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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

#71

Post by cosmic_cheese »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #69
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #51

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…

I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.

It's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.

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

#72

Post by throw-the-towel »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #71
throw-the-towel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.

It's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.

What other aspects do you have in mind, then?

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

#73

Post by EPWN3D »

nkrisc wrote: post #45
bm3719 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

An insane thesis of the terminally online. If you go out into the real world the lines between “left” and “right” are far more blurry than you seem to think.

Yeah I think that there's some serious over-indexing on university political indoctrination. I can buy that kids adopt far-left viewpoints in college after being exposed to them for the first time just due to novelty.

But college is not the be-all and end-all of someone's political evolution. Buying a home and having a family also influences someone's political opinions, broadly in the more conservative direction.

What I think sounds plausible is that the rise of women pursuing post-graduate degrees brings down birth rates. If a woman isn't done with her academic pursuits until she's 30, she'll unquestionably be less likely to have kids as a matter of biology.

Moreover, if it's extremely difficult to buy a house and start a family until you're in your mid-30s, that's going to keep people more liberal for longer.

So I don't think the basic dynamics have changed, but the timelines have. When people have a house and family, they have things to lose and act more self-interested. When they don't, they don't, they're much happier to entertain proposals for vast societal change.

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

#74

Post by gopher_space »

xyzelement wrote: post #47
bm3719 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I think this makes a lot of sense. The parents of my generation (I am in my 40s) saw no danger in sending their kids to a university where every professor and student peer was super-left. A lot of their kids (my peers) ended up unmarried and childless as per this article. So in a way those parents got punished by evolutionary forces for not being careful enough about their kids. I can guarantee you that those of my g…

It’s weird how every conservative family ends up sending their kids to Wesleyan.

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

#76

Post by pfannkuchen »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #29
pfannkuchen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).

We can't also assume that your offspring will have the same values as you.

Sure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here.

I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background.

Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another.

So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

coliveira wrote: post #32
pfannkuchen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).

A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by giardini »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #34
coliveira wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.

The "power" of a country, however you define it, lags the population growth. China was the biggest country for decades, its power only really started exploding some 10 or 15 years ago.

And now its power is declining rapidly.

Peter Zeihan "Don't be Surprised by China's Collapse":

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

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

#79

Post by giardini »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #8

One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here. And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.

Pshaw! There are plenty of non-heterosexual people who end up with children! A (drunken) poke here, a (drugged) poke, a wild moment, etc there really adds up.

Many gay people I know have children.

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

#80

Post by happytoexplain »

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…

Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.
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