I've always been curious about why wealthy(ish) individuals in free societies don't want to have (more) children.
Theoretically one would expect the opposite. Subjectively, I see individuals that would prefer to go on vacation then have children, but that is a false dichotomy- thinking that having children would reduce your quality of life or your ability to do fun things.
The artificial womb will be the great invention of whatever century. It's not a false dichotomy for women who practically get ripped in half and are never quite the same again, but are expected to stay fit. Of course birth rates go down as women start to get treated like people.
I always worry about pregnancy if I'd have a kid. Not only could you get a kid with a disability, your SO could be injured or die too. Not to mention post-partum. I knew of a woman whose sister gave birth and something happened where the birth cause a brain hemorrhage in her and she basically became a quadriplegic. Not only is it devastating for everyone involved, but essentially as the father, you're now a caregiver for two people. How the hell would you work a full time job, take care of a newborn AND your now paralyzed SO? Pregnancy is a real scary dice roll that you just hope luck stays on your side all 9 months.
And I know or heard of people in my immediate circle with serious health issues in children, it's heart breaking.
It almost feels like, people in the past just didn't know of all these risks and they just went with the flow, but knowing about all these issues, as an anxious person, certainly doesn't help one bit.
Part of me believes that it could've stemmed from people birthing at younger ages though. Since most women appear to be having children at older ages as well as men being older when they finally conceive, that could cause many of the issues as well.
Mainly economics, although it has some relation to what the parent post is talking about. Unfortunately the sexual revolution happened in the US about the same time when labor unions got fucked, labor power got diminished due to globalization/deindustrialization/automation, and people started be compensated less dollars per productivity. In an ideal world where Keyne's prediction was right, we (both genders) would work only 15 hours a week due to technological advancement and spend the rest on taking care of famliy and community (including special considerations for women on pregnancy), but it seems that these lower-working-hour dreams haven't come true. But then there's an even more insidious cultural part of neoliberalism: for an increasing number of people you're not just supposed to just do your job, you have to indulge in it to prove your self-worth to the boss, you need to advance and maintain your "career", and have to race to the bottom to get a clutch on getting a chance of moving up the social ladder (or else you're going to work at a call center or increasingly precarious part-time gig jobs). Kids are just a liability in this hyper-competitive world; no wonder why women aren't going to have kids, when every aspect of society is telling you (in indirect ways) not to.
Agree that the artificial womb is an undererstimated milestone technology that will radically change the world. But such a technological solution isn't a perfect solution for low birth rates if you take care of the fact that you still need to take care of the kids born out of these artificial wombs (even though it could radically improve women's lives).
>I see individuals that would rather go on vacation then have children, but that is a false dichotomy
Why is this a false dichotomy? Clearly having children will use up time and resources that could otherwise be used for vacations and other fun things.
I've also heard a theory that in poorer areas, children can become a status marker. So when people see no hope of climbing the socioeconomic latter, they resort to having lots of children to prove their "virility".
It is a false dichotomy because you can go on vacation with your children.
But the added cost per child is just soooo much more than any vacation.
I'd love to be able to handle a second child. I can comfortably handle the financial aspect, it is the lack of energy, lack of free time and my anxieties that prevent me from taking the plunge.
If it is visit Paris, sit at and outdoor cafe and see the Louvre. Yeah, kids don't mess with your vacation except perhaps cost.
If you want to go to raves until 5 in the morning, do drugs and drink. Yeah, kids are a no no to take.
Then there is the in-between, which depends a lot on the type of kid and activity. One week surfing big waves somewhere, maybe possible if your kid has interest and are other smaller waves around. Impossible (or at least non recommended) if kid is afraid of the water and doesn't know how to swim. etc.
You can always take them, give them an ipad and let them spend 7 days in front of it, but at that point, why take them?
I am divorced but have a kid. Vacations (travelling) are usually split in two (or three). One week with my kid at someplace that is mostly for him (beachs + waterparks + etc). A week with my gf (which can be a mix of things) and then a week for myself (usually snowboarding or surfing somewhere by myself or a group of friends). But I can do this because I am divorced, and I don't have him 100% of the time with me. If I had, I could say goodbye to 'my' week (like I did while I was married).
Certainly some things are harder/impossible with kids.
Even just strolling around or just laying in bed is harder if you have kids, unless, as you said, you give them an ipad or let them watch TV, or get a nanny.
Being a parent is taxing either on you wallet or on your energy levels, there's no way around it.
From a status perspective, the wealthier you are the more time & money it costs to have&raise children. Housing, childcare, education, etc... basically all the things that have gone up at a much higher clip than official CPI inflation calculations.
Being a wealthy person in liberal western society you are likely to live in a high cost urban setting.
Some real NYC numbers that I am sure SF is similar for.
* Housing
No kids? Rent a decent 1BR place for $3-4k/mo in any neighborhood you want.
1-2 Kids you can squeeze into a 2BR? Rent is now $6k (2-3 kids / need a 3BR make that 10k), and you are now limited to neighborhoods that are zoned for "good schools".
* Childcare? $2k/mo per kid
* Education? If your kid doesn't get tracked the way you want / you aren't zoned in the right catchment area / you have bought into the arms race - private school is $4k/mo per kid
So 0->1 kid is +$5-9k/mo
0->2 kids is +$7-15k/mo
0->3 kids is +$13-25k/mo
These are post-tax numbers so 1st kid requires +$100k of income and at the high end the 3 kids could mean needing +$500k income.
There are a lot of great cities you could cut these numbers in half, or in a quarter, but scale should be fairly similar.
Without immigration & some more conservative families, we'd probably see the same population aging/declines of Western Europe and Japan/Taiwan/Korea.
What you're describing is basically the top 1% of US households, which starts around $500k/yr income. Even in NY or SF, very very few people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on childcare and private schooling.
I'd agree there is a status/social signalling element to it - I suspect if these households didn't have children, many of them would just spend their wealth on expensive cars, clothes, vacations, or other similar luxuries.
Housing, childcare and education are three of the highest inflation categories outside of medical care. The more kids you have, the more of each you need, and the costs are basically linear.
Outside the 1% the numbers are lower, but it's obviously much harder when expressed as percentage of income.
"The average cost of providing center-based care for an infant in the U.S. is $1,230 per month. "
So on AVERAGE, having 2 kids in daycare is $30k/year nationally. For most anyone, anywhere, $30k/year is a lot of money.
Benchmarking "average 2 kids childcare cost" in state against "top 20% income after tax" in state:
Nebraska 30%
Connecticut 26%
Pennsylvania 25%
Virginia 25%
Arizona 23%
New Mexico 20%
And again this is average childcare cost vs richest 20% (who may likely spend more than average).
People lowering down the bracket closer to average income also need childcare, which is going to consume a higher percent of income.
Sometimes this means one spouse exists the workforce involuntarily to do childcare as the cost of daycare exceeds the lower paid spouses income. Other times it means less formal forms of childcare with the associated costs/risks implied.
Some happily choose to be a full-time parent, and the money does not factor in.
Look at tourist hotspots and how people behave there. A lot of people on their holidays want to drink, stay out until the wee hours of the morning, perhaps use soft drugs, etc. These are perfectly ordinary things to do on holiday, but add a child to the mix and society becomes quite disapproving. Of course children mean, for a subset of holidaymakers, no chance to do what they consider "fun things".
Not disagreeing, but the converse is that there's a large subset of people who feel that playing ball with a kid in a backyard, or helping a kid learn long division, is a lot more fun than partying and smoking pot. Those are the ones that are still having children.
Biologically, if a smaller subset of a species is reproducing, it's going to accelerate evolutionary pressures. Memetically, there may be a parallel cultural effect.
In recent years, there have been a lot of articles that aim to remove the stigma around regretting one's children. Women feel pressured to pretend that they love their children so much and think life is better with them, even when deep inside they wish they had never had them. So, even if that subset of people ends up having kids, it doesn’t necessarily mean evolutionary pressure towards people actually liking those kids and the activities done with them, and the subsequent generation may end up being anti-natalist regardless.
> but the converse is that there's a large subset of people who feel that playing ball with a kid in a backyard, or helping a kid learn long division, is a lot more fun than partying and smoking pot.
No, honestly there is not. Even including people who don't party hard and never take drugs. Kids can be rewarding in their own way, but help with homework nor backyard ball kicking with small child are not those rewarding moments if you do them regularly. They can be fun if you engage with kid once in few months, then it is pleasant change. But regularly, not so much.
Educated people have low birth rates. China and Russia are not Liberal states and their birth rates are very low as well.
Covid-19 has caused millions of births to be avoided and birth rates have fallen out of bed. Demographers are constantly lowering their population projections and are still vastly overestimating the 2050 population.
I think it's more access to quality healthcare. No longer do you have to have as many kids as possible to be sure you'll get over the hill of the childhood mortality rate. Our healthcare system has made losing a child closer to losing a spouse rather than a simple fact of life like it once was.
Education is just a proxy for access to services like that.
Because our biology relied on us wanting sex, and having no mechanism to stop kids from being produced from sex? Whether you want kids or not didn't really factor into it for the vast length of human existence.
Animal biology has a desire to copulate. That doesn't necessarily mean a desire to reproduce per se. Modern birth control lets human beings copulate all they want to satisy those urges without the reproduction part.
I think I saw a research saying that people today have less sex than previous generations had. So, there is still a part that needs to be answered. (I suspect smartphones and social networks.)
Do we have some moral obligation to follow our base biological desires? Humans also used to be much more aggressive to strangers than today. Aggression serves a biological purpose. Should we consider today's relatively passive humans an aberration?
I think some of the "never want children" is sour grapes at not being able to afford to do it and have the life they want in other ways, particularly for women.
Women not required to get married to have a successful life anymore is more likely the actual culprit. Objectively, women's rights and egalitarian opportunities makes it easier for them not to have to get married to survive or rely on others. Marriage is most likely the #1 way low value males back in the day could've had kids. Now they're essentially not able to have kids and more people are ending up single.
I'm not a traditionalist, pro-marriage, or even religious. The long term cultural effects spanning all cultures show that when both sexes have close to equal rights, birth rates drop.
I don't think that's it, since women aren't also required to get married to have children anymore either. It also doesn't account for childless couples, or the lower rate of having children even among those who have children as you go up the socio-economic ladder.
Big tech offers egg freezing. This means you don't have to sacrifice your career. It is a nice benefit, but why can't we instead support young mothers at work?
> The long term cultural effects spanning all cultures show that when both sexes have close to equal rights, birth rates drop.
I haven't thought of it this way. I still think lack of poverty is a bigger predictor, but it's interesting the outliers are countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Iraq. [0] (babies per woman vs. income level)
For quite a while, thanks to the One Child Policy. The birth rate has about about 1.6 babies/woman since about 1990. It's been creeping up, but the current generation got used to the idea of one child per family. In addition, living in the cities is really expensive, and the hukou system means your kid is only guaranteed education in your hometown. I think you can often pay a fee, but I'm not sure, and in any case, it living is already expensive enough.
I wouldn't necessarily credit (blame?) mainland China's One Child policy for that. Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea have even lower total fertility rates.
An American traveler in rural Sichuan, while on the road, found himself speaking to a local family. A few members of the family were present: A husband and wife, and their youngest child, a daughter.
The couple explained that their house had been torn down as punishment for violating the one child policy. This, evidently, is a real punishment that is used. They said they knew it might happen but intentionally tried to have a child anyway, and were delighted, despite everything, when they learned they were pregnant. That was how badly they wanted a daughter. This was the little girl who was now with them.
The girl was present while they told the story of the demolished house. She heard every word. She had no doubt heard the story before. And she had a striking look on her face.
I think liberal is rather a label, a brand to have something to be proud of. Actually our societies are very opressive. We have to function as expected at all times. As a parent I can tell you this is impossible. Toiling along and working through live and spending money on meaningless stuff is the new meaning of life. There's precious few headroom to have children. You can't have them or can't afford them.
It's also an expression of choice and priorities. Every child is a new person that really exists, that can experience the world and continue to live forever in the love of God.
If you think this is oppressive, you ought to try living in a society that's actually oppressive.
> We have to function as expected at all times.
No, we don't. (I mean, yes, we do to the degree necessary to keep a job and not get arrested. Other than that, though, no.) Nothing is forcing you to "function as expected at all times" except your bowing to others' expectations for you.
> Toiling along and working through live and spending money on meaningless stuff is the new meaning of life.
Only if you make it so. As it sounds like you have figured out, there's no actual meaning there. Don't keep chasing down that dead end; you won't find anything there.
That misses the point. Someone being off worse doesn't mean I am fine. Being comparably fine doesn't mean I have to sit in silence and wait until it is bad enough so that I am allowed to say something. I absolutely agree that others are off way worse than I am.
I figured it out. But it doesn't help. Economically I am forced to function. No work no money. I need a certain amount of money to sustain a reasonable level of family life. I like it simple. But still - I must function.
There's a lot of high minded philosophizing in the piece including the notion that not having children is some kind of subconscious death wish of liberal modernity, but I want to propose a much simpler answer, what if people have fewer children simply because they want to, with no deep sinister ideological underpinning?
It's not like people in impoverished nations have half a dozen children because of some deep intrinsic philosophical vitality, they have that many children because family is both social security and primary source of labour. In 'liberal' societies, but more accurately to say is developed societies (because the trend is the same in Japan and China etc), investing more resources in fewer kids is what pays off, and all material reasons aside grants more freedom to women in particular.
The whole tone of discussions about low birth rates always contains this implicit assumption that there's anything wrong with it. My spouse and I also don't want kids, and it's not because we're doing coke every weekend and can't wait to die, it's because we never felt like we wanted kids, and only in recent times do people actually have the kind of liberty to live that way.
> what if people have fewer children simply because they want to
> The whole tone of discussions about low birth rates always contains this implicit assumption that there's anything wrong with it
First, only certain societies have only recently arrived at a value that there is nothing wrong with having more kids. Traditionally, having babies and raising them was considered to be of utmost importance.
Second, it still is of utmost importance given how our societies are structured. You want to work until your 60's, then retire and live until mid-80's? Fine. But who is going to work/pay for your food, entertainment, healthcare, security and general societal infrastructure? All those things need humans which you are not going to raise.
So "developed" societies seem to convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with not having babies, while at the same time utterly reliant on "underdeveloped" societies to import people from.
> investing more resources in fewer kids is what pays off
How do you plan to balance Social Security and budget with fewer people working?
I think the most straight-forward answer is that the working age needs to be raised, budgets need to be balanced, people need to be self-reliant and responsible for their own future, and if all else fails we have a safety net.
I don't actually think that retiring at 60 is reasonable in a society like this, but I also don't think this is a huge problem because many people don't want to retire that early, myself included. In a society with fewer kids we'll need to plan ahead more, but we also are much more productive, so I don't see this as a problem, and most importantly not in conflict with liberalism.
Subjecting personal choice about how many kids to have to welfare debates or population planning to me is the opposite of liberalism if anything.
I hate this narrative of "a pyramid scheme was set up by people who were bad at math and/or knew they would be dead before the consequences hit; now you must produce babies to feed the monster they created".
There are so many other ways of stabilizing retirement systems. If by "Social Security" you specifically mean the US system, there is this interesting fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... "If workers and employers each paid 7.6% (up from today's 6.2%), it would eliminate the financing gap altogether." (Also, the payroll ceiling is ridiculously low, and why does it even exist anyway?)
>(Also, the payroll ceiling is ridiculously low, and why does it even exist anyway?)
Political support. Currently social security is framed as a forced retirement plan. You pay into it while you're working and once you're retired, your payout is roughly proportional to what you've paid in. If you change it to something resembling transfer payments (ie. what you put in is unlimited but what you get back is fixed) republican support will evaporate.
Social security's solvency depends on a continuous flow of immigrants to the US, which proves my point. Also, that is one aspect. There are multiple others where US depends heavily on immigrant labor (eg. agriculture industry heavily dependent on illegal immigrants). You also need young workers for other functions of the society. If everyone decides not to have babies, then societies have a very precarious future.
> Social security's solvency depends on a continuous flow of immigrants to the US
If social security depends on a continuous stream of new suckers who pay into the system, then by definition it is a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are inherently broken. Births and immigration can prop the system up for now, but the longer we do that the more painful the inevitable crash will be. (Painful for the new suckers, of course. Not "our" problem!)
The only way to fix this is to move away from a system that assumes that exponential growth forever is possible on a finite Earth.
If I founded a financial services company offering a retirement fund advertised as "pay in a little, get more out, and don't worry about how that can work as long as we can get new suckers to pay out those who came first", I would be in prison in no time. Rightly so. Let's not pretend that governments can make this work. I'm about as governments friendly as they come, but math says no.
I mean, this is why we’ve gone from defined benefit to defined contribution.
The problem is that we kind of foisted retirement planning onto individuals without some prerequisite level of financial security, so now you have people working into their old age because their math didn’t work out in the end.
> There are so many other ways of stabilizing retirement systems. If by "Social Security" you specifically mean the US system, there is this interesting fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... "If workers and employers each paid 7.6% (up from today's 6.2%), it would eliminate the financing gap altogether." (Also, the payroll ceiling is ridiculously low, and why does it even exist anyway?)
But the ultimate problem isn't lack of money, it's lack of labor. If you have a shrinking labor pool, increasing prices will neutralize any extra money you tuck away. Labor productivity increases may compensate for this to a degree, but that won't happen evenly, and perhaps not happen in some areas retirees particularly need.
> Money also has one problem that grain does not, which is bound up in the way prices work in agricultural societies. The risks the farming family most wants to insulate themselves against, whether caused by war or harvest failure, are risks that involve a contracting food supply. The thing is, as the food supply contracts, the price of food rises and the ability to buy it with money shrinks (often accelerated by food hoarding by the wealthy cities, which are often in a position to back that up with force as the administrative centers of states). Consequently, for the family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Have you ever held a job at a moderately large corporation or government? A lot of people do very little at work a lot of the time. There are a lot of jobs we don't really need done (“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy” - I have a lot of relatives working in medicine and this is acutely apparent in that field). The first thing any populist politician promises to get elected is that they will create more jobs.
I believe the truth is that there isn't so much work that needs to be done as to require a large % of society to work 40+ hours a week. It's mostly a fiction because of beliefs like "people need something to do" or that "welfare=handouts, we can have people freeriding".
The better fix for social security is to uncap the tax (and benefits, though at least one additional bend point would make sense) and apply it to all (not only labor) income.
The pyramid scheme is physics, not policy. In traditional societies, young workers took care of their elderly parents. Social Security is just an abstraction over that process. At the end of the day, old people aren’t saving cans of food to put away for retirement. People have to make the goods and services old people consume.
Yeah. If someone doesn't have kids, they're basically dying alone in terrible conditions or even homeless when they get dementia.
If someone is an only child and doesn't have kids, their genes and their family dies with them.
In all honesty, to me, someone who doesn't want kids is inherently signaling that they're a loser in the game of life. All of the dumb people will have a million kids and displace them if they do that, Idiocracy-style.
In all honesty, to me, someone who doesn't want kids is inherently signaling that they're a loser in the game of life.
So what do the winners of that game win? If the prize of winning the game of life is that your death will be less horrible, well... what fucking awful prizes this game has.
Why are offspring the only worthwhile outcome of having lived a life?
To me it's not particularly important whose genes get propagated. I just want to see humanity improve and produce great outcomes. Sure it is an OK method to try to have offspring with my own values, but it's not the only way I can contribute.
Also, liberal societies (correlated with higher income societies) have a higher opportunity and actual costs associated with having kids. Potential loss of income and cost of raising kids arw both significantly higher than in lower income societies.
It's not a death wish for you and your spouse. It's a death wish for society as a whole (anthropomorphized).
For you and your spouse, sure, have kids, don't have kids, nobody cares either way. Do whatever floats your boat. But if the society as a whole consistently doesn't have kids, then the society as a whole is headed to be replaced by a different society that does have kids.
Sure, if it goes on without end then a society will go extinct. That idea leans heavily on nervous extrapolation. It's like the people who saw a few decades of rapid population growth and imagined apocalyptic fiction like Soylent Green or The Population Bomb in response.
Japan was early to demographic contraction. The UN estimates that its population will shrink to 85 million by the year 2100 if things keep going on like this [1]. That would be about the same as its population in the early 1950s [2]. Is that considered dangerously underpopulated?
I understand the argument that it's risky not having enough healthy young workers to take care of the aged. But an ever-wider population pyramid just delays the problem and makes its absolute magnitude greater.
There are a few ways to theoretically deal with the needs of the old without continual population growth:
- Let them go without. People would die sooner after they become unable to work. A decades-long "retirement" period later in life would be unusual. This was the pre-industrial norm. (Not a good option, but the default!)
- Increase the health span of people so that they can continue to take care of themselves later in life. This could be currently science-fictional projects like Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or just instilling healthy habits to prevent diabetes, reduce cancer risk, maintain muscle mass and heart health, et cetera [3]. An elder-heavy but otherwise healthy population places fewer demands on younger people than elderly long time smokers, drinkers, or diabetics.
- Deliver medical care and other support services with more machines, less human labor. This is also a bit science fictional but at least takes advantages of existing trends. Environmental alterations can also make it easier for elderly people to continue to perform routine self-care tasks like cooking and bathing.
[3] I'm not sure if it is more outlandish to hope that medical interventions will prevent debilitation by old age or that people will adopt healthy habits en masse.
The goal should be a relatively stable population in the long run. But this requires an average of 2.1 children per woman. Societies that get accustomed to lower-than-replacement birthdates do not come back from it.
> My spouse and I also don't want kids, and it's not because we're doing coke every weekend and can't wait to die, it's because we never felt like we wanted kids
I guess Sub-Saharan Africa is the future of humanity then. Because they are the only ones who are having children.
Regardless of spins of pundits, most scientific analysis agree: its due to career demands outweighing everything in ones twenties and traditional support nets not sufficiently being compensated for with alternative support. Altought a career is a way to self deploy and actualise, and as such is great that we increasingly can, its worth balancing it out against other worthwhile ways to do it. It also has led to an economy in which its increasingly unaffordable to not have two full time workers per family. It is argued this balance is lost, and therefore birthrates suffer.
I'd love it if me and my wife could work each 50 or 60%, we in practice we can't. Employers find it unusual, it is going to cost you because governments model their financial structures on the assumption of full time work.
> Regardless of spins of pundits, most scientific analysis agree: its due to career demands outweighing everything in ones twenties and traditional support nets not sufficiently being compensated for with alternative support.
Most analyses I've seen agree it's due to nonfamily social support systems shifting economic incentives away from having children as a form of personal support insurance, which is why it isn’t more pronounced, among liberal economies, in societies with greater young adult career pressure but instead those with stronger social safety nets.
> its due to career demands outweighing everything in ones twenties and traditional support nets not sufficiently being compensated for with alternative support.
What I have seen all repeated the same thing - education and accessible birth control for women lowers the amount of children to be born. The large amount of children is pretty often a result of not having all that much choice. Raising many of them is quite difficult in reality, even if you can afford food for them.
No, I disagree. The primary reason is that we keep defining self actualisation through full time careers climbing silly ladders where you can never stall because up or out. If fulltime employment was 25hrs, and/or we wouldn't have to compete with people (mostly men because of the imbalanced parental leave in many places) being able to focus solely on work, nobody would have problems raising children's in their 20ies
It is really not just that. Having kids and staying with them means quite isolating lifestyle, pretty much anything you used to do regularly or pride yourself at being good at becomes impossible or much harder. "Anything" includes socializing with friends and having uninterrupted adult conversations about topics that are not kids. It means sport, art, hobbies, whatever you engaged with or was happy about.
It means that your life is very routine with not much happening, but little things being harder then normally (like going to shop or hike). It kind of pushes you toward passivity, because if you want to be active it gets frustrating. But, the isolation, lack of social contact and nothing interesting happening whole months were hardest for me.
People sneer about career here as if every woman was having great sky ascending career. And as if men would not liked their jobs fairly regularly. In most cases these are jobs where you get some but little sense of being good at something, but it still keeps you out of depression. Or simply a thing that keeps you having money so that you dont have count every penny every time you buy something. Or that you simply are not desperately dependent on other people.
It gets less fun, but how much, that depends a lot on how old the kids are, how far you live from your friends, what are your hobbies, whether you live near to your extended family, etc.
Sufficiently nerdy people do talk about topics that are not kids, even when their kids are playing next to them.
A small baby you can put in a child carrier and go on a walk with your friends and discuss whatever. With pre-school children, you can have a talk with your friends at the playground, while the kids are playing. The most easily you can synchronize with friends who have children in similar age; you can organize a vacation together, or go to a playground together.
And you can have some fun when the kids are at their grandparents. Or during the weekend, one parent is with kids, the other has a free day; they can switch their roles the next day.
It is definitely not as much fun as it was before. But there are ways to keep some quality moments once in a while.
I have kids. It doea not work the way to describe, because they interrupt you too often for the discussion. Second reason is that their interruptions prevent serious engagement with ... pretty much anything and so your ability to talk about those things go down as well.
Fourth, you are not exposed to adults as much - you spend overwhelming majority of your time alone. That in turn makes people much more tiring when you meet them once in a while.
Fifth, you have competely different lifestyle then people who dont have kids of the same age. They dont understand you when you need to talk about your issues and frustrations and most likely will just dismiss them. Over time, you will do the same to them as you cease to understand their lifestyles.
Then again, people with same age kids that are around are very often having completely different interests and values, so taking about kids is the single one thing you have in common.
> one parent is with kids, the other has a free day; they can switch their roles the next day.
Yes this helps to keep sanity. But not that this is little bit of time where you want to pack everything - sport, socialization, professional learning, hobby fun. Prior kids, you engage in all of these multiple times a week. You literally socialize all the time in work, m whether you want it or not.
Once a week is not enough time nor enouh frequency to be good at something. It means to won't have feeling of personal achievement for a lot of time.
I mean, I see it the most clearly as kids get more independent and I see how much easier everything is becoming. I have seen how tiring people were when I came back to work and how difficult and tiring communication was at first. I think it took over year to get comfortable again and two years to build ability to have friends again.
> The primary reason is that we keep defining self actualisation through full time careers climbing silly ladders where you can never stall because up or out.
Very few careers paths are up or out. It's definitely a choice to go on one of them.
We managed somehow for 5000 years. The constraints that you highlight are entirely a construct of our ostensible 'modern life'. They are self imposed. There's no reason we can't live a high standard of living with 1 person working (though 50% time might work well enough in some disciplines).
I think that whereas little has changed for men, it's mostly influenced by women. In today's society women are encouraged to develop their careers, stay single and have fun through their 20s which is when their fertility is declining while at the same time their standards are rising. There are millions of high achieving single women in their 30s that cannot find a partner because of hypergamy. A few decades of liberalism cannot erase millions of years of evolution.
I've tried and failed many times to explain this phenomenon to women and I can't get it through. Everything these women do that makes them believe their relationship desirability and thus standards in men has increased (education, career) is actually decreasing their relationship desirability (they're older and have less time and energy to devote to family).
That's great that women are doing what they want to do, but they also need to accept that when it comes to dating the 30s high achiever ranks far below the mid 20s waitress who wants to be a full-time homemaker and adjust their standards in men accordingly.
Interesting that those women struggle to understand your point that they deserves less for prioritizing their own livelihoods during a crucial part of their career rather than meeting HN neckbeard standards of “desirability.”
This isn’t hard, people are having less children because the economy is crumbling. Even people with moderately stable jobs are afraid to risk that security by having children.
"This isn’t hard, people are having less children because the economy is crumbling. "
Overwhelmingly people are having less children because 'birth control'. This is a giant social change that we don't remotely talk enough about.
'Sex' 50 years ago meant 'pregnancy'.
Our current social mores would not remotely be possible without effective and fairly widespread birth control.
80% of our young girls would be pregnant by 21.
Secondarily - social change and the aspirations of both young men and women.
" the economy is crumbling"
? COVID aside, what do you mean by 'crumbling'? GDP per capita is rising, unemployment is historically very low, and in reality 'real wages' are actually doing ok. The purchasing power of working class people in 2020 is considerably greater than 50 years ago. Walmart, my god man, that store alone has changed everything. The stuff you an buy, for the prices, it's just shocking.
Economic factors are important - for example, in Quebec they've instituted $5/day day care and that has actually moved the needle.
But our choice to have 2 jobs is very much that - a choice. We could have more kids and different kinds of lives. Real estate would be cheaper, but homes would probably be a little less nice, we'd eat out less and have slightly less stuff.
Offending people who express an opinion does not make the opinion wrong.
I heard this idea first from a woman. A friend of mine complained that when she was 20 years old, every man's head turned to her when she entered the room; but when she was 30 years old, her date's head turned when a 20 years old woman entered the room. On intellectual level she already kinda knew this could happen, but it still hurt a lot emotionally when it actually happened.
Hiding this information from young women is not necessarily helping them.
The problem with career is that for many people it is exciting at the beginning, but becomes a chore after a few years... with no end in sight. This also should be more emphasized to young people (of both genders). Enjoy the work while it's fun, but save as much money as you can for the years when it stops being fun, and think twice about sacrificing things for a career... or you might give up something you desire for something you will hate.
Oh, another thing young people of both genders should be told, is the ageism they will face in the second half of their careers. As another example of how the first impression of the "career" is not a representative one.
Suppose the mid 20s waitress finds a guy who marries her... and divorces her a few years later. Is she in a better position now? Now she is in mid 30s, with no money, no job experience, and a child -- that doesn't work well neither at job market nor at dating market.
I am not disagreeing with you here; just saying that traditional strategies worked more reliably in traditional environment. I wanted to add that today they probably work well among religious people... but then I remembered a few divorced religious people I know.
If the society stayed the same way it is now for a few centuries (which is unlikely to happen; either we get full automation, or we run out of oil), new traditions would probably develop, better fit to the new conditions.
In my opinion, the lesson that many middle-class people miss today, is that just because you have money to spend, you should not spend it all. I would recommend that people who don't have children yet, save 50% of their income, if they can afford it. Because that means that when two such people marry, they can now live on 100% of one income, keep exactly the same economical level they are used to, and have as many children as they want to.
I assume the real reason for low birth rates is the combination: some people don't want to have kids, some people would like to have more kids but they can't afford to. Having the former would not be a problem, if the latter could compensate for it; for one pair without kids, another pair would have 4, and everyone would be happy.
Of course most people are not making 'children decisions' around national or ideological objectives.
And yes, it's possible to be 'overly concerned'.
But there is something to be said about a species that doesn't replace itself, that's an existential question.
More importantly: the rate of decline is enormous in the grand scheme.
If you plot a curve of human population it trends up correlating with industrial power, education, advancement etc. - but then it hits a sudden wall and falls straight down.
If you extend the 'downward trend' of population decline outwards several decades it looks problematic.
It looks like an extinction event.
For context, if you care one bit about the 'greater good' and humanity, life etc. beyond your own life, then you'll likely have some degree of concern about 'extinction' or evaporation of people, culture, knowledge wisdom.
People that do have a sense of 'greater good' would naturally have some anxiety over this.
I think you're being overly dramatic. Humans will not go extinct due to this apparent drop in birthrate. If we lost 10% of the world population every 50 years for 500 years straight, we'd still have one third the current population. I.e. billions of people. I.e. more than 100 years ago. I see no reason to feel anxiety for our species. I'd recommend reserving that for the rest of earth's species.
Losing 2/3 of the population over 500 years is the blink of an eye in historical terms.
The issues is the speed but also the 'leveling out' threshold, i.e. if it drives downward, what's to say that won't stop.
Finally, we have 'many cultures' on this planet, and most will go extinct at that rate, and we really don't know what an ideal situation would be for population on Planet Earth.
Remember we want to build in some petty heavy safety factors into the numbers as risk mitigation.
We literally just took hold of the reproductive process over the last few decades - this is a very big deal, like getting fire from Prometheus, and the first thing we've done with it is put ourselves on a hard downward slope. That's scary unless we know where that equilibrium will land.
> Losing 2/3 of the population over 500 years is the blink of an eye in historical terms.
How so? It's way slower than the population has grown in the past few centuries.
> The issues is the speed but also the 'leveling out' threshold, i.e. if it drives downward, what's to say that won't stop.
What's to say growing populations won't lead to the extinction of humanity? We can't write off that possibility just like we can't write of yours. It's all just speculation.
> Finally, we have 'many cultures' on this planet, and most will go extinct at that rate, and we really don't know what an ideal situation would be for population on Planet Earth.
Cultures seem to mainly go extinct by assimilation by others. This has largely been driven by growing populations. If anything, I think a drop in population would preserve cultures.
> Remember we want to build in some petty heavy safety factors into the numbers as risk mitigation.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
> We literally just took hold of the reproductive process over the last few decades - this is a very big deal, like getting fire from Prometheus, and the first thing we've done with it is put ourselves on a hard downward slope. That's scary unless we know where that equilibrium will land.
What does it matter if there are only 100 million people? And even that would require extreme sustained drops in population for as long as human civilization.
The current trend is such a blip on the radar that I see no reason to worry. And even if the trend holds so what? Why do we need to have so many people?
1. Both the growth in population and the current rate of decline are 'unprecedented' in velocity. They are 'spikes' like the spike we see in climate change graphs.
2. 'Growth' to the extent there are resources to grow is a positive state, 'shrinkage' even given positive conditions in which growth is possible is a much worse state, because it's never happened and implies something might be wrong - like the possibility of a social or some other kind of disease.
3. 'More' population, given resources to sustain it is at least on 1st order basis 'better' - for obvious reasons. Clearly 'more' (or even present amount) may not be ideal but you'd have to do a second order assessment there (i.e. possibility of long term exhaustion of resources etc.) - and determine ways in which it would be worse, but I don't see any really any reason to believe that 7B is 'less safe' than 500M.
In the event of a major nuclear war, it would probably be better to have more people, of more variety, in more places, in more variety of living conditions.
4. 'Safety Factors' If we could magically calculate some kind of ideal population size, we'd have to assess for all sorts of black swan events (war, famine, disease) and have ample extra population to account for those possibilities. You carry more fuel than you need to cross the Atlantic if you really want to make sure that you get all the way.
4. "What does it matter if there are only 100 million people?"
Ok - so this should have been question #1 because this is they key understanding.
Civilization is a pyramid that generates disproportionate wealth from those operating at higher levels of sophistication. Those people require the support of others doing basic work.
If there were only 1000 people on planet earth, civilization would collapse entirely, everyone would be working on the farm. Only at a certain scale would basic foodstuffs be available such that others could start working on 2cnd order things, like carpentry and basic metallurgy. Significantly more people would be required to have enough slack labour to provide for basic literacy and education. The economy would have to be even larger to start to support the most basic technological advancements.
Etc. Etc. Etc..
Given that we now have a lot of knowledge and have harnessed fossil fuels which provide at least tremendous energy, it would be possible to maintain our state of civility with less people surely, but still quite a lot, definitely more than 100M.
Our economy, which sustains our lives to very high material standards, depends upon an huge amount of sophistication and knowledge. I don't think the number for maintaining that is less than 1B and realistically, given that social systems develop at different paces, and some collapse etc. it's probably more around 2B.
Hysterical to blame "liberal Societies" when in places like the US, the GOP have made health Insurance so un-affordable with the removal of regulation (which obama at least tried to address), allowing CEOs and investors to profit from a known unfair system.
The GOP have also made sure in GOP "run" states to try and suppress worker wages while at the same time legalize owners tax breaks to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone. Its no secret how we got to where we are.
so I ask anyone, who in their right mind would have kids? Its simply becoming un-affordable to purchase a home, have kids, and health insurance and some sort of life.
Stop property speculation and REITS purchasing homes to drive up their other property investments.
Bring in socialized healthcare like in the UK (and most of the rest of the world) and stop the insane medical HI pricing (check for basics like insulin in the US compared to everywhere else, its gouging.. plain and simple.)
Every country on earth (but 2?) have birth rates asymptotically approaching just-under-replacement. This is nothing to do with politics of the sort in the title. It has to do with information and accessibility to birth control.
Socially liberal societies, in their current form, are literally not sustainable. And what sustainability they appear to have is actually propped up by socially conservative natives, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/republicans-more-kids-democra... and immigrants from socially conservative countries.
This isn’t related to modern society, necessarily. The US total fertility rate was well over 3.0 in the 1960s, but even then most women worked outside the home. It’s also not necessarily preference. The average number of children women say they want is 2.7, while the fertility rate is now well under 2.0. I strongly suspect it’s the result of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which made it socially acceptable for men not to commit to raising families.
[1] This is actually a fairly new phenomenon, appearing in the last few decades.
>which made it socially acceptable for men not to commit to raising families.
I'm sure the government assistance rules that discourage marriage (i.e. the several thousand year old stable child raising family unit) aren't stalling that trend.
Marriage as we know it probably formed to fit the needs of an agricultural society. We aren’t that any more. For hundreds of millennia before that, humans lived in small tribes, and that was natural for that environment. I don’t know yet what our post-agricultural living arrangements will turn out to be, but it might not be the nuclear family.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame the sexual revolution. There are many other relevant factors that have changed since the 60s, such as the cost of owning a home and raising kids. People are less likely to have nearby family to share childrearing responsibilities, and so on. It's likely a confluence of factors.
Where I live that sort of problem - an ever increasing housing standard - is mostly brought by the house builders to increase profits, not necessarily by the average family's new found demands. Affordable housing in decent quality and like 80m2+ would never be unoccupied in a larger (western-)European city I reckon.
> ... and immigrants from socially conservative countries.
True, they're coming from socially conservative countries. But, do those immigrants represent the socially conservative ideals of the countries they're from? In my experience, that question doesn't have a tidy answer... but my expectation is that the more liberal folk are more inclined to move to more progressive countries, and more conservative folk would rather stay put.
> I strongly suspect it’s the result of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which made it socially acceptable for men not to commit to raising families.
Isn't this just a more politically correct way of complaining about a more gender equal society?
> which made it socially acceptable for men not to commit to raising families.
Men are way more involved in their families then they used to be. Also, it is women who are more likely to initiate the divorce. It is men who seem to cry all the time about not having girlfriend, there is comparatively much less women making whole movements out of being single.
For one, this is something multiple old people I know commented on. The change in how much males interact with their kids or generally do housework. Plus, there is less social pressure to spend time after work away from familly - men after work take kids outside instead of going to drink with buddies in bowling league.
Second, sociological studies are consistent with that - fathers and husbands are more involved, do more work at home.
Plenty of discussion here about the consequences of shrinking populations (given contemporary societal paradigms), but I don’t see any discussion regarding the consequences of growing (or even static) populations amidst increasing global development (I.e. resource use). Changing tax policies, benefits, and social norms seems more feasible than conjuring resources out of thin air, no?
At “Western” levels of consumption, what percentage of the current global population is sustainable?
It's difficult to answer that as things are ever changing, ever improving, but it's probably less than half of the current global population.
At the present, the press is usually talking about all of Earth's resources being used up around August each year. If everyone used the same amount of resources as the top 10% percent we'd probably end up with that point being passed much earlier.
It's because of housing costs, urbanization and the lack of affordable childcare. In 1900 the average number of kids per family was 3.5 down from 7 in the 1800s. Now we are at 2.5 I think.
If you had/have a 40 acre farm you could afford to have 7 kids. You also might have started early. If you live in a multi-generational family you'd have had help. In a 7 kid family some of the older kids are helping raise the younger ones.
Gone are the days of the village. We need a cultural change to support a higher fertility rate with broad government economic support. I don't think America has political will to do that. This country is run by rich white millionaires. Maybe when they die off.
It's been hard enough to develop universal preK and daycare programs.
Everything listed in that article is less generous than what Germany already offers parents and yet birth rates here are still among the lowest in the world.
I don't know why this is so complicated, its birth control and abortion. People typically don't plan kids, they just happen every 3 or 4 years.
Woman now have the choice to delay child birth as long as they want. The average in my country is 30 years ago.
In the past a woman would have already been on children number 2 or three by this point.
Having a child at 40 while possible its a lot harder than 20. So you have less child bearing years remaining.
This explains everything, educated people are more likely to make sound financial choices and delay their first child. Also houses security and finance security is a large factor in abortion in my country and Korea a well studied for their low birth rate.
Their are more abortions than births in my country. I'm not making a political statement its just the situation we live in where you need two incomes just to be lower middle class.
Interestingly Chinese in my country have the most abortions followed by Indians. This is probably due to cultural reasons and not wanting to be disowned by ones parents for 'Throwing your life away'.
High taxes mean people are unable to save enough money to provide a foundation for children - to provide them with better life they had. Only motivator some countries give is child benefit, but that's only an incentive for people to whom it is a lot of money.
No way. Denmark has high taxes which finance free education, free healthcare and "child money" which every mother gets. Remove those benefits and it would be much harder economically to raise children to the same standard of care.
But you'll never get wealthy out of your hard work. I don't know about Denmark but in the UK we also have "free" healthcare but in reality you still have to go private to get cared for.
People don't want mediocre lives for their children.
We don't generally work that hard in Denmark, tbh. I lived in the UK in the late 80s and it was much harder than DK, like fight-to-survive harder. And I've also lived in a country which was even more extreme. Seriously, a benevolent social security system makes sense
Maybe to you, but this is just life to safely meet death, with knowledge you children will have the same fate. Then you realise you'll become like a farm animal under such system.
I absolutely don't live life to meet death safely. On the contrary, in the knowledge that my family will be well cared for (to a large extent), I am free to use my spare cash on stuff I think is fun.
I think it just boils down to cost-benefit analysis in most cases. My wife and I are happily married and decidedly childless.
Why is it not justified for me to ask what I get out of the massive investment that goes into having kids? I don't see kids being able to support my wife and myself when we are old or even being around physically for any kind of help whatsoever. I am hardly able to do any of that for my own parents. I don't even think it makes any sense for me to have such expectations of such payback.
We are told that we are missing out a deep satisfaction that supposedly comes from raising kids. I don't doubt this. However, all the costs that are associated with the pursuit of that intangible feeling seem to be very high.
In my country, public education infrastructure is a sham. Cost of sending a kid to a private primary school these days will set me back by around a fifth of my salary for a mediocre one. And I am definitely in the top 10 percentile in terms of purchasing power in my country.
It's quite bewildering to see some of my colleagues opt in to raising two kids and a mortgage despite that leaving them without any extra income whatsoever. They are typically 1 firing away from complete bankruptcy. I try hard not to scoff at them when they tell us we should try having kids all the while juggling desperately to make ends meet.
Honestly, I consider people who choose to have kids despite not having the financial wherewithal to ensure a wholesome upbringing for them quite irresponsible bordering on immoral. It's ok to gamble with one's own life but making that choice for another human being you choose to bring in to the world is quite reprehensible IMO.
The hand wringing over birthrates is ridiculous. Until we colonize the stars, it is impossible that human population could grow exponentially forever; birthrate decline HAD to happen sooner or later.
If we have reason to believe that continued population decline could lead to the collapse of civilization, certainly hand wringing is warranted. Such a collapse currently would require blindly extrapolating current social trends on the order of centuries, which is a fool's errand.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadTheoretically one would expect the opposite. Subjectively, I see individuals that would prefer to go on vacation then have children, but that is a false dichotomy- thinking that having children would reduce your quality of life or your ability to do fun things.
The main reasons are economical in nature.
And I know or heard of people in my immediate circle with serious health issues in children, it's heart breaking.
It almost feels like, people in the past just didn't know of all these risks and they just went with the flow, but knowing about all these issues, as an anxious person, certainly doesn't help one bit.
Agree that the artificial womb is an undererstimated milestone technology that will radically change the world. But such a technological solution isn't a perfect solution for low birth rates if you take care of the fact that you still need to take care of the kids born out of these artificial wombs (even though it could radically improve women's lives).
Why is this a false dichotomy? Clearly having children will use up time and resources that could otherwise be used for vacations and other fun things.
I've also heard a theory that in poorer areas, children can become a status marker. So when people see no hope of climbing the socioeconomic latter, they resort to having lots of children to prove their "virility".
But the added cost per child is just soooo much more than any vacation.
I'd love to be able to handle a second child. I can comfortably handle the financial aspect, it is the lack of energy, lack of free time and my anxieties that prevent me from taking the plunge.
If it is visit Paris, sit at and outdoor cafe and see the Louvre. Yeah, kids don't mess with your vacation except perhaps cost.
If you want to go to raves until 5 in the morning, do drugs and drink. Yeah, kids are a no no to take.
Then there is the in-between, which depends a lot on the type of kid and activity. One week surfing big waves somewhere, maybe possible if your kid has interest and are other smaller waves around. Impossible (or at least non recommended) if kid is afraid of the water and doesn't know how to swim. etc.
You can always take them, give them an ipad and let them spend 7 days in front of it, but at that point, why take them?
I am divorced but have a kid. Vacations (travelling) are usually split in two (or three). One week with my kid at someplace that is mostly for him (beachs + waterparks + etc). A week with my gf (which can be a mix of things) and then a week for myself (usually snowboarding or surfing somewhere by myself or a group of friends). But I can do this because I am divorced, and I don't have him 100% of the time with me. If I had, I could say goodbye to 'my' week (like I did while I was married).
Certainly some things are harder/impossible with kids.
Even just strolling around or just laying in bed is harder if you have kids, unless, as you said, you give them an ipad or let them watch TV, or get a nanny.
Being a parent is taxing either on you wallet or on your energy levels, there's no way around it.
* Housing
No kids? Rent a decent 1BR place for $3-4k/mo in any neighborhood you want. 1-2 Kids you can squeeze into a 2BR? Rent is now $6k (2-3 kids / need a 3BR make that 10k), and you are now limited to neighborhoods that are zoned for "good schools".
* Childcare? $2k/mo per kid
* Education? If your kid doesn't get tracked the way you want / you aren't zoned in the right catchment area / you have bought into the arms race - private school is $4k/mo per kid
So 0->1 kid is +$5-9k/mo
0->2 kids is +$7-15k/mo
0->3 kids is +$13-25k/mo
These are post-tax numbers so 1st kid requires +$100k of income and at the high end the 3 kids could mean needing +$500k income.
There are a lot of great cities you could cut these numbers in half, or in a quarter, but scale should be fairly similar.
Without immigration & some more conservative families, we'd probably see the same population aging/declines of Western Europe and Japan/Taiwan/Korea.
I'd agree there is a status/social signalling element to it - I suspect if these households didn't have children, many of them would just spend their wealth on expensive cars, clothes, vacations, or other similar luxuries.
Outside the 1% the numbers are lower, but it's obviously much harder when expressed as percentage of income.
2 interesting links: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/20/income-it-ta... https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/child-care-...
"The average cost of providing center-based care for an infant in the U.S. is $1,230 per month. " So on AVERAGE, having 2 kids in daycare is $30k/year nationally. For most anyone, anywhere, $30k/year is a lot of money.
Benchmarking "average 2 kids childcare cost" in state against "top 20% income after tax" in state:
Nebraska 30%
Connecticut 26%
Pennsylvania 25%
Virginia 25%
Arizona 23%
New Mexico 20%
And again this is average childcare cost vs richest 20% (who may likely spend more than average).
People lowering down the bracket closer to average income also need childcare, which is going to consume a higher percent of income.
Sometimes this means one spouse exists the workforce involuntarily to do childcare as the cost of daycare exceeds the lower paid spouses income. Other times it means less formal forms of childcare with the associated costs/risks implied.
Some happily choose to be a full-time parent, and the money does not factor in.
Biologically, if a smaller subset of a species is reproducing, it's going to accelerate evolutionary pressures. Memetically, there may be a parallel cultural effect.
No, honestly there is not. Even including people who don't party hard and never take drugs. Kids can be rewarding in their own way, but help with homework nor backyard ball kicking with small child are not those rewarding moments if you do them regularly. They can be fun if you engage with kid once in few months, then it is pleasant change. But regularly, not so much.
Covid-19 has caused millions of births to be avoided and birth rates have fallen out of bed. Demographers are constantly lowering their population projections and are still vastly overestimating the 2050 population.
Education is just a proxy for access to services like that.
There has to be some kind of underlying reason why humans are going against what we would expect our biology to want, which is to reproduce.
I'm not a traditionalist, pro-marriage, or even religious. The long term cultural effects spanning all cultures show that when both sexes have close to equal rights, birth rates drop.
However, do we tell single men/women who just can't get married to pick up the married peoples slack?
I haven't thought of it this way. I still think lack of poverty is a bigger predictor, but it's interesting the outliers are countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Iraq. [0] (babies per woman vs. income level)
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$marker$axis_y$which=...
When, the last year?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
An American traveler in rural Sichuan, while on the road, found himself speaking to a local family. A few members of the family were present: A husband and wife, and their youngest child, a daughter.
The couple explained that their house had been torn down as punishment for violating the one child policy. This, evidently, is a real punishment that is used. They said they knew it might happen but intentionally tried to have a child anyway, and were delighted, despite everything, when they learned they were pregnant. That was how badly they wanted a daughter. This was the little girl who was now with them.
The girl was present while they told the story of the demolished house. She heard every word. She had no doubt heard the story before. And she had a striking look on her face.
You might call it pride.
Educated people with access to modern medicine have low birthrates. New England was well educated from 1650-1800, but the birth rate was still high.
Low birth rates in Norway or the Congo are a net gain, they cannot be 'dangerous'. Unless, of course, you are a nationalist, racist or religious nuts.
> We have to function as expected at all times.
No, we don't. (I mean, yes, we do to the degree necessary to keep a job and not get arrested. Other than that, though, no.) Nothing is forcing you to "function as expected at all times" except your bowing to others' expectations for you.
> Toiling along and working through live and spending money on meaningless stuff is the new meaning of life.
Only if you make it so. As it sounds like you have figured out, there's no actual meaning there. Don't keep chasing down that dead end; you won't find anything there.
I figured it out. But it doesn't help. Economically I am forced to function. No work no money. I need a certain amount of money to sustain a reasonable level of family life. I like it simple. But still - I must function.
I love being a dad.
It's not like people in impoverished nations have half a dozen children because of some deep intrinsic philosophical vitality, they have that many children because family is both social security and primary source of labour. In 'liberal' societies, but more accurately to say is developed societies (because the trend is the same in Japan and China etc), investing more resources in fewer kids is what pays off, and all material reasons aside grants more freedom to women in particular.
The whole tone of discussions about low birth rates always contains this implicit assumption that there's anything wrong with it. My spouse and I also don't want kids, and it's not because we're doing coke every weekend and can't wait to die, it's because we never felt like we wanted kids, and only in recent times do people actually have the kind of liberty to live that way.
> The whole tone of discussions about low birth rates always contains this implicit assumption that there's anything wrong with it
First, only certain societies have only recently arrived at a value that there is nothing wrong with having more kids. Traditionally, having babies and raising them was considered to be of utmost importance.
Second, it still is of utmost importance given how our societies are structured. You want to work until your 60's, then retire and live until mid-80's? Fine. But who is going to work/pay for your food, entertainment, healthcare, security and general societal infrastructure? All those things need humans which you are not going to raise.
So "developed" societies seem to convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with not having babies, while at the same time utterly reliant on "underdeveloped" societies to import people from.
> investing more resources in fewer kids is what pays off
How do you plan to balance Social Security and budget with fewer people working?
I don't actually think that retiring at 60 is reasonable in a society like this, but I also don't think this is a huge problem because many people don't want to retire that early, myself included. In a society with fewer kids we'll need to plan ahead more, but we also are much more productive, so I don't see this as a problem, and most importantly not in conflict with liberalism.
Subjecting personal choice about how many kids to have to welfare debates or population planning to me is the opposite of liberalism if anything.
There are so many other ways of stabilizing retirement systems. If by "Social Security" you specifically mean the US system, there is this interesting fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... "If workers and employers each paid 7.6% (up from today's 6.2%), it would eliminate the financing gap altogether." (Also, the payroll ceiling is ridiculously low, and why does it even exist anyway?)
Political support. Currently social security is framed as a forced retirement plan. You pay into it while you're working and once you're retired, your payout is roughly proportional to what you've paid in. If you change it to something resembling transfer payments (ie. what you put in is unlimited but what you get back is fixed) republican support will evaporate.
If social security depends on a continuous stream of new suckers who pay into the system, then by definition it is a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are inherently broken. Births and immigration can prop the system up for now, but the longer we do that the more painful the inevitable crash will be. (Painful for the new suckers, of course. Not "our" problem!)
The only way to fix this is to move away from a system that assumes that exponential growth forever is possible on a finite Earth.
If I founded a financial services company offering a retirement fund advertised as "pay in a little, get more out, and don't worry about how that can work as long as we can get new suckers to pay out those who came first", I would be in prison in no time. Rightly so. Let's not pretend that governments can make this work. I'm about as governments friendly as they come, but math says no.
The problem is that we kind of foisted retirement planning onto individuals without some prerequisite level of financial security, so now you have people working into their old age because their math didn’t work out in the end.
But the ultimate problem isn't lack of money, it's lack of labor. If you have a shrinking labor pool, increasing prices will neutralize any extra money you tuck away. Labor productivity increases may compensate for this to a degree, but that won't happen evenly, and perhaps not happen in some areas retirees particularly need.
I'm reminded of this:
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...:
> Money also has one problem that grain does not, which is bound up in the way prices work in agricultural societies. The risks the farming family most wants to insulate themselves against, whether caused by war or harvest failure, are risks that involve a contracting food supply. The thing is, as the food supply contracts, the price of food rises and the ability to buy it with money shrinks (often accelerated by food hoarding by the wealthy cities, which are often in a position to back that up with force as the administrative centers of states). Consequently, for the family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most.
I believe the truth is that there isn't so much work that needs to be done as to require a large % of society to work 40+ hours a week. It's mostly a fiction because of beliefs like "people need something to do" or that "welfare=handouts, we can have people freeriding".
If someone is an only child and doesn't have kids, their genes and their family dies with them.
In all honesty, to me, someone who doesn't want kids is inherently signaling that they're a loser in the game of life. All of the dumb people will have a million kids and displace them if they do that, Idiocracy-style.
So what do the winners of that game win? If the prize of winning the game of life is that your death will be less horrible, well... what fucking awful prizes this game has.
To me it's not particularly important whose genes get propagated. I just want to see humanity improve and produce great outcomes. Sure it is an OK method to try to have offspring with my own values, but it's not the only way I can contribute.
That kinda requires that the most intelligent people do not remove themselves from the genetic pool en masse.
(So far, people who are highly intelligent and also highly religious seem to prevent that outcome.)
Happily, this kind of racist, eugenicist model is utterly disproved.
For you and your spouse, sure, have kids, don't have kids, nobody cares either way. Do whatever floats your boat. But if the society as a whole consistently doesn't have kids, then the society as a whole is headed to be replaced by a different society that does have kids.
Japan was early to demographic contraction. The UN estimates that its population will shrink to 85 million by the year 2100 if things keep going on like this [1]. That would be about the same as its population in the early 1950s [2]. Is that considered dangerously underpopulated?
I understand the argument that it's risky not having enough healthy young workers to take care of the aged. But an ever-wider population pyramid just delays the problem and makes its absolute magnitude greater.
There are a few ways to theoretically deal with the needs of the old without continual population growth:
- Let them go without. People would die sooner after they become unable to work. A decades-long "retirement" period later in life would be unusual. This was the pre-industrial norm. (Not a good option, but the default!)
- Increase the health span of people so that they can continue to take care of themselves later in life. This could be currently science-fictional projects like Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or just instilling healthy habits to prevent diabetes, reduce cancer risk, maintain muscle mass and heart health, et cetera [3]. An elder-heavy but otherwise healthy population places fewer demands on younger people than elderly long time smokers, drinkers, or diabetics.
- Deliver medical care and other support services with more machines, less human labor. This is also a bit science fictional but at least takes advantages of existing trends. Environmental alterations can also make it easier for elderly people to continue to perform routine self-care tasks like cooking and bathing.
[1] https://qz.com/1295721/the-japanese-population-is-shrinking-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Vital_st...
[3] I'm not sure if it is more outlandish to hope that medical interventions will prevent debilitation by old age or that people will adopt healthy habits en masse.
I guess Sub-Saharan Africa is the future of humanity then. Because they are the only ones who are having children.
Is it a problem if future humans' genetic makeup is more Sub-Saharan African than it is today?
I'd love it if me and my wife could work each 50 or 60%, we in practice we can't. Employers find it unusual, it is going to cost you because governments model their financial structures on the assumption of full time work.
Most analyses I've seen agree it's due to nonfamily social support systems shifting economic incentives away from having children as a form of personal support insurance, which is why it isn’t more pronounced, among liberal economies, in societies with greater young adult career pressure but instead those with stronger social safety nets.
What I have seen all repeated the same thing - education and accessible birth control for women lowers the amount of children to be born. The large amount of children is pretty often a result of not having all that much choice. Raising many of them is quite difficult in reality, even if you can afford food for them.
It means that your life is very routine with not much happening, but little things being harder then normally (like going to shop or hike). It kind of pushes you toward passivity, because if you want to be active it gets frustrating. But, the isolation, lack of social contact and nothing interesting happening whole months were hardest for me.
People sneer about career here as if every woman was having great sky ascending career. And as if men would not liked their jobs fairly regularly. In most cases these are jobs where you get some but little sense of being good at something, but it still keeps you out of depression. Or simply a thing that keeps you having money so that you dont have count every penny every time you buy something. Or that you simply are not desperately dependent on other people.
Sufficiently nerdy people do talk about topics that are not kids, even when their kids are playing next to them.
A small baby you can put in a child carrier and go on a walk with your friends and discuss whatever. With pre-school children, you can have a talk with your friends at the playground, while the kids are playing. The most easily you can synchronize with friends who have children in similar age; you can organize a vacation together, or go to a playground together.
And you can have some fun when the kids are at their grandparents. Or during the weekend, one parent is with kids, the other has a free day; they can switch their roles the next day.
It is definitely not as much fun as it was before. But there are ways to keep some quality moments once in a while.
Fourth, you are not exposed to adults as much - you spend overwhelming majority of your time alone. That in turn makes people much more tiring when you meet them once in a while.
Fifth, you have competely different lifestyle then people who dont have kids of the same age. They dont understand you when you need to talk about your issues and frustrations and most likely will just dismiss them. Over time, you will do the same to them as you cease to understand their lifestyles.
Then again, people with same age kids that are around are very often having completely different interests and values, so taking about kids is the single one thing you have in common.
> one parent is with kids, the other has a free day; they can switch their roles the next day.
Yes this helps to keep sanity. But not that this is little bit of time where you want to pack everything - sport, socialization, professional learning, hobby fun. Prior kids, you engage in all of these multiple times a week. You literally socialize all the time in work, m whether you want it or not.
Once a week is not enough time nor enouh frequency to be good at something. It means to won't have feeling of personal achievement for a lot of time.
I mean, I see it the most clearly as kids get more independent and I see how much easier everything is becoming. I have seen how tiring people were when I came back to work and how difficult and tiring communication was at first. I think it took over year to get comfortable again and two years to build ability to have friends again.
Very few careers paths are up or out. It's definitely a choice to go on one of them.
That's great that women are doing what they want to do, but they also need to accept that when it comes to dating the 30s high achiever ranks far below the mid 20s waitress who wants to be a full-time homemaker and adjust their standards in men accordingly.
This isn’t hard, people are having less children because the economy is crumbling. Even people with moderately stable jobs are afraid to risk that security by having children.
Overwhelmingly people are having less children because 'birth control'. This is a giant social change that we don't remotely talk enough about.
'Sex' 50 years ago meant 'pregnancy'.
Our current social mores would not remotely be possible without effective and fairly widespread birth control.
80% of our young girls would be pregnant by 21.
Secondarily - social change and the aspirations of both young men and women.
" the economy is crumbling"
? COVID aside, what do you mean by 'crumbling'? GDP per capita is rising, unemployment is historically very low, and in reality 'real wages' are actually doing ok. The purchasing power of working class people in 2020 is considerably greater than 50 years ago. Walmart, my god man, that store alone has changed everything. The stuff you an buy, for the prices, it's just shocking.
Economic factors are important - for example, in Quebec they've instituted $5/day day care and that has actually moved the needle.
But our choice to have 2 jobs is very much that - a choice. We could have more kids and different kinds of lives. Real estate would be cheaper, but homes would probably be a little less nice, we'd eat out less and have slightly less stuff.
Offending people who express an opinion does not make the opinion wrong.
I heard this idea first from a woman. A friend of mine complained that when she was 20 years old, every man's head turned to her when she entered the room; but when she was 30 years old, her date's head turned when a 20 years old woman entered the room. On intellectual level she already kinda knew this could happen, but it still hurt a lot emotionally when it actually happened.
Hiding this information from young women is not necessarily helping them.
The problem with career is that for many people it is exciting at the beginning, but becomes a chore after a few years... with no end in sight. This also should be more emphasized to young people (of both genders). Enjoy the work while it's fun, but save as much money as you can for the years when it stops being fun, and think twice about sacrificing things for a career... or you might give up something you desire for something you will hate.
Oh, another thing young people of both genders should be told, is the ageism they will face in the second half of their careers. As another example of how the first impression of the "career" is not a representative one.
I am not disagreeing with you here; just saying that traditional strategies worked more reliably in traditional environment. I wanted to add that today they probably work well among religious people... but then I remembered a few divorced religious people I know.
If the society stayed the same way it is now for a few centuries (which is unlikely to happen; either we get full automation, or we run out of oil), new traditions would probably develop, better fit to the new conditions.
In my opinion, the lesson that many middle-class people miss today, is that just because you have money to spend, you should not spend it all. I would recommend that people who don't have children yet, save 50% of their income, if they can afford it. Because that means that when two such people marry, they can now live on 100% of one income, keep exactly the same economical level they are used to, and have as many children as they want to.
I assume the real reason for low birth rates is the combination: some people don't want to have kids, some people would like to have more kids but they can't afford to. Having the former would not be a problem, if the latter could compensate for it; for one pair without kids, another pair would have 4, and everyone would be happy.
And yes, it's possible to be 'overly concerned'.
But there is something to be said about a species that doesn't replace itself, that's an existential question.
More importantly: the rate of decline is enormous in the grand scheme.
If you plot a curve of human population it trends up correlating with industrial power, education, advancement etc. - but then it hits a sudden wall and falls straight down.
If you extend the 'downward trend' of population decline outwards several decades it looks problematic.
It looks like an extinction event.
For context, if you care one bit about the 'greater good' and humanity, life etc. beyond your own life, then you'll likely have some degree of concern about 'extinction' or evaporation of people, culture, knowledge wisdom.
People that do have a sense of 'greater good' would naturally have some anxiety over this.
The issues is the speed but also the 'leveling out' threshold, i.e. if it drives downward, what's to say that won't stop.
Finally, we have 'many cultures' on this planet, and most will go extinct at that rate, and we really don't know what an ideal situation would be for population on Planet Earth.
Remember we want to build in some petty heavy safety factors into the numbers as risk mitigation.
We literally just took hold of the reproductive process over the last few decades - this is a very big deal, like getting fire from Prometheus, and the first thing we've done with it is put ourselves on a hard downward slope. That's scary unless we know where that equilibrium will land.
How so? It's way slower than the population has grown in the past few centuries.
> The issues is the speed but also the 'leveling out' threshold, i.e. if it drives downward, what's to say that won't stop.
What's to say growing populations won't lead to the extinction of humanity? We can't write off that possibility just like we can't write of yours. It's all just speculation.
> Finally, we have 'many cultures' on this planet, and most will go extinct at that rate, and we really don't know what an ideal situation would be for population on Planet Earth.
Cultures seem to mainly go extinct by assimilation by others. This has largely been driven by growing populations. If anything, I think a drop in population would preserve cultures.
> Remember we want to build in some petty heavy safety factors into the numbers as risk mitigation.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
> We literally just took hold of the reproductive process over the last few decades - this is a very big deal, like getting fire from Prometheus, and the first thing we've done with it is put ourselves on a hard downward slope. That's scary unless we know where that equilibrium will land.
What does it matter if there are only 100 million people? And even that would require extreme sustained drops in population for as long as human civilization.
The current trend is such a blip on the radar that I see no reason to worry. And even if the trend holds so what? Why do we need to have so many people?
2. 'Growth' to the extent there are resources to grow is a positive state, 'shrinkage' even given positive conditions in which growth is possible is a much worse state, because it's never happened and implies something might be wrong - like the possibility of a social or some other kind of disease.
3. 'More' population, given resources to sustain it is at least on 1st order basis 'better' - for obvious reasons. Clearly 'more' (or even present amount) may not be ideal but you'd have to do a second order assessment there (i.e. possibility of long term exhaustion of resources etc.) - and determine ways in which it would be worse, but I don't see any really any reason to believe that 7B is 'less safe' than 500M.
In the event of a major nuclear war, it would probably be better to have more people, of more variety, in more places, in more variety of living conditions.
4. 'Safety Factors' If we could magically calculate some kind of ideal population size, we'd have to assess for all sorts of black swan events (war, famine, disease) and have ample extra population to account for those possibilities. You carry more fuel than you need to cross the Atlantic if you really want to make sure that you get all the way.
4. "What does it matter if there are only 100 million people?"
Ok - so this should have been question #1 because this is they key understanding.
Civilization is a pyramid that generates disproportionate wealth from those operating at higher levels of sophistication. Those people require the support of others doing basic work.
If there were only 1000 people on planet earth, civilization would collapse entirely, everyone would be working on the farm. Only at a certain scale would basic foodstuffs be available such that others could start working on 2cnd order things, like carpentry and basic metallurgy. Significantly more people would be required to have enough slack labour to provide for basic literacy and education. The economy would have to be even larger to start to support the most basic technological advancements.
Etc. Etc. Etc..
Given that we now have a lot of knowledge and have harnessed fossil fuels which provide at least tremendous energy, it would be possible to maintain our state of civility with less people surely, but still quite a lot, definitely more than 100M.
Our economy, which sustains our lives to very high material standards, depends upon an huge amount of sophistication and knowledge. I don't think the number for maintaining that is less than 1B and realistically, given that social systems develop at different paces, and some collapse etc. it's probably more around 2B.
"Primitive" peoples inherently grasp that we are nothing without our children. Only we "modern and enlightened" people do not.
The GOP have also made sure in GOP "run" states to try and suppress worker wages while at the same time legalize owners tax breaks to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone. Its no secret how we got to where we are.
so I ask anyone, who in their right mind would have kids? Its simply becoming un-affordable to purchase a home, have kids, and health insurance and some sort of life.
Stop property speculation and REITS purchasing homes to drive up their other property investments. Bring in socialized healthcare like in the UK (and most of the rest of the world) and stop the insane medical HI pricing (check for basics like insulin in the US compared to everywhere else, its gouging.. plain and simple.)
.. and then.. maybe... would consider it.
This isn’t related to modern society, necessarily. The US total fertility rate was well over 3.0 in the 1960s, but even then most women worked outside the home. It’s also not necessarily preference. The average number of children women say they want is 2.7, while the fertility rate is now well under 2.0. I strongly suspect it’s the result of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which made it socially acceptable for men not to commit to raising families.
[1] This is actually a fairly new phenomenon, appearing in the last few decades.
I'm sure the government assistance rules that discourage marriage (i.e. the several thousand year old stable child raising family unit) aren't stalling that trend.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
True, they're coming from socially conservative countries. But, do those immigrants represent the socially conservative ideals of the countries they're from? In my experience, that question doesn't have a tidy answer... but my expectation is that the more liberal folk are more inclined to move to more progressive countries, and more conservative folk would rather stay put.
Is that actually true? I'm very surprised if so.
I added males so that comparison can be more fair, some people are too young, in school, too old etc.
Isn't this just a more politically correct way of complaining about a more gender equal society?
Men are way more involved in their families then they used to be. Also, it is women who are more likely to initiate the divorce. It is men who seem to cry all the time about not having girlfriend, there is comparatively much less women making whole movements out of being single.
What makes you think that?
Second, sociological studies are consistent with that - fathers and husbands are more involved, do more work at home.
I would observe that the men who have families are more involved, but there are also many more men who do not have families to be involved with.
https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Universit...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/seeking-arrangements-sugar...
https://www.insider.com/teachers-are-increasingly-becoming-s...
At “Western” levels of consumption, what percentage of the current global population is sustainable?
At the present, the press is usually talking about all of Earth's resources being used up around August each year. If everyone used the same amount of resources as the top 10% percent we'd probably end up with that point being passed much earlier.
If you had/have a 40 acre farm you could afford to have 7 kids. You also might have started early. If you live in a multi-generational family you'd have had help. In a 7 kid family some of the older kids are helping raise the younger ones.
Gone are the days of the village. We need a cultural change to support a higher fertility rate with broad government economic support. I don't think America has political will to do that. This country is run by rich white millionaires. Maybe when they die off.
It's been hard enough to develop universal preK and daycare programs.
https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate
Also, facilitate dating, sex, cohabitation, and civil unions, or it won't happen as much.
Woman now have the choice to delay child birth as long as they want. The average in my country is 30 years ago.
In the past a woman would have already been on children number 2 or three by this point.
Having a child at 40 while possible its a lot harder than 20. So you have less child bearing years remaining.
This explains everything, educated people are more likely to make sound financial choices and delay their first child. Also houses security and finance security is a large factor in abortion in my country and Korea a well studied for their low birth rate.
Their are more abortions than births in my country. I'm not making a political statement its just the situation we live in where you need two incomes just to be lower middle class.
Interestingly Chinese in my country have the most abortions followed by Indians. This is probably due to cultural reasons and not wanting to be disowned by ones parents for 'Throwing your life away'.
OK. But then:
> need two incomes just to be middle class
Maybe it's not as simple as just abortions and birth control then?
Look at Sweden btw. We have over 2.0. How? Probably because the state makes it possi le to have children, instead of impossible.
Why is it not justified for me to ask what I get out of the massive investment that goes into having kids? I don't see kids being able to support my wife and myself when we are old or even being around physically for any kind of help whatsoever. I am hardly able to do any of that for my own parents. I don't even think it makes any sense for me to have such expectations of such payback.
We are told that we are missing out a deep satisfaction that supposedly comes from raising kids. I don't doubt this. However, all the costs that are associated with the pursuit of that intangible feeling seem to be very high.
In my country, public education infrastructure is a sham. Cost of sending a kid to a private primary school these days will set me back by around a fifth of my salary for a mediocre one. And I am definitely in the top 10 percentile in terms of purchasing power in my country.
It's quite bewildering to see some of my colleagues opt in to raising two kids and a mortgage despite that leaving them without any extra income whatsoever. They are typically 1 firing away from complete bankruptcy. I try hard not to scoff at them when they tell us we should try having kids all the while juggling desperately to make ends meet.
Honestly, I consider people who choose to have kids despite not having the financial wherewithal to ensure a wholesome upbringing for them quite irresponsible bordering on immoral. It's ok to gamble with one's own life but making that choice for another human being you choose to bring in to the world is quite reprehensible IMO.
If we have reason to believe that continued population decline could lead to the collapse of civilization, certainly hand wringing is warranted. Such a collapse currently would require blindly extrapolating current social trends on the order of centuries, which is a fool's errand.