9 ms·

The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

80 points by jeremylevy 3y ago

atemerev 3y ago
I don't understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.
- loxs 3y ago
  It's not a problem for the universe, only for you in your old age ;)
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  Because a cone-shaped demographic pyramid means: 1. Fewer productive taxpayers to pay for old-age pensions 2. A drop-off in available investment capital as private pensions are converted to bonds and cash 3. Fewer workers for an economy with soaring demand for specific fields e.g. medical
- jphoward 3y ago
  It's a problem when it happens suddenly because you end up with a 'top heavy' age distribution. The elderly pensioners:young earners ratio explodes and society security/national insurance cannot afford healthcare/pensions etc. This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy. The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
  - scotty79 3y ago
    This is only disturbing for people who think human work creates the economic value we need. While in reality most of our economic value is created by machines. We don't feel it because it's mostly captured by billionaires so it seems that we still need to work as much as we used to. So the future with less workers is just a future with poorer billionaires and they don't like that which explains why all the media owned by them are trying to scare us about againg population scenario.
- sushibowl 3y ago
  The problem is that a significant part of the current world economic system is dependent on adequate supply of human labor. The declining population phase is especially painful as this will lead to a larger proportion of older people, which cannot supply the same amount of labor yet do consume the same amount of resources. I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
  - atemerev 3y ago
    Well, incidentally, right now the AI revolution is happening, the problem will be unemployment, not a deficit of human labor
- NalNezumi 3y ago
  It's considered a problem because the entire system, for most developed nations, implicitly relies on a specific demographic distribution. Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio). A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management. Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem. But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Our systems need revision anyways. Nothing ever happens voluntarily. So we should be kind a glad that there is outside factor that will eventually force us to revise out systems. Because laziest approach to the problem, like letting more immigrants in didn't work out that well.
dpflan 3y ago
“”” If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “”” Will have to check back on this in a few years.
- wunderland 3y ago
  If women push back childbirth to their 30s, fewer births with happen overall because quite simply fewer women will be able to conceive.
  - furyg3 3y ago
    > in the United States during 2018-2020 (average), the highest fertility rates per 1,000 women were to women ages 20-29 (80.1), followed by women ages 30-39 (75.3) [...] Source: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+rate+by+age&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+r...
    - derbOac 3y ago
      "...ages 40 and older (12.8)." Part of the issue is the infertility cliff happens in the late 30s to mid 40s, so those age categories are a little wonky in terms of capturing the phenomenon. Having bumped up against this myself, the problem in the US isn't that women are more often waiting until they are 32 to have kids, it's that they are waiting until they are 39. The figure here illustrates it well: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rates-declined-for-younger-women-increased-for-older-women.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat... There seems to be a much bigger decline in births among younger than there is an increase in older, but if those women are delaying rather than abstaining completely, they'll run into infertility issues later if they wait late enough. There will be a certain number who intend to have more kids than they actually do. I don't think this is all of it, as it doesn't address why women are increasingly forgoing children in prime fertility years. I also in general think it's part of a set of demographic trends that point to societal problems (stalling or declining life expectancy for one).
shp0ngle 3y ago
Just offset the lack of new people being born by opening up borders to everyone, problem solved!
- atemerev 3y ago
  This but unironically.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  That certainly is an approach worth considering; immigration has been described as America's cheat code.
- otikik 3y ago
  But ... they might be non-white! Or Irish! We can't have that.
- richeyryan 3y ago
  It's helping Germany offset an ageing population and declining economic productivity. If age distribution in your population is becoming unbalanced and you can't encourage the current residents to increase the birth rate, what other option is there? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german-population-record-high-2022-2023-01-19/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german...
  - progx 3y ago
    I can't see where it help us declininng economic productivity. Other options: family friendly politic, better education, investments in schools, better care in schools (full day care), consistent politic where you can plan your future,.... Today we can read in the newspaper, that 25% of our children in school can not read. Elephant in the room.
    - richeyryan 3y ago
      If the people don't exist, they can't produce. You can make all the policy decisions you want, but the economy will stagnate if you don't have people working in fields or factories or wiring up houses. Sure, better education might make higher-value workers that produce more economic value. Providing better support for families will help people interested in having children potentially have more children and be economically productive while doing so. If your current citizens don't want to have children, then it doesn't matter.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved. I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
- scotty79 3y ago
  Unless the new generation experiences another new shock which seem to just keep comming.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.
  - knallfrosch 3y ago
    That's what 2,000 people tell Paul Krugman every time he tells them 'the economy is fine' in his New York Times column. It's quite entertaining to watch, altough troubling. He's smart, he gets a lot of direct feedback, and yet he doesn't understand it at all. Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations. Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid: "You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid" See: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negative-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negativ...
    - christophilus 3y ago
      I agree with everything you say, but technically it's about as easy for me to build a house today as it was for my grandpa (who built his own house in the 40s). At least, it is if I get to ignore regulations. It requires being very frugal, moving to a low cost of living area, taking a lot of time, manual labor, and getting help from friends. Also, you have to live in 3rd world conditions for quite a while. At least, that's what my grandpa did. I know a few folks-- who are quite poor-- who have done it in the past 10 years. But maybe 0.01% of the population is willing to do anything like it. I know I'm not.
CalRobert 3y ago
Hopefully we can do this for the species as a whole and gradually find equilibrium at a more sustainable population.
- gsich 3y ago
  Overpopulation is currently not a problem for humanity.
  - louwrentius 3y ago
    Indeed and it has been a dog whistle for the eugenics crowd since the 70s. https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1603412908184309760?lang=en https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1603412908184309760?la...
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      I don't understand how my comment has anything to do with Eugenics.
      - louwrentius 3y ago
        Follow the link for context. The whole overpopulation topic is an old scare with ties to eugenics
        CalRobert 3y ago
        I haven't said anything about "the wrong kind of people having babies" and have been pro-immigration in another comment so I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said. Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) would probably allow the current number to get by fine.
        3y ago
pjc50 3y ago
The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so? Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
- secretsatan 3y ago
  It seems the thinking is shifting to making them have kids whether they want to or not.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty. Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
louwrentius 3y ago
> In general, a smaller workforce and an aging population would have negative implications for economic productivity and per capita income growth. In addition, the combination of a smaller workforce and an aging population puts fiscal pressure on social insurance programs, like Social Security, that rely on tax payments from current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees. This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change. Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies. But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?
throwaw12 3y ago
> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks * (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on
- RhysU 3y ago
  There's a comical Jurassic Park "life finds a way" outcome lurking... those reproductively restricted by these ideas gradually will be replaced by those who are not so inhibited.
- throwaw12 3y ago
  * (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workplace * (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
  - carlmr 3y ago
    Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed. I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family. But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with. I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
sprash 3y ago
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- emptyfile 3y ago
  [dead]
- louwrentius 3y ago
  Feminism is about equal rights for women and men (and everything in between). If you are against that, you are indeed a sexist / misogynist.
- exitb 3y ago
  So the lack of free life choices for women is the load bearing piece of our society?
  - sprash 3y ago
    Yes, the result is obvious. As soon as you introduce feminism birthrates are tanking. This can be observed observed across the globe. Couple this with the establishment of contraceptives and acceptance of abortion you get a recipe for annihilation.
  - fwlr 3y ago
    It’s become popular knowledge that the way ducks mate is almost all non-consensual. Less well known is that something like 90% of all orangutan mating involves violence by the male against the female. If we ended rape among ducks, or ended sexual violence among orangutans, that would probably be the end of their species. It’s extraordinarily sad and disturbing, but for some incredibly unfortunate animals, rape and sexual violence are load-bearing pieces of their existence. Obviously such is not the case for literal human existence, but we aren’t that far removed from orangutans; it does seem possible to me that human society (mostly invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, mostly by men with dim views on women) could have oppression of women as a load-bearing component. Some of the radical feminist thinkers in earlier waves certainly believed this was true, it was part of their argument that society needs to be completely rebuilt.
samwillis 3y ago
Unsurprisingly the UK birth rate has done a similar roughly 20% drop of that period: https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the... Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people. Anecdotal evidence, I'm in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.
- pjc50 3y ago
  The UK's "no child benefit for children beyond the second" is a clear policy signal as to what the government wants.
  - samwillis 3y ago
    I honestly don't get it, but I'm not an economist so I may be wrong. Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare. But as I said, not an economist.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      This is why the UK is talking about getting retired people back into work. And is well on its way to ending pensions altogether. The age at which pensions are paid out has been creeping upwards and is now heading towards 70. What should have happened is that pension payments were ring-fenced, but of course government finances don't work like that. Most pensioners vote Tory, so the government is literally robbing its own base. And most haven't realised it.
      - revelio 3y ago
        You can't ringfence pension payments if by ringfence you mean just store them in a savings account. Inflation would destroy the saved money completely, so the funds have to be invested. In turn those investments have to yield enough to cover both inflation and expected investment losses, whilst still yielding enough to pay out reliably over the average expected lifespan post retirement. Unfortunately if you do the numbers it doesn't work, financially. The number of years you have to pay out to people is so large that you need a very high ROI to keep the fund stable, but ROI sometimes wasn't high enough and the funds fall behind. This isn't a Tory or UK or even a government problem. It affects pension funds around the world and private funds too.
kypro 3y ago
> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline. I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out. Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
- erfgh 3y ago
  I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.
  - kypro 3y ago
    You don't necessarily need to own a home, but I think we'd agree most want to be in a good place financially before raising kids. Having a foot on the property ladder and living somewhere you can raise a family over the long-term is clearly part of this for most people. You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
  - revelio 3y ago
    It's a slightly bizarre and under-discussed aspect of British culture. There's a widespread cultural belief that you have to own a house and "get on the property ladder" before you start a family or really consider yourself a proper adult. The ladder is a reference to the assumption that house prices only ever go up so it's free money to own one, which you can then invest in another more expensive house and so on.
batmansmk 3y ago
Had a job in SV, we moved to EU when my wife was pregnant. We would have loved to stay but as many of immigrant friends, we had difficulties figuring out how to be a happy family in USA. We couldn’t afford a house, education without becoming slaves to our career and not to feel threaten by the constantly changing immigration policy.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  As an American who moved to the EU after having a child in the US, when I tell people we had to pay for our son on a payment plan, they cringe. Yes, we had insurance, but ironically, the calculated conception date was 2 days before we got insurance -- reality is that we got insurance when we decided to have a kid, so the calculated date is actually wrong. Thus, it was a pre-existing condition and insurance wouldn't cover it. True story.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    May sound cruel, but I don't find that outrageous. Purpose of insurance is to pool the risk. 100 people pay 1$, one unlucky fellow meets an accident gets 98. In case of pregnancy/delivery it is not a truly random event so society will have to pool for a planned event. For such events we need government support proxying for society not some insurance company.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Yes, the purpose is to pool risk, but nobody expects to need insurance within days of purchasing it. An insurance company worming out of it due to 'technicalities' is kind-of shitty when the cost of having a child is >30k USD and they can negotiate it down to 10k -- but as a regular Joe, you have no negotiation powers.
    - EForEndeavour 3y ago
      You don't think it's outrageous or at least cringeworthy that an insurance company used a one-size-fits-all, deterministic, possibly opaque and proprietary math formula to estimate an inherently fuzzy date based on a chain reaction of biological processes with duration error bars far exceeding one day, and then mechanically making an all-or-nothing coverage decision because of a TWO-DAY difference between that speciously precise date and the date on which enrollment forms were filed? That may be the way the contracts and laws are currently set up, and if we want to have a child without going bankrupt, we have to play the game. But it's simultaneously possible to recognize that the system produces some deeply ridiculous cases such as this one.
mschuster91 3y ago
> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is. To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases. The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month. Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth. Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change? The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
- komali2 3y ago
  From your perspective, do you think there's a good possibility the USA will improve the living conditions of our generation and the zoomers? I'm very skeptical and that's why I don't live there anymore, but I'm curious about those who are sticking it out. Is the hope that there'll be some kind of political change, a slow shifting to more progressive politicians?
hanselot 3y ago
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- consp 3y ago
  Birth rates in 2018-2020 were about equal here, NW Europe (per capita, within the margin of error) and went up afterwards. But that was not what you wanted to hear.
  - hanselot 3y ago
    Why would the birth rates from 2018-2020 be relevant other than for comparative purposes? The question I posed was specific to birth rates after people volunteered for gene therapy. The funniest part is that it would be incredibly easy to prove whether I am right using data, so it should be equally easy to prove me wrong. Off the top of my head, I imagine if we take places with the highest rate of coerced compliance, we should see a noticeable drop in birth rates overall as well as premature or still births as well as overall fertility rate. So proving me wrong should be very easy to do. You can all thank me later for volunteering to be in the placebo group. Still running the comparison for European countries. Will come back with the data once I finish.
lynx23 3y ago
Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!
somenameforme 3y ago
As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family/fertility campaign [1]. It's so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability. I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80: --- (100) Year 0: 100 births, 0 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (150) Year 20: 50 births, 100 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (175) Year 40: 25 births, 50 twenties, 100 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (187) Year 60: 12 births, 25 twenties, 50 forties, 100 sixties, 0 deaths (93) Year 80: 6 births, 12 twenties, 25 forties, 50 sixties, 100 deaths (46) Year 100: 3 births, 6 twenties, 12 forties, 25 sixties, 50 deaths Year 120: 1 birth... --- Various observations: - Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric. - A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation. - By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths. - The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium. - The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models. [1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290693.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290693.shtml
- pjc50 3y ago
  The formal end of the "one child policy" in China was only 2016.
jcfrei 3y ago
Here's another possible cause that I don't see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it's really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.
raptorraver 3y ago
There was a funny diagram I sawed that presented the birth rate of my country and placed the launch of Tinder to the timeline. The same year Tinder was published the birth rate started going down. Most likely there are other better explanations for this but it made me think. How has the radical disruption of dating market affected the way people form relationships and start families?
- consp 3y ago
  Tinder was launched late in 2012, just after the housing market crash. Maybe it's just plain old correlation, not cause.
advael 3y ago
That this analysis tries to claim this doesn't correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say "the economy recovered" we don't mean anything that's meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the "real economy" and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore "distributional outcomes" and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a "recovery" or really even "the economy" has less and less to do with the majority of people's real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions

80 points by jeremylevy 3y ago

I don't understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.

loxs 3y ago
It's not a problem for the universe, only for you in your old age ;)
dukeyukey 3y ago
Because a cone-shaped demographic pyramid means: 1. Fewer productive taxpayers to pay for old-age pensions 2. A drop-off in available investment capital as private pensions are converted to bonds and cash 3. Fewer workers for an economy with soaring demand for specific fields e.g. medical
jphoward 3y ago
It's a problem when it happens suddenly because you end up with a 'top heavy' age distribution. The elderly pensioners:young earners ratio explodes and society security/national insurance cannot afford healthcare/pensions etc. This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy. The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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- scotty79 3y ago
  This is only disturbing for people who think human work creates the economic value we need. While in reality most of our economic value is created by machines. We don't feel it because it's mostly captured by billionaires so it seems that we still need to work as much as we used to. So the future with less workers is just a future with poorer billionaires and they don't like that which explains why all the media owned by them are trying to scare us about againg population scenario.
sushibowl 3y ago
The problem is that a significant part of the current world economic system is dependent on adequate supply of human labor. The declining population phase is especially painful as this will lead to a larger proportion of older people, which cannot supply the same amount of labor yet do consume the same amount of resources. I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
- atemerev 3y ago
  Well, incidentally, right now the AI revolution is happening, the problem will be unemployment, not a deficit of human labor
NalNezumi 3y ago
It's considered a problem because the entire system, for most developed nations, implicitly relies on a specific demographic distribution. Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio). A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management. Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem. But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
- scotty79 3y ago
  Our systems need revision anyways. Nothing ever happens voluntarily. So we should be kind a glad that there is outside factor that will eventually force us to revise out systems. Because laziest approach to the problem, like letting more immigrants in didn't work out that well.

dpflan 3y ago

“”” If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “”” Will have to check back on this in a few years.

wunderland 3y ago
If women push back childbirth to their 30s, fewer births with happen overall because quite simply fewer women will be able to conceive.
- furyg3 3y ago
  > in the United States during 2018-2020 (average), the highest fertility rates per 1,000 women were to women ages 20-29 (80.1), followed by women ages 30-39 (75.3) [...] Source: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+rate+by+age&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+r...
  - derbOac 3y ago
    "...ages 40 and older (12.8)." Part of the issue is the infertility cliff happens in the late 30s to mid 40s, so those age categories are a little wonky in terms of capturing the phenomenon. Having bumped up against this myself, the problem in the US isn't that women are more often waiting until they are 32 to have kids, it's that they are waiting until they are 39. The figure here illustrates it well: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rates-declined-for-younger-women-increased-for-older-women.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat... There seems to be a much bigger decline in births among younger than there is an increase in older, but if those women are delaying rather than abstaining completely, they'll run into infertility issues later if they wait late enough. There will be a certain number who intend to have more kids than they actually do. I don't think this is all of it, as it doesn't address why women are increasingly forgoing children in prime fertility years. I also in general think it's part of a set of demographic trends that point to societal problems (stalling or declining life expectancy for one).

shp0ngle 3y ago

Just offset the lack of new people being born by opening up borders to everyone, problem solved!

atemerev 3y ago
This but unironically.
CalRobert 3y ago
That certainly is an approach worth considering; immigration has been described as America's cheat code.
otikik 3y ago
But ... they might be non-white! Or Irish! We can't have that.
richeyryan 3y ago
It's helping Germany offset an ageing population and declining economic productivity. If age distribution in your population is becoming unbalanced and you can't encourage the current residents to increase the birth rate, what other option is there? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german-population-record-high-2022-2023-01-19/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german...
- progx 3y ago
  I can't see where it help us declininng economic productivity. Other options: family friendly politic, better education, investments in schools, better care in schools (full day care), consistent politic where you can plan your future,.... Today we can read in the newspaper, that 25% of our children in school can not read. Elephant in the room.
  - richeyryan 3y ago
    If the people don't exist, they can't produce. You can make all the policy decisions you want, but the economy will stagnate if you don't have people working in fields or factories or wiring up houses. Sure, better education might make higher-value workers that produce more economic value. Providing better support for families will help people interested in having children potentially have more children and be economically productive while doing so. If your current citizens don't want to have children, then it doesn't matter.

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved. I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.

scotty79 3y ago
Unless the new generation experiences another new shock which seem to just keep comming.
bboygravity 3y ago
Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  That's what 2,000 people tell Paul Krugman every time he tells them 'the economy is fine' in his New York Times column. It's quite entertaining to watch, altough troubling. He's smart, he gets a lot of direct feedback, and yet he doesn't understand it at all. Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations. Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid: "You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid" See: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negative-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negativ...
  - christophilus 3y ago
    I agree with everything you say, but technically it's about as easy for me to build a house today as it was for my grandpa (who built his own house in the 40s). At least, it is if I get to ignore regulations. It requires being very frugal, moving to a low cost of living area, taking a lot of time, manual labor, and getting help from friends. Also, you have to live in 3rd world conditions for quite a while. At least, that's what my grandpa did. I know a few folks-- who are quite poor-- who have done it in the past 10 years. But maybe 0.01% of the population is willing to do anything like it. I know I'm not.

CalRobert 3y ago

Hopefully we can do this for the species as a whole and gradually find equilibrium at a more sustainable population.

gsich 3y ago
Overpopulation is currently not a problem for humanity.
- louwrentius 3y ago
  Indeed and it has been a dog whistle for the eugenics crowd since the 70s. https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1603412908184309760?lang=en https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1603412908184309760?la...
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    I don't understand how my comment has anything to do with Eugenics.
    - louwrentius 3y ago
      Follow the link for context. The whole overpopulation topic is an old scare with ties to eugenics
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        I haven't said anything about "the wrong kind of people having babies" and have been pro-immigration in another comment so I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said. Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) would probably allow the current number to get by fine.
        3y ago

pjc50 3y ago

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so? Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?

secretsatan 3y ago
It seems the thinking is shifting to making them have kids whether they want to or not.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty. Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.

louwrentius 3y ago

> In general, a smaller workforce and an aging population would have negative implications for economic productivity and per capita income growth. In addition, the combination of a smaller workforce and an aging population puts fiscal pressure on social insurance programs, like Social Security, that rely on tax payments from current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees. This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change. Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies. But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?

throwaw12 3y ago

> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks * (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on

RhysU 3y ago
There's a comical Jurassic Park "life finds a way" outcome lurking... those reproductively restricted by these ideas gradually will be replaced by those who are not so inhibited.
throwaw12 3y ago
* (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workplace * (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
- carlmr 3y ago
  Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed. I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family. But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with. I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.

sprash 3y ago

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emptyfile 3y ago
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louwrentius 3y ago
Feminism is about equal rights for women and men (and everything in between). If you are against that, you are indeed a sexist / misogynist.
exitb 3y ago
So the lack of free life choices for women is the load bearing piece of our society?
- sprash 3y ago
  Yes, the result is obvious. As soon as you introduce feminism birthrates are tanking. This can be observed observed across the globe. Couple this with the establishment of contraceptives and acceptance of abortion you get a recipe for annihilation.
- fwlr 3y ago
  It’s become popular knowledge that the way ducks mate is almost all non-consensual. Less well known is that something like 90% of all orangutan mating involves violence by the male against the female. If we ended rape among ducks, or ended sexual violence among orangutans, that would probably be the end of their species. It’s extraordinarily sad and disturbing, but for some incredibly unfortunate animals, rape and sexual violence are load-bearing pieces of their existence. Obviously such is not the case for literal human existence, but we aren’t that far removed from orangutans; it does seem possible to me that human society (mostly invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, mostly by men with dim views on women) could have oppression of women as a load-bearing component. Some of the radical feminist thinkers in earlier waves certainly believed this was true, it was part of their argument that society needs to be completely rebuilt.

samwillis 3y ago

Unsurprisingly the UK birth rate has done a similar roughly 20% drop of that period: https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/428262/birth-rate-in-the... Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people. Anecdotal evidence, I'm in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.

pjc50 3y ago
The UK's "no child benefit for children beyond the second" is a clear policy signal as to what the government wants.
- samwillis 3y ago
  I honestly don't get it, but I'm not an economist so I may be wrong. Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare. But as I said, not an economist.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    This is why the UK is talking about getting retired people back into work. And is well on its way to ending pensions altogether. The age at which pensions are paid out has been creeping upwards and is now heading towards 70. What should have happened is that pension payments were ring-fenced, but of course government finances don't work like that. Most pensioners vote Tory, so the government is literally robbing its own base. And most haven't realised it.
    - revelio 3y ago
      You can't ringfence pension payments if by ringfence you mean just store them in a savings account. Inflation would destroy the saved money completely, so the funds have to be invested. In turn those investments have to yield enough to cover both inflation and expected investment losses, whilst still yielding enough to pay out reliably over the average expected lifespan post retirement. Unfortunately if you do the numbers it doesn't work, financially. The number of years you have to pay out to people is so large that you need a very high ROI to keep the fund stable, but ROI sometimes wasn't high enough and the funds fall behind. This isn't a Tory or UK or even a government problem. It affects pension funds around the world and private funds too.

kypro 3y ago

> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline. I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out. Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.

erfgh 3y ago
I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.
- kypro 3y ago
  You don't necessarily need to own a home, but I think we'd agree most want to be in a good place financially before raising kids. Having a foot on the property ladder and living somewhere you can raise a family over the long-term is clearly part of this for most people. You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
- revelio 3y ago
  It's a slightly bizarre and under-discussed aspect of British culture. There's a widespread cultural belief that you have to own a house and "get on the property ladder" before you start a family or really consider yourself a proper adult. The ladder is a reference to the assumption that house prices only ever go up so it's free money to own one, which you can then invest in another more expensive house and so on.

batmansmk 3y ago

Had a job in SV, we moved to EU when my wife was pregnant. We would have loved to stay but as many of immigrant friends, we had difficulties figuring out how to be a happy family in USA. We couldn’t afford a house, education without becoming slaves to our career and not to feel threaten by the constantly changing immigration policy.

withinboredom 3y ago
As an American who moved to the EU after having a child in the US, when I tell people we had to pay for our son on a payment plan, they cringe. Yes, we had insurance, but ironically, the calculated conception date was 2 days before we got insurance -- reality is that we got insurance when we decided to have a kid, so the calculated date is actually wrong. Thus, it was a pre-existing condition and insurance wouldn't cover it. True story.
- blackoil 3y ago
  May sound cruel, but I don't find that outrageous. Purpose of insurance is to pool the risk. 100 people pay 1$, one unlucky fellow meets an accident gets 98. In case of pregnancy/delivery it is not a truly random event so society will have to pool for a planned event. For such events we need government support proxying for society not some insurance company.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Yes, the purpose is to pool risk, but nobody expects to need insurance within days of purchasing it. An insurance company worming out of it due to 'technicalities' is kind-of shitty when the cost of having a child is >30k USD and they can negotiate it down to 10k -- but as a regular Joe, you have no negotiation powers.
  - EForEndeavour 3y ago
    You don't think it's outrageous or at least cringeworthy that an insurance company used a one-size-fits-all, deterministic, possibly opaque and proprietary math formula to estimate an inherently fuzzy date based on a chain reaction of biological processes with duration error bars far exceeding one day, and then mechanically making an all-or-nothing coverage decision because of a TWO-DAY difference between that speciously precise date and the date on which enrollment forms were filed? That may be the way the contracts and laws are currently set up, and if we want to have a child without going bankrupt, we have to play the game. But it's simultaneously possible to recognize that the system produces some deeply ridiculous cases such as this one.

mschuster91 3y ago

> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is. To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases. The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month. Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth. Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change? The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.

komali2 3y ago
From your perspective, do you think there's a good possibility the USA will improve the living conditions of our generation and the zoomers? I'm very skeptical and that's why I don't live there anymore, but I'm curious about those who are sticking it out. Is the hope that there'll be some kind of political change, a slow shifting to more progressive politicians?

hanselot 3y ago

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consp 3y ago
Birth rates in 2018-2020 were about equal here, NW Europe (per capita, within the margin of error) and went up afterwards. But that was not what you wanted to hear.
- hanselot 3y ago
  Why would the birth rates from 2018-2020 be relevant other than for comparative purposes? The question I posed was specific to birth rates after people volunteered for gene therapy. The funniest part is that it would be incredibly easy to prove whether I am right using data, so it should be equally easy to prove me wrong. Off the top of my head, I imagine if we take places with the highest rate of coerced compliance, we should see a noticeable drop in birth rates overall as well as premature or still births as well as overall fertility rate. So proving me wrong should be very easy to do. You can all thank me later for volunteering to be in the placebo group. Still running the comparison for European countries. Will come back with the data once I finish.

lynx23 3y ago

Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!

somenameforme 3y ago

As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family/fertility campaign [1]. It's so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability. I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80: --- (100) Year 0: 100 births, 0 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (150) Year 20: 50 births, 100 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (175) Year 40: 25 births, 50 twenties, 100 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths (187) Year 60: 12 births, 25 twenties, 50 forties, 100 sixties, 0 deaths (93) Year 80: 6 births, 12 twenties, 25 forties, 50 sixties, 100 deaths (46) Year 100: 3 births, 6 twenties, 12 forties, 25 sixties, 50 deaths Year 120: 1 birth... --- Various observations: - Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric. - A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation. - By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths. - The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium. - The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models. [1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290693.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290693.shtml

pjc50 3y ago
The formal end of the "one child policy" in China was only 2016.

jcfrei 3y ago

Here's another possible cause that I don't see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it's really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.

raptorraver 3y ago

There was a funny diagram I sawed that presented the birth rate of my country and placed the launch of Tinder to the timeline. The same year Tinder was published the birth rate started going down. Most likely there are other better explanations for this but it made me think. How has the radical disruption of dating market affected the way people form relationships and start families?

consp 3y ago
Tinder was launched late in 2012, just after the housing market crash. Maybe it's just plain old correlation, not cause.

advael 3y ago

That this analysis tries to claim this doesn't correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say "the economy recovered" we don't mean anything that's meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the "real economy" and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore "distributional outcomes" and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a "recovery" or really even "the economy" has less and less to do with the majority of people's real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions