The cultural element here is so strong. I'm a millennial, and aside from a handful of Mormons I know, I feel like people my age fell into two categories: those who didn't go to college and had kids young, often without the benefits of marriage and financial security, and those who did go to college and had kids in their mid to late 30s or not at all. This divide is so stark, I feel like a lot of people unconsciously internalized the idea that having kids before a certain age, or even having kids at all, was low status. When none of your friends have children, you correctly interpret that having children will isolate you and change a lot of your social relationships for the worse. It all just feels like such an uphill climb. I've known my whole life that I wanted to be a mother, and even I didn't manage to have my first kid until I was 37!
I would characterize having and raising children as an expression of optimism about the future of the country, a joyous loving joint project between two partners who support each other, but not necessarily something "fun". If society wants more children, it has to create an economic environment that supports families.
I came from a large family so spent 10+ years supporting my mother and parenting younger siblings (while going to school and eventually holding part-time jobs). My conclusion--and the reason that I did not have children--is that taking care of children involves a tremendous amount of exhausting, tedious, dirty, drudgery. Raising children is an act of pure love for the child, a supportive partner, and the family unit. Ideally both parents are doing something 'fun' like working at an interesting job and splitting the physically and emotionally demanding work of raising children and turning them into participating citizens who can hold a job.
BTW, there was talk of putting a $1,000 tax break in one of the recent bills being debated in Congress. That would not cover a month of child care. The cost of having a child from age 0 to age 17 (no college) ranges from $200,000-300,000, so having a child means really really budgeting and giving up luxuries. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/090415/cost-raising-child-america.asp
Call me basic, but: 1) do we need more people on this planet? No. 2) Could we do with a few billion less people? Yes. 3) we haven’t even peaked yet! 4) How soon would it take to get down to 6 billion? A century or more? I just don’t get all the hand-wringing.
For example, humanity had plenty of innovation and productivity growth with far fewer people. We could theoretically lessen any hypothetical decline in productivity growth going forward by increasing the education level and employment prospects for the billion+ people living in low-income countries. Yes, there will be adjustment issues in caring for older dependents— we’re already there. But is that a reason to keep population growing, considering the ecological damage from climate change, nanoplastics, forever chemicals etc., and the loss of wilderness? Lots of other concerns (like lack of sustainable agriculture)…
Most people who care about fertility issues also believe in other things about genetics. things like IQ is heritable and varies amongst individuals and groups. Hence education won’t make immigrants from low income countries smarter or more likely to maintain or contribute to our society.
Productivity comes from a fraction of smart people operating in a free society. That fraction is only large enough in the current developed world, and it’s precisely this fraction where the fertility shortfall has been highest.
Productivity can also be impeded by the underclass through things like welfare, disorder, and political instability. The third world has an extremely large underclass, and they can’t be enobled by things like education.
Our last bastion of global talent to be released was when China gave up communism, because that was holding back a huge smart fraction. But China is aging fast and not having kids.
I don’t think it’s necessary to believe this to worry about fertility. “It’s ok that I and everyone in my culture is childless and has no future because we will be replaced by another people that will pay our pensions” is hardly a healthy sentiment, and the realization that said immigrants might not actually be able to pay the pensions is a secondary problem.
I only know the case in the US— the issues around Social Security were apparent 30 years ago and could have been solved with fairly modest measures then. Even now, taking the cap off the tax on earnings would solve most of the shortfall.
I mean increasing taxes above $175k by another 12.4% would raise some money, but it’s also a huge tax increase and the money can’t be spent on anything else.
It also does little to address Medicare or Medicaid.
It doesn’t even really solve the problem. The trust fund keeps shrinking (which increases the burden on The treasury even if it’s not zero yet) , it just kicks the can on when it reaches zero.
Ultimately, these programs just aren’t actuarial equivalent. They are designed as Ponzi schemes from the get go.
You live in a world shaped by economic growth & innovation that resulted from a growing population. You haven't experienced what it will be like with declining growth & innovation caused by shrinking populations. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/after-eating-software-will-bite-the
Almost none of this speaks to women who bear children and then are ditched leaving them with all the work, or stuck with a manchild ensuring still more.
I would be delighted with artificial wombs, letting men opt for children without first convincing a woman to give up two years and suffering a lifetime earnings hit for the endeavor . But it had better come with ironclad child support enforced rigorously, and require the prospective parent(s) to prove a safe home and child carers will be there for 20 years or be a social mess. That would probably be classist but nobody is saying people wouldn't be allowed to have kids the old fashioned way.
Lol spoken like a true woman. Family courts almost never give men custody and you know what pregnant women do to kids where they know the father is going to fight for custody day one and force the mother to pay child support, abort. Quit blaming men here, we want kids, we just don't want you or your albatross. I've had seven kids aborted on me, I've wanted everyone of them and would have happily raised them all as a single dad.
If you had seven women choose abortion over allowing you to be a parent, or fewer women choosing a total of seven times that you were not a worthy father to their potential child, perhaps as the common denominator you're the problem.
I think maybe one would have to consider irrational arguments in addition to the rational ones. It is always a bad moment to have kids, so we probably do not have them as rational actors but as religious beings (broadly understood: nationalism would count as religion). The non-religious will go extinct, regardless of how much you want to social engineer, make parenting appealing on Netflix or give economic incentives to women (which is not going very well). I think the need to be fanatical (in a good way) as a culture was outlined with stark clarity by Ross Douthat in the following essay
I'm pessimistic -- I don't think it is fixable. My reasoning is that it comes back to your point #2.
"People are more likely to have kids if it’s FUN - relative to alternatives."
Basically we're in an arms race. Think about Reed Hasting's, Netflix's CEO, famous quote that "Sleep is our competition". One side of the arms race we have capitalism (& marketing). On the other side we have evolution & culture. One of them can innovate at the speed of months & years while using the latest research on psychology and brain chemistry to hook us. One innovates at the speed of decades, centuries, or even millions of years.
Evolution didn't need procreation and child rearing to be the unsurpassable pinnacle of human existence, it just needed to be enough better on average than the alternatives for genes to be passed along. Just ask the preying mantis or cuckoo birds or emperor penguins if child rearing is super fun times and amazingly fulfilling.
See the book Hooked by Nir Eyal. "How to Build Habit-Forming Products". It's pitched as a Good Thing, something that all companies should aspire to. That's what raising children ultimately has to compete against -- thousands of companies that all employ experts and millions of dollars of R&D to consume our attention.
To me, it's a bit like asking "what can we do to make radio dramas as popular as they used to be". Like, you can't. They've been outcompeted by new innovations that are simply better. There's no turning back the clock.
Even if we returned to hunter gatherer days of village-wide child rearing we might make child rearing 2x as fun ... but that's still going to fall short of the 10x or 20x that the alternatives all offer nowadays.
There's a reason why even HAVING SEX is on the decline, it's all tied to same underlying root cause as modern capitalism outcompetes biology. Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and his argument that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with a world "whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement" seems to have pretty accurately predicted where we are headed and nothing in the 40 years since then has really shown we can change the trajectory.
On points (2) and (4) in this brief but thought-provoking piece: Media, especially visual media like movies and TV, have always privileged depictions of young people, because young people are more attractive and getting people to watch is the whole thing that makes visual media successful or not. So popular media entertainment will always show lots of stories about what’s fun for younger people, but not so much older people. There will be lots of images for younger, reproductive-age adults about the fun of clubbing, but not of the fun of playing with grandkids. And those images of fun times with grandkids aren’t going to be chosen as entertainment by younger adults, anyway.
But when and where there are fewer mass media entertainment options, a lot of entertainment comes out of doing things in a community. Especially in smaller, geographically-constrained communities, you can’t help mixing younger and older adults. So younger, reproductive-age adults will witness older adults and their grandkids, and see grandmas and granddads having fun. I think that makes it easier to imagine what a future version of themselves might also find fun, and consider whether the tradeoff of fun clubbing now for fun building a clubhouse for your kids and grandkids is worth it.
Increasingly, first in wealthy countries but also now spreading to poorer ones, entertainment is a screen-based private affair, not a physical community one. It’s going to be hard for a current 25 year old to imagine what the 50-years in the future version of herself might find fun, because it’s going to be hard to have the opportunity to watch a 75-year old enjoying grandkids in the present—or at least much harder than it was in even the fairly recent past.
The cultures in advanced countries that still have good fertility, I think, have one thing in common: a "great chain of being" narrative about life. Far history and their connections to it, their heritage, is present in their daily life as actual people with names.
Kazakhs: have to learn their family tree back seven generations. Jews: an immense history full of named ancestors and their lives. Maori: whakapapa (genealogy) going back to the arrival of the great canoes in the 1200s, with stories about ancestors regularly recited.
I think in those cultures, the people alive today see themselves as a part of this great thing that exists in deep time. They are responsible for keeping it going. I don't know: maybe there are counterexamples, but I think it's worth exploring.
Edit: the obvious counterexample of a culture with this mindset that has poor fertility, Confucian Chinese culture: that culture was more or less completely obliterated by Mao's cultural revolution, and in Taiwan by adoption of Europeanised culture by the Nationalists.
Alice, when you said "maybe I'm basic", I was expecting your "proximate cause" explanation: the fertility crisis is a coupling crisis, and and coupling is being delayed because these days young people don't have many extended interactions with people of the other sex.
I think that insight has a lot of merit and offers possibilities for policy. It's about as basic as one can get.
The idea that having children is nothing but a sacrifice is a big message that has made a lot of my cohort (late millennials) wary of having children. I want to have children and have wanted to my whole life, but the repeated idea that it will cause me to essentially lose the things I cherish about my current life (time with partner, time on hobbies, own personality) has made me afraid of it. Many of the women I see writing about motherhood also posit models of motherhood that do not look attractive to me (full time SAHM sacrificing everything for children, or extensive childcare which makes me question when you will see your own children).
My parents have actually been helpful in this because they have a model of parenthood very different from that I see elsewhere. For my parents, having children was an excuse to see the world. They wanted me to be educated and engaged, so they actually took more trips after I was born, went out more, did more activities, came up with more things. They still kept the interests they had before. I've also found it useful to bookmark models of motherhood from women I find in some way relatable. Seeing these women write about the joys of parenthood while still also being the same people they were before gives me faith that there is a model of motherhood I can fit into.
None of my friends seem to either want to have children or, if they want to, to be on track to having children that my hypothetical children would be able to engage with. For the ones who want to have children, the challenges are finding a suitable long term partner and a living situation they would want to raise children in (not living in their parents' house, not living in a studio apartment with roommates). And so we see here issues in pairing and feeling safe raising children. Looking at members of my cohort who had kids, they tended to marry younger (out of college with a job or even high school) and have kids quickly. The ones out of high school probably would have had kids no matter what. The ones who married fresh out of college had a job and seemed to be well set-up.
I agree the culture (ie the 6 bullet points seem reasonable) in which we marinate is now the primary driver of family size (since family size can be managed with contraception). However, not so for my wife.
While we are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and have spent our lives as members of the low fertility Anglo-Saxon middleclass, I knew before we married that with our marriage she intended to replicate her family of origin: 2 well matched parents with 4 kids closely spaced in age. In many respects my role was to help make it happen. It did lead to various burdens and constraints on our lives, though I was fine with that, and it is what we created together.
At the time I took it all for granted, though in the past 10 years as I have noted the ongoing decline in [the average] women's fecundity and the rise in concerns about ageing demographics, I have pondered on how and why we differ from our friends. Especially, now that our kids are in their 20's with nary a sign of marriage let alone grandkids. I don't know why my wife's expectations were so resistant to the cultural beliefs around us. And now I feel the bemused disquiet I imagine many East Asian parents have felt for some time.
Sorry to be blunt, but what is your interest in raising the birth rate? Sure, I'm a little curious about the reasons it is decreasing but that could have been a premise in the piece. We can also increase the production and utilization of coal, but if the result is the emission of CO2, CH4, or similar gases with large infrared absorption cross sections, there is a high cost to the commons. Our natural fecundity is a product of the conditions our genetic line experienced in the deep past. There is evidence that our genetic line survived more than one period where the number of individuals in our ancestor group was steady for eons. Those periods were probably due to resource or knowledge constraints. I would argue that what we see happening now is also due to resource and knowledge constraints. There is probably little to be done about it. The difference now is that starvation and childhood illness don't need to be factors increasing suffering.
The planet can survive with many more or many fewer children. It's our society that might not as the population of elderly people who need extensive care dwarfs the young population who will have to work orders of magnitude harder to support them.
The author touched on the social unrest angle, but I'm not sure that justifies a focus on children over migration. Both are longstanding human coping mechanisms. Also, this isn't a US concern, presently. Though some will argue about that. As for other Western nations and historically populous nations in the East, we have natural experiments in progress to review.
The phrase, "orders of magnitude harder" is hyperbolic, even if you mean in base 2. The Black Plague era can provide some insight. Scarce workers had to be paid better, leading to the enlightenment.
Social collapses or cultural collapses litter the historic record. It's intriguing to consider birth rates as a factor. Usually, birth-rate and resources contribute together.
In general, the evidence is mostly about negative effects of economic, cultural shocks, and peer pressure, that they can actually be positive here is not obvious at all and one shouldn't assume it for no good reason.
They can go in the other direction, but with effect sizes so trivial that it doesn't really matter.
It's like an economic shock generally has bad effect on family planning decisions but recovery to the previous level improves it somewhat but not to the level at which it was before.
Average tfr/cfr looks more like a multiplicative than aт additive process, hence it's not suprising.
Let me restate: economics and cultural shocks mostly have meanigful/large negative effects, the examples of them having positve large effects are very rare, one should probably think that it's a mismeasurement or a wrong narrative when one finds them due to how literature worked out through the years.
It doesn't need to get fixed, it's a self limiting and self correcting problem. Nobody going to cry when all the embittered raven women and their cuck male hanger-ons die off, they are genetic dead ends so the world is better off for it. The Amish, Mormons, Muslims, anchor baby dropping immigrants, welfare queens, and housewives that like sex will inherit the earth. Humanity will survive just fine.
The cultural element here is so strong. I'm a millennial, and aside from a handful of Mormons I know, I feel like people my age fell into two categories: those who didn't go to college and had kids young, often without the benefits of marriage and financial security, and those who did go to college and had kids in their mid to late 30s or not at all. This divide is so stark, I feel like a lot of people unconsciously internalized the idea that having kids before a certain age, or even having kids at all, was low status. When none of your friends have children, you correctly interpret that having children will isolate you and change a lot of your social relationships for the worse. It all just feels like such an uphill climb. I've known my whole life that I wanted to be a mother, and even I didn't manage to have my first kid until I was 37!
I would characterize having and raising children as an expression of optimism about the future of the country, a joyous loving joint project between two partners who support each other, but not necessarily something "fun". If society wants more children, it has to create an economic environment that supports families.
I came from a large family so spent 10+ years supporting my mother and parenting younger siblings (while going to school and eventually holding part-time jobs). My conclusion--and the reason that I did not have children--is that taking care of children involves a tremendous amount of exhausting, tedious, dirty, drudgery. Raising children is an act of pure love for the child, a supportive partner, and the family unit. Ideally both parents are doing something 'fun' like working at an interesting job and splitting the physically and emotionally demanding work of raising children and turning them into participating citizens who can hold a job.
BTW, there was talk of putting a $1,000 tax break in one of the recent bills being debated in Congress. That would not cover a month of child care. The cost of having a child from age 0 to age 17 (no college) ranges from $200,000-300,000, so having a child means really really budgeting and giving up luxuries. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/090415/cost-raising-child-america.asp
Recommending the new movie The Materialists, on this theme.
Call me basic, but: 1) do we need more people on this planet? No. 2) Could we do with a few billion less people? Yes. 3) we haven’t even peaked yet! 4) How soon would it take to get down to 6 billion? A century or more? I just don’t get all the hand-wringing.
Check this out for some of the various concerns surrounding decreasing population size: https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-dawn-of-the-posthuman-age
For example, humanity had plenty of innovation and productivity growth with far fewer people. We could theoretically lessen any hypothetical decline in productivity growth going forward by increasing the education level and employment prospects for the billion+ people living in low-income countries. Yes, there will be adjustment issues in caring for older dependents— we’re already there. But is that a reason to keep population growing, considering the ecological damage from climate change, nanoplastics, forever chemicals etc., and the loss of wilderness? Lots of other concerns (like lack of sustainable agriculture)…
Most people who care about fertility issues also believe in other things about genetics. things like IQ is heritable and varies amongst individuals and groups. Hence education won’t make immigrants from low income countries smarter or more likely to maintain or contribute to our society.
Productivity comes from a fraction of smart people operating in a free society. That fraction is only large enough in the current developed world, and it’s precisely this fraction where the fertility shortfall has been highest.
Productivity can also be impeded by the underclass through things like welfare, disorder, and political instability. The third world has an extremely large underclass, and they can’t be enobled by things like education.
Our last bastion of global talent to be released was when China gave up communism, because that was holding back a huge smart fraction. But China is aging fast and not having kids.
I don’t think it’s necessary to believe this to worry about fertility. “It’s ok that I and everyone in my culture is childless and has no future because we will be replaced by another people that will pay our pensions” is hardly a healthy sentiment, and the realization that said immigrants might not actually be able to pay the pensions is a secondary problem.
I only know the case in the US— the issues around Social Security were apparent 30 years ago and could have been solved with fairly modest measures then. Even now, taking the cap off the tax on earnings would solve most of the shortfall.
"Raising taxes is not like earning more income; it's more like visiting the ATM"
https://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/11/15/econ-101-for-the-supercommittee/
I mean increasing taxes above $175k by another 12.4% would raise some money, but it’s also a huge tax increase and the money can’t be spent on anything else.
It also does little to address Medicare or Medicaid.
It doesn’t even really solve the problem. The trust fund keeps shrinking (which increases the burden on The treasury even if it’s not zero yet) , it just kicks the can on when it reaches zero.
Ultimately, these programs just aren’t actuarial equivalent. They are designed as Ponzi schemes from the get go.
You sound more knowledgeable on this I am
Thanks, I appreciate the reference! I have read that article and others. I am not persuaded.
You live in a world shaped by economic growth & innovation that resulted from a growing population. You haven't experienced what it will be like with declining growth & innovation caused by shrinking populations. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/after-eating-software-will-bite-the
Almost none of this speaks to women who bear children and then are ditched leaving them with all the work, or stuck with a manchild ensuring still more.
I would be delighted with artificial wombs, letting men opt for children without first convincing a woman to give up two years and suffering a lifetime earnings hit for the endeavor . But it had better come with ironclad child support enforced rigorously, and require the prospective parent(s) to prove a safe home and child carers will be there for 20 years or be a social mess. That would probably be classist but nobody is saying people wouldn't be allowed to have kids the old fashioned way.
Lol spoken like a true woman. Family courts almost never give men custody and you know what pregnant women do to kids where they know the father is going to fight for custody day one and force the mother to pay child support, abort. Quit blaming men here, we want kids, we just don't want you or your albatross. I've had seven kids aborted on me, I've wanted everyone of them and would have happily raised them all as a single dad.
If you had seven women choose abortion over allowing you to be a parent, or fewer women choosing a total of seven times that you were not a worthy father to their potential child, perhaps as the common denominator you're the problem.
I think maybe one would have to consider irrational arguments in addition to the rational ones. It is always a bad moment to have kids, so we probably do not have them as rational actors but as religious beings (broadly understood: nationalism would count as religion). The non-religious will go extinct, regardless of how much you want to social engineer, make parenting appealing on Netflix or give economic incentives to women (which is not going very well). I think the need to be fanatical (in a good way) as a culture was outlined with stark clarity by Ross Douthat in the following essay
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/extinction-technology-culture.html
> So surely this issue is fixable!
I'm pessimistic -- I don't think it is fixable. My reasoning is that it comes back to your point #2.
"People are more likely to have kids if it’s FUN - relative to alternatives."
Basically we're in an arms race. Think about Reed Hasting's, Netflix's CEO, famous quote that "Sleep is our competition". One side of the arms race we have capitalism (& marketing). On the other side we have evolution & culture. One of them can innovate at the speed of months & years while using the latest research on psychology and brain chemistry to hook us. One innovates at the speed of decades, centuries, or even millions of years.
Evolution didn't need procreation and child rearing to be the unsurpassable pinnacle of human existence, it just needed to be enough better on average than the alternatives for genes to be passed along. Just ask the preying mantis or cuckoo birds or emperor penguins if child rearing is super fun times and amazingly fulfilling.
See the book Hooked by Nir Eyal. "How to Build Habit-Forming Products". It's pitched as a Good Thing, something that all companies should aspire to. That's what raising children ultimately has to compete against -- thousands of companies that all employ experts and millions of dollars of R&D to consume our attention.
To me, it's a bit like asking "what can we do to make radio dramas as popular as they used to be". Like, you can't. They've been outcompeted by new innovations that are simply better. There's no turning back the clock.
Even if we returned to hunter gatherer days of village-wide child rearing we might make child rearing 2x as fun ... but that's still going to fall short of the 10x or 20x that the alternatives all offer nowadays.
There's a reason why even HAVING SEX is on the decline, it's all tied to same underlying root cause as modern capitalism outcompetes biology. Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and his argument that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with a world "whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement" seems to have pretty accurately predicted where we are headed and nothing in the 40 years since then has really shown we can change the trajectory.
On points (2) and (4) in this brief but thought-provoking piece: Media, especially visual media like movies and TV, have always privileged depictions of young people, because young people are more attractive and getting people to watch is the whole thing that makes visual media successful or not. So popular media entertainment will always show lots of stories about what’s fun for younger people, but not so much older people. There will be lots of images for younger, reproductive-age adults about the fun of clubbing, but not of the fun of playing with grandkids. And those images of fun times with grandkids aren’t going to be chosen as entertainment by younger adults, anyway.
But when and where there are fewer mass media entertainment options, a lot of entertainment comes out of doing things in a community. Especially in smaller, geographically-constrained communities, you can’t help mixing younger and older adults. So younger, reproductive-age adults will witness older adults and their grandkids, and see grandmas and granddads having fun. I think that makes it easier to imagine what a future version of themselves might also find fun, and consider whether the tradeoff of fun clubbing now for fun building a clubhouse for your kids and grandkids is worth it.
Increasingly, first in wealthy countries but also now spreading to poorer ones, entertainment is a screen-based private affair, not a physical community one. It’s going to be hard for a current 25 year old to imagine what the 50-years in the future version of herself might find fun, because it’s going to be hard to have the opportunity to watch a 75-year old enjoying grandkids in the present—or at least much harder than it was in even the fairly recent past.
The cultures in advanced countries that still have good fertility, I think, have one thing in common: a "great chain of being" narrative about life. Far history and their connections to it, their heritage, is present in their daily life as actual people with names.
Kazakhs: have to learn their family tree back seven generations. Jews: an immense history full of named ancestors and their lives. Maori: whakapapa (genealogy) going back to the arrival of the great canoes in the 1200s, with stories about ancestors regularly recited.
I think in those cultures, the people alive today see themselves as a part of this great thing that exists in deep time. They are responsible for keeping it going. I don't know: maybe there are counterexamples, but I think it's worth exploring.
Edit: the obvious counterexample of a culture with this mindset that has poor fertility, Confucian Chinese culture: that culture was more or less completely obliterated by Mao's cultural revolution, and in Taiwan by adoption of Europeanised culture by the Nationalists.
Alice, when you said "maybe I'm basic", I was expecting your "proximate cause" explanation: the fertility crisis is a coupling crisis, and and coupling is being delayed because these days young people don't have many extended interactions with people of the other sex.
I think that insight has a lot of merit and offers possibilities for policy. It's about as basic as one can get.
The idea that having children is nothing but a sacrifice is a big message that has made a lot of my cohort (late millennials) wary of having children. I want to have children and have wanted to my whole life, but the repeated idea that it will cause me to essentially lose the things I cherish about my current life (time with partner, time on hobbies, own personality) has made me afraid of it. Many of the women I see writing about motherhood also posit models of motherhood that do not look attractive to me (full time SAHM sacrificing everything for children, or extensive childcare which makes me question when you will see your own children).
My parents have actually been helpful in this because they have a model of parenthood very different from that I see elsewhere. For my parents, having children was an excuse to see the world. They wanted me to be educated and engaged, so they actually took more trips after I was born, went out more, did more activities, came up with more things. They still kept the interests they had before. I've also found it useful to bookmark models of motherhood from women I find in some way relatable. Seeing these women write about the joys of parenthood while still also being the same people they were before gives me faith that there is a model of motherhood I can fit into.
None of my friends seem to either want to have children or, if they want to, to be on track to having children that my hypothetical children would be able to engage with. For the ones who want to have children, the challenges are finding a suitable long term partner and a living situation they would want to raise children in (not living in their parents' house, not living in a studio apartment with roommates). And so we see here issues in pairing and feeling safe raising children. Looking at members of my cohort who had kids, they tended to marry younger (out of college with a job or even high school) and have kids quickly. The ones out of high school probably would have had kids no matter what. The ones who married fresh out of college had a job and seemed to be well set-up.
I agree the culture (ie the 6 bullet points seem reasonable) in which we marinate is now the primary driver of family size (since family size can be managed with contraception). However, not so for my wife.
While we are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and have spent our lives as members of the low fertility Anglo-Saxon middleclass, I knew before we married that with our marriage she intended to replicate her family of origin: 2 well matched parents with 4 kids closely spaced in age. In many respects my role was to help make it happen. It did lead to various burdens and constraints on our lives, though I was fine with that, and it is what we created together.
At the time I took it all for granted, though in the past 10 years as I have noted the ongoing decline in [the average] women's fecundity and the rise in concerns about ageing demographics, I have pondered on how and why we differ from our friends. Especially, now that our kids are in their 20's with nary a sign of marriage let alone grandkids. I don't know why my wife's expectations were so resistant to the cultural beliefs around us. And now I feel the bemused disquiet I imagine many East Asian parents have felt for some time.
Why do we need to boost birth rates, though?
7) in most relationships men want to have kids generally less than women do, so everybody framing it as a woman question misses a huge point
Sorry to be blunt, but what is your interest in raising the birth rate? Sure, I'm a little curious about the reasons it is decreasing but that could have been a premise in the piece. We can also increase the production and utilization of coal, but if the result is the emission of CO2, CH4, or similar gases with large infrared absorption cross sections, there is a high cost to the commons. Our natural fecundity is a product of the conditions our genetic line experienced in the deep past. There is evidence that our genetic line survived more than one period where the number of individuals in our ancestor group was steady for eons. Those periods were probably due to resource or knowledge constraints. I would argue that what we see happening now is also due to resource and knowledge constraints. There is probably little to be done about it. The difference now is that starvation and childhood illness don't need to be factors increasing suffering.
The planet can survive with many more or many fewer children. It's our society that might not as the population of elderly people who need extensive care dwarfs the young population who will have to work orders of magnitude harder to support them.
The author touched on the social unrest angle, but I'm not sure that justifies a focus on children over migration. Both are longstanding human coping mechanisms. Also, this isn't a US concern, presently. Though some will argue about that. As for other Western nations and historically populous nations in the East, we have natural experiments in progress to review.
The phrase, "orders of magnitude harder" is hyperbolic, even if you mean in base 2. The Black Plague era can provide some insight. Scarce workers had to be paid better, leading to the enlightenment.
Social collapses or cultural collapses litter the historic record. It's intriguing to consider birth rates as a factor. Usually, birth-rate and resources contribute together.
In general, the evidence is mostly about negative effects of economic, cultural shocks, and peer pressure, that they can actually be positive here is not obvious at all and one shouldn't assume it for no good reason.
The effects of “peer pressure” and “cultural shocks” obviously depend on their content! It’s odd to say that cultural shocks go in one direction.
They can go in the other direction, but with effect sizes so trivial that it doesn't really matter.
It's like an economic shock generally has bad effect on family planning decisions but recovery to the previous level improves it somewhat but not to the level at which it was before.
Average tfr/cfr looks more like a multiplicative than aт additive process, hence it's not suprising.
Are you implying there are no cultural shocks?
Let me restate: economics and cultural shocks mostly have meanigful/large negative effects, the examples of them having positve large effects are very rare, one should probably think that it's a mismeasurement or a wrong narrative when one finds them due to how literature worked out through the years.
I don’t know what you mean by “positive”, but obviously shocks can go in either direction
It doesn't need to get fixed, it's a self limiting and self correcting problem. Nobody going to cry when all the embittered raven women and their cuck male hanger-ons die off, they are genetic dead ends so the world is better off for it. The Amish, Mormons, Muslims, anchor baby dropping immigrants, welfare queens, and housewives that like sex will inherit the earth. Humanity will survive just fine.