The Wall Street Journal reports that fertility rates are down and countries around the world are desperately trying to bribe young adults to have more babies:
Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes.... These are among the benefits—along with cheap child care, extra vacation and free fertility treatments—that have been doled out to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage.
....Europe and other demographically challenged economies in Asia such as South Korea and Singapore have been pushing back against the demographic tide with lavish parental benefits for a generation. Yet falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes and education levels.
....Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old working in human resources, knows having kids would help her and her husband buy a larger house in Budapest, but it isn’t enough to change her mind about not wanting children. “If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow,” she said. “But morally, I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.”
In the past, declining fertility has been due to an active desire to have fewer children. But Lyman Stone argues persuasively that over the past 20-30 years desires have remained fairly stable. So why the decline in actual fertility? Stone says it's all about marriage:
If you're not married, you're way less likely to have kids, even if you want them:
Women who get married are overwhelmingly more likely to achieve their childbearing ideals and expectations, both in cross-sectional data and in panel data.... While policies oriented towards subsidizing childbearing may help to some extent, the reality is that no policy intervention is likely to produce durable results if women don’t spend more of their fertile years in marriages that are open to children.
I've never thought fertility was affected much by money. Poor people have always had as many kids as rich people—maybe more. So all these schemes to reward people for having more children were bound to fail.
Of course, it's equally fruitless to bribe people to get married. So even if Stone is correct we're no closer to a solution. My guess is that we need a better class of men so that marriage is worth it. But I don't know how to get that either. Any ideas?
So first of all, the last thing we need is more babies. The population of this planet needs to decline and that is just something our economies will learn how to deal with. Economic prosperity cannot be based on the endless population growth. That type of economics will come to an end in about 50 years or so.
As for whether people "want" to have kids. Well there is what people say and what people do. Having kids is super easy. Raising and taking care of kids takes more effort. Raising and taking care of kids according to the ever increasing standard of what is required of a decent middle class parent is more and more difficult all the time.
Here's the thing though. When women control their own destiny, when they are educated, have control of their bodies and their lives and are allowed to pursue the careers of their choice, fertility decreases. This is a proven and inescapable fact. So we can coerce women into having kids by pushing them back into the kitchen and taking away access to birth control and abortion, or we can live in a free society.
Also I think there is a lot of this denial amongst child-bearing age women and men about what point in life they should be having kids. I've had numerous conversations with millennials in their late 30s who have said they are planning to have kids "some day", but they are not ready yet. Well if you put off even trying to have kids till you're nearly 40 I have some doubts about your actual desire to have kids. And sorry but biology is a thing. Women who put off even trying to have kids till they are in their late 30s are unlikely to produce very many.
I come from a big family that has produced a ton of kids and yet, even this family is now below replacement rate. I have 6 brothers and sisters. Among the 7 of us there are 11 kids (and unlikely to be more). That is a decline in population right there.
Sorry to go on. It's a subject I have thought about a lot.
Spot on.
++
Ah, so see the problem, women have choices.
Neither women having a choice nor a decreasing population is a problem.
It' is if you're trying to put people over a barrel and force them to except lower wages and the like.
If children are a priority then this is the problem.
1. Women can now support themselves without a husband.
2. Women can choose a fulfilling career instead of the fulfillment of motherhood.
But the future belongs to those who show up for it. There are subcultures in most developed countries where women are expected to get married and have kids or be ostracized. As the rest of us have fewer kids these subcultures will become the culture and they will gain political power to legally enforce their culture on the rest of us. I think it is a self correcting problem.
This constant, gripping fear of other cultures is such a sad way to go through life. It certainly unites the angry bigots of the world, but what a terrible way to get through each day.
Who said fear? Perhaps the left.
I think Mormons, fundamentalist Catholics, Quiverful Protestants, Orthodox Jews and Amish tend to vote more Republican than the country as a whole.
Even if each woman had 20 kids, the Amish are many generations away from gaining control over any of the few states they currently live in… and it’s only through Electoral College and the Senate that any lasting change in official govt policy becomes reality.* I would say the same about Orthodox Jews too, except they are also so few and far between in most states that I’ve never seen any outside of a few major metro areas.
*SCOTUS is another level of official govt policy making now, but the Amish and Orthodox Jews are even further away from dominating that body. Catholics though got it locked down.
There are 90,000 Amish in Pennsylvania. The presidential election winner may will chime down to a few hundred views in Pennsylvania this year the way it did in Florida in 2000. If so the course of the Amish may well decide the presidency and who appoints two or three new Superb Court justices.
Going forward they will become even more important. Look at the Israeli Orthodox to see how this can play out over a few generations.
You did.
They will "ENFORCE THEIR CULTURE ON THE REST US!"
Dont play dumb.
I don't have a big problem with that. I am not at all sure that many of the changes in traditional gender roles and sexualized culture have been net positives.
True Amish don't vote. They consider it sinful. Specifically they believe scripture requires them to remain sperate from the rest of society.
I love the structural similarities between this problem and global warming.
In both cases you have a serious problem that will likely play out over multiple lifetimes.
And one social-political faction claims that this problem can only be mitigated by immediate collection action (collection action that Just Happens to be ideologically consistent with the mores of that faction).
And the other social-political faction just denies the problem exists and accuses the the first faction of bad faith.
Youve typed a lot of words on this topic....but you havent been able to support what the concrete problem is with lower birth rates.
Youre unhappy and want to punish people for not having what you deem to be enough babies....but the actual problem seems to be left to the imagination of the reader.
Some of the resident bigots have at least identified that their problem is just a culture war with the cultures and peoples that they look down on.
That's weirdly never occurred because oppressive cultures do not, in fact, spread if their children can opt out.
Exactly!
The implicit assumption is that religious/political beliefs are inherited. They aren't.
Pretty sure those cultures you mention have massive leakage problems that will prevent them from overwhelming the rest of us.
It's not just a matter of women controlling their own destiny. Men are increasingly reluctant to become fathers.
Seems having too many people is not a problem: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-the-2020-census-will-reveal-about-america-stagnating-growth-an-aging-population-and-youthful-diversity/
Fine. But in exchange, you should be barred from accepting goods or services produced by any generation after yours. So for example, when you are 70, the goods and services you consume must be entirely produced by people of your generation, or older.
After all, you were unwilling to sacrifice to produce the next generation. And in refusing that sacrifice you elevated yourself professional and financially over those who made that sacrifice. Why should you benefit at their expense?
So we need to coerce people to have kids? And your solution sounds . . . complex. Yeesh.
Also gross.
This makes no sense at all.
I agree, emphatically.
I am an Old, which means I will at some point soon depend on the Not Old to support me, even if that only means their continuing to pay into Social Security and Medicare so I can continue drawing those benefits... when and if I retire (being able to retire is no longer a sure thing in our exciting Late Capitalist economy and Climate Crisis world).
But even if that's the case, I am very firmly of the opinion that this planet needs more humans like fish need bicycles. (IYKYK)
"being able to retire is no longer a sure thing in our exciting Late Capitalist economy and Climate Crisis world" The elderly have never been richer as a group than they are now. Retirement has never been easier.
Gibberish.
"The population of this planet needs to decline" I;ts been decades since the US didn't need immigration to keep its population from declining. With covid, even immigration isn't enough to keep the US population from declining.
That's not accurate. For some decades the US birth rate has been below the replacement rate. However, for most of those decades the age distribution skew produced by large baby boom families has meant that the death rate was also low and the number of women of child bearing age was disproportionately large, which meant that there were enough domestic births to keep the population growing despite the low birth rate. Now that the baby boomers are getting old, the death rate is climbing, the proportion of women of child bearing age is dropping, and there are no longer enough births to maintain the population
If decline in childbearing is worldwide what is the point of trying to artificially stimulate it? Conservatives can imagine it makes them sound like they're 'conservative' and responsible, but if it's the same everywhere and everything remains relatively the same where is the serious issue?
You could say the same about inflation existing everywhere too, but that didn’t stop Republicans and then centrists making it into an exclusively-domestic problem that needs solving immediately.
It’s almost as if Republicans and centrists always need something to complain about when Democrats are in power, even if it’s not actually a problem and or even if it’s a problem not unique to the US.
As women have gained economic freedom, they've grown more picky.
There are too many marginal men out there. Some are emotionally closed; others financially unstable themselves, some are just gross.
Hate to say it, but it's true.
You dudes need are competing with our cats for best companion,and the cats are winning.
Honestly? The most likely outcome is we buy AI girlfriend robots and then leave you alone with your cats.
Everyone is happy.
I don’t think this is the snappy comeback you think it is. Most women are totally willing to go it alone with regards to a vibrator vs a penis too, especially given so many penis-owners have no idea how to use the equipment they got to make her enjoy the real thing.
Great example of what I mean.
Thanks for the demo.
Gross.
LOL! You do know about sperm donation and IVF, right?
Yes, declining fertility is a problem. If nothing else, you need young generations to provide for the older generations (as China is finding out the hard way). We've long busted the myth that "overpopulation" is a problem. We are feeding more people with less land than ever before. You could triple the population of the United States alone and not be anywhere close to running out of resources.
More to the point, as Stone points out, women *want* more babies than they're having which might be the first time this is happening in human history. So if nothing else, think about that: millions of women who wanted families and never had them.
My take is that we the main changes need are societal. We need to break the "male" career model that you go to school, get a job, work at that job until you die and kids are somebody else's problem. We should be encouraging women (and men!) to take time off their careers to have kids while they're young. And not punishing people for delaying a career. That's not a change government can make (although it could do it for its own hiring practices).
My main regret about having kids is that I didn't have them when I was younger. But it wasn't possible with my career arc. Another friend desperately wanted kids but wasn't in a position to try until she was too old. That needs to change.
"We need to break the "male" career model that you go to school, get a job, work at that job until you die and kids are somebody else's problem."
This is correct.
Yes. See Usha "has three kids" and apparently JD doesn't.
"Yes, declining fertility is a problem. If nothing else, you need young generations to provide for the older generations (as China is finding out the hard way)."
Perhaps you will take another look at the hockey-stick curve of human population growth and decide if that is not a bigger problem in the longer term.
"Perhaps you will take another look at the hockey-stick curve of human population growth and decide if that is not a bigger problem in the longer term."
[looks]
Nope.
> If nothing else, you need young generations to provide for the older generations
Brad Delong has debunked this soundly. Under very reasonable and conservative assumptions about productivity growth, older generations can be provided for just fine, -assuming that the gains from productivity growth are equitably redistributed-. Of course, that's a gigantic assumption: if the gazillionaires insist on taking all those gains (as they have done for the last 40+ years) then yeah, it won't work.
So all we need to do is kill all the gazillionaires, and we won't need a constantly-increasing population to ensure old people are taken care of.
Maybe if we stopped using Ponzi scheme economic models this would be less of a problem. As a side bonus, not having to support the Olds would free up a lot of money for the young and fertile to make having babies less financially catastrophic for them. Here in the US we would have to bribe them with a free single family detached home in a decent school district.
And all the school districts would be decent. As Governor Tim Walz says, we prefer to invest the money up front.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "not having to support the Olds"? How would the elderly be supported under your updated economic model? (And for that matter, how would your non-"Ponzi" economic model differ from the current one?)
Art Electic's approach to "not having to support the Olds":
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220521-kill-japan-s-elderly-cannes-film-probes-chilling-idea
You should realize that when you use the words "Pnzi scheme" you are irrefutably proving you are a complete imbecile.
I think you have confused "Ponzi scheme" with "pyramid scheme". The need for a "bottom layer" of ever increasing size is typical of a pyramid scheme.
If you equitably distribute the gains from productivity growth then why should I and other investors make the investments that are required to grow productivity?
Do you think productivity growth just happens? Or that it is a natural process like trees growing?
Those kiosks at McDonald's increase productivity. They depend on a huge number of risky investments in companies that created the software and hardware components and integrated them together. The investments into the tech in the kiosks succeeded but many others failed. What pays for all those risky investments (including the failed ones) are the outsized returns from the ones that succeeded. If the government traced capital gains at 40% instead of 20% many of those investments would never have been made.
haha, as if you have a choice. What're you gonna do with your money? -eat it-? You're going to invest one way or another.
Actually I can consume more now rather than deferring gratification into the future when I will have more money and can consume even more. So can other investors.
If we do that then the economy will adjust to produce more consumer and luxury goods and less economic output will be reinvested into infrastructure, tech, education, etc.
The more investment you have the fastest productivity and the economy grow.
The reverse is also the case.
You have a clear failure of the imagination. What makes you think that a system that equitably distributes then gains from productivity growth would be in the least bit capitalist?
Por que no los dos? Capitalism and democracy may be at odds, but if football and baseball can tweak their rules...
I've been of the opinion for decades that we are moving toward making labor generally obsolete. All the existing economic systems make work the primary interface between individuals and the economy as a whole. You work, you get paid. This has been true in laissez-faire capitalist economies and in the most extreme communist economies. We need to get away from that model, and find an entirely new economic system that can deal with abundance without work.
"Those kiosks at McDonald's increase productivity." They actually don't. "They depend on a huge number of risky investments in companies that created the software and hardware components and integrated them together. " the hardware components were off the shelf and there was nothing remotely risky about it. Like self check out at grocery stores, you'll have similar numbers of people using those (because they prefer not to interact with the store staff) and checking out in the old fashion way.
Bullshit. "Productivity growth" doesn't wipe a senile dementia patient's butt. Somebody's kid has to do that.
One core argument made by more-sophisticated right-wingers against attempts to prevent climate is that the costs of climate change will be borne by wealthier future generations. Hilarious to see Brad adopt an analogous argument here.
Also, the standard neoliberal approach to economics over the past 50 years has been to tout absolute gains and ignore distributional consequences. You expect people to accept that caveat now?
The argument that present sacrifices are unnecessary because future generations will be wealthier is
Butt wiping robots can be invented.
What a bizarre, confused argument.
These are not analogous:
Climate change- We can profit now from harm done to future generations because those future people will be richer because of productivity improvements and can pay the cost of the damage I am doing.
Babies - We dont need to harm people today in order to address imaginary harms to future retirees. Future retirees will actually be better off than they are today because of productivity improvements, theres no need to inflict harm or costs on the present.
Insisting that these are the same thing is a bit......dumb? Disingenuous? Both?
The countries still cranking out tons of kids are mostly the same ones that import a lot of food, get stuff from foreign aid and NGOs, have famines all the time, and have the lowest per capita incomes on the planet.
Um, yeah. I’m going to have to see some actual support for that assertion. This site permits links..,
"Yes, declining fertility is a problem. If nothing else, you need young generations to provide for the older generations (as China is finding out the hard way)."
-------
This is completely wrong.
Productivity growth resolves this imagined problem. Each generation is more productive than the last and needs fewer workers to support a similar or more advanced lifestyle than the less productive generation that came before.
You even make this point when you talk about the advances that have been made in food production.
China is still growing rapidly. They havent found anything out. Countries with slower population growth arent suffering in any quantifiable way.
No, China is no longer growing rapidly. Their population growth has fallen below the replacement rate.
And "greater productivity" taking care of people presumes the equivalent of the agricultural revolution in elder care. Maybe you could bother to even wave your hand at an explanation of how that'd work in practice?
People don't realize how miraculous the agricultural revolution was...and how much it's based on petroleum and extractive technologies. Just saying, "greater productivity will fix it" is not actually an answer.
China is growing at 4-5% per year. This is still rapid growth, especially if you look at per capita figures.
So, youre wrong.
General productivity improvements will lift standards of living. The improvements do not have to be specifically in elder care products and services in order for old people to benefit from increased quality of life with a smaller working population.
Society has to decide to allocate resources to elder care and general productivity improvements will allow us to do that. Having more workers doesnt solve elder care either, we still have to decide to allocate resources.
The point is that a smaller workforce will be okay because it will also be a much more productive workforce.
China's economy continues to grow quite rapidly. However, China still has a large reservoir of underemployed/unemployed labor; the transition from an essentially feudal economy where most people were subsistence farmers to a modern industrial economy is far from complete. The result is that China still has room to grow the number of employed people quite a bit even though the overall population is declining. When they have sucked the entire available labor force into factories and such, then we will see what effect their low birth rate has on their economy.
You have no idea what the word feudal means. subsistence farming is completely unrelated to it.
You love to pick nits, don't you?
China is still growing rapidly" This is true if you are talking economic growth. China's population is now shrinking.
What most other people said plus:
Immigration can solve “who will take care of all the old people?” problem. Immigrants can easily replace all the missing native born children, except that immigrants are also far more likely to not look like the old people, so the old people vote to keep them out. This is why Japan, for example, has its demographic problem: they are super opposed to increasing immigration, so there’s nobody to take care of the old people. (China’s problem is similar but different: fewer immigrants want to move to a country more oppressive, more racist or noticeably poorer than their own.)
Re immigration: the first line of Kevin's post said "fertility rates are down...*AROUND THE WORLD*".
Immigration is a short term patch for very wealthy countries. Yes, old people/Republicans are foolish to vote against utilizing this patch. But it can not "solve...the problem."
Austin: Children are too expensive and time-consuming to raise in the US. So let's manufacture them in third-world countries. It's where we manufacture everything else!
Yes - this is completely correct. We need to recognize that society must be structured to support the families we need for the next generation. We need to commit the resources to make that happen.
The flip side, of course, is that we need to inculcate a sense of responsibility for producing & nurturing the next generation in both men and women. It is the duty of each generation to produce and raise the next generation. An individual who shirks that duty should be viewed the same as somebody who doesn't pay taxes because they would prefer to spend the money furthering their own interests: a freerider.
That's also gross.
Yeah, none of these plans to help with childbearing help with childcare.
Thank you for saying this. So many Boomer Doomers got sucked in by the overpopulation panic of the 1970s and never updated their priors as the situation changed.
I happen to believe that having kids is good and not having kids is bad. I respect the right of other people to disagree with me, and to make different choices. I chose to have a child and I hope to have some more. Because of my age and other realities, I won't have a large family. But I will have the kids I can. Hopefully I'll do a good job as a parent. I'm trying.
I assume you support massively increasing governmental support for families or are you a VD Jance conservative who wants women to have kids and sacrifice everything to raise them?
I am a Democrat. I support family-friendly policy. I also support the rights of others to have different opinions than I have and make different choices than I did, and I went into parenthood fully aware of the sacrifices that would be involved.
Having two kids is good. Having three or more kids is bad.
May I ask why you think so?
Because we DON'T need a growing population.
Inasmuch as we already have a known negative birth rate, I’d say you’re full of shit. As a parent of three kids who are all working towards careers that focus tightly on helping people and the world in various ways, I’d say you’re also demonstrably stupid.
"I happen to believe . . . "
You? Who are you?
I am a person with an opinion, who respects the right of others to have different opinions while remaining firm in my opinion. I am a person who made a choice, who respects the right of others to make different choices while remaining firm in my choice.
Who are you?
My fear regarding human fertility rates is that, in our general comfort amid safety and abundance, we are tracking the rats.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh
The rats didn't know why they were acting that way, and neither do we.
What a fascinating link. Thank you. Indeed the parallels are frightening.
Over a long time, we can expect to see natural selection at work. People with a strong drive to reproduce will have kids; people with a weak drive to reproduce won't. In due course, this can be expected to breed for stronger drives to reproduce. Of course, this is a slow process. By the time population growth becomes positive again, we can expect the world to have a considerably fewer people than it does right now.
If your goal is to actually increase the number of children, perhaps the most effective way would be to socially stigmatize being single and being childless. Shame, expectations, and social stigma carry a lot of weight in human behavior.
Of course, many would not like this for reasons which I need not explain. And "implementing" this would be very difficult; it would have to arise organically and that is not likely.
On the other hand, I personally think a lot of people who do not have children would be happily surprised at how much meaning and joy children would bring to their lives, and after having them, they would be happy social pressure drove them along that path.
What a nightmarish vision - the last thing we need is more stigma.
Why?
Maybe we need more stigma for criminality, doing drugs, not working, wasting a college education by not planning from day one of college how to make one's degree pay back the cost of one's education.
Because stigmatizing things that don't harm anybody is fucking wrong, you troll.
Except that you live in a society. And your comfort and continued existence depend on other people having children.
So it's kinda like taxes. A cost you bear for the common good.
You believe in stigmatizing tax cheats, don't you?
There is no risk of birth rates dropping to zero, so we can discard the silliness of pretending to worry about your existence.
Because of productivity improvements, your comfort level is going to be just fine.
Your desire to control the reproduction of others is just plain weird. Insisting that your influence over others birth decisions is similar to public tax payments is even weirder.
Strange dude.
Birth rates don't have to drop to zero before you start to see serious negative consequences:
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/trust-funds-summary.html
The social security trustees are currently assuming a long-run TFR of 1.9. But our TFR is currently 1.66. And there is no reason it won't drop further.
Presumably you'd like SS to be around for your dotage?
Also -- "weird" is done, fuckwit. We're back to calling people we disagree with "fascists."
Small increases in the SS tax and/or tax cap fixes this.
This would be a more normal solution to any worries about SS funding.
Obsessing over women having more babies to stabilize your retirement is actually very weird. Sorry if that offends your delicate sensibilites. Poor, sad weirdo.
Your conclusions are entirely the result of your numerical illiteracy as encompassed by the claim "There is no risk of birth rates dropping to zero". Birth rates dropping to one is enough to quickly result in utter collapse of society.
There is also no risk of birth rates dropping to 1.
Pretending that there is any numerical literacy involved in the panicked shrieks over birth rates is...LOL.
The birth rate of South Korea in 2023 was 0.72. For 2024, it's projected to be 0.68. I'm told that South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, but I believe there are other countries that also have birth rates below 1.
Criminality, doing drugs, going on public assistance, etc all harm everyone in society who has to pay to clean up the messes such people make.
lol
public investment in people is the same thing as CRIMINALITY!!!
Lol, goodness....how dumb.
Doing drugs harms nobody except the drug user.
And the people killed in driving accidents the victims of the crimes caused by drug use.
Drug use is a victimless crime. Murder, with our without drugs, is a crime with a victim.
Smarter trolls, please.
On the other hand, we could just support the people who want children with housing, great schools, child care, and Healthcare and leave those who don't want children alone. Society is better off if people who don't want children don't have them.
This ignores political reality.
When fewer people have kids support for spending on education, childcare, etc will drop.
Meanwhile more and more people with kids will look at the ever increasing amount they have to pay to support the childless elderly and ask why people with children can't rely on their families more and why people without children cannot take the money they save on child expenses and save it for retirement.
Exactly, which is why I was suggesting upthread that there needs to be another system than the young supporting the old. An ever increasing population is not sustainable long term.
Um... who do you think will support the old if not the young? It can be done privately by families or publicly by government but unless you abolish retirement or have robots do all the work, the young must support the old.
You answered your own question. Robots.
These motivations exist regardless of the birth rate.
Plenty of Republicans with kids and elderly parents regularly vote to defund public support systems.
Plenty of Democrats without kids or parents vote to enhance these public support systems.
The actual birth rate doesnt make a difference in this regard.
Spot on!
Yep.
European countries do those things but it doesn't seem to affect the birth rate there either.
I have a 7 year old. I love the kid more than anything but it wasn't worth it.
“…they would be happy social pressure drove them along that path.”
The LGBT community were certainly much happier pre-roughly 1980, when they were all but forced into sham marriages if they wanted to keep their jobs, families or friends. Lots found fulfillment in their children because they were denied fulfillment in their bedrooms and hearts.
"The LGBT community were certainly much happier pre-roughly 1980" you're delusional.
Gross.
"how much meaning and joy children would bring to their lives"
It ain't that much.
"I've never thought fertility was affected much by money. Poor people have always had as many kids as rich people—maybe more. So all these schemes to reward people for having more children were bound to fail."
I don't think this is accurate. Granted, I don't hang out in red circles where values are a bit different, but my impression of those folks is that money is less likely to be their primary motivation for having/not having a kid.
However, among all of the couples I know, money is indeed a primary factor. It may not prevent them from having kids entirely, but it does delay them - and they might have fewer kids than they would otherwise.
Also, the kinds of interventions mentioned above DO work for people for whom a primary barrier is the sheer financial cost of having each child.
And finally... it's tiresome to have to mention that marginal economics is at play with behavior here, and just about everywhere where humans make a choice. Make one option more attractive, and at the margins more people will choose it than the alternative. It's basic behavioral economics. It's sad that you don't recognize that in this post.
Every single country in the world that has economic incentives to have more kids has failed to do so. Every one.
That might not be entirely accurate, depending on how you define "success" and "failure". The problem is that there is no country offering those incentives for which we know what the birth rate would be without the incentives. If we see a country offering generous incentives to have children continuing to have a birth rate below replacement rate, it's possible the incentives are having no effect, or it might be that in the absence of incentives the birth rate would be even lower.
If you define failure as not getting the birth rate up to at least replacement, then you're right, the incentives to have children have failed in every case.
What lawnorder said.
It’s amazing how the same people who argue tax credits and deductions, indirect or direct subsidies and direct provision of services can play big roles in other kinds of decision making, but will definitely have zero effect on other kinds of decision making, with the latter group conveniently being decisions that those people would never want or need to make themselves (or at least would allow their own taxes to remain low).
1) That's not the point.
2) You can't prove that. What is instead more likely is that they would have had even fewer children without those incentives.
Use that brain, that's why you have it.
Financial incentives aren't the same as helping with the actual time and investment required by children.
You're almost there, but not quite.
Financial incentives don't help with the child care.
If the couples you know really wanted to have kids, fear of being a little bit less well off would not slow them down.
It’s the crisis that may actually save the planet
I find this article odd. Why would the writer seek the opinion who is morally opposed to having children. Isn’t it obvious that a moderate lessening of the costs of having children wouldn’t sway her opinion?
As a parent myself, money mattered, both in terms of when we started and when we stopped. We’d have loved at least one more, but by the time we could afford it it was too late.
Yep. If you have kids when you're young, you have lots of energy but little money. If you have kids when you're older, you have more money but less energy. There's no good time to have kids.
We need more widespread power outages. This latest solar storm isn't doing the job.
L.O.L.
The financial difficulties of having children are real, but the hit to your career, personal life, and stress level is harder to take.
Honestly, I think a lot of people who would like more kids just get burned out by trying to juggle it all. I sure did. Single parents are even more stressed out by the constant demands of parenting in America today. It's tough to find infant daycare, and if you find it, the hours rarely match what you need for your own job. Once they are in school you have to figure out before and after school care. Budget cuts mean you may have to figure out drop off and pick up - with a 15 minute window for each. Then there are the million random days that school is out, with the insanity of signing up for summer camp and the insanity of summer camp hours. Add in the resentment of your coworkers when you have to take a sick day for the baby or leave early for teacher conferences. Finally, your childless friends just don't understand why you are falling asleep at 9 pm every night, so your entire social circle disappears. A bit of extra money can't really make up for all of that.
I think you need a wider field of view. Falling birth rates are a world-wide phenomenon; specifically American conditions can't plausibly explain a world wide phenomenon.
No, but birth control can.
I think I blame capitalism.
Weirdly all those things thhey mentioned about scheduling around child care are also a world wide phenomenon.
Because children need care 24/7.
Did YOU have "after school care" when you were growing up? I certainly didn't. We got together after school and made minor mischief to our hearts' content. Kids nowadays live in a concentration camp of adult jailers. No wonder they hate us.
I don’t know you but even in your freewheeling liberated youth, I imagine you weren’t left home alone for any length of time after coming home from kindergarten or first grade. I started being allowed to stay home alone in 4th grade as a “latchkey kid” in the late 1980s, and even at that time, it was rare enough that some PTA busybodies reported my behavior to the principal. Back then, nobody in elementary school did this. (I do agree with you though about overparenting teenagers and think by 6th grade kids are definitely able to get and stay home alone for a few hours.)
I did. Until I was in second grade, then I had a bus that took me a couple blocks from home.
Not all kids have a bus that'll do that. My cousins, for instance, had to pay extra money to get the bus to come to their neighborhood.
“Add in the resentment of your coworkers when you have to take a sick day for the baby or leave early for teacher conferences.”
Allowing childless people to use sick days to take care of other relatives (sick parents, siblings, etc) might help with this. Few companies allow for it, and fewer allow for it if you have to travel to do it - eg the childless adult might need to take an entire week of sick leave to tend to an elderly person, but that would likely be seen as “too much” compared to a parent taking 5 individual days off throughout the year to tend to sick kids… even though both cases represent 5 total sick days a year taken for family.
This! And more!
You're close but misstating the issue.
GDP/capita is clearly negatively correlated to the fertility rate. Even within the US, household wealth is negatively correlated to the birthrate.
So, fertility is affected by money, but it presents what appears to be a paradox. How do we resolve the paradox of inverse correlation between income and fertility? There are two drivers of this, depending on your time scale. The first is the shift from agrarian to industrial/post-industrial. The second is a shift away from quantitative to qualitative values of a family or a household within/beyond the post-industrial period of a nation.
Maybe if you do another post on this, I'll go into why these schemes cited by the WSJ continue to fail.
If you look throughout nature, fertility is always impacted by abundance. Outbreed your resources and you perish. Menstruation drops off considerably during times of high stress like war. Our bodies respond strongly to environment.
One of the oddities of human metabolism is that a high protein diet, usually an indicator of prosperity and an ability to support many children, reduces fertility. Yes, fertility is impacted by abundance, but the impact is often negative.
“My guess is that we need a better class of men so that marriage is worth it.”
That would help, I’m sure. It’s common for women to find losing 170 pounds of man-baby more of a relief than a problem. Yeah, you don’t have that extra pair of hands, but when you have to pry a phone or game controller out of them, or repeatedly explain what needs to be done, it’s kind of a wash. At least the actual babies grow up eventually, or pretend to in another household.
Most people of both sexes tend to want partners who are useful, trustworthy, and at least somewhat entertaining (straight men also want decorative partners, which contributes nothing to the actual partnership but I guess flatters their egos). Almost every relationship failure I’ve witnessed has been due to lack of one or more of those three qualities. And I’m not sure young men even understand the assignment.
Sexual stereotypes are unhelpful. Similarly unflattering things could be said about women with about the same accuracy.
Feel free to list them when Kevin posts about men not wanting to marry/have kids, then. This one was about why women aren’t enthused.
Also, most people who go through Econ also know there's a logical fallacy in the framing of "overpopulation". The paradigm is simply one of supply and demand, right? Is there enough supply of resources to support the demand of a growing population? 40-60 years ago, it was thought that resources were finite. It turns out, supply can grow with demand through technology.
The preservation of Nature also became a core reason for the framing of "overpopulation" -- climate change, amirite? But you can read KD's own climate optimism through technology -- CCS, etc. -- to see that, again, technology will evolve to preserve Nature as we know it to exist, at least on the macro scale, even if at the micro scale some things disappear or change forever. The faulty logic often used is to see Nature as static despite some guy named Darwin suggesting that Nature is not static. Perhaps ironically, one of the more influential 80s conservationist books, "Playing God in Yellowstone", argues that this sensibility of treating Nature as static is causing as many problems as it intends to prevent.
We can probably develop the technology to allow the Earth to support a significantly larger human population. The question is why would we want to? When I was a kid, the world population was estimated at 3 billion. I can't say that the addition of five billion more bodies has made the world a better place.
We already have, Because technology to involve less work does exactly that.
And we want technology to create less work because we've an innate desire to do less effort.
Magical thinking to the rescue.
Exactly.
The problem is definitely needing "better men". Unfortunately, women's standards for what "better" is have risen. For many all the "betters" are already taken; who wants a "lad" or a "bro" for a partner if you don't have to depend on men to feed and house you? I expect that some time soon female geneticists will figure out how to peel away the zona pellucida that prevents an egg from entering mitosis even if a sperm gets into it, and then y-chromosome bearing children will quickly plummet to the levels of drones in a hive.
Slowly receding global population is not a problem, it is a positive notably in the face of coming AI and expanded robotics.
Companies should have to pay social security taxes on AI and robots! And no, the robots cannot collect the benefit. They will never retire.
Not "never," but close enough if they're designed and made in Japan, even as fancier tech is developed.
We are very unlikely to achieve slowly receeding population as a steady state.
It's one thing if you don't want children and the government tries to tempt you into it by offering money to buy a house. That has the moral problems that the woman from Budapest identifies.
But I think the offer is aimed more at people who want children but have decided not to do it because they can't afford to buy a house to raise them in. Childlessness because of financial constraints, against the couple's desires, is definitely a thing. For them, this government offer would be most welcome and entirely reasonable to accept.
Subsidizing people to buy a house, tends to just push up the price of houses as well. It is much more important to generally reduce the price of housing. And I don't think that can be done without investing in public housing.
Just not the way we did it.
Prices will go up if supply is constrained by strict zoning codes, but if developers can build more housing to meet the demand they will do it until there is enough of a glut to make further building unprofitable.
There is plenty of evidence that this is a myth. Read the blog https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/ - basically the problem with this argument is twofold - 1 - not all locations are equal, 2 - people will hold land rather than build on it (or replace existing buildings) rather than build in a falling market.
Especially this paper https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2021.1920991
When I look at women around me who had kids, almost all had either steady reliable marriages or the exact opposite, in which case they basically said the man can go but the child stays. Maybe too many women are in the middle, both lacking relationships they count on to last and a go-it-alone attitude. In that light, living in France, I never heard of someone planning a child because of any financial benefits, but state-provided child care does play a role. Maybe the state is then conceived of as the second parent who'll always be there. As a father who raised my kids mostly alone, I can say non-financial state participation not only helped but also gave a sense of security. (Ironically, child care in France came about because the capitalist class wanted it: after WW I there weren't enough men for the factories).
this looks remarkably like an upside-down chart of wealth inequality in the US, complete with little bump in 50's:
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states
Very good eye!
Just to draw the obvious connection: there's a sory about four posts below this one about the need for more immigrant workers in Texas. Those people are available to start contributing to our economy now, not in 18 years time. Why not iust find more of them, persuade them to come here, find them jobs....
Europe is in the same place: needs more people. More babies seems like the most inefficient answer to that problem.
A tactical stroke of genius:
1. Assert that the republicans should just allow more immigration!
2. Republicans refuse.
3. Assert that every consequent problem is The Republicans' Fault.
4. Rest secure in the knowledge that you are a Good Person.
Except that the immigrants themselves have sub-replacement rate fertility (or do within a generation). Which makes the whole approach a Ponzi scheme.
And there is another small matter: your approach requires the developed world to strip-mine the developing world of its young people, even as TFR in the developing world falls below replacement levels.
Uh, oh. Maybe you are not a Good Person.
Uhoh?
The guy having empathy for those not of his blood is not a good person?
Gross, snowball, you'e just gross.
This guy is fragile. Very fragile.
Yeah. You're probably not.
Why publicly document you are an ignoramus by routinely using the phrase Ponzi Scheme utterly incorrectly?
In actual fact, a lot of immigration today is due to shrinking resources caused by global warming. So, no, these people aren't leaving behind sub-replacement economies, they're leaving behind death and starvation.
Smarter trolls, please.
Sorry, I haven't read all the thread, but this is ridiculous. Marriage today is optional. People often do it, BECAUSE they want to have kids. Otherwise they don't, because the legal hassles are too much of a problem if you break up.
Two other reasons ... 1) Who wants to bring more children into a world with Trump, Putin, Hamas, Netanyahu, etc., and maybe WW III? 2) Who wants to increase the population when overpopulation is a main cause of overcrowding, hunger, deforestation, war, and climate change?
We are farther away from WW3 then we have ever been.
"We are farther away from WW3 then we have ever been.
((checks doomsday clock))
Uh, no.
"The Clock's original setting in 1947 was 7 minutes to midnight. It has since been set backward 8 times and forward 17 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 90 seconds, set in January 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#:~:text=The%20Clock's%20original%20setting%20in,seconds%2C%20set%20in%20January%202023.
The real question is more always better. Understand there are economic "reasons" why it's a concern, but folks act like it's apocalyptic if population isn't increasing.
What is the optimum population for any particular country or even the Earth as a whole?
I'm not sure how long it will take for the process to play out, but I am confident that natural selection will eventually push fertility rates back up. If the primary determinant of whether someone has children is whether they want children enough to make them a priority, than any genes that somehow make people want children will be heavily selected for while genes that make people indifferent or hostile to kids will be eliminated from the gene pool. Persistent low fertility arrived in Japan first, so they're the country to watch for signs of this effect starting to take hold.
Some decades there was a science fiction story called "The Marching Morons" published; it noted that reproduction rates were inversely correlated with intellectual endowment. Not long after it was published, some geneticists did the math (with large error bars) based on what was known about the magnitude of the reproduction differential and the distribution of the relevant genes and concluded that the then existing reproduction differential would have to continue for at least several millennia to produce the described result.
I suspect something similar applies here. It will take centuries or millennia of low average fertility to produce a significant change in average desire to reproduce.
How rapidly genes get selected depends on the size of the advantage. Genes that confer a small advantage get selected slowly; those that confer a big advantage get selected quickly.
It seems to me that, under current conditions - readily available birth control, lots of ways to gain social prestige without having kids, lots of things to do with your time that kids will detract from - the evolutionary advantage from strongly wanting kids is HUGE. Given that people who don't want kids usually have NO OFFSPRING AT ALL, I doubt it will take thousands of years for the not-want-kids genes to get selected out.
The problem is that humans are, to a geneticist, wild animals. People who have a strong desire to reproduce are still likely to be carrying genes for a weak desire to reproduce, just as people who are very bright may still carry genes for lower intellectual function. The result of this heterogeneity is that even with a fairly strong selective advantage, it takes many generations to significantly vary the overall genetic composition of the species.
BTW, we're not discussing people with no desire to reproduce. We're talking about people with varying strengths of desire to reproduce. Although the number of childless people who are past breeding age is increasing, it's still the case that most women have at least one child. The "contest" is not between people who have children and those who don't, it's between people who have one or two children and those who have three or more.
It's true that desire for children is probably a multi-gene trait, but that doesn't prevent it from getting selected for. It will be slow, but I am sure it will happen. How many generations exactly? Stay tuned, but I expect we'll see an effect start to appear before the end of the century.
"I'm not sure how long it will take for the process to play out, but I am confident that natural selection will eventually push fertility rates back up."
Natural selection works on the timescale of hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes, it is going to cultural selecton rather than natural selection. Nothing to do with genetic changes.
What makes you assume that? Any trait that is advantageous for leaving more offspring gets selected for. If genes have any effect at all on whether people want children, genes that make people want kids are gonna get selected for, much more strongly than they were in the past when people had far less control over their reproductive fate.
"What makes you assume that?"
1) The genration time of humans makes genetic evolution very slow.
2) Except for deleterious mutations (which are just selected out), effects of genetic mutations on average number of children is very small.
Together, that means that genetic evolution is much much slower than cultural evolution, and completely overwhelmed by it.
Not always. When British cities were darkened by industrial soot, it took less than a century for the moths to turn from light-colored to dark, because dark was now better for camouflage and conferred a big advantage.
If there is a big advantage from a gene, it will get selected quite rapidly.
Note that a century is some hundreds of generations for moths. For humans, a generation is generally considered to be 25 years, so if there is a big advantage from a human gene, it will get selected in a few thousand years.
Tell me how you meet someone these days. Used to be at work but that's forbidden now. Used to be at church but you couldn't pay me enough to go into a church nor to marry anyone who does. There are still bars but who wants to marry a barfly?
So you're left with apps, which is basically a pig in a poke. If you can't meet people, you can't marry them. Well, except for Musk who seems to spray every room with his sperm.
I have a high regard for dating apps. I met my first wife in a bar a bit more than forty years ago, and that marriage lasted more than thirty years. I met my second wife on a dating app (Plenty of Fish, as it happens) and we have been happily together for more than eight years. Between the first and second wives, I met a number of perfectly nice women whose company I enjoyed and apparently vice versa, but who just weren't Ms. Right and/or didn't see me as Mr. Right.
Dating apps are WONDERFUL.
There are lots of people who participate in non-profits that build homes for the homeless, work in soup kitchens, house and feed homeless animals, and engage in other civic-minded activities that don't require religion or adult beverages.
There are lots of people who join book clubs, chess clubs, choruses, gun clubs, etc.
In countries with high birth rates women have few choices besides marriage and childbearing. In countries with low birth rates women have more schooling and work opportunities. Therefore, women’s opportunities and choices are the key, plus an awareness of the environmental effects of more humans on the planet could play a role. In countries with high birth rates, forced pregnancy and marital rape are the norm. Or you could call it the culture of the country. You choose!