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Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

nature.com

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Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#51

Post by cosmic_cheese »

My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation.

If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.

The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.

I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#53

Post by yongjik »

bm3719 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

That's a really funny way of looking at "Some right wingers end up repelling their children through sheer bigotry or just being terrible parents, and as a result, these poor children will find solace and friendship in an ideology opposite from their parents' one."

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#54

Post by skissane »

bm3719 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left.

I think the right has been evolving higher memetic immunity, which is causing this strategy to become less effective over time.

Increases in homeschooling and private religious schools – school vouchers in the US really help with that. Reduced rates of cross-political friendship, dating and marriage. Increased geographic sorting based on ideology. Social media echo chambers. The "right-wing media ecosystem" (see e.g. Libs of Tiktok) is a lot more engaging than it was 40 years ago. Internet filtering (some religious groups pressure even adults to install it.) Increasing political pressure on universities to moderate their politics reduces their effectiveness at transmitting left-wing politics to students, meanwhile right-leaning alternative tertiary institutions are growing.

Also, odds of political defection is partially determined by personality traits, which are partially genetic. This creates selective pressure to reduce the frequency of defection-promoting alleles in right-leaning populations across generations, which is a genetic rather than memetic factor predicting that conservative retention rates will rise over decades to come. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/ which discusses this with respect to genes for religiosity, which is heavily overlapping with (albeit not quite the same as) political conservatism.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#55

Post by OutOfHere »

tryagainian wrote: post #41
julianlam wrote: post #19

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"? You want to raise the fertility rate, yes? You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure). Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fe…

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Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#56

Post by mrweasel »

homeonthemtn wrote: post #10

Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online. As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4. It certainly runs counter to many onl…

Just a thought, based on my own experience. If you have children, or is about to have a baby, you start being around more parents or "parents to be". Either as part of parenting groups, in conjunction with daycare, schools or parents of your children's friends. Because this centers around your child, the children around you tends to be roughly the same age, plus or minus a few months.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#58

Post by int_19h »

Isn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children.

Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#60

Post by novia »

coldtea wrote: post #38
novia wrote: post #3

Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet. https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.

That's why people shouldn't take life advice from cartoons and celebrities

I mean, I probably saw this when I was 4 or so, and I don't have any children now. I can't really blame my four year old self for being impressionable. I'd say this is probably more of an example of why people should be cautious of the kind of content they put in front of their kids.
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