It seems like, if you actually want to investigate this question, you would want to add data on:
- how does this vary by country
- how does this vary by income (relative to median for that country)
- how does this vary by religion
Probably other things, but at least those. This graph doesn't even say what country (or group of countries) it is about, as far as I can tell?
It is not just the united states and its a well documented phenomenon everywhere.
S. Korea and Japan aren't having kids, either; they're looking at demographic collapse. China and Russia aren't having kids, either, and the EU isn't far behind.
The richer and more educated the country the fewer kids, basically.
Some people are actually undertaking this radically novel and risky procedure.
It appears that women say they can't find a suitable partner.
The reason for that, in turn, is that men are now in the minority in university, and young women (23 - 33) have higher yearly incomes on average than young men.
The few men whom women do find suitable are deluged with offers from women, and see no reason to commit to any one woman.
I could make all kinds of jokes about dating (mostly at my expense) with this, but to be a bit serious, I wonder if people know why they do things. Ultimately, what are children for?
Rise of fascism? Housing crisis? Looming environmental disasters? Unaffordable health care, education, while wealthy people shoot themselves into space?
Yes. There is food scarcity in North Korea and the political and economic environment there is not conducive to pursuing happiness. Probably people in rural North Korea want children for labor purposes but feeding them might be a burden. In Iran there are water shortages, drought, high inflation, and a regime that is despised by a large majority of the people.
They did in North Korea until 2015. They did in Iran until 2021. In both cases access to abortions and contraceptives was restricted at those junctures due to the governments panicking over falling birth rates.
There's plenty of propaganda on both sides; you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who outspokenly believes that having children is the only path to true happiness/meaning/fulfillment.
Society is in such a broken, no trust state that people people prefer relationships with animals than with people speaks volumes to the collapse of the west
Turns out, actually having to give birth is kind of a drag, even in the best of conditions, and women who realize they have a choice in the matter are more and more likely to nope right out of it.
Or at least nope out at levels less than the current 2.1 children needed for replacement levels.
Passing a head through an opening too small for the task doesn't look appealing at all - I remember an account from Annie Lowery about a doctor cutting open her perineum as part of her delivery.
> The sense of being eviscerated, the room going Technicolor. I did not know I could feel so much pain.
> The extra anesthesia kicked in, so I keeled over in the bed as the doctor explained that he’d performed an episiotomy while wresting the baby out. I was insufficiently anesthetized at the time. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. [0]
And the alternative is getting gutted and sown back up.
But I can't help but suspect that it's the time pressure that really makes it infeasible. We can only juggle so much and it takes a lot of time to keep up with the demands of modern life.
Lack of religion/purpose is also probably huge. With all the reasons not to have kids, you probably need a good reason to, but maybe there isn't one.
Well, yes. Then again, it can also be the most rewarding, purposeful thing in the life of a female (and male) human, an experience of pain but sheer beauty.
Even in highly liberal/socialistic countries with low levels of religion women are opting out.
It all boils down to choice. And women are choosing "No thanks" in high numbers even in countries where you'd think most of the barriers are quite low.
yeah but the question is why are they choosing "no thanks"?
being pregnant and giving birth aren't easy, but we literally evolved specifically do be able to do that -- hence the big hips and other body dimorphism, etc.
it's a function of stress, economics, and loss of social cohesion via things like "the third place" and large family groups.
all of the people I know having kids live in small towns and have tons of relatives nearby, while the doctors and office slaves living in a tech-bro city on the other side of the country from their family struggle to have a cat.
Not sure why you've been downvoted. This seems like as good as any explanation. All the economic hypotheses are weak given historical data, and rely on "just rich enough". Several things happened in a reasonably short period of time that support choice being the reason: medicine, equality, and social change (ie a large, but not total, reduction in pressure to have kids by society and family).
No idea why this is downvoted. It's pushing a bowling ball through a narrow opening, it's REALLY painful. You sh*t yourself, bleed for ages, risk your life, seriously harm your body, you become a milk supplier... Then you need to become a mommy. If a woman isn't 100% with her children then there's constant judgement towards her as a "bad mother".
The reward is motherhood which is a 24x7 thankless job filled with dread about your kids. I'm obviously exaggerating and am happy with my kids, but I 100% get the people who choose not to have any. It isn't a bad choice.
Up until recently, many women felt they have no choice and the clock is ticking. The "you'll regret it when you're older" stuff, can be partially solved by freezing eggs (I know a lot of older mothers and we only started at 32).
Furthermore, in recent years there are many inspirational childless women who show it's perfectly acceptable to not go through that.
Agreed, Its a big risk giving birth to a child. Modern medicine has greatly reduced this though. But why put yourself in a situation where you may bleed profusely because of a tear or having to go through c-section.
For us, there's just too much money taken off our wages to guarantee long-term safety and stability for even a single child. And wage increases barely touch that: The leftover amount is almost constant over a factor of 2 in income increase.
Your phrasing implies you blame high tax rates, but I'd first attack this from the opposite end: the market for housing has not been leaving enough in your pocket, with capital (whether morgage lenders with interest rates, or, more likely, landlords) soaking up any excess gained by your pay increase
Both taxes and rent take their part, but taxes several times more. So yes I blame taxes because that's almost the entire problem.
Pay increases not resulting in more income is an effect of a highly complex tax structure that essentially takes of as much as possible without people going on a killing spree.
That's fair I guess. But I never worked for any huge company with huge profits. In fact they're small enough that I know pretty well that they're not making much profit at all.
But this argument might hold more weight in bigger companies, which don't really pay that much better.
Regardless, most of my taxes are not used to improve society. A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself. It would be trivial (!) to chop off half of the tax without a net detriment to society.
> It would be trivial (!) to chop off half of the tax without a net detriment to society.
If you have a good trivial plan on how to do it why do you believe it hasn't been done yet? Political complexities arise quickly, as neat and simple as you might see the solution there's whole systems behind that make it less trivial, systems with needs that have to be catered for to any change to happen.
> A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself.
Is the chunk being sent far away really useless? Or cutting it off will have outsized consequences after the fact that you aren't able to predict? How do you go about finding that out and being able to balance what's necessary if consequences would appear after 10-30 years?
The system needs to work, it needs funding, what are you proposing? To just cut it all off?
I think you haven't thought deeply enough about this issue if you think it's trivial to solve.
You write under the assumption that the people in charge have the goal to efficiently use resources to give back utility to the citizens who fund the system. That is quite naive IMO, with a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
I would be suggesting obviously massive changes in policy. Which is (I kid you not) illegal for me to say because there are several pieces of legislation in Germany that protect the government from critics. In particular there are laws to punish people who want to change the status quo.
The part I am allowed to say out loud is that the number of people employed by the state has to be drastically reduced. Their legendary low workload is an obvious sign that they're being employed only to ensure their vote. Also some of the wages in the public sector are ridiculous and need to be almost halved to put them back into reality.
But regardless of the specifics: It would still be very straightforward and obvious to anyone who has ever taken a cursory look at the national finances.
> You write under the assumption that the people in charge have the goal to efficiently use resources to give back utility to the citizens who fund the system. That is quite naive IMO, with a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Not at all, I'm writing under the assumption that to change the status quo there's a huge political issue underlying it which is the core tenet for why it's hard to change and not trivial at all.
It's trivial if we ignore this reality, it's absolutely not trivial when you have to consider the political ramifications of getting rid of a huge chunk of public servants, changing stuff under a democracy is never trivial exactly because of the issue you mention: votes. If you harm a part of the population in most cases you'll lose their votes, which is a counterbalance for "trivial" changes that would cause some harm without any sort of pandering to those voters to not be left behind.
Fair take. I don't expect this to change ever and actually keep getting worse.
In that way, "trivial" it is only if we'd be living in an utopia or meritocracy where doing the right thing is what motivates action.
That being said the far bigger chunk of the money is not lost onto public servants, but to other parts I won't talk about. But changing that in reality also faces different pushback.
> That being said the far bigger chunk of the money is not lost onto public servants, but to other parts I won't talk about. But changing that in reality also faces different pushback.
I have a feeling you might mean to the EU in general. It's not like Germany doesn't benefit tremendously from the EU if that's your point.
While I would absolutely leave the EU the second I would become Germanys benevolent overlord, it's not yet illegal to speak out such thoughts. But I do believe that the EU is a massive net cost to Germany. Take the target2 balances alone
Please, show me any sources where the EU is a net cost to Germany. You need to substantiate that opinion because it's the most baffling one so far.
Germany both benefits from having access to a huge market to export its goods as well as being able to recruit workers from almost anywhere in the EU due to salaries being higher than most others. Those are just the basics, apart from that Germany has always benefited from the Euro since it made its exports more attractive to the global markets than if Germany had its own currency which would be stronger than what the Euro is.
The monetary policy of the ECB has tremendously benefited Germany over decades, just looking at the balances doesn't tell much of any story, I'd love if you'd expand on your arguments rather than leaving to me the work to understand what exactly you are trying to say because it simply doesn't make any sense.
The only illegal thought I can imagine in Germany is being a Nazi, I really do not understand what you are trying to hide behind "I cannot speak because it's illegal to say it". You can speak out against immigrants, you have a whole political party just based on that alone, so it isn't that. What is it then?
I appreciate the genuine curiosity. But this isn't the proper place for such discussions for several reasons. And my target2 argument didn't do the complexity of the matter justice - I'm willing to admit.
This'll be the end though as I don't think this is worth anyone's time. And I won't touch the other line with a ten meter pole.
I have to say, I'm skeptical of this claim. But I'm not that familiar with the tax code of most countries. Mind sharing what country this is where this would be true?
If it was done as a desired choice rather than it being driven by economic fears, you're right, we shouldn't care. But for most people, they aren't having kids because they don't have a house, they don't have a stable partner (tangentially tied to economic needs), they just don't have money to raise kids.
With supply and demand, you'd expect a decline in workers would mean higher wages down the line. But the ruling class will always make sure there is endless immigration and free trade agreements to keep the average citizen broke and miserable.
> If it was done as a desired choice rather than it being driven by economic fears, you're right, we shouldn't care. But for most people, they aren't having kids because they don't have a house, they don't have a stable partner (tangentially tied to economic needs), they just don't have money to raise kids.
Do you have data to back up this assertion? My understanding is that the poor still have the highest birth rate in the US.
The economy is predicated on future growth, so if growth slows due to lack of workforce, bad things may happen. Social programs become insolvent. It becomes difficult to take care of an aging population.
(Not sure what makes you say “cheap and exploitable”, are future generations somehow more exploitable than current or past generations?)
Then change the economy to a more sustainable version of itself instead of predicating that people must multiply themselves to make another rich asshole even richer. Problem solved.
The economical system we live under is predicated on future growth. The economy can have different forms, it's the exploitative way of economy that demands future growth, perhaps we should be looking into a different way to organise the economy that caters for the inevitable future where we won't have constant population growth to support the system.
I remember back when I'd spit the growth-for-growth-sake-is-cancer thing. But the reality is, unless you've spent time in a low/no-growth economy, how on Earth can you speculate on what is good or bad about it? All the last three generations of humans have ever know is unbridled, fantastical growth. And being pessimistic about continued growth is the definition of literal ignorance of what a no-growth or negative growth society looks like.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, or that we can keep this game going forever. But let's not pretend everything will be better when we finally stop having future generations to build our cars or take care of us in our old age. And no, robots wont do it for us (maybe cars, but damn, I hope I don't have robots taking care of me in my dotage).
I've spent decades in geophysical exploration for energy and mineral resources after growing up in agriculture and returning to it.
After spending time mapping entire countries for resources and having travelled through roughly two thirds of the 190+ countries I can report first hand that the earth is finite is size.
People familar with growth on a medium in a finite petri dish and increased cattle stocking on land, with fishing, and general consumption will be happy to tell you that infinite growth cannot be sustained from finite resources.
At some point metrics have to flip about and measure innovation and efficiency in a sustained economy.
Even should we branch out into space that still leaves the earth as a constrained system now exporting support to a outlier that needs time to itself become self sustaining .. Mars won't be suppporting Earth for many centuries to come, if indeed ever.
I 100% agree with you but the main problem is retirement which is what they're seeing in Japan and China. The younger generation is too small and can't sustain the older generation. When you pay social security it isn't actually saved, it goes to pay for the current older generation. The assumption is that when you grow old the same will happen too...
This is further complicated by modern medical science which is prolonging the life expectancy of people and making the overall cost even heavier. That's why countries are trying to raise the retirement age.
The solution should be a major leap in productivity coupled with a more progressive taxation system. Neither one of these seem to be happening right now, I hope this changes.
Perhaps the younger generation doesn't want to spend time with the older generation and thinks they need too much looking after.
This morning (I'm in GMT+8) my father (born 1935) was out for five hours delivering Meals on Wheels to older people that have difficulty cooking for themselves.
Do you mean that modern societies/families no longer take care of their elders within the family?
Wow. My mother was born in 47 and is now wheelchair bound. Barely functioning. It's probably that clean farm life that keeps your father vital at that age.
There's no single one stop comment for the entire planet.
My experience of Japan was that older people stay active longer .. and people like to have purpose and part of that can include looking after each other as people grow old and diminish in function at differing rates.
My experience of parts of some countries such as the UK and the US is that people get fat and relatively inactive some what sooner than I'm used to seeing in here in Australia and elsewhere (Vietnam, Nigeria, etc).
My father had a farming life early on, he's returned to a farm adjacent life in his early 80s, otherwise he's worked largely around minesites as a worker, foreman, manager but has stayed active walking about plants and constantly improving land they've owned by building walls, shovelling tonnes of literal shit for the garden, etc.
Fostering a sense of local community helps ease the changes as people age and there's a place for cross generational interaction in life also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_rJVvxx_g
The global human poulation isn't growing mostly due to births currently, it's growing because a very old generation is dying off and an old generation is aging but not dying as fast as the previous one.
Global replacement rate of ~2.1 is approaching (at the low end of estimates we're past it already), we're at 2.2 or so and population peak estimates keep getting lowered as models are updated with newer numbers, even with people living longer.
I believe the question is asked backwards. We should be asking why people decide to have kids in the first place. And it is not that easy to answer this question.
I do but the answer is not obvious, and when I talk to my friends it's often surprising, too. There is some complex dynamics at play, with varying levels of expectations on the part of both partners, often having quite different ideas as to why they decided to have kids (heck, this even changes in time post factum!), and what would make them have another one now.
Ultimately, not attractive enough in whatever category. For some reason, you MAANGs are oblivious to how desirable those company names and salaries are to women... Just too demure, I guess.
For some reason my friends in other careers like the arts, culinary, hospitality, janitors, construction are getting happily married and starting families.
Being attractive doesn't demand money, it demands you to be an interesting, loyal, caring person to someone else.
I'd guess that believing in this worldview where money is an obstacle for finding someone is in itself a filter for potential matches.
Probably other things, but at least those. This graph doesn't even say what country (or group of countries) it is about, as far as I can tell?
Also interesting is how does it vary within a religion. i.e compare the birth rate of Turkey and Iran to that of Mali.
My view is that income and median education dominate other factors.
S. Korea and Japan aren't having kids, either; they're looking at demographic collapse. China and Russia aren't having kids, either, and the EU isn't far behind.
The richer and more educated the country the fewer kids, basically.
It appears that women say they can't find a suitable partner.
The reason for that, in turn, is that men are now in the minority in university, and young women (23 - 33) have higher yearly incomes on average than young men.
The few men whom women do find suitable are deluged with offers from women, and see no reason to commit to any one woman.
1. Chris Williamson's Youtube channel has many videos digging away at the problem, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAmQ7Tcrh6A
2. Random NYT opinion piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-me...
-Mark Twain
- it's painful
- it's expensive
- it's a drag
- culture war stuff (who wants to deal with school issues, medical issues, community issues, etc.?)
Or at least nope out at levels less than the current 2.1 children needed for replacement levels.
> The sense of being eviscerated, the room going Technicolor. I did not know I could feel so much pain.
> The extra anesthesia kicked in, so I keeled over in the bed as the doctor explained that he’d performed an episiotomy while wresting the baby out. I was insufficiently anesthetized at the time. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. [0]
And the alternative is getting gutted and sown back up.
But I can't help but suspect that it's the time pressure that really makes it infeasible. We can only juggle so much and it takes a lot of time to keep up with the demands of modern life.
Lack of religion/purpose is also probably huge. With all the reasons not to have kids, you probably need a good reason to, but maybe there isn't one.
[0]https://archive.is/ZsHIH#selection-1173.59-1173.281
It all boils down to choice. And women are choosing "No thanks" in high numbers even in countries where you'd think most of the barriers are quite low.
being pregnant and giving birth aren't easy, but we literally evolved specifically do be able to do that -- hence the big hips and other body dimorphism, etc.
it's a function of stress, economics, and loss of social cohesion via things like "the third place" and large family groups.
all of the people I know having kids live in small towns and have tons of relatives nearby, while the doctors and office slaves living in a tech-bro city on the other side of the country from their family struggle to have a cat.
The reward is motherhood which is a 24x7 thankless job filled with dread about your kids. I'm obviously exaggerating and am happy with my kids, but I 100% get the people who choose not to have any. It isn't a bad choice.
Up until recently, many women felt they have no choice and the clock is ticking. The "you'll regret it when you're older" stuff, can be partially solved by freezing eggs (I know a lot of older mothers and we only started at 32).
Furthermore, in recent years there are many inspirational childless women who show it's perfectly acceptable to not go through that.
Pay increases not resulting in more income is an effect of a highly complex tax structure that essentially takes of as much as possible without people going on a killing spree.
Taxes help to fund society as a whole, corporate profits skyrocketing is not helping society as a whole.
But this argument might hold more weight in bigger companies, which don't really pay that much better.
Regardless, most of my taxes are not used to improve society. A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself. It would be trivial (!) to chop off half of the tax without a net detriment to society.
If you have a good trivial plan on how to do it why do you believe it hasn't been done yet? Political complexities arise quickly, as neat and simple as you might see the solution there's whole systems behind that make it less trivial, systems with needs that have to be catered for to any change to happen.
> A bug chunk is sent far away, another chunk is used to fund the system itself.
Is the chunk being sent far away really useless? Or cutting it off will have outsized consequences after the fact that you aren't able to predict? How do you go about finding that out and being able to balance what's necessary if consequences would appear after 10-30 years?
The system needs to work, it needs funding, what are you proposing? To just cut it all off?
I think you haven't thought deeply enough about this issue if you think it's trivial to solve.
I would be suggesting obviously massive changes in policy. Which is (I kid you not) illegal for me to say because there are several pieces of legislation in Germany that protect the government from critics. In particular there are laws to punish people who want to change the status quo.
The part I am allowed to say out loud is that the number of people employed by the state has to be drastically reduced. Their legendary low workload is an obvious sign that they're being employed only to ensure their vote. Also some of the wages in the public sector are ridiculous and need to be almost halved to put them back into reality.
But regardless of the specifics: It would still be very straightforward and obvious to anyone who has ever taken a cursory look at the national finances.
Not at all, I'm writing under the assumption that to change the status quo there's a huge political issue underlying it which is the core tenet for why it's hard to change and not trivial at all.
It's trivial if we ignore this reality, it's absolutely not trivial when you have to consider the political ramifications of getting rid of a huge chunk of public servants, changing stuff under a democracy is never trivial exactly because of the issue you mention: votes. If you harm a part of the population in most cases you'll lose their votes, which is a counterbalance for "trivial" changes that would cause some harm without any sort of pandering to those voters to not be left behind.
In that way, "trivial" it is only if we'd be living in an utopia or meritocracy where doing the right thing is what motivates action.
That being said the far bigger chunk of the money is not lost onto public servants, but to other parts I won't talk about. But changing that in reality also faces different pushback.
I have a feeling you might mean to the EU in general. It's not like Germany doesn't benefit tremendously from the EU if that's your point.
Germany both benefits from having access to a huge market to export its goods as well as being able to recruit workers from almost anywhere in the EU due to salaries being higher than most others. Those are just the basics, apart from that Germany has always benefited from the Euro since it made its exports more attractive to the global markets than if Germany had its own currency which would be stronger than what the Euro is.
The monetary policy of the ECB has tremendously benefited Germany over decades, just looking at the balances doesn't tell much of any story, I'd love if you'd expand on your arguments rather than leaving to me the work to understand what exactly you are trying to say because it simply doesn't make any sense.
The only illegal thought I can imagine in Germany is being a Nazi, I really do not understand what you are trying to hide behind "I cannot speak because it's illegal to say it". You can speak out against immigrants, you have a whole political party just based on that alone, so it isn't that. What is it then?
This'll be the end though as I don't think this is worth anyone's time. And I won't touch the other line with a ten meter pole.
With supply and demand, you'd expect a decline in workers would mean higher wages down the line. But the ruling class will always make sure there is endless immigration and free trade agreements to keep the average citizen broke and miserable.
Do you have data to back up this assertion? My understanding is that the poor still have the highest birth rate in the US.
(Not sure what makes you say “cheap and exploitable”, are future generations somehow more exploitable than current or past generations?)
Then change the economy to a more sustainable version of itself instead of predicating that people must multiply themselves to make another rich asshole even richer. Problem solved.
But this is the problem. We already know with climate, that there is limit to the growth anyway.
Basing success on always being able to find a fresh mark perhaps isn't sustainable.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, or that we can keep this game going forever. But let's not pretend everything will be better when we finally stop having future generations to build our cars or take care of us in our old age. And no, robots wont do it for us (maybe cars, but damn, I hope I don't have robots taking care of me in my dotage).
After spending time mapping entire countries for resources and having travelled through roughly two thirds of the 190+ countries I can report first hand that the earth is finite is size.
People familar with growth on a medium in a finite petri dish and increased cattle stocking on land, with fishing, and general consumption will be happy to tell you that infinite growth cannot be sustained from finite resources.
At some point metrics have to flip about and measure innovation and efficiency in a sustained economy.
Even should we branch out into space that still leaves the earth as a constrained system now exporting support to a outlier that needs time to itself become self sustaining .. Mars won't be suppporting Earth for many centuries to come, if indeed ever.
This is further complicated by modern medical science which is prolonging the life expectancy of people and making the overall cost even heavier. That's why countries are trying to raise the retirement age.
The solution should be a major leap in productivity coupled with a more progressive taxation system. Neither one of these seem to be happening right now, I hope this changes.
This morning (I'm in GMT+8) my father (born 1935) was out for five hours delivering Meals on Wheels to older people that have difficulty cooking for themselves.
Wow. My mother was born in 47 and is now wheelchair bound. Barely functioning. It's probably that clean farm life that keeps your father vital at that age.
My experience of Japan was that older people stay active longer .. and people like to have purpose and part of that can include looking after each other as people grow old and diminish in function at differing rates.
My experience of parts of some countries such as the UK and the US is that people get fat and relatively inactive some what sooner than I'm used to seeing in here in Australia and elsewhere (Vietnam, Nigeria, etc).
My father had a farming life early on, he's returned to a farm adjacent life in his early 80s, otherwise he's worked largely around minesites as a worker, foreman, manager but has stayed active walking about plants and constantly improving land they've owned by building walls, shovelling tonnes of literal shit for the garden, etc.
Fostering a sense of local community helps ease the changes as people age and there's a place for cross generational interaction in life also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_rJVvxx_g
Global replacement rate of ~2.1 is approaching (at the low end of estimates we're past it already), we're at 2.2 or so and population peak estimates keep getting lowered as models are updated with newer numbers, even with people living longer.
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
1. Assuming you didn't study economics or anthropology or sociology.
Being attractive doesn't demand money, it demands you to be an interesting, loyal, caring person to someone else.
I'd guess that believing in this worldview where money is an obstacle for finding someone is in itself a filter for potential matches.