I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.
Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.
And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old
I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other side of the country/world. Anecdotally the loneliest older people I know are ones who have put it upon their children to keep themselves from loneliness.
> And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them
As a parent I always find it funny that we need to add this to every statement of frustration of family life (I'm not critiquing you, I also say this every time I mention any frustration about parenting). It is worth recognizing that saying the contrary is fundamentally taboo. I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
> So when one of my kids throws a tantrum
If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.
"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"
I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.
So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.
> I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare.
My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
> Like all ideas, someone had to invent them
Not at all. Behaviors can be emergent based on environmental conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
is one example.
I was referring to the parent commenter’s specific ideas and conclusions, not general behavior patterns.
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.
> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
Why not ask Israelis?
Even ignoring Haredim (who's fertility rate has fallen dramatically) secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work crazier hours than Americans (South Korea is the only OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working), live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, and pay American level prices for everything.
But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye.
Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on greedy.
[0] - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Very different things
> But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google ATX would also be able to demand a job at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or $140k at McKinsey CDMX.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive.
Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.
Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
Take immigrant crime rates with a grain of salt, globalists fraud them in every way possible to push their world view.
I lived in South Florida for 12 years working on mega yachts. We were all aware of the criminals raping children then. We were aware of the 14 and 15 year old child prostitutes from Russia trafficked into St Martin. The girls were in the hot tub on the third deck on the yacht in the next slip over and nobody said anything. We were all aware of the hard working immigrants from South America too busy providing for their families and sending money home to be committing crimes.
> No amount of baby cash
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
> There is an amount of baby cash that would work
Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.
And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny. This is a bigger issue than it may seem.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one.
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
> hire a competent housekeeper/nanny
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
That doesn't seem to be supported by the data, the "nicer" and richer a country becomes, birth rates drop.
And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate.
How do you square those facts with your view here?
However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
The dimension of this issue that never gets air time is that we've made having kids almost completely intentional. The richer a country becomes, the more intentional having kids becomes. The dynamic we see with rich countries is that as having kids becomes more intentional, there's also the increase in reasons why people would choose to delay or forego having kids.
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
Generally, the more developed a country is, the more capitalistic it is. Capitalism inherently assigns monetary value to everything, even children, and as capitalist societies currently function children have deeply negative value. So deeply negative that it completely nullifies the higher “default” standard of quality of life that comes with life in a developed country.
Because it's not just money. It's time and money. You can have lots of money and nice things, but if you don't have time to raise your kids, you can't do it. And if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money.
The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory.
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
As someone with unsupportive family, I feel this.
I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.
you think people in Chad are optimistic about the future of their village and are therefore having lots of kids? Give me a break dude.
Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.
Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
I think there are two steps: 1) Make people want to have kids. 2) Make it feasible for them to do so.
People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
I know women who want more kids but their husbands/partners don't want more. One has 3 and she's the breadwinner (FAANG), so they can definitely afford them. A couple others are letting it happen if it happens but they already have one so aren't pressed. I think all of them would have had more if they started earlier but it took everyone a long time before feeling secure enough at work to have kids.
> People already want more kids than they're having
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
"for every three kids wanted… only two are born".
Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.
My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
Well, they know the middle will work no matter what, so they may as well squeeze them.
Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.
Where though? It isn't the case here in Sweden, it's pretty great.
This hasn’t been my personal and 2nd hand experience.
That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.
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It’s surprising that effective, cheap contraceptives aren’t on the list.
We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards?
Thats kind of the point.
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US.
Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...
Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.
Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.
> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
Great point. I'd argue though, is it a utopia if we're not as happy?
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
>without being authoritarian.
Too late. We already have the eyes/muscle and nascent legal justifications; leadership will eventually force the issue.
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
That’s looking at history through a modern lens.
The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex.
They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
Analysis from a time before the birth control pill is pointless. It's an alien society.
Funny how you don't realize you fit perfectly into the description of one of the groups that know exactly what is going on.
What do you mean?
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> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
> Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
TFR has been falling in the US since the 1800s, long before birth control.
TFR doesn't account for mortality.
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Easy.
In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor.
Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.
You really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough.
In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival.
In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
I think that perfectly aligns with their take.
People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.
That actually makes sense. I think I broadly agree with this. Maybe we can do 100 different little things to help people feel like they are "set up".
More and more women have the power to choose when they get pregnant every day.
This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.
> Since the fertility problem is worldwide
Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.
The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
Not entirely. Sperm counts in young men have been falling for decades. No one is sure why.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo
Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
I think if artificial wombs ever succeed it will turn the world upside down
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
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>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
Theyre probably all correct.
Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.
Before you get to agreeing on what solutions to try, you first have to build a consensus that there is in fact a problem. I was an only child, as was my wife, as is my daughter. We're a happy little family (and not even that little, once you factor in grandparents, friends, and the other "aunts and uncles" in our life).
If everyone lived like us, the population would halve in a generation, but a) that seems unlikely, and b) why is that bad?
The only compelling argument I can see is that the "normie" tribe that we come from will be inevitably outnumbered by various stripes of anti-feminist religious weirdos. I buy this argument to an extent (some, possibly most, of the kids from those families will probably mean-revert to being more "normal"), but it is still a problem for several generations down the line while we have urgent problems to deal with ahead of it.
Israel had a net birth rate increase from 2000-2025 despite being at war and under regular rocket barrages for much of that time.
While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
Israel is a very complex case to say the least...
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.
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Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Every morning I get to my son's school about 10 minutes before the doors open. We arrive by bike and we sit ALONE on the benches near the front door.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
> Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars
Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.
A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.
It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
Anecdotally my experience is dramatically different.
Last week I arrived by car right near the beginning of dropoff time. Pulling in right in front of me was the mom of one of my kid's classmates, carpooling with another kid who lives in the same apartment complex. The three of them met up as soon as they got out of the car, and then another one of their friends (who lives across the street from the school and usually walks) joined them from his driveway. They met up with a 5th friend before they crossed the street.
Then I walked - well, more like ran - with the 5 of them down the 111 steps that take us from the street level to the schoolyard. When they reached the bottom, they met up with 3 more friends who had just been let out of the drop-off zone in front of the school itself. Said a quick goodbye to my kid, but he wasn't really paying attention, he was already ensconced in his pack of 8.
I've gotten there with my kid before drop-off time, walked down the stairs with him, and there's been a pack of about 20-30 kids and 2-3 parents usually milling around before the school gates open.
I realize that this is somewhat atypical in 21st-century America, and we specifically chose this community because, well, it actually has a sense of community, but it's not unique. In preschool I'd take my son over to his preschool bestie's house (she lived about 2 cities away), and there'd be a whole pack of kids roaming the neighborhood going over unannounced to each other's houses.
If the medium is the message, the SUV communicates that there is only space for the nuclear family members, speed and comfort is of the essence, and the road is the only acceptable avenue for transportation. The sidewalks are for homeless people, jogging athletes, and eccentrics.
Oh good grief, parents with SUVs aren't that complex, and they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well (negating your first point).
People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids. If you want to translate that as "speed and comfort is of the essence", then fine. I could say the same about someone with no kids who prefers living in a highly urbanized area because their definition of speed and comfort is different.
And virtually no one is thinking "I need to demonstrate my belief that traveling on foot is only for weirdos OR exercising" when purchasing a vehicle, both because not many (to be generous) people think that in an area with sidewalks and because it's just not relevant.
On the off chance you’re in the Bay Area, look into Walk N Roll: https://walknrolltoschool.org/
I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).
Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.
We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.
A different experience here in London - when we are 10 minutes early there's a big load of kids waiting with their parents, most arrive on foot.
jesus that’s dystopian af
How could anyone in the United States responsibly have children? If you lose your job, you and the kid die. Lack of health care makes it impossible to have kids unless you're already set for life. One single event like a car accident, disease, or lightning could mean the end of you and your family.
The rich don't need poor people, so they should die.
The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society.
Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Second this. Maybe also "The Fourth Turning"
It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness.
So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.
Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.
> It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, because they need to put kids to sleep. So, they have to try much harder to have any social contact.
I wonder if what you describe is a consequence of suburbia. In any sort of proper town, there's quick and easy access to parks where you encounter people on the walk to the park, which gives a great sense of community. When you have to pack up the kids in a car you are isolated from community, except through the negative community of bad driving.
The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Suburbia is the easiest place to take the kids and go find things to do on a walk.
> The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Same. As long as you don’t literally stay at home, being a parent with kids is such an easy way to meet more people.
That is not my experience with California suburbia in any way, it is extremely desolate and lonely compared to any proper town or city I have encountered. But I'm very glad that others are having better experiences!
The comment you're responding to is about a decline in social institutions in general. As someone from a tiny town, when I was growing up, stay at home moms were always outside and talking all day. They'd watch over kids together as well. The loneliness aspect of parenthood is a modern invention.
Stay at home parenting doesn't literally mean physically staying in the house. There's far more opportunities for socialization for those not burdened by work, kids are portable, they like doing stuff, and there's really not ALL that much to taking care of them.
> But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely
So...don't do that? Let the parent who works in the office come home and spend time with the kid, and go out for drinks (or hiking or the gym or whatever) with other friends. Do all the chores beforehand during the day, so that the working parent only has kid duty.
If both are working, both have chores and kid duty after work.
I had a period of behind effectively a stay at home dad and I disagree with this completely.
Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.
It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.
Did you struggle with dirty looks at the park?
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
Never once.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
This is why "Moms clubs" are a thing. I get that safe spaces are wanted, especially if the mothers needed to nurse, but dads were unwelcome in the chapter near me.
YMMV. Plenty of groups out there to meet other parents and become friends with. I know several people who had kids and were SAHP and made lots of friends this way. Mind you, as the kids got older everyone moves around so friendships might not always last but it’s very possible. And you have a very obvious thing to bond over - being a parent.
I work at faang and have no friends from that. I’m surrounded by thousands of people every day I’m at work. Everyone is there to work - not be social or hangout or be friends. People show up to social events to grab food and take it back to their desk.
> There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others.
My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.
Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
This is absolutely not our experience, but we've been intentional about joining communities / activities that involve lots of in-person time together. Church is a huge one (especially joining small groups / service groups), but we also do 4H (they have them in urban areas too!), and my wife started an educational co-op with cool field trips, and we organize neighborhood events like caroling at retirement homes, a pre trick or treating party, and a New Year's party for kids.
Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.
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We lived in one of those American planned communities shaped like a kidney. Our kid went to primary school just outside the HOA gates. He had been cutting through the bushes of our neighbor to get to school because it was faster than walking the 2.5 miles through the kidney shaped neighborhood. The one day the neighbor yelled at him and chased him all the way home. We started driving him to school after that and eventually left the neighborhood entirely.
I think we understatement just how hostile western society is to children these days. It's the small things, like an unwalkable and unbikeable neighborhoods, flights that force you to pay more to sit together, and the endless liability waivers.
this really depends on where you live. i’m in an extremely safe family oriented suburb, there’s lot of community, kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids.
I'd say (and this is painful for many) that it really depends on who you are and how you act - if you're outgoing, or force yourself to pretend to be, and you talk, and you listen, and you don't immediately judge people (by whatever metric you come up with) - you can build community anywhere
Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.
Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.
The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
It was a lot easier to get along with people who voted differently when it was about differences in fiscal policy and taxation.
It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
ironically enough my community is inside of one of those scary red states lol
> kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids
Don't have kids myself, but this aspect seems incredibly obvious just reflecting on my childhood in suburbs of Chicago through the 80s-90s.
But the causes for what's keeping the kids indoors now instead of literally running the neighborhood are manifold. In the 80s there were far fewer indoor forms of entertainment to occupy the kids without driving mom batshit insane and making a mess of the place. Now the kids have tablets and gaming consoles, the outdoors is such a scary place when it's not full of gangs of children who know all the backyards better than the parents ostensibly owning them.
It's all rather depressing and the longer I live the more convinced I am that not adding my own kids to this state of affairs was the right move.
Its not boring being inside anymore.
Rewind the clock a few decades and there were a lot more reasons to go outside.
You have hit the nail on the head completely.
There is no 'good' reason. It's anti-social media that is driving people apart, and it's not good at all.
Yeah I think the meritocracy pushed by America is at least in part responsible for this. Social validation for being a high-performing employee is much greater, than for being a member of the community.
It's not an either/or choice for nearly anybody.
There are plenty of volunteers at community events in my area that have prestigious jobs, and the strivers working to maximize opportunities for themselves actually seek these out as another opportunity for accolades and networking.
You just need to find people who actually have an interest in their community. You know who those people often are? Parents. I suspect the decline in birth rates, especially in urban areas, amplifies this in both directions.
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I think the fear narrative in America is just completely out of whack. Besides gun shooting and ICE, there are no real threats.
The politicians have made it seem like there is a lot of there is so much threat but realistically normal people just exist. Stop filling for fox news and maga hate messaging.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
Many of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.
That is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.
> Self deportation is the goal.
Perhaps.
GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.
I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.
Don't be ridiculous, talking about "partisan fear". They have taken away documented, American citizens without due process.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
It’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.)
Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
or just shoot you while you are in your car.
I guess you don't live in Minneapolis, or another targeted metro area. It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in a city where 3000 masked and poorly trained people cos-playing special forces are specifically tasked with arresting as many people as they can and told that they have full immunity.
you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.
you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).
It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
There have been several raids in my city, but it is definitely nothing like what is going on in Minneapolis.
What?
This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest...
As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...
These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.
My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.
I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
So because ice detained a Venezuelan national or tore down a banner an American citizen should be fearful of having kids? You realize you’re proving my point I hope?
My city has had ICE raids since early on. I just am not hysterical.
I'm sorry but your summary of what I posted is so selective that I have to assume you're replying in bad faith.
I just read both articles and I think his summary is accurate enough to stand behind his claim that putting off having children (if you want them) because of a theoretical situation qualified as 'hysterical' (assuming everyone in your household is authorized). I don't think he was replying in bad faith, even if you two disagree.
With all due respect, but this extremely biased and US-centric view. IT was not easier to have kids in 2024 or 2023, both in the EU or US. Childcare is expensive, pace of life today (and the past 20 years at least) implicitly treats kids as a liability and a detriment to career progression and financial security.
Yes, this article is about the US.
And I live in a place single digit blocks from multiple places where ICE agent behavior has made national headlines. I have no financial reservations.
imagine ending your genetic line because you’re upset about the current us president
What a bizarre comment. Who cares about their genetic line? Are you evolution itself? Do you have stakes in making sure your genes make it to the future?
A weird comment to make to someone who already has children, but I guess at least we can all be happy that my kids are being raised by parents that can read?
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what an insanely insulting reply. this site sucks now.
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Given that I.C.E. has been allowed to stop people just for not looking white enough, and even white citizens have been shot for being "near" I.C.E. operations, I would suggest that it is not safe to assume someone is not a citizen, just because I.C.E. makes them feel unsafe in their neighborhood.
> even white citizens have been shot for being "near" I.C.E. operations
Explain exactly what you are referring to
I'm sorry, is this serious? Yes, Kavanaugh stops do exist and are problematic. But the question is -- are they doing them? Almost all of their operations in Minnesota (just assuming Minnesota here, apologies if I have mischaracterized) have been targeted operations, where they are pursuing a specific individual.
The two situations where someone was fatally shot were both targeted; they were not just grabbing brown people off the street and throwing them in the paddy wagon.
And if you're going to pretend that they just happened to be "near" ICE operations, and not actively trying to interfere and obstruct their operations (while attempting to stay technically inside the bounds of the law) then I don't think we can have a good faith conversation here.
The vast majority of people in Minnesota are simply unaffected by these operations. Many people have convinced themselves that they are at risk but this is not reflective of reality.
> If you claim to be changing your life in any way in response to this then you're just putting a fig leaf on decisions that you've already made.
How insulting. Bad faith arguments have become way too prevalent on this site.
I will remove that accusation in the interests of not distracting from my main point. I don't know you and the particulars of your situation and apologize for an unsupported insinuation.
Agreed. You are not alone, all of us see what's going on, and it only takes a few bad actors that are highly motivated to cause the craziness you see on display here.
Regular, normal people are still in the majority, we just need to acknowledge each other and not let the propagandists flood the zone.
If someone sees the world around them getting worse, I think it's pretty logical to not bring a child into that society.
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You think only non-citizens are under assault? Are you familiar with “Kavanaugh Stops”?
Yes, the idea of Kavanaugh Stops is problematic. The problem is that they are not happening.
Even ProPublica's reporting [1], while in the headline claiming these stops are problematic, reveals that there are a whopping 9 cases that they've found where racial profiling appears to be a factor.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
ICE threatens everyone, regardless of citizenship. They daily detain citizens without even bothering to ask "papers please". They menace and threaten and intimidate people just out and about in the neighborhood.
The ICE raids have little to do with immigration, they are a secret police force meant to cause terror in communities with their lawless violence. It is a politically driven attack on a state that had the audacity not to vote for Trump, nothing more.
Simply not true. Even ProPublica's reporting [1], despite the grand headlines, does not support this. They found a total of 9 cases where racial profiling appeared to be a factor. The remaining cases were either people who actively tried to obstruct or interfere with ICE operations or cases where there was probable cause.
They menace and threaten "people just out and about in the neighborhood"? It is hard to engage in good faith when you are baldly making statements that are completely unsupported. There have been two tragic deaths in which ICE (or BP) agents seem to be at fault, but the victims were not just "out and about" and making that claim is incredibly disingenuous.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
For anybody looking on, this sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days. All that crazy stuff Europeans are seeing with JD Vance and Trump's Greenland behvaior is what everyday Americans experience on a wide range of topics.
Having somebody link to a source that directly refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is something I've experienced multiple times in the past week! It's quite shocking.
When the Trump administration went so hard on open lies that are directly contradicted by videos we all saw of ICE events, it was vice-signaling that started even greater amounts of bearing false witness. Openly lying seems to signal "in-group" status these days, like the sign in the green grocer's shop[1]. Get people to lie about the evidence they see with their eyes, and the become completely controlled, because to do so is to have total subservience to their master. No more eyes or ears except for those of their master. People that used to have values slowly abandon them, all in service to the lie that they are living. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
That is the state of the US at the moment. I have hope that we can return to our former sanity, or at least ensure that the reigns of power are in the hands of normal, centrist people instead of the extreme fringes, but it is in no way certain.
[1] As Carney recently referenced from Vaclav Havel; here's a recentish essay on it: https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...
ICE was arresting people whether they are citizens or not, whether they have legal status or not. They also beat people because they wanna.
They beat people because Trump and his regime want them to.
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My darwinian theory:
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
Real people are annoying, hard to deal with, unpredictable, dirty, smelly, all sorts of issues.
The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away.
What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone else.
>Real people are annoying
They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.
That's the point - real people are annoying because you are annoying. (Not you in particular, but me, you, everyone.)
Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.
In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.
One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.
It's like Google, Meta, etc are not only siphoning money from peoples attention. They are siphoning human life force.
If you look at the top companies in America currently by market share, pretty much all are selling addictions while maybe a handful actually selling tangible products.
I dream of the day when people wake up to see TikTok and Instagram are as bad or worse than smoking.
I watched this video a while ago that said something similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispyUPqqL1c
The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.
He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.
He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.
I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 48492.1 We have entered orbit around Sol III-bis. Long-range scans suggested a pre-warp civilization at the peak of the Information Age. However, upon arrival, Lieutenant Uhura reports total silence across all hailing frequencies. No radio, no subspace chatter, not even leaking analog television waves. Yet, life sign readings are off the charts. It is a ghost town inhabited by eight billion ghosts.
[Surface - The Town Square]
The transporter beam hums and fades. Riker, Spock, and Counselor Troi materialize in the middle of a bustling intersection.
Riker immediately reaches for his phaser, expecting a reaction. A panic. A scream. Nothing.
A native walks straight through the space where Riker’s arm is raised, correcting their path by mere millimeters at the last second, eyes never leaving the blue glow of their palm.
"Captain," Riker taps his combadge, voice tense. "We've landed. We are... invisible."
Spock raises an eyebrow, scanning a nearby human with his tricorder. "Incorrect, Commander. We are simply irrelevant. Their optical sensors are registering our presence, but their visual cortex is filtering us out as 'non-content'. We are pop-up ads in a physical reality they have deprecated."
Suddenly, Troi gasps. She stumbles, clutching her temples. Her knees hit the pavement hard.
"Counselor!" Riker is at her side instantly.
"It’s... it’s too loud, Will," she whispers, her face pale, sweat beading instantly on her forehead. "It’s not voices. It’s not emotions. It’s... flashes."
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears leak out. "A billion images of felines. Dancing figures. Arguments without context. Tragedy mixed with absurdity. It’s a scream, Spock, but it’s a scream about nothing."
"Motion sickness of the mind," Spock observes, looking at his readings. "A precise description. You are attempting to find a focal point, Counselor, but there is none. The signal is not radiating from a central broadcast tower. It is a mesh network of pure dopamine."
He turns his tricorder to the crowd. "Fascinating. They utilize a tight-beam UHF protocol—what the archives call 'Bluetooth 17'. It ensures that no signal ever touches an unintended recipient. They have achieved perfect privacy, and in doing so, created perfect isolation."
"They could have warp drive," Riker mutters, looking at a mag-lev train passing silently overhead, filled with slumped, blue-lit figures. "Look at this infrastructure. The power efficiency alone..."
"They do not want warp drive, Commander," Spock says, closing his tricorder with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet street. No one flinches. "Space travel requires looking up. Warp drive requires a destination. This species has already arrived."
Troi looks up, her eyes bloodshot, trembling. "We have to leave, Will. Please. It’s... sticky. The thoughts... they want to be thought. They’re hungry."
Riker taps his badge. "Enterprise, three to beam up. Now! Lock on to my signal, not the ambient noise."
[The Bridge]
Back on the ship, Troi is in sickbay, sedated. Spock stands at the science station.
"Status on the planet, Mr. Spock?" Picard asks, looking at the viewscreen. The planet is beautiful, blue and green, peaceful.
"It is a tomb, Captain," Spock replies, his voice devoid of judgment but heavy with implication. "They have not been conquered. They have been optimized. They have traded the chaotic inefficiency of exploration for the streamlined certainty of simulation."
"The Great Filter," Picard murmurs.
"Indeed," Spock turns. "We often theorized that advanced civilizations destroy themselves with fire. It appears, Captain, that it is just as likely they destroy themselves with a warm bath."
Picard stares at the screen for a long moment. "Helm, engage. Warp 1. Get us away from here."
"Course, sir?"
"Anywhere," Picard says, adjusting his uniform. "Just... outward."
As much as I love this post, I have to be the one to point out that Uhura and Spock are from a different Enterprise than Picard, Riker, and Troi. Great work, though, I can practically hear Leonard Nimoy reading this dialogue.
Was this written by a human? It's far to entertaining to have been written by an LLM.
I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
This is surely part of the story historically, but not recently. Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s in the US, while total fertility rate is down ~20% since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
This seems like the type of argument that is possible to perform a data analysis to defend or refute. Lot of countries collect data on female participation in the workforce and birth rates. Many countries also collect data that could determine if this has an impact on the individual household level.
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
It's good timing. As new labor productivity enhancing tools become more available/affordable (LLM) it seems advisable to have smaller labor pool. More vacancies with less labor competition should allow more rapid reskilling of displaced workers.
Most of the developed countries are facing this.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
Much to do about nothing
I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
As a man who's never wanted kids, and is now getting to an age where it probably wouldn't be a good idea, those weren't really the big factors for me.
Having a kid is just an unfathomably large commitment. If you bring a kid into the world, I believe you're responsible for creating the conditions where that kid can grow into a healthy, well adjusted adult, and that's seemed like an increasingly impossible commitment for the past few decades.
I have a small child. It's awesome!
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Maybe all these things are true at the same time. More of a “is it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all” kind of dialogue.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.
New Yorker has a detailed article on this phenomenon that's a great read.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
What are some of the myths they bust in that article? For those of us who can't see past the paywall
One really common that myth this article busts is about child care.
"Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."
Childcare can be nice to have but it can also be a full-time job just getting the kids there if you have more than a few.
We certainly take advantage of things like free preschool; but if we look at it objectively (and ignore benefits to the child) it consumes more time than if we didn't use it - getting him ready, walking him to school, picking him up, etc. Since it's free, we look at "time spent" and it's something like 2-3 hours spent to "get" 3 hours.
Minus the commute you had to do most of that anyway though, right? We get my four year old ready and walk her to school (city free pre-k a few blocks away, plus paid aftercare).
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
You got 8 hours out of it, we get maybe three - because of how it works out.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
Yeah, haha fair. Even my friends with two look noticeably shell shocked most of the time. Good luck =)
I don’t think the evidence either way is strong enough to call that one a myth. There are lots of other differences between the two countries that could offset the impact of Austria’s childcare subsidies.
There are plenty of longitudinal studies from various geographies, which I would summarize as “childcare subsidies increase birth rates in some contexts, but the effects are complex and depend on program specifics.” E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2917182/ and https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-07...
I can only speak for myself, but 2 was a good number for me. This amounts to somewhat less than a replacement rate. My wife and I had enough time and energy to give the kids what they needed, and still have some for ourselves at the end of the day. And if either of the kids needed extra resources or attention, we were able to do it without neglecting the other one.
I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.
Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.
I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.
(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)
Just to expand a bit on Zurich and comparing with Slovenia (another "very socialist" country).
Childcare in/around Zurich is (was 2 years ago) 2500 - 3000 CHF / month (lower prices after ~18 months). This is and isn't expensive. The list prices are high, but so are salaries (and taxes are low), and this is cheaper than rent (for 1 kid). Not subsidized.
In Slovenia, the full price is about 700 EUR / month, subsidised up to 77% by the government (i.e. by high-earners, effectively a double-progressive taxation with already high taxes).
What you get for that price in Zurich? A lot! Kindergarten starts at 3 months and can take care of kids for the whole work day (7am-18pm). Groups are tiny and lots of teachers - 3 adults per 12 kids. Groups are mixed age as well, which I think are preferable. You also get a lot of flexibility - e.g. half-days (cheaper) or only specific days per week (e.g. Mon-Thu). Jobs are equally adaptable, a lot of people work 80% (so Friday free, spend with kid(s)).
In Slovenia, the situation is much worse. 2 teachers per 12 or even 20 kids (after age 4), age-stratified groups, childcare finishes at 5pm (but start at 6am, if someone needs that...). Children are only welcome after 11 months of age. No flexibility at all. This is all for public childcare - we also looked at private, but generally you pay more (1000+ EUR) but get ... not much more. Maybe nicer building (not even), but groups are equally large (IMO biggest drawback).
So as far as childcare is concerned, Switzerland is IMO much better.
But where Switzerland fucks you, is elsewhere. As mentioned, tax is low, so that's a plus. But there's minimal maternity leave (hence kindergarten starts at 3 months). If women can, they take more time off work, but not everyone can. What I wrote above about "kindergarten" only applies until 4 years of age, after which "preschool" starts, which is government-funded and hence free. Well, "free". It ends at 12pm after which you need to move your kid back into private childcare if you have a job. After that, school starts, which has a lunch break around 12pm as well - children are supposed to eat lunch at home - which again isn't really compatible with 2 working parents.
I'm not in Switzerland any more so I don't know how people actually manage when kids start school...
In the USA there's a definite "kid gap" around 4k-1st grade - before that, childcare if used is "open late" and flexible (if you have the cash) - and after 1st the kid is often mature enough to do simple movements on their own if school doesn't go long enough (walk to the library, or get into extra curricular activities, etc).
At 4k-1st you often have shortened hours, so if you're a working parent you need to arrange for transportation or be able to take long lunches, etc to move children from one place to another.
This "gap of annoyance" happens right about when you'd naturally be looking at a second or third kid as a possibility - I wonder how much effect it has on people.
TL;DR: the article argues we cannot fix the population crisis with small tax breaks or traditional values because the modern world has made the cost of raising a child being too high for most people to want to try.
---
The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.
1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.
Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.
2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).
Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.
3. Myth: Women working is the cause.
Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.
4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.
Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.
e: moved TL;DR to the top.
> lack of support is
This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.
You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.
Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)
> 4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
> Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
That doesn't address the "myth". You can keep bringing more migrants and eventually replace the population.
I am at work and didn't have time to read the full article. Here's Gemini summary:
The article "The End of Children" (published in The New Yorker, March 2025) explores the global phenomenon of plummeting fertility rates, examining why traditional explanations and policy solutions are failing to reverse the trend. Here is a summary of the key points: * Economic Support Isn't Enough: The article challenges the popular liberal argument that fertility decline is primarily caused by economic insecurity or a lack of childcare. It points out that Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden—which offer generous parental leave, "baby boxes," and flexible work cultures—still face declining birth rates similar to or lower than the U.S. Even in places where childcare is free (Vienna) versus expensive (Zurich), fertility rates often remain identical. * The "Achievement Culture" Trap: The definition of "affording" a child has inflated significantly. In many wealthy, educated circles, raising a child now implies providing a suite of expensive advantages—individual bedrooms, travel sports, private lessons, and organic diets. This "intensive parenting" model means working mothers today actually spend more time on active childcare than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations, making the prospect of parenthood feel overwhelming. * Political and Educational polarization: There is a widening fertility gap based on politics and education. Democrats and those with higher degrees are significantly more likely to be childless. This is partly attributed to the extended time required for education and career establishment, pushing childbearing to later years when it is biologically more difficult. * Failed Government Interventions: The author highlights various aggressive attempts by governments to boost birth rates, such as Hungary's tax exemptions for mothers of four and South Korea's numerous "happiness projects" and subsidies. Despite spending fortunes, no modern nation has successfully reversed a low fertility rate back to replacement levels. * A Shift in Meaning: The article concludes with a philosophical reflection on how children have transformed from a natural part of life into "variables" in a high-stakes lifestyle choice. They are increasingly viewed through the lens of identity and personal fulfillment, leading to a culture where parents fear judgment and non-parents fear being seen as selfish, intensifying the anxiety around having children at all.
Wow, I never thought id see the day on HN.....
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
> At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?
Realistic solutions look something like: - we increase productivity of the working population - we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees - we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired
I think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.
But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.
Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually.
Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.
The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
Or decrease handouts to the non-working population. Maybe we cannot afford to keep seniors in their SFHs driving everywhere.
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We need young people to pay for old people retirement (economically speaking, someone has to be working when someone else is just eating).
I really hope that automation and robotics will _finally_ allow us to invert the pyramid.
Much more likely is that conditions for elder care will continuously degrade until MAID becomes most people's choice.
Don't know about inverting the pyramid but we may get more pyramid schemes. Like Google and Oracle doing 100 year bonds for AI.
Despite the hype cycle around humanoid robots it's unlikely that they'll advance enough to be capable of replacing many human workers in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities within our lifetimes. Expect to see lots of really sad stories about elder abuse and neglect because as a society we simply won't have the resources to adequately care for them all.
I kinda expect nursing and people paid to give attention to the elderly to be the last job standing. very hard to replace or automate
Paid by whom? That's the problem. The people with money won't be willing to pay more taxes to fund workers to care for a growing indigent elderly population. It's already causing shortages today and will only get worse.
They don’t have to. If say robotaxis become widespread, you’ve freed up some portion of the labor market to do something else. They don’t have to automate all jobs, just some.
The evidence has shown that this thinking is flawed - disruption of jobs in an industry causes a slow, wrenching, scarring adjustment process that increases the load on welfare programs and makes quality of life broadly worse: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got...
sure but after 3-5 generations it works out, like with farming and weaving. just gotta wait longer!
If only this was a game of Victoria 3
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It won't. The economic gains of automation will continue to be captured by the capital-owning class. It's simply too valuable to just give over to the masses.
Why? I understand that's how the system works now but does it have to? Productivity has never been higher.
Why though? All those old people paid in all their lives so surely that is sitting in a vault somewhere waiting for them.
If they were only eating there would be no problem. But they want fancy vacations. They want houses. They need drugs. They need MRI machines. And they need these things for decades for minimal cost irrespective of ability to pay. And, when they do die, they expect to pass estates tax-free to thier children. Supporting the retired population is one thing, but the day may soon come when we revisit what it means to be retired.
If you want to punch up try aiming higher than the upper-middle class. Other countries have MRIs and drugs as part of universal healthcare.
Those other countries are still paying for those things somehow. (or they really have the alleged death panels critics talk about) You can shove the cost in different places, but somehow they still have to be paid.
Ya but those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers. The ability to purchase shares in both the hospital that is treating you and the company that authorizes your treatment is a uniquely american priviledge.
> those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers
I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
We need young people to pay for the billionaire subsidies (economically speaking, someone has to accumulate all that profit and it's not going be us)
I am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing).
The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
Predicting population decline is safer than overgrowth. Since with low birth rates we know we need substantially higher than replacement rates to make up for the deficit. Which seems unlikely
Safer in the sense that its better to be overcautious than under? I definitely agree! I'm just saying we could do without the finger wagging. Either we commit to fostering relationships or we commit to their substitutes. I'm just saying I call their bluff.
The main issue with population decline is the inability to depend on the growing younger population to fund the retirement of elderly people
That's the way the system is set up but basically it's not sustainable. You can have more young people now to fix the problem of funding older people. But what happens when these young people get old? Now you need even more young people.
Look at the problems South Korea is having, where there are not enough young people to support and care for the elderly. Elders face economic hardship and the healthcare system is buckling under load.
Because progress and growth makes us wealthier and happier? It's pretty simple.
People say "Oh, but GDP isn't everything" - but it's correlated with almost everything good, so might as well be.
GDP is correlated only while good things are increasing - forcing every married family to divorce at gunpoint and become two family households would greatly increase GDP - but I don't think we'd agree that's good.
This. The prospect of a brighter future at least means capital and labor are fighting for slices of a bigger pie. If the pie per capita stays constant or shrinks there will be a lot more anti-social behavior to response to the zero-sum environment.
humans are good. life is good. we should be trying to increase the number of conscious beings in the universe.
we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
Because you are not prepared for the poverty that follows from an economy stalling.
The Social Security system relies on creating a debt of unborn children to older people based on those older people having already paid now dead people, so keeping it solvent requires more meat for the tax machine.
A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot.
---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled -----
yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
Mentioning Social Security and government implies there is some other form of retirement that doesn't inherently depend on younger people still working, doesn't it? I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
The traditional approach to this is:
a) make younger female family members do all the work
b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
Even if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden.
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
> They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
That's always been my deep unsettling feeling about the whole idea of "mass-market social security nets" of the type Americans call "social security" - it's one thing to provide for those who literally have nothing and nobody; it's another to blanket everyone with it and disrupt natural processes that are as old as time.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
Forms of retirement that don't have the force of law can be adjusted on the fly to match the available resources. When the government forcibly requires that each elderly person be paid a fixed amount of resources yearly, it's possible for there to be literally zero surplus for the young people making the resources. That can't happen under systems where the transfers are voluntary.
> I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night.
Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-...
More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
(I am a social democrat, not a libertarian) All models require to some extent the youth working, but not all require a part of the youth's fruits of their labour being taken and put into social security. A libertarian might say that the onus is on the boomers to save enough money to fund their own retirement so that they're not reliant on the social security safety net.
It doesn't really matter on a macro scale if you have social security doing it, or "retirement accounts" doing it - at the base there is capital and value-add (work) and you're transferring from one to the other.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
It absolutely does matter whether you're taxing wages or capital though.
Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity.
The point is that money is still just an abstraction. When you take a step back and analyze things in terms of goods and services being the value, you end up with the same types of questions as when analyzing social security in terms of money.
Basically it makes people feel good. Growth is exciting and motivates people to do stuff. Shrinkage makes people sad, depressed and more likely to try to protect what they have. It's often irrational, but that's just the way it is.
Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
This might be a really good analogy - we're in an endless summer and we have people who are now dying having lived in it their entire life - we don't even know what fall is like, let alone winter.
On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
I think people really fail to understand the gravity of an inverted demographic pyramid, going from 2 young people supporting 1 old, to 1 young person supporting 2 old. That's .5 -> 2x, a 4x increase in burden (taxes / extra work).
American capitalists and economic planners fret about "Japan Syndrome". To have more productivity and more consumption i.e. GDP growth, you need more people as a core driver. We don't actually need this, we could do fine with a stable population, but capitalism needs to grow or perish.
Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
If you or anyone you care about is or will be elderly and is not financially independent, you should care.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
The line has to go up every year forever. You know the old saying
> Capitalist Economics: "Humans only value things monetarily." Sociology: "Uh, I don't..." Capitalist Economics: "Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus." Sociology: "Uhhh, Psy, can you help?" Psychology: "That's not how humans..." Capitalist Economics: "ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!" Physics: drops teacup
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
I think it's clear that the reduction in teen pregnancy is indeed a big contributor to the decreasing fertility rate. I would guess the reason this doesn't get brought up in discussions about how to _increase_ the fertility rate is that reversing the trend on teen pregnancy is just really not a palatable solution to many people. Although there are some, usually on the religious right, who advocate for banning contraception, teaching abstinence-only sex education, etc., which would most likely have the effect of reversing the teen pregnancy trend.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
An unsolvable problem that will correct itself homeostatically. Also: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
I don't get what the fence metaphor has to do with the problem
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
I'm struggling to see why this is a problem.
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
Is this a stupid question? Why do we want high fertility rates anyway? Isn't the world overpopulated?
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
It's not just numbers or speed. It's the shape of the population pyramid. Around the world except Africa, populations are aging. This means less taxes will come in, less workers of prime age, much more healthcare and elder care will be needed, and thus less of the valuable workers in other sectors.
Fully agree and I don't see why more people aren't talking about this.
World population in early 1800 was around a billion. As recent as 1928, it was only 2 billion. We added 3x that number in the last 100 years!
I see population decline as a good thing. Nations should focus on managing the decline gracefully. It's good for the environment. It's good for distributing our limited resources equitably.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
this is the issue. the US was easily addressing this problem with immigration before the current regime
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
As a parent, I genuinely question why I continue to participate in a society that tolerates traffic deaths and firearm violence like the US. If there's a large chunk of people who won't lift a finger to keep kids from being shot at school, there's a large chunk of people who value my child's life at zero.
One of the ways the Netherlands made streets safer for dismounted people was by framing it as stopping killing kids with your cars. Yes this is "think of the children" logic but since kids are generally healthy the top causes of kid death in the US are gunfire and cars.
The USA had those same protests a decade before the Netherlands, but collectively decided that they preferred to blame the parents more than they wanted to restrict car drivers:
From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidde...:
> "all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses." ...
> "Many demonstrations—particularly the biggest ones—were triggered by the injury or death of a child. Against any tendency to blame the parents for permitting their children to have a life of their own beyond home and school, demonstrators consistently demanded streets that local children could use safely. And while the demonstrations were nearly always nonviolent, they were vocal and insistent, and sometimes confrontational. They included some degree of traffic obstruction, sometimes even full blockades that barred all motor vehicles." ...
> "Women bearing signs picketed streets and intersections, or set up folding chairs across the breadth of streets and sat in them. Children often participated. A mainstay of the demonstrations was baby carriages, occupied or not, which rhetorically associated the demonstrations with motherhood and with the safety of children. The technique was common enough to give the demonstrations a name: Some newspapers called them “baby carriage blockades.”" ...
> "the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was the mother’s fault."
Agree with the statement,
Don't agree with the supporting statements though.
Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
I've wondered if massive one time payments would be a solution. Like 100k for the first kid, 90k for the second, etc. Obvious moral hazard around having kids just for the payment, but if population decline is actually a big problem, it isn't necessarily worse.
Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal value?
ive seen similar things like no income tax if you have 3 kids. i think that give you slightly better alignment because you still want to be productive.
> The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.
I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.
If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.
The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this,
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-tr...
I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to give it back, but otherwise did not have to face prosecution.
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
There are such deep contradictions in these thoughts. You think that the illegal immigrant is going to starve without the criminal employer? When just a second ago you were saying they should be deported, and that "most" people think that's OK?
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
What can I say, I contain multitudes.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
> extend labor protections
This would also solve the "competition" problem, because it would tend to equalize wages.
Wanting them gone isn't the same as putting the blame on them. It isn't a personality conflict or a troubled relationship; immigrants shouldn't feel guilty for wanting to stay and the people competing with them should feel guilty for wanting them to go. Or rather, who cares? Shouldn't people be allowed to have their inner states to themselves? Can't we own anything? How did a discussion about labor exploitation turn into a discussion about feelings?
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
Get off the internet and make some sexy time.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's utterly pointless to examine them.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far.
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
It's actually not a good trade at all, you need a balanced population pyramid if you want a functional economy in the future. The housing stock is behind due to financial crisis in 2007, as well as lots of other factors, and population decrease won't solve most of those.
In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.
If the US wants to increase its population, maybe it should stop sending masked agents out to kick in doors, directly reducing the population.
The US doesn't want indiscriminate population growth. It wants white people that were born here to reproduce more.
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Does it? It sure costs a whole helluava lot. I mean, there's tax credits and things, but it's not at all cheap!
I think capitalists just want cheap labor. The US itself doesn’t have a unified position on population. Plenty of people want a population decrease because they feel everything is overcrowded.
Well, when I say "US" I mean the current administration and the people that have power within it. Maybe that's not their actual intention or desire, but that is the story their policies and actions are telling.
It's interesting how the sides flipped. Left was strongly anti-immigration because it saw it as a tool of capitalism to drive down wages and just general abuse of working-class rights. Now Left is pro-immigration, and the right is against for the same reason the Left was. When did this change happen?
I'm on the left and am anti-immigration. Always have been. I think pulling the cream of the crop is objectively good for the country, but bad for the places they come from. Liberal low skilled immigration is just bad for everyone except the handful of people that actually employ them.
When the “left” started becoming more about social wokeist policies than about economics and fiscal policy.
I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.
The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…
It's amusing. The left is always accused of "woke" but the ones constantly crying about it are those on the right. The right will even vote against their own economic interests to "stick it to the woke."
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
The US has endless backlog of people waiting in line to legally enter the country. It doesn’t need to keep any illegal aliens to meet its immigration goals.
This logic would fly a couple of years ago.
Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
> Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate". For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law. But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
> And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
There's nothing bizarre about workers being angry at a system that is being abused to drive down wages. The reality is that there are segments of workforce in the USA that will only hire H1Bs workers because they know they can treat them illegally. This happens all over the place but is particularly prevalent at larger orgs (both in tech and finance). The behavior is implicitly authorized by the companies as they outsource the "being the jerk" to those managers.
The non-H1B workers rightfully feel angered by this because it directly lowers their wages. It's like scabs flooding a union shop. Only worse as the scabs are scared of not only losing their jobs, but their visas.
> And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate"
Ok, let me make you aware of it and then you'll be unable to continue to use this excuse.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26871634-19-ts-of-02...
> Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country.
Quit burying your head in the sand of what is happening around you. I urge you to actually read the reality in the court records of what is actually happening.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate".
You are wilfully unaware.
> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.
The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.
Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.
Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.
When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.
> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.
The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.
> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.
ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?
This already happened in 1986.
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."
"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."
"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here
I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....
State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?
Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.
How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.
What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.
It creates a huge moral hazard to reward those who illegally entered/overstayed visas
The vast majority taken up in these dragnets are legal residents of the united states.
The attorney representing ICE to the courts in MN admitted it directly, admitted that ICE does not believe it needs to honor orders of the federal court system, and that they do not comply with orders to release legal residents of the united states.
You should educate yourself. Here's commentary that directly references the lawyer's responses and judge's commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o-_2thaI8
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
It's not a guarantee that we'll import more food - though that may be a good thing in the long run to help other countries - we could also switch what kinds of food we eat.
Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.
Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.
facilitating the free movement of labor across borders by... abducting and abusing all the laborers coming across our borders? very curious
I think you missed the sarcasm.
I did, sorry
Necessity is the mother of invention. Americans like to invent things - we'll be fine.
Maybe they should have a look to what other countries are doing. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
Meanwhile, in Denmark:
Why have Danes turned against immigration?
...
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
...
Heck, they could just make it easier for documented immigrants to live here.
There are other plans now:
https://baptistnews.com/article/remember-the-first-goal-of-p...
The ever-advancing big tech dystopia where individuals are pervasively tracked, quantified, and siloed. A destroyed economy squashing mobility, making the basic necessities uncertain, and future wealth questionable. Terrorist gangs abducting people in their homes based on what AI says, and executing people in the streets for protesting about it. All things that make for warm fuzzy feelings about bringing children into this world!
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead, downward. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
Holy shit that article invokes explicit nazi policy without a shred of shame.
The interesting thing is this is Spain's second wave of doing this, and the economic studies on the first wave of it showed visibly positive results. Spain's economy moved in growth, and with a size larger than many other European nations in similar background conditions of flat to negative population growth, but tighter immigration allowances.
Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system.
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
Spains youth is everywhere in europe but in spain? That economy sounds like a warzone from what they tell..
You're mentally stuck in 2009-2015. The world has moved on and Spain is now significantly outperforming Germany in growth (obviously not yet in wealth, which is the integral of growth over much longer time periods). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YZeqk8NCQ&t=456s
I have no doubt that this has positive effects on the national economy as a whole (you get workers, on demand, without really paying for raising, educating, training them), but it is not really sustainable because population growth is low/negative pretty much everywhere, and it also leads to significant pushback from cultural friction and local workers (that dislike competition).
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
As I see it, the root of unhappiness in voters is nonperformant housing markets and unaddressed growth of inequality where wages are not sharing in growth of profits. This creates a raft of difficult issues. And the rightwing indeed has an effective playbook to exploit these unaddressed shortfalls while blaming immigration. And the center left parties seem unwilling or unable to address the root problems.
That sounds like a horrible way to flirt.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
Shithole country
Poor people. Start pumping out kids to be future wage slaves in this corpo dominated country. Carls Jr loves you.
Mass human behavior in regards to fertility, climate destruction, and social decay is much more sensical if you frame it as species-wide suicidality.
Maybe if young folks could afford housing they'd have kids...there's a thought.
I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong, and not even plausible (anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings, and they could not even afford proper sunday shoes for all of them, much less current living standards).
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
> "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
Yes - because they have high standards! Higher than achievable standards, and more income to give up if they start trading off time from work to actually raising their own children.
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I'm not going to find sources right now, but from my understanding the research shows that the greatest impact on number of children is education of girls. Once women have more options, staying home their whole life popping out babies seems less desirable.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
I'd argue that the minimum education level rising in general is already strongly correlated itself, because it indicates that "uneducated" children are economically worthless (=> parents need to pay more to educate and children take longer until self-sustainable and economic "worth" of adolescents is relatively lower).
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
Because I was making more money than my wife. Get it?
In my opinion, it mostly comes down to contraception and changing lifestyle choices. Most child-free people I know simply prefer not to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
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> my grandmother had 17 siblings
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
I can't agree with you enough. I am so sick and tired of the cost of living argument. Back in the 1800s people were living in tiny cramped places and having 5-6 kids while barely able to afford necessities.
People then also largely worked on family farms and having kids was the economically sensible thing to do. Times change and people expect differently for both their own lives as well as the lives of their children.
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
How many kids do you have?
>I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
Your post implies that costs for raising kids stop when the kids are in school. Your post did not include costs for college - which is becoming a norm for a lot of people. Un-subscribing from the idea of giving your kids college education is a bad decision.....
I suspect few women are willing to give up all their other options to stay home and make babies their whole life.
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
> anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
Contraceptives will be harder to get. Project 2025 is also about stopping the "senseless use of birth control pills".
Well, they can do whatever they want in their red-states. Blue states are already moving healthcare away from federal non-sense standards [0] and [1]
[0] https://governor.wa.gov/news/2025/washington-california-and-...
[1]https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-mdhhs/newsroom/2026/01...
That's what nationalizing elections is for, make blue states turn red.
This is often a commonly blamed reason, but I think the data at this point pretty strongly suggests that the more affluent a country is the less kids they have.
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
Seems like when you give women the choice, many elect to have fewer kids than replacement level.
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Parental_Glory - Russia tried this, not sure how successful it is.
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
Yes, the "cost of having kids" argument is 100% bunk. Africans in abject poverty are having 6-7 kids, while individuals living in the richest countries are having 1 or none even though they clearly can afford many more.
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
This comes up in every discussion about demographics. But counterintuitively, there are no examples of financial incentives actually fixing this problem.
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
[1] https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/hungary-to-spend-6-2-o...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hun...
Back of an envelope suggests that to really make this work you'd need most women in the 20-40 range to have the job title of "parent" and a lower middle class or more salary paid by the state, so .. 10-20% of GDP? Nobody wants to contemplate just how expensive this is going to be, including the fact that now you have a short-term labour shortage (because they're out of the regular workforce as well!)
If that were true then we would expect to see a positive correlation between income and family size, but households making 500k are basically the same size as households making 50k.
Your specific claim may indeed be true, but it's misleading. The relationship between income and children is U-shaped. From middle incomes to higher incomes, fertility rises. It is also important to point out that income is tied to other factors in America. You're going to disproportionately find your $500k earners in a handful of superstar coastal cities. Those things need to be controlled for if you want to isolate the effect of income on family size.
More that young(er) folks could afford to live on a single income for the pre-school years. Or, I guess, that there's extensive parental leave and support for the parent doing primary caregiver.
Mixed in with all this, and possibly preceeding all this, is declining marriage rates. It's significantly riskier, financially and relationally, to have kids without getting married.
There are many solutions to different aspects of the problem - if we define the problem something like "people get together older, and have kids older, and have fewer."
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
You need a positive life affirming story in your life to set up kids and the current core does not have that. "You will be either a concentration camp guard or a prisoner, in a apocalyptic war" is not a life narrative, its a contraceptive.
The Amish aren't on the consumer treadmill. They have amazing social support from their community. They tend to be "traditional families" so there's no question re: child rearing. So I guess that satisfies both of the original conditions... But I figure people would prefer a more commercial lifestyle. Particularly on places like HN.
The Amish aren't becoming scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As a society I don't think the Amish lifestyle is something we would embrace.
By all estimates, they have also fairly high rates of domestic violence and abuse rates. Which to be fair, traditional families also frequently featured.
Lots of people are doing the math and explaining why what the people who aren't having kids are saying is wrong. They have their math and the people still don't have kids.
Is housing really that expensive? When you price out a loan on a starter house it really ain't that bad. I'm a recent first time homebuyer and I don't understand why people think they aren't affordable. There were plenty of cheaper homes that I looked at and even with rates at their highest would be cheaper than my rent.
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
Based on your lower comment, Rhode Island.
Median family income $87k
Cost-of-living ~$36k excluding housing
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
In general the “housing is too expensive” people mean “I looked at every available house in both San Francisco and New York City, and didn’t find anything cheap!”
When picking a city, pick two:
-Good job market
-Not high cost of living
-Good quality of life (commute, amenities, etc.)
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
such annoying pedantry to point out that "akshually houses are cheap in southern missouri"
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
That's what it feels like to me. Hey I checked all the houses in a jet set fart sniffing town and there's nothing!
the cities mentioned account for nearly 10% of US GDP by themselves. That's not exactly what I would describe as a "jet set fart sniffing town." maybe you misread and thought the OP said Jackson or Sun Valley or something?
Housing for the boomers used to cost 3x the median salary. Now it's more like 6x the median salary. These are nationwide numbers. Wage growth isn't keeping up to pace with housing prices
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
How much cost do you consider a first time home as costing?
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God forbid paying the masses a living wage or allowing them access to things their forebears had. They will own nothing and they will be thankful for it.
[/s just in case it goes over someone's head]
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
I approve. The population shrinks until we build more god damn housing in these major cities where all the fucking jobs are!!
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
ICE works :0
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
I ask this of basically everyone on here who posts something like this, and never get a reply, but I'll try again:
Why would you expect income increases to track productivity gains?
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I suspect anyone using wikipedia do justify their inability to find a partner is generally undesirable.
I didn't realize incel rhetoric had spread to hackernews. God we're doomed.
The fall of this site after 2016 has been sad to watch. Basically turned into low-volume reddit.
go back to the incel corners pls and keep this kind of misogynist rhetoric out of here
But it's objective!! You can objectively measure the value of people. We could just plug people's value into a database and let AI do the match-making. People don't have to be involved in the decision-making. Especially not female people!
/s
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maybe you're just undesirable
What could explain the OnlyFans content creators gender ratio?
that, but also men in their 20s and 30s refusing to settle down, and wasting with gaming, entertainment, and porn (and caling women that are objectively their equal, or even much superior "mid").
i know almost zero men that dont want a girlfriend, many are trying
Many are trying to get some punani, many have given up and live in the setup I described (some openly incel-y, others expecting the girlfriend to fall from the sky), way fewer are trying to settle. At best they want to settle after 35+.
My only advice to you is: clean up your grooming, spend some time getting in shape, treat women as equals, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. It also doesn't hurt to have a sense of humor. Guys who are funny will always have girlfriends. Even when I was poor as dirt I always had girlfriends.
Get a job, make your bed, clean yourself, read, walk, and talk to everyone.
If you think you can't do any of those things, figure out how. If you're scared to try, start by talking to old people - and really listen.
Stop thinking about yourself, think about others, and don't get fixated on "one girl" or otherwise drive yourself insane.
If you've done all of the above for a few years, then you may be in a position to complain - and change something drastic about your life (move, change jobs, travel, etc).
But the root of it all is treat everyone as a person worthy of respect, not just "hot girls" as trophies to be won. It ain't no video game.
I have a close male friend in their mid-thirties that has struggled dating since I've known him (~10 years). He is attractive, dresses well, goes to the gym, eats well, has a few hobbies, and isn't emotionally stunted nor suffer from any arrested development issues. My girlfriend thinks he might be cursed since we don't have any single friends to match-make him with.
He moved to a different city a few years ago and reported more hookups, but serious dating is just as bad. I'm starting to notice him becoming tired of it all, even though he hides it quite well.
Given it's not realistic to keep moving to different cities as it's financially and socially expensive to do so. What should I suggest?
interesting how HN downvoted this one, but not previous :P
Deporting hundreds of thousands of people might have something to do with that. Economic contraction seems to be a certainty.
Sounds hellish.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
I wish there were more reasoned debate and distinguishing between legal immigration including tech workers (H-1B visas) versus illegal immigration for eg food truck workers, DoorDash scooter drivers.
Also the lack of knowledge about the existence of the fantastic and generous H-2A visa for farm workers is maddening.
H1B is just a cheap labour scam unless you think there aren't any Americans that could do the jobs on the jobs.now website that reposts the H1B re-advertisements.
H-2A is expensive and prone to abuse. It is generally considered a failure by both employers and workers who participate in it. So I’m guessing your use of fantastic and generous is either sarcasm or uninformed?
Nobody cares.
Why a debate - we are not allowing enough immigrants, VISA class is just hiding that fact.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force" - amazing that you can get people to believe that. There is a massive shortage of labor and the labor force participation rate is already dangerously high.
There is no labor shortage. Look at layoffs and job openings - lowest since 2020.
Yes, Trump is also successfully destroying the demand side of the labor economy at the same time. Is that what his supporters imagined that sentence means? It is nevertheless the case that the prime-age labor force participation rate is bouncing off 85% and getting it any higher than that is impossible.
LOL. There is no labour shortage. There is only a shortage at a particular price point.
If there is such a labour shortage, what explains the layoffs?
I believe the trend of population decline coupled with the wave of retirees when coupled with "AI" will produce a net benefit for everyone.
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
Every single other previous advance that could have done that has NOT produced the less stressed part - imagine taking an 1800s subsistence farmer and arming him with modern equipment and tooling; he'd be ecstatic.
The key is always internal, personal, once you right yourself, the world starts feeling much better.