US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles

You can do all the crosstabs you want here: http://elections.reuters.com/#poll

The marriage gap is much bigger than the gender gap, age gap, and any socioeconomic gap. I think it falls right below the race gap in terms of size, and is probably on par with the religious/non-religious gap.

Agreed. Young people and single mothers are both very unlikely to be married and already known to hugely favor Democrats.

Assumption here being that US needs more younger people.

Let's see a couple trends here though:

1) US life expectancy is on the rise, I guess one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world is good for something.

2) Average retirement age is moving farther ahead - Reuters recently ran an article about startup founders who are 60+ y.o. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i...

3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

4) Youth unemployment is on the rise

5) Youth STEM skills, the only applicable skills that matter in current economic climate, are declining

Why does the country need large amounts of young people again? A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. Most of the youth employed at various menial jobs are earning low enough income to qualify them for tax credits, so they're not a huge revenue source.

Is this[1] the problem in Japan that you are talking about? Seems like the main idea is we had to find a way to get the banks to start lending again. The government can't open a shop and lend to small businesses themselves. What other option did we have other than to bail out the banks? Honest question. I don't know very much about these things.

[1]: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/bailout.html

The bank bailout had nothing to do with anything. This is a longer term trend.

If we are discarding of a distinction between correlation and causation, the best way to increase birth rate is to plunge the public into crippling poverty.

Indeed, the latest figures (2012, CIA World Factbook) show the United States' 13.68 births per theousand persons is still higher than most of Western Europe.

The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

Still, we might hit negative growth worldwide in about 50 years, that's going to be very interesting.

It is true that the US has had remarkebly high birth rates during the last 30 years compared to most of Europe and the rich cuntries in Asia. However, once the trend for low fertility has been established it is extremely difficult to break. Even the countries in Europe that have given strong economic incentives to have children have still not managed to keep their fatility rates at replacement level. The only exception is Ireland, which has strong anti- abortion laws. Teherefore it important of the US to confront the problem of declining fertility before it has turned into a permanent problem.

Not yet. Europe (and Japan) gives us a taste of things to come.

I wonder if this is one of the major ways (other than conversion) that the major religions of the modern world spread in the first place. After all, they all seem to emphasize having children to a great degree, something that I don't think existed in many other religions.

"Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is)"

The genetic argument should cancel itself it out. After all, if genetic factors should eventually cause people to have more children, then how is it possible for us to have a 55 year trend toward less children (as the article says, since 1957)? If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so? For you to make this argument solidly, you'd have to establish at least 1 of 2 dependent arguments:

1.) there is some critical number that triggers a reaction

2.) there was, in the past, some force that allowed people to defy the genetic impulse to have children, but whatever that force was, it will no longer have as much power in the future

Here on Hacker News I have, several times, seen people invoke the idea that child-raising is a genetic impulse and that therefore the trend toward less children should be self-correcting. The people who advance this idea don't seem to get the irony of the suggestion.

Here is a bit of personal history: my great grandmother had 16 children. My mother had 4 children. Of the 4 of us, we are mostly past the age where we would consider having children. The 4 of us have so far had a total of 3 children, and I don't think there will be any more children, so my mom has less grand-children then she had children. This surprises her.

There are some powerful forces pushing the trend towards less children. My feeling is that some people are glib in their dismissals of the trend. A poorly thought out genetic argument would fall into my category of glib.

...except for the fact that non-religiosity is spreading quite a lot faster than people can breed. Religious indoctrination runs in families, but reason and skepticism are universal.

I wouldn't count on it. Even if it were possible the genetic pool is too vast for single traits to really have an impact. Plus consider that most (if not all?) homosexuals have heterosexual parents - that is more influenced by number children, but it shows that there is more involved than just people who have the traits being selected out. Most of the biggest advocates against religion were born in religious families. Most parents regret having kids, most couples who have kids are less happy than couples who don't have kids. People wanting to be child free is here to stay and it will grow before it has any chance of being bred out. Choosing to be child free is the rational thing to do if you want to be happy. I welcome people to join more people avoiding having kids here: http://reddit.com/r/childfree

Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.

The problem is the world isn't shrinking. It's just the wealthy educated bits of it that are. So we're going to have a shrinking number of first world citizens surrounded by ever increasing numbers of the global poor.

Now, if you wipe out poverty entirely and bring everyone up to the same standard of living and education you'll probably see a shrinking global population. But that isn't happening yet and won't happen for a long time.

You can go first.

Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.) Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory.

The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future.

So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.

To pay and care for the current population.

People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.

s/Less/Fewer/; But anyway, saying things like "stupid people being brought into the world" is meaningless. That's not a birth issue, but an education one; you can argue that fewer people in the country makes education a simpler problem, but I don't know that that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Especially since birth rates for lower socioeconomic class families aren't dropping, to my knowledge, and those are the ones generally in the worst position for education.

>This is not alarming.

It's certainly alarming if you have pay-go pension schemes like Social Security and Medicare. The way things are going either the young will live under a crushing tax burden or people who paid into social welfare programs for fifty years won't see any benefit. That's not a recipe for a stable society.