Given roughly all of the decline in fertility rates is due to decreases in teen pregnancy and early twenties pregnancy, are not the most obvious proximal causes stuff like longer education/career paths later marriage, stronger norms against early pregnancy etc. The more fundamental causes seem hard to pin down, but explaining the changing age profile of parents seems like a good start.
A theme in academic fertility research is the tradof between the "quantity" and "quality"of children. Modern norms around parenting set high bars for parents to meet when it comes to how they raise children. If you give birth to children in less-than-ideal circumstances or fail to invest enough time into their upbringing, you are seen as failing your child. This makes it practically impossible to have lot's of children like people used to. This cultural norm is especially strong in East Asia, no wonder that region sees the lowest birthrates.
For me, the smell test for these explanations is "Does this make sense with HK/KR/SG being the top 3?", and none of them does as far as I can tell. My bet is on primarily (1) better birth control & (2) urbanization and secondarily (3) a cultural shift as a result of the change induced by (1) & (2), i.e. it became normal to choose not to procreate, and it even became abnormal to procreate at a young age.
The issue is that old people might enslave the young to provide for their pensions. The young will respond to that enslavement by reducing their own fertility to compensate, causing a death spiral.
Not that this gets harder, not easier, to fix as there are more old people (they make up more of the voting public).
Also, young people whose jobs are caring for old people will likely throw in their lot with olds out of self interest.
If the Amish or whoever ever got big enough they would be drawn into this. Many of these are welfare sponges and even the Amish use technology and interact with the economy more than you think.
I don’t see a way around this beyond a constitutional change to voting, but I would support any legislation that tried to protect parents from confiscatory taxes.
Before Social Security (first introduced in the 1870s in Bismarck's Germany), the only way for most people to keep eating after they became too old or sick to work was to have had enough children that some of them are around to feed and house you.
So the "slavery" you are worried about is the situation we started with. It was Social Security that enabled working people to leave their extended families and form nuclear families. Someone please correct me if I have left out anything important.
Of course, the largest fall in birth rates was after that time, when lower infant mortality meant you didn't have to produce 5 or 10 kids to maybe have some of them outlive you. That is why the poorest countries in Africa have the world's highest birth rates -- they still don't have Social Security.
The term nuclear family originated in the 1920s by Malinowski who was the father of social anthropology, and it was not strictly defined until the 1960s, and even then it was strictly in the context of an industrialized society with factory work. It lacks real meaning outside this context.
If one is to relax that original definition and overgeneralize towards structure, then technically nuclear families go back all the way to the 1300s well before any form of Social Security.
FICA is taken by force, enslavement. My parents asking for my help isn't force, I can choose whether or not to provide it.
The childless free ride in that their retirement must be paid for by taxes on the young, and yet they did not take on the expense of birthing and raising the people paying for their benefits. The fair thing for them to do is therefore to forfeit their retirement benefits that they have not paid for, but they won't do the fair thing. Hence is would make more sense to tax them a higher amount in the present to relieve the tax burden on those having children.
Except it is not the old doing the enslaving. It is the politicians. And the old are not a homogeneous voting block. Plus we remember when the state was not a nanny and many of us would like to see a return to that. $36,000,000,000,000 in debt accruing interest at nearly $1,000,000,000,000 a year is going to be the ultimate enslaver. And ask yourself why the politicians do not act? Could it be they are satisfied with the notion of being the overseers on the federal plantation?
In some ways this has already happened. Social Security and Medicare taxes take 15.3% of each persons income? Then you have sales taxes taking another 10%, Gas Tax on mileage, and Income taxes at both the state and federal level, and tax breaks only on specific areas which require capital to be used.
Yeah its a death spiral, but its one of many. The non-market socialism death spiral would be coming first (inflation/money printing biases state-run apparatus over the firm in the market, leading to sieving or concentration/consolidation). When producers cannot make a profit in purchasing power they leave the market which would be stage 3 ponzi (debt growth>gdp), and any company dependent on a money printer (indirectly, arbitrary preferential loans) becomes de-facto state-run when the market vanishes. ECP then forces spiral death cycles in a myriad of chaotic ways. Society fails, food production fails, ecological reversion and those that survive are unprepared to start over. Extinction.
Constitutional changes mean nothing when the people responsible for enforcement don't do their job and regularly violate their oaths. Societal problems had the can kicked down the road cyclically until all sorts of existential problems all come crashing down all at once.
I may as well add something useless to the conversation.
Suppose the declining birth rate can be shown to be entirely the fault of government safety regulations making parenting such a chore that few parents want a second child -- car seats, clunky strollers, crib regulations, day care signups, you name it. Just suppose.
Suppose someone could reliably prove that all those regulations save, I dunno, 10,000 children's lives a year. But they also reduce the number of births by 1 million a year.
Does that mean the safety nazis are responsible for a net 990,000 unborn children every year, and is that equivalent to 990,000 deaths?
If a woman gives birth and kills the baby, or has an abortion, and no one else knows she was pregnant, has she actually killed anybody?
My main position on abortion laws is that they are way too indefinable to be enforced consistently. If I were a pregnant woman who had not planned the pregnancy, I do not know at what point, if any, I would think abortion a moral choice.
At best "being blamed" for children not conceived is a lesser evil than murdering children. At some point between conception and birth, almost all people agree that the lesser evil becomes the greater evil.
Staunchly pro-life people seem to put that at conception itself, with a few saying that preventing pregnancy is the same/similar. I am curious how they would handle your question, or what they see as the difference between a condom and conception prevented by safetyism. I suspect there's still a clear difference in their minds.
Even very pro-choice people put that at birth, except a pretty small fringe.
It seems the masses put that at some stage fairly early on related to viability, heartbeat, or something else that signifies growing humanity.
Here's something interesting, by Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the Oct. 7 issue of The New Yorker: "(In 1962) a group of researchers at the University of Illinois decided to calculate what would happen if the number of people on the globe continued to increase along the trajectory it had followed for the previous two millennia. The researchers concluded, with a mathematical version of tongue-in-cheek, that the population would approach infinity on November 23, 2026. In the meantime, the planet would become so crowded that there would be no room to move. 'Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,' they wrote in Science. 'They will be squeezed to death.'" See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/07/dr-calhouns-mousery-lee-alan-dugatkin-book-reviews-rat-city-edmund-ramsden-and-jon-adams
This article argues that a crisis of meaning is the reason for declining birth rates, which is consistent with the high birth rates of populations in which a fundamentalist religion provides the meaning.
Although it's not enough to bring fertility back below replacement level, many high-fertility sub-groups, like the Haredi or Mormons, have quite high "leakage" (i.e. people born into the group who leave and reject it as adults). I don't know about Amish. This would slow the eventual recovery of fertility.
Regardless of the details, low fertility pretty much cannot be an existential problem for humanity; having few or no children is going to selected against by evolution and genetics will find a way to bring it back up eventually.
Falling birth rates are inevitable, unstoppable, and welcome.
There is no longer any reason to have 10 kids to plow the family's fields, thanks to advances in technology and medicine, not to mention massive growth in per capita GDP. Barring societal collapse, this is permanent.
Global population will finally start declining in ~2080. The challenge then becomes managing the decline: how can new technologies (robotics, AI) allow society to function with fewer people? how can developed countries avoid being overrun by migrants from countries already ruined by overpopulation? how can social services for the elderly function with fewer younger workers? These are the questions we should be asking, not how to increase birth rates, which is not going to happen.
If we successfully address these issues, the result will be profound increase in quality of life.
Remember, the global population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, less than half of what it is now. Was it a dystopian hellscape then? I think not.
Put into context: changing sexual norms and this includes abortion essentially removes women’s collective bargaining power over sex, if she will not have premarital sex, the male can and will seek out a woman who is willing to do so. If the woman becomes pregnant, she may abort and she may not, but in either scenario her fertile years are being wasted profligately by men who may have no interest in marriage, thus decreasing her fertility window. If she aborts, that’s one less human in our reproductive spreadsheet, if she doesn’t abort, that’s one child who may be raised by a single mom. Single moms have a lot on their plate, keeping food on the table and avoiding homelessness are not easy, even without a dependent child. Single moms aren’t as attractive on the market for men who really want to get married and have a family. So this situation just creates fewer children because it’s hard to find a marriageable man if you’ve got what is colloquially called “baggage”. Baggage might be an unstable baby momma or baby daddy, or children (“you aren’t my ‘mom/dad’”), poverty, depression or anxiety (who wouldn’t be depressed or anxious). It’s no mystery, ask any woman who is or was childbearing age after abortion and birth control became available widely culturally accepted, even celebrated. Men coerced women for sex, empty promises of “love” and some nonspecific future together and throw in a generous sampling of drugs and alcohol and the men most likely to use and abuse women did so, the women most at risk for this predatory behavior became victims. Too many lies have been told, too many levels of exploitation have been built into our culture and you’ve got what you have now, a porn addled, confused and frightened population who don’t know how to form lasting bonds and start families. Add to this the greedy banks, the education system which exists to plunder every last dime from students and their parents (during their prime working years) and we are too busy learning “stuff” and overpaying for skills you could learn on YouTube for free. Houses cost a half a million dollars and rents suck up nearly 100% of the typical income of an average job, including licensed professionals. It’s not rocket science, people! We have apps that seem designed to keep young people apart when they could be easily facilitating good matches between seriously marriage minded young people. It’s like this is a big scam and the victims are being blamed
Curious that you note the societies with strong birth rates and perform an analysis of declining rates without mentioning that those strong birth rate societies have strong religious conviction and fail to analyze the decline thereof in the larger, declining birth rate society. Hmmm. Also this low status stuff is becoming tedious. It only applies to people who value the opinion of others over their own principles of self-fulfillment. Which is what genuine freedom means - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I deem fit so long as I do not harm others in violation of law.
There were a number of things that came to my mind reading this which you didn't include, albeit I do believe that interference in mate search is a problem, it is one of a few factors, but not specifically what you mention. Overall, I don't believe it is the leading factor.
There are a number of subtle things that are occurring today that go largely ignored.
Many of us grew up watching cartoons, and in those cartoons maladaptive behaviors are (in the last 30 years) been promoted. We adopt our local culture through the same mechanism, called reflected appraisal. As children we are far more isolated which is why this has such a larger impact, and one can distort this to impart and cause adoption of behaviors that interfere with normal relations. You see this in the Pixar videos where they always have the normally trusted individuals such as priests, or policemen acting crazy, or the handsome person is always the villain (targeted at women), or women always have to stick up/emasculate/murder with words, the person they like (targeted at both men and women towards unattractive behavior). These things have an impact during these vulnerable times of development and it happens at such a low level of perception that most don't even realize it. This is probably the leading factor, men are taught unattractive behaviors, as are women, and this interferes, alongside movements such as the feminist movement or the MGTOW alternative. With sufficient suffering everyone breaks mentally, and the amount of suffering caused today largely from these related things (a result boomers utilizing torture psychology techniques), it is amazing anyone is having children.
You can read up about this further in Robert Lifton/Joost Meerloo's writings, they are well established experts who describe the structures used in detail. You then can see those same structures used in everything from childrens videos, to customer/business process design, to governance policy. The majority of the generation at that time learned that if you add sufficient cost, you can coerce people to do just about anything, and if they break psychotically, that's just some deranged individual, no one did it (because these techniques aren't well known).
On a unrelated side note, Active Shooters closely mirror the same semi-lucid psychotic violent state seeking self-annihilation described in these books on real torture. Food for thought.
Additionally, dating watering holes have been drying up because of online dating. Online dating companies are almost a monopoly (owned by 2 companies now), and they lose a customer when a compatible match is found.
If you only see what they want you to see, and they always match you up with incompatible personalities (and they have the data to tell that), then you don't end up matching up and wonder where all the good men and women have gone. Men blame women, Women blame women, or men.
It is a type of interference which doesn't present any characteristics that can be used by a person to alert to the fact that this is what they are doing. Only through statistical sampling, and some rather obtuse pattern matching from experience might you figure this out (maybe).
You never meet except by accident/chance. This type of behavior (running down the biological clock for profit) is very close to how the USDA handles agricultural parasites (by biasing the numbers towards sterility, screw worm). This is also happening subtly in parallel through google along a wide variety of societal pillars (gender relations, labor relations, political relations).
There is also a natural psychological drive to find mates who are operating at roughly the same level as themselves. Women don't generally date down, ever, and if you look at the demographics of college graduations, its skewed at something close to 70% women and 30% men. Jordan Peterson iirc covers this briefly in his talks related to studies he mentions about egalitarian societies and equality of opportunity vs outcome.
Finally, the economics for having children no longer exist. Adam Smith wrote this most eloquently with regards to the requirements for economic activity. Producers must make a profit, and wages must be sufficient to support oneself, a wife, and 3 children. Today wages don't even support oneself, and this is a natural outcome of inflationary economies based in fiat, and the latter part of the silent generation/boomers really screwed most of us with Social Security and Medical. Tax your unborn children excessively without representation to fund your retirement; its one of the most evil things I can think of and is talked about briefly in Thomas Paines writings with regards to political philosophy in relation to what he calls Dead men ruling, where laws were enacted in parliament without any choice and they were not tailored towards good faith by those, without agency or consent of those that would be born later. Basically a violation of the generational handover of the social contract (which has been violated in more than just this way).
I'm reminded of the description of the slave natives in the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, in the 1500s and how they would become so demoralized that they would become psychotic, and kill their children, not have any, and die strategically in granaries run by the Spanish government, and the fact that it was so destructive that the government who was responsible for the ongoing Spanish Inquisition at the time would outlaw slavery for those natives.
We have been approaching such a time for quite a long time now and no one bothered to pay attention. Runaway money printing drives this behavior distorting economic calculation.
You may find the Selfish Ledger by Google an interesting watch. This is what is being done to us, because a few intelligent people decided to solve the overpopulation problem by making people think it was their own idea not to have children, and when it works and over corrects they'll realize that psychology is sticky but it will be too late by then. Almost unthinkable.
I read many complaints about expensive and difficult to get childcare is. There was a time when grandparents could fill that role. It’s much more difficult when those grandparents live in another state.
I enjoy being able to point to declining birth rates with increasing prosperity, whenever I run into a degrowther/population-bomb-nut.
However, I often wonder if it is a reliable truth. For example, if we had prosperity with more free time, might people have more children, as they would actually have time to spend with their huge investment? As we currently have society structured, jobs that produce a comfortable income also tend to result in working ridiculous hours.
I've wondered, thinking about the long term, whether there might be technological developments that substantially reduced the cost of having children. Artificial wombs would reduce the cost of producing children and AI might be able to reduce the cost of rearing them.
Alternatively, imagine a future where AI had replaced many jobs and child care is one it can't replace. People are rich through the increased productivity, but child care is what many people do, perhaps to acquire the capital that they can then live on.
I'm thinking of doing a post on the subject, once I have accumulated enough ideas. Do commenters here have suggestions?
I've considered the possibility that people would do all of the people care jobs - things that involve human emotions and interactions. Childcare, elder care, maybe sales roles. Possibly even waitstaff, nursing, psychiatry, and things we don't normally think about like sex work.
The kinds of work that we would have psychological hang-ups about a machine doing, even if it could very accurately imitate a human.
What I've just noticed about this list is that it's extremely slanted towards current female roles in society. There's a ton of implications for future society just based on that.
Evolutionary arguments presume that creatures will produce offspring like themselves (with small mutations). But human beings are about to enter a period when their mastery of biotechnology will falsify that presumption. People will create genetically enhanced versions of themselves, or completely novel (nonhuman) creatures. “Survival of the fittest” will no longer apply.
There have been been lots of studies, I can't speak to their rigor, that show sex itself has been falling for generations and not just in raw amount or lifetime sexual partners but even desire itself. It seems Gen X was an extremely oversexed outlier with Gen Z lining up to be an extremely undersexed outlier according to a back of the napkin meta-analysis of every study I've seen on it in the past fifteen years included recent one. So on your questions (A) yes and (B) the latter. It seems for most people, multiparty sex is simply a low value substitutable good which as Gen X'er myself I can't even fathom lol.
Given roughly all of the decline in fertility rates is due to decreases in teen pregnancy and early twenties pregnancy, are not the most obvious proximal causes stuff like longer education/career paths later marriage, stronger norms against early pregnancy etc. The more fundamental causes seem hard to pin down, but explaining the changing age profile of parents seems like a good start.
A theme in academic fertility research is the tradof between the "quantity" and "quality"of children. Modern norms around parenting set high bars for parents to meet when it comes to how they raise children. If you give birth to children in less-than-ideal circumstances or fail to invest enough time into their upbringing, you are seen as failing your child. This makes it practically impossible to have lot's of children like people used to. This cultural norm is especially strong in East Asia, no wonder that region sees the lowest birthrates.
Would you think it fair to say that *accidental* pregnancies are what has declined?
For me, the smell test for these explanations is "Does this make sense with HK/KR/SG being the top 3?", and none of them does as far as I can tell. My bet is on primarily (1) better birth control & (2) urbanization and secondarily (3) a cultural shift as a result of the change induced by (1) & (2), i.e. it became normal to choose not to procreate, and it even became abnormal to procreate at a young age.
The issue is that old people might enslave the young to provide for their pensions. The young will respond to that enslavement by reducing their own fertility to compensate, causing a death spiral.
Not that this gets harder, not easier, to fix as there are more old people (they make up more of the voting public).
Also, young people whose jobs are caring for old people will likely throw in their lot with olds out of self interest.
If the Amish or whoever ever got big enough they would be drawn into this. Many of these are welfare sponges and even the Amish use technology and interact with the economy more than you think.
I don’t see a way around this beyond a constitutional change to voting, but I would support any legislation that tried to protect parents from confiscatory taxes.
Before Social Security (first introduced in the 1870s in Bismarck's Germany), the only way for most people to keep eating after they became too old or sick to work was to have had enough children that some of them are around to feed and house you.
So the "slavery" you are worried about is the situation we started with. It was Social Security that enabled working people to leave their extended families and form nuclear families. Someone please correct me if I have left out anything important.
Of course, the largest fall in birth rates was after that time, when lower infant mortality meant you didn't have to produce 5 or 10 kids to maybe have some of them outlive you. That is why the poorest countries in Africa have the world's highest birth rates -- they still don't have Social Security.
The term nuclear family originated in the 1920s by Malinowski who was the father of social anthropology, and it was not strictly defined until the 1960s, and even then it was strictly in the context of an industrialized society with factory work. It lacks real meaning outside this context.
If one is to relax that original definition and overgeneralize towards structure, then technically nuclear families go back all the way to the 1300s well before any form of Social Security.
FICA is taken by force, enslavement. My parents asking for my help isn't force, I can choose whether or not to provide it.
The childless free ride in that their retirement must be paid for by taxes on the young, and yet they did not take on the expense of birthing and raising the people paying for their benefits. The fair thing for them to do is therefore to forfeit their retirement benefits that they have not paid for, but they won't do the fair thing. Hence is would make more sense to tax them a higher amount in the present to relieve the tax burden on those having children.
Except it is not the old doing the enslaving. It is the politicians. And the old are not a homogeneous voting block. Plus we remember when the state was not a nanny and many of us would like to see a return to that. $36,000,000,000,000 in debt accruing interest at nearly $1,000,000,000,000 a year is going to be the ultimate enslaver. And ask yourself why the politicians do not act? Could it be they are satisfied with the notion of being the overseers on the federal plantation?
In some ways this has already happened. Social Security and Medicare taxes take 15.3% of each persons income? Then you have sales taxes taking another 10%, Gas Tax on mileage, and Income taxes at both the state and federal level, and tax breaks only on specific areas which require capital to be used.
Yeah its a death spiral, but its one of many. The non-market socialism death spiral would be coming first (inflation/money printing biases state-run apparatus over the firm in the market, leading to sieving or concentration/consolidation). When producers cannot make a profit in purchasing power they leave the market which would be stage 3 ponzi (debt growth>gdp), and any company dependent on a money printer (indirectly, arbitrary preferential loans) becomes de-facto state-run when the market vanishes. ECP then forces spiral death cycles in a myriad of chaotic ways. Society fails, food production fails, ecological reversion and those that survive are unprepared to start over. Extinction.
Constitutional changes mean nothing when the people responsible for enforcement don't do their job and regularly violate their oaths. Societal problems had the can kicked down the road cyclically until all sorts of existential problems all come crashing down all at once.
The old can't enslave the young. The young will be the concentration camp guards, for the old will be too infirm to do it themselves.
The fiscal problems will resolve themselves when the money runs out.
You mean when producers abandon the market and shut down causing shortage?
Money doesn't run out when you constantly print it.
I may as well add something useless to the conversation.
Suppose the declining birth rate can be shown to be entirely the fault of government safety regulations making parenting such a chore that few parents want a second child -- car seats, clunky strollers, crib regulations, day care signups, you name it. Just suppose.
Suppose someone could reliably prove that all those regulations save, I dunno, 10,000 children's lives a year. But they also reduce the number of births by 1 million a year.
Does that mean the safety nazis are responsible for a net 990,000 unborn children every year, and is that equivalent to 990,000 deaths?
Haha, I love your first sentence. If only we all had the same humility.
There was a study a few years back that supports your hypothesis: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
Yes, then no. You can't be blamed for deaths of someone never conceived, but you can be blamed for people choosing not to conceive.
If a woman gives birth and kills the baby, or has an abortion, and no one else knows she was pregnant, has she actually killed anybody?
My main position on abortion laws is that they are way too indefinable to be enforced consistently. If I were a pregnant woman who had not planned the pregnancy, I do not know at what point, if any, I would think abortion a moral choice.
At best "being blamed" for children not conceived is a lesser evil than murdering children. At some point between conception and birth, almost all people agree that the lesser evil becomes the greater evil.
Staunchly pro-life people seem to put that at conception itself, with a few saying that preventing pregnancy is the same/similar. I am curious how they would handle your question, or what they see as the difference between a condom and conception prevented by safetyism. I suspect there's still a clear difference in their minds.
Even very pro-choice people put that at birth, except a pretty small fringe.
It seems the masses put that at some stage fairly early on related to viability, heartbeat, or something else that signifies growing humanity.
The french underwent the demographic transition two centuries ago and are still here. She'll be fine.
Here's something interesting, by Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the Oct. 7 issue of The New Yorker: "(In 1962) a group of researchers at the University of Illinois decided to calculate what would happen if the number of people on the globe continued to increase along the trajectory it had followed for the previous two millennia. The researchers concluded, with a mathematical version of tongue-in-cheek, that the population would approach infinity on November 23, 2026. In the meantime, the planet would become so crowded that there would be no room to move. 'Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,' they wrote in Science. 'They will be squeezed to death.'" See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/07/dr-calhouns-mousery-lee-alan-dugatkin-book-reviews-rat-city-edmund-ramsden-and-jon-adams
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/08/fertility-crisis/679319/
This article argues that a crisis of meaning is the reason for declining birth rates, which is consistent with the high birth rates of populations in which a fundamentalist religion provides the meaning.
Although it's not enough to bring fertility back below replacement level, many high-fertility sub-groups, like the Haredi or Mormons, have quite high "leakage" (i.e. people born into the group who leave and reject it as adults). I don't know about Amish. This would slow the eventual recovery of fertility.
Regardless of the details, low fertility pretty much cannot be an existential problem for humanity; having few or no children is going to selected against by evolution and genetics will find a way to bring it back up eventually.
Falling birth rates are inevitable, unstoppable, and welcome.
There is no longer any reason to have 10 kids to plow the family's fields, thanks to advances in technology and medicine, not to mention massive growth in per capita GDP. Barring societal collapse, this is permanent.
Global population will finally start declining in ~2080. The challenge then becomes managing the decline: how can new technologies (robotics, AI) allow society to function with fewer people? how can developed countries avoid being overrun by migrants from countries already ruined by overpopulation? how can social services for the elderly function with fewer younger workers? These are the questions we should be asking, not how to increase birth rates, which is not going to happen.
If we successfully address these issues, the result will be profound increase in quality of life.
Remember, the global population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, less than half of what it is now. Was it a dystopian hellscape then? I think not.
Put into context: changing sexual norms and this includes abortion essentially removes women’s collective bargaining power over sex, if she will not have premarital sex, the male can and will seek out a woman who is willing to do so. If the woman becomes pregnant, she may abort and she may not, but in either scenario her fertile years are being wasted profligately by men who may have no interest in marriage, thus decreasing her fertility window. If she aborts, that’s one less human in our reproductive spreadsheet, if she doesn’t abort, that’s one child who may be raised by a single mom. Single moms have a lot on their plate, keeping food on the table and avoiding homelessness are not easy, even without a dependent child. Single moms aren’t as attractive on the market for men who really want to get married and have a family. So this situation just creates fewer children because it’s hard to find a marriageable man if you’ve got what is colloquially called “baggage”. Baggage might be an unstable baby momma or baby daddy, or children (“you aren’t my ‘mom/dad’”), poverty, depression or anxiety (who wouldn’t be depressed or anxious). It’s no mystery, ask any woman who is or was childbearing age after abortion and birth control became available widely culturally accepted, even celebrated. Men coerced women for sex, empty promises of “love” and some nonspecific future together and throw in a generous sampling of drugs and alcohol and the men most likely to use and abuse women did so, the women most at risk for this predatory behavior became victims. Too many lies have been told, too many levels of exploitation have been built into our culture and you’ve got what you have now, a porn addled, confused and frightened population who don’t know how to form lasting bonds and start families. Add to this the greedy banks, the education system which exists to plunder every last dime from students and their parents (during their prime working years) and we are too busy learning “stuff” and overpaying for skills you could learn on YouTube for free. Houses cost a half a million dollars and rents suck up nearly 100% of the typical income of an average job, including licensed professionals. It’s not rocket science, people! We have apps that seem designed to keep young people apart when they could be easily facilitating good matches between seriously marriage minded young people. It’s like this is a big scam and the victims are being blamed
Curious that you note the societies with strong birth rates and perform an analysis of declining rates without mentioning that those strong birth rate societies have strong religious conviction and fail to analyze the decline thereof in the larger, declining birth rate society. Hmmm. Also this low status stuff is becoming tedious. It only applies to people who value the opinion of others over their own principles of self-fulfillment. Which is what genuine freedom means - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I deem fit so long as I do not harm others in violation of law.
There were a number of things that came to my mind reading this which you didn't include, albeit I do believe that interference in mate search is a problem, it is one of a few factors, but not specifically what you mention. Overall, I don't believe it is the leading factor.
There are a number of subtle things that are occurring today that go largely ignored.
Many of us grew up watching cartoons, and in those cartoons maladaptive behaviors are (in the last 30 years) been promoted. We adopt our local culture through the same mechanism, called reflected appraisal. As children we are far more isolated which is why this has such a larger impact, and one can distort this to impart and cause adoption of behaviors that interfere with normal relations. You see this in the Pixar videos where they always have the normally trusted individuals such as priests, or policemen acting crazy, or the handsome person is always the villain (targeted at women), or women always have to stick up/emasculate/murder with words, the person they like (targeted at both men and women towards unattractive behavior). These things have an impact during these vulnerable times of development and it happens at such a low level of perception that most don't even realize it. This is probably the leading factor, men are taught unattractive behaviors, as are women, and this interferes, alongside movements such as the feminist movement or the MGTOW alternative. With sufficient suffering everyone breaks mentally, and the amount of suffering caused today largely from these related things (a result boomers utilizing torture psychology techniques), it is amazing anyone is having children.
You can read up about this further in Robert Lifton/Joost Meerloo's writings, they are well established experts who describe the structures used in detail. You then can see those same structures used in everything from childrens videos, to customer/business process design, to governance policy. The majority of the generation at that time learned that if you add sufficient cost, you can coerce people to do just about anything, and if they break psychotically, that's just some deranged individual, no one did it (because these techniques aren't well known).
On a unrelated side note, Active Shooters closely mirror the same semi-lucid psychotic violent state seeking self-annihilation described in these books on real torture. Food for thought.
Additionally, dating watering holes have been drying up because of online dating. Online dating companies are almost a monopoly (owned by 2 companies now), and they lose a customer when a compatible match is found.
If you only see what they want you to see, and they always match you up with incompatible personalities (and they have the data to tell that), then you don't end up matching up and wonder where all the good men and women have gone. Men blame women, Women blame women, or men.
It is a type of interference which doesn't present any characteristics that can be used by a person to alert to the fact that this is what they are doing. Only through statistical sampling, and some rather obtuse pattern matching from experience might you figure this out (maybe).
You never meet except by accident/chance. This type of behavior (running down the biological clock for profit) is very close to how the USDA handles agricultural parasites (by biasing the numbers towards sterility, screw worm). This is also happening subtly in parallel through google along a wide variety of societal pillars (gender relations, labor relations, political relations).
There is also a natural psychological drive to find mates who are operating at roughly the same level as themselves. Women don't generally date down, ever, and if you look at the demographics of college graduations, its skewed at something close to 70% women and 30% men. Jordan Peterson iirc covers this briefly in his talks related to studies he mentions about egalitarian societies and equality of opportunity vs outcome.
Finally, the economics for having children no longer exist. Adam Smith wrote this most eloquently with regards to the requirements for economic activity. Producers must make a profit, and wages must be sufficient to support oneself, a wife, and 3 children. Today wages don't even support oneself, and this is a natural outcome of inflationary economies based in fiat, and the latter part of the silent generation/boomers really screwed most of us with Social Security and Medical. Tax your unborn children excessively without representation to fund your retirement; its one of the most evil things I can think of and is talked about briefly in Thomas Paines writings with regards to political philosophy in relation to what he calls Dead men ruling, where laws were enacted in parliament without any choice and they were not tailored towards good faith by those, without agency or consent of those that would be born later. Basically a violation of the generational handover of the social contract (which has been violated in more than just this way).
I'm reminded of the description of the slave natives in the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, in the 1500s and how they would become so demoralized that they would become psychotic, and kill their children, not have any, and die strategically in granaries run by the Spanish government, and the fact that it was so destructive that the government who was responsible for the ongoing Spanish Inquisition at the time would outlaw slavery for those natives.
We have been approaching such a time for quite a long time now and no one bothered to pay attention. Runaway money printing drives this behavior distorting economic calculation.
You may find the Selfish Ledger by Google an interesting watch. This is what is being done to us, because a few intelligent people decided to solve the overpopulation problem by making people think it was their own idea not to have children, and when it works and over corrects they'll realize that psychology is sticky but it will be too late by then. Almost unthinkable.
I read many complaints about expensive and difficult to get childcare is. There was a time when grandparents could fill that role. It’s much more difficult when those grandparents live in another state.
I enjoy being able to point to declining birth rates with increasing prosperity, whenever I run into a degrowther/population-bomb-nut.
However, I often wonder if it is a reliable truth. For example, if we had prosperity with more free time, might people have more children, as they would actually have time to spend with their huge investment? As we currently have society structured, jobs that produce a comfortable income also tend to result in working ridiculous hours.
Are people simply too busy to reproduce?
I've wondered, thinking about the long term, whether there might be technological developments that substantially reduced the cost of having children. Artificial wombs would reduce the cost of producing children and AI might be able to reduce the cost of rearing them.
Alternatively, imagine a future where AI had replaced many jobs and child care is one it can't replace. People are rich through the increased productivity, but child care is what many people do, perhaps to acquire the capital that they can then live on.
I'm thinking of doing a post on the subject, once I have accumulated enough ideas. Do commenters here have suggestions?
I've considered the possibility that people would do all of the people care jobs - things that involve human emotions and interactions. Childcare, elder care, maybe sales roles. Possibly even waitstaff, nursing, psychiatry, and things we don't normally think about like sex work.
The kinds of work that we would have psychological hang-ups about a machine doing, even if it could very accurately imitate a human.
What I've just noticed about this list is that it's extremely slanted towards current female roles in society. There's a ton of implications for future society just based on that.
Evolutionary arguments presume that creatures will produce offspring like themselves (with small mutations). But human beings are about to enter a period when their mastery of biotechnology will falsify that presumption. People will create genetically enhanced versions of themselves, or completely novel (nonhuman) creatures. “Survival of the fittest” will no longer apply.
I wonder if there was any data that could tells us
1. Are people having less sex per capita ?
2. Are people avoiding pregnancies or sexual intercourse itself ?
There have been been lots of studies, I can't speak to their rigor, that show sex itself has been falling for generations and not just in raw amount or lifetime sexual partners but even desire itself. It seems Gen X was an extremely oversexed outlier with Gen Z lining up to be an extremely undersexed outlier according to a back of the napkin meta-analysis of every study I've seen on it in the past fifteen years included recent one. So on your questions (A) yes and (B) the latter. It seems for most people, multiparty sex is simply a low value substitutable good which as Gen X'er myself I can't even fathom lol.
Very interesting. I could not have gussed it.