A recent post by the Financial Times’ highly respected lead economics commentator, Martin Wolf, Why are fertility rates collapsing? Gender roles, provides a detailed, if also perhaps unduly conventional, view of why birth rates have plunged all over the world. Even though most of what Wolf and others like him have said is true, we think it misses key issues due to sentimentality and cultural indoctrination about parenthood and child-rearing creating blind spots.
Due to wanting to avoid a sprawling post, we will ignore the elephant in the room, that for the health of the biosphere and to have any hope of limiting further damage to the planet, that humans should welcome and find ways to manage smaller population levels. Laments like those of Wolf are anachronistic. But they not only reflect a reluctance to embrace falling birth rates, but also sidestep how many modern childrearing practices are unduly costly in labor and human development terms.
On top of that, the modern ease of getting divorced is a disincentive for women to have children. In the US, one out of seven single mothers winds up bankrupt. In a divorce, it’s the husband who has an option of continuing to involved in parenting (unless the mother is pretty horrid, courts have a strong bias to award custody to her). He can exit and leave the work to her.
Yes, it is true that now that female labor has become more valuable due to reproductive control providing for much improved access to stable work and higher pay levels means that motherhood is most “costly” to them than it once was. The women’s liberation movement also did raise gender role expectations among women to levels that that generally have not been and never will be.
Kids are starting to become a Giffen good, with higher income families having higher fertility rates. This trend was anticipated decades ago by a friend, Christina, who was the first woman on Wall Street to become a partner in M&A, at Lazard. She also even by the extreme standards of that field had an astonishing work ethic. Most of those who knew her were stunned when she became pregnant. I was a guest at the prospective parents’ country home when the very pregnant Christina reported on a call with her mother-in-law, who apparently had quizzed her pointedly on why she was having a child. The reply: “Because it costs more than a Chanel bag and all my friends will be jealous.”1
It’s not sufficiently acknowledged how much sacrifice doing an adequate job of childrearing entailed. I sometimes remark that turning children into human beings requires decades and does not always take. Admittedly, in the days of subsistence farming, that problem was “solved” by putting kids to work as soon as they were able, for the practical reasons of both teaching them needed skills and exploiting their labor.
Historically, aristocratic parents did not bring up their progeny but relied on servants. For instance, both the father of diplomacy Talleyrand and Churchill recounted how rarely they saw their parents. Talleyrand’s club foot may have been the result of being dropped by wet nurse in his infancy.
That is not to say that some do not genuinely find being around kids a lot (as opposed to in small doses) to be enjoyable. But that personality type needs to be recognized as in a minority. And that’s before considering that small children are also body fluid intensive.
And that is before getting to additional modern factors that skew the equation away from parenting being experienced as rewarding. The first is the new norm, at least in the US, for parenting being a high-supervision activity. Like many readers, I grew up in the days when kids were allowed a lot of independent action within certain parameters. Even as a six year old, I was allowed to be out and about in the ‘hood as long as I was home in time for dinner. That provided a break for adults. Now “free range” children is a derogatory term. Yet children being denied this amount of autonomy and limited risk-taking cannot be a plus for their development, even if contemporary parents take pride in filling scheduled enrichment, like music lessons and play dates.
The fact that devices provide cheap and easy engagement, as we and many many others have discussed, is causing additional harm to many children by both overstimulating them and leading them to focus on screens as opposed to developing other critical skills, from reading to negotiating. But less often discussed is the fact that parental use of iPads as baby sitters is not just a reflection of the cost and difficulty of finding good day care. It also signifies that the parents find device engagement more satisfying than dealing with humans, in this case their own offspring. A new article in Unherd discusses this predisposition in an unusually candid manner. From Am I allowed to hate fatherhood?:
In recent years, women writers have made a highbrow cottage industry of the family-stress confessional…
These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage….
Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question?…Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material?
The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on X about just this issue.
It began with my four-year old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I also confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality.
The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.
Frankly, the lack of self-awareness the author exhibits is astonishing. He presumably was not conned by his wife into getting her pregnant and then somehow emotionally manipulated into hanging around to try to be a proper father, as opposed to offering merely to write checks. He is open about his resentment of being expected to be a provider as well as spend time helping raise his kid. If you had such a poor understanding of what the deal was, given your wife’s givens (presumably having to need to work while being a mother to help keep up the household income), why were you on board with the “becoming a parent” project?
Now I can’t prove it, but it seems a reasonable guess that the author’s resentment about a comparatively small time demand by his child is at least in part the result of device fixation. Most people are no longer used to having short bits of idle time, and now fill that with mental junk food, as in fooling with devices. As we can see with how many people stare at screens as opposed to talk to the people they are with, like their own family members at dinner, or crowd-watch. So the demand of being a parent now compete with entertainment-by-device, and the kids are less pleasurable, hence less valued in the “what gets my attention” hierarchy.
Today, despite ongoing attempts to denigrate childless couples and individual as unfulfilled, surveys have regularly found that couples without children are happier than those with kids, although the ones with offspring do report having a greater sense of purpose. Mind you, in groups so large there are many cases of particular couple with children being happier than those without.
We’ll now turn to Martin Wolf. Even though he assembles useful data, perhaps the discussion above will help convince you that his “it’s about gender roles” is such a superficial, if also entirely conventional, gloss as to not provide for good guides for action, particularly policy. From his article:
The decline in fertility has occurred in almost every country in the world. Furthermore, notes the Nobel-laureate Claudia Goldin, in her 2023 paper “The Downside of Fertility”, every OECD member (bar Israel) has a total fertility rate (average number of children per woman in a lifetime) of less than 2.1 (the replacement rate)….
Yet these changes do not fully explain what is going on, not least the markedly lower fertility rates of graduate women and the extraordinarily swift collapses in fertility in fast-growing economies with traditional gender norms, notably that wives should look after the children. In such countries, not only do the costs of bringing up children tend to be high, but they fall overwhelmingly on women.
I have to stop. Maybe it is just me, but it seems remarkable to see Wolf go on about gender norms, as opposed to putting this development in the neoliberal frame. Women gaining reproductive control allowed them to become “better” prospective employees, as in less likely to drop out because they became pregnant. Even though the pressure from the women’s lib movement provided a big tail wind, women would not have been so readily welcomed into the workplace save for the addition to the labor pool moderating pressure to raise pay. If women had continued to be relegated via successful, discriminatory workplace practices, that kept them largely relegated to pink collar professions, and put a low glass ceiling on other type of work, do you think we’d see as many opting for careers?
As indicated, childrearing is taxing and if anything even more undervalued by society. Wolf and his “gender role” pom pom waivers don’t sufficiently acknowledge that. This may seem like a mere 30 degree change from his perspective, but differences like that are consequential.
Here is how Wolf frames the opportunity cost issue:
The simple (and obvious) point is that educated women who end up with the full responsibility for childcare for multiple children have relatively more to lose than their non-college-educated peers. This is why they are more likely to insist on marriage. It is also why they tend to have fewer children (though that is also because they start later).
I also doubt the assumptions about sequencing, that women get educated and then decide whether to have kids. Perhaps I am revealing myself as having a prototypical “second wave” feminist perspective, but I know many women who are educated who were clear in pursuing a career that they did not want to reproduce:
[Nobel-laureate Claudia] Goldin argues that women who gain professional incomes are better off and have much more agency. But if they are to do so, they need to postpone working in order to pursue their education, which increasingly they do. Once they are educated and in the labour force, they need to choose whether and with whom to have children. If they are to work successfully after having children, they will depend on the active help of their partners. But they cannot be sure the latter are reliable. Their partner might be a devoted helpmeet but he might leave her in the lurch. If his support fails, women will find it hard to sustain their career. So, graduate women hedge. They not only insist on marriage, but have few children, often one or none….
Now consider the cases of countries that had huge economic growth from a low base, as in southern Europe and east Asia. There, she argues, social mores are often stuck behind contemporary realities. Men still hanker after the patriarchal norms of a traditional society. Women enjoy the liberation of a modern economy. Goldin notes that countries particularly affected by this expectations mismatch (such as Japan, South Korea and, I suspect, China) also have high rates of female childlessness.
Again, there is a hidden assumption here, that having children is rewarding but a career maybe even more enticing. But again the point is blunted by “liberation of a modern economy” as opposed to seeing that it really does take a lot of work, no matter what the income level or accomplishment aspirations of the parents, to raise children that become competent, self-supporting adults. The message of women in aggregate is that society no longer values this activity adequately for enough of them in aggregate to value it enough to have the number of babies that businesses and policy makers want.
Recall that the overarching message of Karl Polyani’s classic The Great Transformation was that the operation of modern economies was to grind away at the social order. In the long time frame he covered, that process was never arrested or reversed, but reforms sometime did slow the pace of destabilizing changes enough to make them tolerable, at least at an overall level.
Now one can argue that this is indeed “unnatural” given physical reproductive urges. But pretty much everything we do in modern life is unnatural, from living in apartment buildings or manicured suburbs to turning up at work at a set time, regardless of the season. Much of what passes for civilization is a fight against the domination of nature, including lately, billionaires’ fixation with achieving super longevity.
As indicated early on, my druthers would be for respecting nature by embracing the fall in birth rates for the health of the planet. But we don’t yet seem to have remotely serious enough consideration of how to get there.
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1 Christina did prove to be a good mother, always having breakfast with her eventual two girls and getting home early enough to help with homework. Both kids turned out to be well-adjusted and accomplished. But admittedly was considerably aided by having a stay-at-home husband who walked them to school, and by paying up to have two excellent nannies who stayed with the family throughout their childhoods. Christina was also famously frontal in negotiations and in other settings. For instance, at a Radcliffe seminar on work/life balance in the 1990s, she got up and said nothing would change until women owned the means of production
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The drop in birth rates is a global phenomenon. Whatever is the cause (I suspect that it is urbanization), it is not something that is specific to American, or Western in general, society.
I think urbanisation is the big one. The increase in it is one of the commonalities across every country.
I’d also the idea we have an urge to reproduce is wrong. We have an urge to have sex. Now for most of human existence the two were entwinned. But now the link between them is largely cut.
I think people are referring to increased costs of having children when they mention urbanization, and I don’t disagree. But there is a side effect of modern urbanization that I didn’t see mentioned in the comments yet that likely plays a big role – a vastly increased level of toxicity in the environment that has deleterious effects on the human reproductive system.
Good book on that topic from a few years ago – COUNT DOWN: How the Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
I think there is more to the urbanisation than the cost. Though that is a part.
First the negative reasons. Cities are crowded, generally less suitable for kids to just go out and play. They lack community, urbanisation has generally made it harder for families to be close enough to suppoet other members.
Then the positive reasons. There are so many things for people to do in cities that it makes it easier to prefer the other options than having kids.
The pollution issue is worth looking into. Frankly pollution is the only one I think it is worth trying to fix if it is s cause. Any cultural or social causes are likely hard to fix without major unintended consequences.
“First the negative reasons. Cities are crowded, generally less suitable for kids to just go out and play. They lack community, urbanisation has generally made it harder for families to be close enough to suppoet other members.”
Bollocks. I have wonderful memories of my childhood, both at home in a crowded environment and in the village of my maternal grandmother. At home, in a “soviet” style apartment building, with a bedroom and living room, we were four. at the highest level – no elevator. But by ghose there were tons of children to play with And we did play, winter and summer, but especially summer. In the proximity and further afield, but mostly between the main artery and the river and the old housing quartal and the city limits. All kinds. And my uncle and his family were just across the street. And then we moved in the same neighbourhood in a bigger apartment.
Except family life that sucked big time, outside was a paradise. And in the village was the same, but even more idilic, with herds of cows, pigs, sheep, and flocks of geese, and turtledoves and tons of cousins trying to fit all on one bike. While the village life has become depleted of human and animal life, the homecity has staied as vibrant as 50 years ago during the socialist regime.
I hate these generalizations that reflect a very narrow cultura/civilizational space, remind me of all the north american sociological studies that rely on input from the north american undergraduate student… Sorry, but that it is not the world.
Contraceptives are thousands of years old (it’s not like wrapping your penis in something to keep sperm from coming out is a new-fangled idea). I think it is less about being able to have sex without children than about the life trajectory of a person being determined by him/herself and not the society in which they live.
Many men are very resistant to wearing condoms. Maybe you are more responsible. But for instance (some gay men like to overshare), I know of an HIV positive man who was a bottom (sperm recipient, note that not all gay men are either reliable tops or bottoms but he was) who had most of his sex partners bareback with him even though they knew the risk…including the man who eventually became his boyfriend, and had the bad taste to talk about his high daily need for sex. They relied on the odds of getting HIV from insertive anal sex being about 1 in 1000: https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/estimated-hiv-risk-exposure
Now admittedly the odds of getting pregnant from a single act of intercourse are higher, but as a gay man told me, “If they knew how much sex we have, they would kill us all.”:
Condoms are in the news. At the risk of being slightly off topic, Love in a cold climate: Winter Olympic village runs out of condoms after three days, Guardian.
My sense has been that dropping birth rates are the result of precarity caused by the social system with its income inequality, lack of affordable healthcare, high cost of education, transportation, and so on. This feeling of general unease is augmented by climate change. In short, women don’t want to give birth to children to live in such an uncertain world. This analysis does not work for China, but there it was social policy for the Han people to limit their families.
I can’t access that FT article right now so I’m not sure what line its taking, but for me, one of the striking things about the rapid fall in fertility worldwide is that it seems almost entirely independent of ‘the usual’ explanations. We are seeing it in developed and developing countries. In religious and non-religious societies. Among higher socio economic groups and lower economic groups within countries. One a few, usually very traditionalist cultures in parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East seem (so far) to be immune. So its proving a very difficult phenomena to explain. Which of course means that everyone blames whatever it is about modern life they don’t like.
One key clue however may be that in most countries there has not been a noticeable change in fertility in couples (adjusting for age). The core change has been a reduction in the number of couples, both because of people remaining single or just marrying later. Note that the latter has not historically meant an inevitable drop in fertility – for decades in the 20th Century Ireland had both the old average age for marriage along with high rates of birth.
There are two clear correlations with the sharp dip in fertility rate over the past 15 years – one is the rise of social media, and the other is the sharp drop in ‘coupling up’, which may (or then again, may not) be connected. There may also – although this is less clear – been a possible related issue with the price of housing rising above its historic connection with wages in many, if not most countries.
I’m not worried about the drop in population – as Yves says, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and as problems the world faces now, there are much worse ones. But the potential underlying causes seem deeply disturbing.
I was remiss in failing to mention a likely big factor, which is another part of the “It’s the neoliberalism, stupid,” which is the rise of rentierism, including in China. The big but far from only manifestation is higher housing expenses.. That increases the cost of household formation and makes space-consuming kids even more of a budget stressor.
Yes! The high housing costs as part of the broader and deeper expansion of the rentier business model are neo-liberalism’s most destructive weapon, yet. I think PK’s point about social media is a pretty minor factor. The time period just correlates with the housing cost jump.
We got our first house in 2013 (that small window of affordability post-crisis) and there was a BIG jump shortly thereafter in house prices which got turbocharged during COVID.
There’s a guy who’s 10-15 years younger than me (solid full-time job, and also part-time job) that I was talking to just yesterday and he’s resigned to the idea that he’s stuck waiting for his parents to die so he can get a modest inheritance to be able to get a house for him and his wife. For now, he’s stuck renting from a stupid private equity sponsored REIT of a landlord. Isn’t it wonderful, the rentier business model is bringing back medieval serfdom!
This situation is grinding society to dust, as Polyani suggested.
It’s a sad situation thst so many people effectively need their parentd to die. Snd unfortunately it will largely be a forlone hope. Depending on their age they could easily live another 20-30 years, by which time the chance of having a family is gone. And their house value will most likely have disappeared in health care, old age care and potentially as an alternative pension.
I guess I can be happy I am 66 and broke. My kids won’t inherit a dime from me, so at least they don’t have to wait for me to die. They can ignore me RIGHT NOW! How many boomers are manipulating their kids into “caring” about them with the hope of that quickly vanishing inheritance? A LOT.
There has certainly been a rise in rentier behaviour, although when you dig into the figures per country the situation is very ambiguous– so much depends on which price variable you use. I don’t think there is much doubt but that it is ‘proportionately’ more difficult to afford a home for young people in many countries, but I don’t think it matches the drop in fertility that closely – its complicated by the wild price swings over the past 25 years. In Europe, countries with very good housing policies and a good supply of housing stock (such as Austria and Denmark) have still see the same demographic pattern as those where there is a much more severe housing problem for younger people.
Going back, in my own parents day in Ireland it was extremely difficult for young people to get a home, and there was a strong societal pressure on people not to marry until they had their own house. My parents married in their 30’s, and managed to get their first home together shortly after (‘we had one house, and one chair between us’, as my mother used to say) but they still had five children, and this was considered entirely normal (at the time Irish fertility rates were still well above most other European countries). In England, there was at the time far more public housing available, and yet its fertility rate was significantly lower than in Ireland. So while it may contribute, I don’t think it can be considered a definitive answer.
Another potentially large factor is toxins’ impact on fertility. There has been a massive drop in sperm count among men in recent decades, and that’s just the most easily measured aspect of fertility. I know a few couples who want to get pregnant and can’t, and this constant toxin exposure is nowadays always a possible reason. Endless endocrine disrupters, heavy metals, pesticides, and more – fertility issues have been predicted for decades, at least since the book “Our Stolen Future” was published about these toxins in the mid 1990s.
I’m with “it’s the neoliberalism, stupid.” It’s socially atomizing across every dimension — why ought we be surprised that this impairs social reproduction at its most basic level?
One obvious correlation is the world-historic level of urbanization, with this being the first time in history that most people have lived in cities. Cities are the centers of economic activity, and people flock to them, but they do not have large families. Normally, populations are maintained by high birthrates in the countryside, but, when a certain level of urbanization is reached, this cannot be maintained. Countries today that are relying on mass immigration to make up for the low birthrate are in effect treating other countries as a surrogate countryside.
As Yves said, it’s economic factors that are behind this. Society has made it difficult to earn decent income if you are young, youth (18-26) median income is $18K, 26-35 is $48K and 35-45 is $79K. If you need to share accommodations with 3-4 people to make it work, are under constant financial and emotional stress, that is not conducive to coupling up.
I get that people like to take potshots at social media, and at video games before that, and at TV before that, but the sad truth is that the society has failed young people. Forms of youth entertainment that don’t require money have been systematically removed and criminalized, so what are young people to do? So, we expect young people to spend more time socializing in person, while removing venues and opportunities to do so?
I fear that as the world has fewer and fewer children and youth in it, it will become more and more hostile to them. Any sort of rebellion against this hostility will be labelled as a problem, used as an excuse to drive the hostility further. The problem is not the youth and their habits, the problem is the broader society that has thrown the youth under the bus and it’s blaming the victims.
>”…society has failed young people.”
Good comment and I agree with everything you say. As George Bush the Elder famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Very few women of child-bearing age want a man who’s working low-income, insecure gig jobs without benefits. But often, that’s the only thing on offer. And so they choose to say “No thanks” and wait for someone better. If no one turns up they are quite content to lose themselves in the fantasies of social media and Taylor Swift songs.*
*This last requires some explanation. I have done a bit of unscientific research (i.e. collected a few anecdotes from women aged 20-40) and found that the reason TS is so popular with these women is that her songs often deal with relationship angst and the difficulty they are having finding a good man. In other words, she speaks to their current predicament with the emotional power of lyrics and music.
I agree so much with this. Children have transitioned from a generational economic asset to a systemic externality. The costs of producing a human are privatized (borne by the parents), while the yield (labor, tax revenue, consumption) is socialized and harvested by the rentier class. The state and the corporate sector want the chickens without paying for the eggs. They became so entitled to human population growth from the historical momentum of economic highs and the natural biology of reproductive urges that they tragically mistook birth rates as an inexhaustible “biological commons.”
This also explains the elite preference for high immigration over pro-natalist policies. Importing a fully-formed 25-year-old worker is free to the host economy’s capital class. They reap the labor surplus without having paid for the two decades of non-productive growth and education required to create that worker. For the native working class, this is a betrayal of the social contract.
You now hear young people describe their unborn children as entering a world where they are merely fuel for a rentier system. They will spend most of their income paying rent and the rest on basic survival. By not bringing them into this world, they are protecting them from exploitation. By driving the cost of being young to impossible levels and refusing to materially support the reproductive phase of human life, the system is essentially eating its own seed stock.
The collapsing birth rate is just another feature among many in the modern “Rat Park” culture: atomized individualism, financialized short-termism, social entropy, and consumptive/addictive nihilism. It is an artificial winter for sure. Populations will bounce back in the distant future. For that, I am hopeful. It’s exiting this crisis that scares me. We are overdue for an untold spike in the human death rate.
YES. In the U.S., we now have a system that is incapable of social reproduction because wages are too low and unpredictable relative to the cost of living, especially housing and health care. I can’t speak to trends in the rest of the world—other than to say that as women gain in education and agency, they generally chose to have fewer children—but the future here seems so perilous and uncertain that a responsible person of modest means might reasonably conclude that they won’t be able to support and care for a child for 18-20 years.
Social policy in the U.S. treats children as private—and increasingly luxury—goods and not as carriers of our communal cultural and economic future. That the same right wingers who push this logic then chide potential parents for not producing the future that the right wants is…well, exactly what one would expect of them, I guess. It is both cruel and logically untenable.
I am on the opposite position, I don’t think it’s that hard to explain, I think it is exactly what should be expected.
Most countries have by now gone through most of the demographic tranistion, birth rates are coming down to match death rates, or have already done so. Depending on cultural and political factors this has taken different amount of time and the population multiple varies a lot, but the overall pattern of demographic transition has held. (For those that don’t want to go to wikipedia and read up on the demographic transition it is simply: Deaths are high, births are high: stable. Deaths go down, births are high: increasing. Deaths stay low, births go down: still increasing but the increase is slowing. Deaths are low, births are low: stable). This is nothing new, this is what has been expected, at least in the field of population history.
After a country has passed through the demographic transition a country can’t expect to just keep growing even though that was the normal for a century in said country. Prospective parents need to get enough material wealth and future prospect for themselves and their kids to want to have kids. That is not new either, almost a hundred years ago, during the great depression, the Myrdal’s wrote Crisis in the Population Question.
Poverty, lack of prospects and fear of war pushes birth rates down once you are through the demographic transition (and probably before, but then it is masked by other factors). A stable population can be had after the demographic transition, as shown by a lot of western Europe in the last half of 20th century, but it takes some doing. Neoliberalism, climate change and the fear of a new world war should be expected to pull birth rates down.
A stable or even shrinking population (which we don’t have yet, the world population is still growing as smaller grandparent generations are replaced by larger grandchildren generations), isn’t a bad thing, though I think it is much more about population footprint. The world has enough for everybody’s needs, but not for the billionaires greed.
Oh, and I don’t know if number of couples are decisive here. The only data I found points in different directions: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/what-share-of-women-reach-the-end-of-their-childbearing-years-without-having-children
Look at post-war booms, people tend to have kids when there is hope for the future, not when there isn’t.
Why would anyone want to bring a child into this coming hell of climate change? And we can probably add AI to the mix – if all or most jobs and careers will disappear shortly, why bring a child into this? And given housing is not affordable, most kids will never own a home, will need to rely on inheritance (of which most parents will have none by now, or thanks to AI will need to dip into). And given all the western powers that be are wanting to start WW3…etc. There are more reasons not to have kids than to have them.
The post-war boom in the US wouldn’t have happened without the FHA structured program to underwrite the construction of a ton of middle class housing. As soon as Congress restructured it in the 1970s, we stopped building adequate mass housing and the home-building industry because a smaller cartel, focusing on selling to the rich.
The reasons for the diminishing fertility of the human population worldwide has been a discussion topic several times in this forum.
I already suggested that an underlying cause explaining the “baby bust” is that modern society has become outright hostile to human beings in general, viewing children in purely utilitarian terms — as resources, not an end in themselves, that must benefit some external forces and institutions (the State, the market, etc) instead of their parents. Breeding helots is not a gratifying endeavour, so why bother? — especially if, as Yves argues below, human beings are not innately driven to procreation per se.
I would be dubious about how the collapse of birthrates is all about gender roles. Sorry, but that kinda smacks of ‘first world problems’. I think that is more of a matter of parents not being able to afford to have many kids or perhaps none at all. In this post the following sentence appeared-
‘Kids are starting to become a Giffen good, with higher income families having higher fertility rates.’
It says it right there. Families that have a lot of money can afford to have more kids. Families where perhaps the husband and partner are working two jobs each just to keep their head above water? Not so much. And if there is one thing that our Neoliberal economic system is successful at is keeping most people living on the edge with little else left to devote to buying a home much less having many kids. In passing, I heard the other day that the average age of a home buyer in the US is now 59 years of age.
They’ve created a faithless society. One of the first blessings given is the following.
The current trend is pretty much impossible to reverse in the west for the next view generations without radical change.
I wonder if anyone will get desperate enough to consider banning birth control.
How dare you denigrate major regions and act as if the Bible is the only authority
Buddhism, the Sikh faith, and Islam do not have procreation as a duty.
And per you, Christ was a poor role model since he died childless.
Not only that, Yves – he railed against the idea of family, saying following God was priority over family, friends, neighbors, community. He advocated for dropping all to prepare for the end of times.
As said it is a blessing and not a duty or obligation. It is a personal decision wether to accept this blessing.
Or are you saying that having children is no blessing in any major religion except Christianity.
Besides Buddhism Christianity is one of the view religions with expected celibacy from monks and/or nuns.
That was not your claim. You explicitly said that not having kids meant you were godless, which is a clear denigration in your framework.
Buddhism as far as I can tell is indifferent. They regard existence on this plane as a state of samsara which one aspires to transcend.
My claim is that we are living in a society without faith.
I do apologize for not separating my belief from my argument.
It was not my intention to denigrate other religions, because I’m sure that which religion one follows is not the determining factor.
But it is a fact that people with faith have more children.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/#:~:text=In%20the%20modern%20world%2C%20religious,replacement%20%5B38%E2%80%9340%5D.
This is still highly culturally biased. Neither Hindus nor Buddhists have weekly services as a practice, save some Buddhist sects as an accommodation to Westerners. They observe certain religious festivals.
And one can argue that religious practice is a proxy for patriarchy, as in female oppression. Look at how pro-lifers are hostile to abortion, even for some in the case of rape.
“My claim is that we are living in a society without faith.”
You must be joking mate, which society, Westren or ????. The hole orb is awash with faith. Then you have the little problem of how neoliberalism has infected so many faiths in the West – mega churches, prosperity sorts, propertarians, its a clown car of so many mangled interpretations of of scripture. Not that most have no clue of its original historical/environmental context.
This then totally ignores the fundamental economic factors about family formation e.g. costs and income to facilitate. The Book ‘The Two Income Trap’ back in the day was illustrative of how solid people of faith in good social standing could be wiped out due to neoliberal dicta – profit before family formation. Not that in history due to environmental dramas societies were ordered not to have children as it was too high a cost to everyone.
Personal decisions made under absurd information asymmetry is a mugs game at the end of the day. Made manifold under the machinations of the so called free market, how long will your job last, when will you have too move to keep your job, end all Gov support for families, yet in places like Hungry they are doing things to support it and now the EU wants to promote a neoliberal to head the nation ….
Lmmao Trump has a spiritual advertiser[tm] in the WH …. Bush Jr laments …
I would like to add that to me being godless is different from being without faith.
However I do not think this blog page is the place to discuss my beliefs in detail.
Did you catch that the only OECD nation with an increasing birth rate is Israel? And I think it’s fairly well known that within the Israeli demographic, those having the most children are the religious fundamentalists.
I’d argue that the world would be better off with fewer faithful Zionists.
I would argue that “be fruitful and multiply” is not an instruction to have as many children as you can, nor is it an instruction that “God’s plan” requires that we all marry and have families, there are many ways to be fruitful and multiply which don’t include sexual reproduction. In Jesus’ parable of the talents at Mathew 25, it’s clear he didn’t mean multiply money, he meant multiply the kingdom of heaven, the kindnesses towards others, share the love in a way which grows and allows the holy spirit to be fruitful in others. This is almost an instruction to not read “multiply” in the way it has been, as sexual reproduction, as simply multiplicaiton of some physical aspect of the world – instead, it’s clearly multiplication of the spiritual fruits. Indeed, Jesus is likely addressing the “be fruitful and multiply” misunderstanding, gently correcting it.
“There’s always a catch,” my seminary dean kept saying as he went over my seemingly ideal call documents. “There’s always a catch.”
What a deal those “call documents” that you cite seem to be for the first humans. YHWH creates all this great stuff, and humans are in charge of it all. But there’s always a catch.
Then we hit that second Genesis myth. There’s always a catch. You thought you had dominion over the whole thing only to find out you can’t eat from that one tree. What’s that all about? The snake was happy to explain that it was because eating from that tree gave you God-vision. YHWH would be jealous. The snake wasn’t lying about that. Indeed, as soon as Eve took that first crunchy bite followed immediately by the man of the house, here comes YHWH, and it all turns to shit. Curses all around
Thus Ezra and the boys, returned from exile to the ruin of Jerusalem, began their book-length explanation of how, if YHWH was:
1) a god who loved his people; and that
2) YHWH was not dead or impotent even though his house had been razed to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar,
how then was Zion nothing but rubble
It was a good move that restored YHWH, a religion and an ethnic identity for a long time. Blame the humans (well, the woman), not the god. Rebuild the temple. Rebuild the walls, and off we go into the future, but that future kept repeating the past as Alexander and the Caesars rolled through, eventually leaving the second temple in ruins.
We have to give Ezra and the boys a lot of credit. Not only did they create a religion that has lasted thousands of years and served as the foundation for another one, they also got it right about the fundamental flaw in human nature.
“You will be like gods.” Yep, that’s us humans and our hubris (another good polytheistic myth on this topic). It didn’t take eating an apple to give us that hubris. It seems to be built in with our dexterous hands and our big brains. Eating the apple is giving in to the temptation to use those gifts, whether from YHWH or Gaia a/k/a evolution, to build skyscrapers and H-bombs and Chevrolets from which you can see the USA while spewing carbon into the atmosphere.
Peter Thiel complains we don’t have flying cars because “gods” like him “deserve” flying cars. He claims he’s a Christian, but the Genesis snake quoted YHWH’s words more accurately. Now Peter, Sam, Elon and the rest of the boys are going to do Ezra one better. Having experienced living as gods themselves, they’re no longer content with projecting a typical ancient Near East tyrant into the sky as a fictional God, they’re going to build a Calf, not of gold but of massive amounts of silicon brought to life by massive amounts of electrons flowing through it. They’re forgetting that there’s always a catch. May they, and they alone, reap the harvest of the wind they are sowing.
Algorithms are proving better contraceptives than TV. Keeping people hooked on to screen. Click bait doom mongering scaring everyone abt bringing children to violent, unsafe world. Skynet is taking over
Re “It’s not sufficiently acknowledged how much sacrifice doing an adequate job of childrearing entailed. I sometimes remark that turning children into human beings requires decades and does not always take. Admittedly, in the days of subsistence farming, that problem was “solved” by putting kids to work as soon as they were able, for the practical reasons of both teaching them needed skills and exploiting their labor.”
The “traditional family” is not designed around securing well raised children. The sources of the pressure on society to support such unviable systems are capitalistic (inheritances, etc.) and religious (control of believer’s sexuality and family life).
We hear people say “It takes a village … to raise a child” then turn around and insist on parental rights that throw all of the responsibility upon parents. In prehistoric times, there were no traditional families. Everyone in a family group had part of the child rearing duties. It can be argued that human females have evolved a capacity for multiple orgasms to encourage multiple matings so that children do not belong to just that male and that female. Those kids have more than two daddies, because it takes a fucking village.
Our own culture is subverting our success.
Aunts and uncles often live in different cities due to the difficulty of finding a job, and grandparents are often more interested in leisurely retirements.
First, nature vs nurture: Humans, as with all life on this planet, have a natural urge to procreate and we’re now over 8 billion. However, nature seems to have inserted in our genetics a set of brakes for when the population gets out of hand and overruns the resources. In our case we’ve replaced hunting and foraging for money, and a large part of our population is finding it hard to keep themselves sheltered and fed. Nature’s solution, besides die-offs, is to reduce the urge to procreate.
Second, the author skips over the laws and customs concerning children.
a. When I got divorced I asked my lawyer about getting custody of my daughter. He informed me that I would have to prove to the court that my wife was unfit and then prove myself fit. So basically I was liable for the cost but cut out of the decision part. Hardly what I considered fair (equitable). When I was young I saw little of my father, not because he didn’t want to see me and my sister, but because my mother ran him off when he came around. My wife achieved that by moving out of the state. Most of the divorced fathers I know had the same problems even though the author suggests that fathers simply don’t want to raise their children.
If a woman gets pregnant it’s her sole decision (regardless of laws and customs) whether to keep it or abort it. The father has no say in whether he has a long-term financial burden or not. Again, not quite equitable. A good reason to avoid marriage, coupling, and even sex.
b. When I was a child if I disobeyed I’d get the belt across my butt. It was an excellent method of teaching me not to play in the street. Most of the parents I see now can’t control their children because it’s either illegal or antisocial to spank or otherwise punish children. Who wants to raise children when the state makes discipline illegal. I learned to my chagrin that even touching the hat on an unruly teenager was treated as “felony child endangerment” here in Idaho. The parents chose not to prosecute but I learned that I want nothing to do with, and to stay as far away from children as I can. My attitude, like many others, is to recommend not having children.
No, we do not have a natural desire to procreate. We have a natural desire to fornicate. The wanting to have children part is the result of cultural indoctrination. I managed to grow up an a family with none of that and where we moved so often that I managed not to be in any community long enough to have pervasive views take. So the level of programming of women is very apparent to me. Neither of my brother wanted to have kids either. One is childless, the other did have kids because his wife’s family demanded it (he idealized his father in law so this was not as weird as it might otherwise seem).
I would say that we absolutely do have a natural desire to parent. Which is not the same thing as a desire to procreate, but is close.
I hate to seem harsh, but you look to have bought into cultural indoctrination. Who is this “we”? I know TONS of women who have no regrets about not having had kids. Ditto all the gay men I know, and a few straight men too. I knew at the age of 6 that I did not want to be a parent. My parents didn’t. They did so (late, BTW) because it was the 1950s and expected of them. My mother did not like children (she did not like her grandchildren either). My father had kids only to advance his career.
Saying that we have a natural desire for something does not mean that this desire is strong in all people or that you cannot be happy without it being fulfilled. I don’t have children, and I am not miserable because of it..
But we clearly have a desire to take care of small, cute things, in which “cute” is not coincidentally defined as “looking a bit like a human infant.” If we didn’t, we would have died out as a species long ago.
I’m sorry, but your experience or even experience of tons of women and men does not prove the absence of a natural urge to procreate. Even statistics couldn’t be a definitive proof of such absence. As in, Conrad Lawrence famously said the swans are monogamous by design — but not by statistics. Also, being healthy is natural — yet who’s healthy?
That does not, in return, PROVE that natural urge to procreate. But I’d say the claim is not inappropriate, and your arguments do not disprove it.
This is Making Shit Up as well as bad faith argumentation. You are abusing the clear meaning of words. Natural urges are eating, thirst, sex drives. Everyone needs to eat and drink water frequently. Only about 1% of the population is asexual. Contrast that with the finding of a 2024 Pew survey:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/
If this was a “natural urge” it would be impossible a majority of the population in their peak reproductive years to suppress it.
And the idea that there is a “natural desire” to be healthy is absurd, and disproven by how addictive junk foods like Cheetos are. Humans experience pain and that is our big health preservation mechanism. We learn to avoid foods that give us food poisoning as well as (in most cases) moving in ways that might sprain joints or break bones.
I think that the desire to procreate and the desire to fornicate are separate natural desires that reinforce each other, I don’t believe that the claim of children as a good would be seemingly so universal across different cultures if it was just cultural indoctrination. Not all individuals will have the desire to procreate, though frankly not all individuals have the desire to fornicate either. Also, and this is admittedly anecdotal, but I think that the claim that women in American society are socially pressured into having children is overstated at this point in time. When my wife and I had our first child four years ago, my wife got treated like deciding to have children was an insane choice by multiple people, including by female family members that had already had children. Exact same thing happened to her again when we had our second child two years later.
I would suggest that the idea that not having children is desirable is the culturally indoctrinated position, not the opposite. It is historically quite unusual, usually reserved for priests and monks and hermits.
Anecdotally, I find that to be the case quite a lot among my millennial cohort. A close friend of mine has recently had a baby, and he is absolutely infuriated with the amount of people telling them in advance how TERRIBLE the experience is gonna be, how they will have no rest whatsoever, how they will not belong to themselves, how their lives are effectively OVER.
Could it be a function of a consumerist mentality, wanting to only receive pleasures, and do it as frictionless as possible? The same cultural trend that destroys the value of DOING work, rather talking only about how you will be COMPENSATED for that?
Therefore, basically, indoctrinating humans to be devoid of any outgoing energy flow. Or, in other words, STERILE?
“When I was a child if I disobeyed I’d get the belt across my butt. It was an excellent method of teaching me not to play in the street. Most of the parents I see now can’t control their children because it’s either illegal or antisocial to spank or otherwise punish children.”
My first wife had twin toddlers when we got together that I helped raise. They were never subjected to corporal punishment, and although we lived in an urban environment, they successfully avoided wandering mindlessly into the road to get squashed like bugs. In their fifties now, they’re doing quite well. My second wife and I have one son, also never subjected to corporal punishment, also raised in an urban environment, who is a competent pedestrian, has mastered a rather hazardous trade, and now has two toddlers of his own that in all likelihood will never feel the sting of a belt across their butts. There are other ways to teach.
We have two small children and we spend 2700/month on daycare. In our state, there is subsidized pre-K, but it’s typically from 900am to 1200pm, so we will have to use daycare for several more years.
My last employer, one of the most famous institutions in the world, used a loophole to make me pay for my parental leave, for which I got four weeks.
I also have older step kids. Their bio dad drained us of tend of thousands in legal fees, and he doesn’t pay child support because he doesn’t feel like it. He chooses voluntary impoverishment. The legal fees were high because the judges and magistrates were lazy.
Every vaccine, doctors visit, dentists visit, etc requires taking time off work.
It’s rewarding yes, but very difficult and I understand why many avoid it. Society prioritizes tax cuts for rich people.
This is exactly why my wife (who is a teacher) has excited the workforce each time one of our children were born.
Her income basically covered childcare so we decided that it was better for her to be at home with the children instead of working when it was a net gain of zero financially for her to work.
For a government that talks about needing more people having children, they sure make it hard as hell to take care of them….
agreed with the commentariat. Urbanisation seems to be the big one. Having space for child rearing is very difficult and, considering that one parent basically needs to drop out of the workforce, extremely expensive. Add to that that urbanisation usually means that the grandparents are not near enough to help, and child-rearing has become extremely difficult.
it was said that it took a village to raise a child. siblings and cousins would pool their children together and one or several adults would look after them all while the other adults went on with their lives. now everything is so atomized and these relational lifelines are often too far away.
I am going to guess that things were working out pretty well for the author of the UnHerd piece, prior to fatherhood. The oblivious good fortune required for a functional adult to wax eloquent about “an honest vocation” is staggering. (Yes, we know, lower-echelon PMCs are getting squeezed. Boo hoo.) He seems like someone who readily accepts conventional beliefs, until they become inconvenient to him, personally–and then wants to pick and choose. I would not be surprised if his initial calculation had been that having children was just part of *the cost of doing business*.
On the topic of degrowth, any kind of rationally planned or controlled path forward seems very unlikely. Plummeting birth rates from a collective sense of doom might be the best we can get.
About 10,000 years ago agriculture took root in the Indus valley and sparked the Indo-Aryan expansion. Agriculture supports about 10 times the population of hunter gathering. It was not conquest that drove the Indo-aryan expansion, it was population growth. That expansion advanced at about three miles per year from the shear pressure of demographics. I suppose the last gasp of the expansion was settling the west coast of the US. But then the population of the globe has more then tripled since WW2. Everyone looks to technology as fundamental to our current economic growth but the actual root cause of economic growth in the modern era comes down to demographic pressures.
The anointed economic beneficiaries know it is population growth that is the driver and they are getting very freaked out about the prospects of contraction. The freak out about population contraction is not from the religious right’s competitive repopulate needs, it’s the threat to the wealthy’s wallets.
Why are birth rates falling? The world is now teaming with humans. It is not hard to feel the pressure in cities. Anyone who old enough has seen rural areas fill up with development. The availability of birth control is, of course, a factor but my guess is socio-economic reality, if not knowingly, is instinctively evident in suppressing the urge to reproduce.
It has become clear to a significant number of global inhabitants that it is unsustainable. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth but technology has made us blind to that fact. It is a fragile situation just waiting for a catastrophic event or a slow grind of environmental decay that will in any case lead to population collapse.
Coincidence, or does JP stand for Jack Pot? :)
It seems like the establishment, which indeed blindly wants more children, isn’t facing up to 2 circumstances: first, we have continually increasing productivity, so we don’t need an increase in population to get more produced. Second, the world already can’t supply enough jobs to its young people, including educated ones, particularly prominent now in China and India, but also gaining speed in the U.S. (and no doubt other places, if I was properly informed). if Ai works sufficiently (which I hope it doesn’t for more than one reason) more and more jobs will be lost, with even higher productivity. Of course there are claims that AI use will somehow create more jobs, good jobs. The problem is that lost good jobs don’t necessarily translate into more (good) jobs, as the collapse of industrial employment in the Midwest has recently illustrated. And underneath all of this, as many have pointed out, we just can’t keep increasing population forever because our planet and resources simply can’t take it. (Water is already failing). The refusal of our governments and elite classes to deal with these issues, by demanding more and more population, is part of the absolute greed and incompetence of the so-called leaders of our time, all over the West, and elsewhere.
Two thoughts:
First, I wonder how much of this large scale fertility reduction is related to the vast increase in the amount of information about the realities of raising children. The amount of information available to me (Gen X) via blogs and other internet sources about the details of what I would be getting into was a lot greater than that from magazines and other people in the community (babysitting experience, younger siblings, etc) available to my parents (Boomers). There are even more sources today. Also a lot more info is available on birth control now than when I was young.
Second, (at least in my circles), young women who had “a good future” before them were strongly encouraged to be on birth control, so unplanned sexual encounters were probably less likely to result in pregnancy. During my working life, especially early on, I was told on multiple occasions (in work environments) not to have children. Not by a direct supervisor but by people who had a yes/no vote on my continued employment and future opportunities. Many of them likely meant well in terms of career development advice. Not to mention observing women who did get pregnant being quickly marginalized. The superstars who thought they were good enough that those issues were something they could overcome found support for future career moves was very limited.
Of course, the irony of all this is that higher ed is crashing into a demographic cliff (2026 is when things are supposed to get “really bad”) and not able to get enough college-aged entrants. Many schools are struggling financially especially if they are “tuition-dependent”. Just where did they think all these potential college students would come from, when they’ve been telling, with words and otherwise, people in their own industry not to have children?
RE: Yves’ friend Christina avowing that “nothing would change until women owned the means of production,” made me chuckle.
Women already own ‘the means of production.’ Males are the muscular delivery system for a teaspoon or so of raw materials needed by the female ‘factory’ to manufacture more humans.
This is the reason patriarchy was invented: men wanting to control the means of production: just a bunch of rentiers.
add to that the obsession with robots and AI.
I find India to be fascinating. See the FT plot above. The birthrate in India started declining, as far as I can see in 1964—my World Bank data only goes from 1960 to 2022—and has declined from a high of about 5.9 to about 2.0 in 20220. If you look at the FT plot that line has a r ≅ 0.95 or so.
I’ve, so far, glanced at 28 countries, both developed and developing, the overall trend is a declining birthrate from a 1960–1965 base though there are some exceptions such as Nigeria where the decline seems to start in 1978.
In some cases one can see a sudden increase in the rate of decline such as in Iran that looks related to the Islamic Revolution and in some cases we see a drop and partial recovery or stabilization of the rate (Israel & USA for example) but across the board we are seeing declining birthrates. The Israel birthrate “stabilization” seems to have occurred just after the collapse of the USSR.
My tentative guess is that the advent of fairly reliable and convenient birth control methods may be one explanation though certainly not a complete one.
I love NC threads like this. Thanks, Yves, for getting things started and providing some guardrails for a discussion that does a great job of bringing various factors to the fore.
I’d like to add a couple of things, the first bouncing off what Rev Kev said above about the time demands on parents and what Steve Ruis brought up about community responsibility for raising children. Our children would have a very, very difficult time navigating all their responsibilities without a big assist from grandma (with pop-pop serving as assistant). The expense of childcare is horrendous, and the quality of many childcares is the same. The 140 year-old two-decker we inhabit was practically designed to facilitate extended families. When the post-WW II prosperity arrived, and with it, the rise of the “nuclear” family with a house in the ‘burbs,” things went along alright for a while in an economy where a single, blue-collar worker could support a family, but as that waned, subsequent generations, beginning with the Boomers, had major child care issues. Daniel Schmachtenberger, who was raised by hippies in a communal setting, argues that human tribes allocated the raising of children to the oldsters while the parents spent their prime working years providing what the tribe needed. Strikes me as a good system that gives us oldsters something fulfilling and crucially important to do while it allocates more time and attention to youngsters than they could ever receive from working-age parents.
My second will sound, as Lambert would say, woo-woo. Gaia is, rather belatedly, protecting herself and the rest of the life that inhabits the Earth. The measures are limited so far. A reduction in birth rates is painful only for those who desire to be birth parents and can’t be for one reason or another, and for those capitalists whose souls are enslaved to the “more and more forevermore” drive. Gaia may take more drastic measures in the future, but for now, we should be celebrating the end of exponential growth in the human population.
Anthropology posits that the roots of civilization began to form about 35 to 40 thousand years ago when cromagnons began to live long enough to become grandparents. It fell to grandparents to pass on the store of knowledge. The parents were busy keeping food on the hearth.
Humans are real newcomers. Mother nature has always taken care of herself as she has near infinite time on her hands. George Carlen said mother nature evolved humans because she wanted a layer of plastic in the stratigraphy. He said then mother nature would shake off humans like fleas from a dog
Thanks for both these points. The Hippy Dippy Weatherman left behind a lot of wisdom packaged as hilarious jokes.
I see declining birth rates as a good thing. We are just too big an animal for 8 billion of us to sustainable over the long term. We can either do something about it ourselves or the problem will be fixed for us and I expect the latter will be far messier and painful.
No one likes what I have to say about this, and that will be true here as well. Life, including the relations between the sexes, is profoundly unpleasant in the modern, neoliberal state. The kind of workplace that college educated young people experience early in their career is filled with unpleasant people, especially supervisors, and many of these supervisors are now women. Women drink the Kool-Aid of neoliberal culture more deeply than men. Amongst themselves, men are more skeptical, and more hesitant to drive things all the way to absurdity. And there are many forms of absurdity, woke absurdity, business-talk absurdity, feminist absurdity, Christian (usually some form of protestant fakery) absurdity, political absurdity, and on and on.
No one wants to reproduce a culture they hate every day and in every way. I think that it is only people who can escape the dominant culture who can have pleasant enough lives that they will want to have children. You can escape by being wealthy and hence, independent of that culture. Sometimes local, small town cultures offer some independence. Conservative Roman Catholics also live outside that culture, even if not wealthy, as do smaller percentages of people of other genuinely felt faiths. Some people who are deeply intelligent, and profoundly committed to art, science, or some craft can also escape, because they just don’t have time for all the crap. And many people who choose not to go to college, but to pursue their living in the trades, may also escape the dominant culture, if that is their choice. Apparently more and more young men of the sort that previously would have attended at least some college, are choosing the trades. I wonder if it is not for just this reason.
There are some national cultures that are more resistant. NC commentator John once recommended this discussion between Emmanuel Todd and Kaho Miyake about the relationships between men and women in different cultures: https://open.substack.com/pub/emmanueltodd/p/dialogue-between-kaho-miyake-and?r=blt6&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay . Absent a catastrophe (that none of us want) that erases modernity, American culture is probably unredeemable. Maybe the Todd-Miyake conversation suggests that French and and Japanese culture could save themselves if they turn away from neoliberalism in time.
What is being observed is almost exactly what was predicted back in 1972 by Meadows et.al.
There have have been two follow up studies to test their thesis and we are pretty much on target.
Gemini made a good fist of sumarising all this for my kids at Christmas.
Really? Any link where I can read about it?
Yes but I am not allowed to post it for reasons I have sympathy with.
Published in 1972 by a team of MIT scientists led by Donella Meadows, The Limits to Growth was a groundbreaking study commissioned by the Club of Rome. It used computer modeling to explore the long-term consequences of a growing global population and finite resource base.
At the time, the book was highly controversial. Economists criticized it for underestimating the power of markets and technological innovation to find substitutes for scarce resources. However, 50 years later, many modern scientists note that real-world data has tracked the “Standard Run” scenario with unsettling accuracy, particularly regarding carbon emissions and resource strain.
There is a video of an interview with Meadows.
Recent scientific reviews, most notably a major 2021 study by Gaya Herrington and subsequent 2024 updates, have found that the real-world data from the last 50 years tracks the original 1972 “Standard Run” with striking, and some say alarming, accuracy.
What I find interesting is that since the early 1970s, across the western world, the R rate for births has generally been below 2.1. The researchers did foresee that birth rates would eventually fall as societies became wealthier, but the speed and depth of the decline, falling well below the replacement rate of 2.1, has been more extreme than their original “Standard Run” assumed.
This later research confirms that we are entering a “crunch point” where the original 1972 model and modern demographic shifts are colliding.
There is a very good animation entitled “The End of Economic Growth (The Population Collapse)” that explains where we are and the likely outcomes going forward.
The city I live in has gone from 269,000 people in 1960 to 1.2 million as of last year. All my life, the norm has been residential expansion, new roads, upgraded transportation, new businesses – all entailing construction, expansion and growing opportunity. Contrast this with a city that has a stagnant population over the same period. Unless stagnant population city has growing productivity commensurate with growing real compensation, there wouldn’t be near as much economic growth. Imagine that happening for whole countries, as natural population growth tends to zero or slightly negative.
There is no need to imagine, its happening in real time. Japan has 9 million empty houses. The “R” or replacement rate needs to be 2.1 or higher for there to be a growing population. This map shows year that various countries fell (and have remained) below that value.
Why don’t we see the effect? Well in the years after 1945, the baby boomer years, the population grew very quickly because the replacement rate was nearer 3 and many of these boomers were starting work as the birth rate dropped so it wasn’t really that noticable.
In the UK the population grew by nearly 20 million during this period and there was virtually no immigration. In the UK the R rate dropped below replacement in 1972/73. Many of these boomers have worked and the early ones have already retired but there are many more to follow, the last of them will become eligible for their state pension in able 2040.
It was recently reported that Germany’s working-age population peaked around 2015 and is now shrinking by roughly 300,000 people per year. Median age is already ~46 with fertility rates now dropping below 1.4. Within a decade, Germany will have 5-7 million fewer workers. This directly constrains industrial output as skilled vacancies run persistently high and capacity shrinks despite demand.
All this means is that between now and about 2060, when the last of these boomer generation have moved on, countries with these demographics and ponzi style state and public sector pension schemes will find more and more of their resources being spent on the retired.
As to the handwaving about somehow magically increasing the bithrate I think it is too little too late. It takes 25 years to make net tax contributor so this should have started back in the 1990s.
Furthermore, I doubt AI and robots will come to the resue because they don’t pay tax and it is tax to fund the pensions, healthcare and social care of this balloon of boomers that governments will require.
At the bottom of the linked page is a graph showing the Business As Usual run. This link to a web page on the Limits to Growth sponsor’s web site, the Club of Rome, also contains some history of the project. Note that the results were NOT what the Club of Rome was looking for.
Hand-wringing would not even get one to first base in the back seat of the car at the drive-in.
I have recently dipped into the history of family systems. It does seem that some of the founding male fathers of the anthropology discipline believed in a primitive type of sexual communism but a guy by the name of Edward Westermarck, with much ethnographic data in his book – The History of Human Marriage (1891) – destroyed the idea of a primitive sexual promiscuity and gave us one of the first formulations of the original nuclear family that was naturally selected for its effectiveness in bringing up the young.
It also seems that this anthropological understanding came largely from comparing hunter-gatherers with the agricultural peoples of societies with or without a state.
One conclusion was that the family was much simpler among hunter-gatherers (it tended to have a father and mother with their children) than among most of the agricultural peoples that had developed state systems. Such a family structure was apparently efficient and flexible and seems to have ensured the success of the species (also see writings of Emmanuel Todd).
Todd’s more recent observations regarding what he calls “zero state religion” (as described in his The Defeat of the West and possibly elsewhere, but that’s where I encountered it) also seem germane to this discussion.
I believe the whole point of most discussions about fertility rates is to place the blame on personal choice, usually women’s, or gender norms, or the pill, or dating apps, etc, etc. Specifically so as to ignore the deliberate structural policies that are the ultimate, overwhelming decider of the population’s birth rate. Children are supposed to be women, and mens choice. But do men or women today choose their declining economies, their precarious job prospects, the rising costs of living and housing, the atomisation of their social and community networks by suburbanisation, unstable jobs and general policies of emiseration.
People make choices. Populations follow policies. The proverbial fields are growing barren because it’s always cheaper in the short term not to pay for fertilizer. You can see the population dustbowl coming a mile off.
I think the ‘playing catch’ anecdote is more about unrealistic expectations, something mothers should be very familiar with as well:
People who describe playing catch in those terms are usually doing so in the past tense, looking back with the warm glow of nostalgia. But yes, at the time we would quite often rather be doing our own thing. A lot of little kid play is boring and repetitive to adults. We do it anyway, because it’s what we signed up for, and (if we’re lucky) we can take empathetic pleasure in their enjoyment. The fact that he didn’t particularly want to play, but did so anyway, doesn’t make him abnormal or ungrateful – it just makes him a normal parent.
His mistake was talking to the public Internet about it, instead of talking in private to a trusted friend or group of them. These conversations never end well when conducted in a public forum.
Regarding the article subject, I wonder if it ever occurs to the authors of these to actually ask the young people that they are expecting to shoulder the burden.
Not once in Wolf’s article does he mention climate change. It will almost certainly be one of the first things you hear about if you ask a young person about their parenting plans, or lack thereof. A child born today can expect to live until the early 2100s, if life expectancy remains steady. Climate science tells us broadly what the world is going to look like at that time. Even the best case scenarios aren’t pretty, and the worst are catastrophic. I have heard, more than once and from many different people, that having a child today, with the knowledge of what they will face in their lifetime, would be a selfish act of cruelty.
Yes, all of the other factors mentioned play a part as well, particularly the shift in thinking from parenting as a human right to parenting as a discretionary lifestyle choice for those with the income to support it. But in my social circles at least, this is the biggest one.
Yes, I was remiss in not mentioning that. Even a decade ago, the professionals I knew in their 30s were debating whether or not to have children due both to concerns about that additional consumption on the planet plus the issue you raise, that they may face a very harsh life. I have long had the view that having children is the cruelest thing people do. Every major religion has as major purpose reconciling believers to the inevitability of suffering and death.
I think there is some kind of deep processes afoot that is affecting “coupling,” a rupture in the socialization/social reproduction of society. Even affordability, neoliberalism etc I’m not sure I buy. It seems like people used to have plenty of children despite trying circumstances. My immigrant grandparents cranked out six amidst more trying circumstances than I think I have seen.
I’m 30 now (male). When I reflect on my 20s, I can see that the incentives, culture, norms, and daily practices were just not such as to support the kind of coupling up that would result in the sort of long term commitment and physical proximity necessary to result in children. Plenty people my age want children now, and it’s not like we weren’t having sex– there was enough of that (heck, maybe too much)– but it just never seemed like “the thing to do” to. Too many options, a high sex but low intimacy culture, a lot of moving around, a general focus on personal development in opposition to commitment to things outside of oneself (not limited to children), low trust and a peculiar culture of sexual paranoia that managed to blend with a pornographization of culture… Coupling up and having kids? My gosh, it sounds quaint and old-timey, like molasses and buttermilk and a fire in the hearth.
Um, people had plenty of children before there was cheap and widely available reproductive control. I hew to the explanation that childrearing was never what it was cracked to be and was often done out of social conformity or women getting pregnant and her sex partner feeling obligated or being pressured into marrying her. My mother made clear my father had kids for career reasons, that not having would raise uncomfortable questions about him.
And while I know more single childless women than I do childless women in couples, the latter are all in very long-term relationships and most of them, married.
The big change is women do not have to get married to survive at a pretty OK level…if they apply themselves. Some may have grown up in happy families but far more saw through their own families and and through peers that marriage and having kids is not our society pretends it is.
I look at the focus on “gender roles” on this subject as having two purposes. One is to continue to streng the divide between how men and women are viewed in relation to parenting, mainly the devaluation if bot demonization of fatherhood despite decades of data showing the importance of fathers being in their childrens’ lives. The other is it deflects attention from the sole reason why birth rates are falling which is that it is simply too expensive to be anything but a dumb selfish decision for the vast majority of child bearing age adults. Particularly here where something like half the population doesn’t have $500 in emergency cash how can anyone with a straight face ask why people aren’t having children?
I had no innate desire to have children, but my wife did — desperately so — and I love her, so we have two (so, not quite replacement level). I don’t know the extent to which our experience is typical — that one partner or the other is the primary driver in reproductive outcomes.
childless 40yo in nyc that’s been with partner for 21y (and married 12y) here. between our siblings (we’re both from 3 kid households) there are 7 children in the next generation. including my cousin’ kids, 10. of those, 3 have some form of autism/spectrum, from mild (precocious yet socially or cognitively stunted) to extreme (verging on safety risk to family and sibling as they enter puberty with routine violent outbursts and little to no verbal communication).
i had a PANK (permanent aunt, no kids) growing up with whom i was/am very close and served as an example of an independent and fulfilling professional life, yet still with close family relations albeit no kids.
both my wife and i never wanted kids (from our own visions of adulthood as kids ourselves), routinely interrogating our priors in our best child-bearing years, and never wavering. if anything increasing certainty.
that’s all to say, that yes, economics is a central factor. the cost of raising any kids (financial, social, , privacy, time, carework etc) is increasingly astronomical. but we already came to this decision before those opportunity costs presented themselves. growing up in the 90s and 00s, the examples existed and opportunities for happy childless adulthood were there. now they simply abound and we’re discussing them openly. (my wife has become a defacto spokesperson, often asked with penning essays on her choice). the stigma of wanting no kids is slowly lifting, perhpas.
the health risks, and challenging odds of raising competent, kind, self-motivated, well-adjusted and independent children, however, is something i’ve only come to appreciate. i would never roll the dice now (thank you IUDs) and am amazed that peers with at least one successful child reared (or so it seems on track) would roll the dice with aging eggs and IVF rounds to add another. too many peers i know or siblings are terrified that some of their kids will never be independent (emotionally or financially).
what’s the saying, all joy and no fun?