I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more. Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan. If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life…
Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.
I'd call it hedonism if a couple wants to be able to go out on a date on a whim, easily take a vacation, watch adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room, maintain good sleep/health habits, keep a flexible schedule unconstrained by school pickups/staying home with a sick kid, etc. These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altoge…
The degeneracy of these millennials who want to maintain healthy sleep habits...
Funny enough I know lots of millennials without children with horrible sleep patterns and habits.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?
it wouldn't be a bad thing except that we're heading towards a future where there's too many old people for the economy to sustain itself.
There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial…
> A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate This was my first intuition.
This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.
Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.
People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security; this used to be done by the parents rejecting marriages that didn't bring enough dowry and extreme punishment for extra-marital relationships. Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have…
> People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more. Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan. If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life…
This is really the message of Abundance . If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy o…
Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.
I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more. Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan. If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life…
I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there wa…
You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.
No need to gender this, and I feel like people would be more receptive to the issue if it wasn't. Everybody ages: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12801554/
Gender does matter though. Men can sire offspring into their 60s, women have marked decline in fertility starting from 32 and hit an absolute wall (menopause) by their fifties.
I know the "bring them into this world" thing is overdone, but a big part of me feels it to my core. I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical. How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pa…
I hate to say it, but I have been feeling the same way recently. I just don't see humanity being sustainable on this planet if we are relying on constantly producing more and more people. There has to be an equilibrium of some kind.
I doubt anybody wants to produce more and more people. Most predictions for total population size I have seen are rather asymptotic.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2]. My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put of…
Except in [0] the birth rate is relatively flat between 1950-1970 and then suddenly starts a rapid reduction. Developed countries have already been industrialized for 100 years by that point. The modern work day and access to many modern fun and rewarding activitys have been available for literal decades. Mass urbanization already occurred. Many of the modern household appliances have been in use for decades. Antibio…
This is table stakes obvious, though? Again we see the weirdness of having an almost exclusively male conversation about the subject.
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.