became professors sooner. Etc. That was definitely a Soviet achievement. True.
But something this article really tries to downplay: this didn't stop fertility rate from falling fast. It just took slightly longer before it started falling. Slightly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Women_Have_Better_Sex_Unde...
> an economic system predicated on individual autonomy and naked self-interest whose incentives run counter to child-rearing
A free market is just the natural state of things which reflects what people want vs the reality of resource constraints. For example, even in communist societies there will always be a (underground) free market.
Blame capitalism, but the real estate part.
Real estate: there's not enough of it, new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit. Young people without families optimize for themselves and continually are willing to compromise for less space for the same money but minimum_space(single) << minimum_space(family+kids)
So new construction, particularly large apartment building have few to no units that anyone could actually raise a family in and trend towards "studio" concrete cylinders.
Places with more space are zoned for exclusive residential and are thus tremendously boring.
Mixed use places are full of vacant commercial space because lowering the rent would trigger property revaluation and the places that aren't vacant are tremendously expensive because of the large amount that has to go to paying the rent ... or paying their low-to-middle income employees who spent half their income on rent.
All of this money is getting sucked out of the economy into A) people who want real estate income without working and B) the financial system giving them loans.
Nobody wants kids because they have to chose between expensive housing where it's boring and extremely expensive housing where it's not. Just furthering the generation on generation the young paying for the previous generations real estate "investment" growth.
Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit
Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service.
And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.
There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much.
I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins
> the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".
> Jacobin
Oh, you can go way further to the left of Jacobin.
I’m always skeptical of media with an obvious institutional slant of any kind. Sometimes that’s true even if it’s a slant I kind of agree with.
Kind of narrows the media pool though. Most media these days is there to fellate someone’s existing worldview.
I do not know any actual leftists that take it seriously it mostly just serves to embarrass everyone.
Which this article basically does, at first glance. It assumes capitalism is bad for baby-rearing, doesn't really motivate why, and instead just goes East Germany had a higher birth rate than West Germany before reunification, then after reunification, it flipped, therefore capitalism causes low birth rates.
Honestly - it’s hard to find a publication that isn’t biased, or in many cases just outright wrong outside of a narrow subject matter and are ignorantly pushing someone’s propaganda because they don’t know better. The Atlantic, Economist are posted often and come to mind. I’m exaggerating slightly I’m sure Jacobian has a reason for being disdained.
Should I declare everyone who says positive things about libertarianism as "biased" and discount their points?
But the reality is, if all the excess tax money that is collected does not go to where the problems are, and is just being boarded onto a plane in a bag with 2M dollars headed to Mogadishu - then you can't blame capitalism for the mess we're in.
The reality is we need to fix all the jobs being sent to people from other countries. The stat just came out that in the last 5 years 90% of the jobs went to foreign born people. We also need to reverse the climate doomerism that's pushing people to lose faith in life in general.
Can you ask both your questions at once instead? Also please argue in good faith, the 3rd or 4th most hit topic in the last 5 months has been the amount of Fraud we've been enveloped in. To ask your original question like that reeks of disingenuity.
Just a reminder that actual adult scientists at the ACS (American Chemical Society) have calculated (for all to see) that the excess heat being trapped just over the continental USA since 1750 is about 28 500 Hiroshima bombs.
Per second, every second.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cimZGu5GadQ 11' min in.
But I suppose that we can't expect much when they've been educated by government employees.
There was never a free market, and there will never be one, as markets as such are by necessity created by central authorities.
Most people who are having kids in india are lower income people.
so i just don't understand when people say it's because of money issue, when people with comfy jobs fail to have babies, it's not about money.
Money matters but is not the primary.
The kids pick up on this lament consciously or unconsciously and realise that the more kids they will have, the worse the problem.
The "poor" people get subsidies and freebies, and the more children they have, the more sops state governments throw away at them.
I'm also told, but can't confirm it, another factor is social media pushing fancy vacations abroad spending their entire income.
1. Many men and women fear to commit to a relationship today and are increasingly remaining single, or marrying late (in their late 30's or 40's). Thus, even those who marry can't have a large family as the older you get the more fertility issues you have (along with additional anxieties of how to manage young kids when you are old).
2. For indian women in particular, it is also anxiety about loss of freedom if they can't work. Thus, even those who marry young, try to avoid having a large family as they fear it will be an impediment to their career (which means less financial freedom, and the fear of being under the "control" of a male spouse).
3. And finally there's the western capitalistic consumerism , where even spouse or a kid can be seen as an impediment to enjoying a consumerist lifestyle by the individual in their "pursuit of happiness".
The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
> Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
This. It's not some bargain-bin homo economicus thinking like the GP proposes ("Children are assets when they can help with farm work..."). It's that capitalism has evolved to squeeze the life out of everything in order to maximize short-term profits for the shareholders, and it's corrupted almost everything that stands in its way.
And with AI, there's hope that capitalism can continue unabated even after literally squeezing the population to death.
Truly the best economic system, amirite?
Of course they are, on a global scale. There is no other process than birth that can increase global population.
An inverted population either kills the old or enslaves the young.
We reached peak baby 5 years ago. There is a still a path to steady state population but that is closing fast.
Your idea is dumb. The world fertility rate is barely above replacement and dropping (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN). Do the math, it doesn't work.
Everyone that belongs to 0.1% of richest people in the society. All others get to win increased crime rates, salary stagnation and other benefits.