It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost?
I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were:
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction
3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice,
from what I have tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5.
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
[..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this.
Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could:
- get married
- buy a house after a year married
- start a family at 20
- had 1 car for the family
- had a boat
- had a motorcycle
right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
Honest question: why are we so afraid of population decline? For people on the left, it means less consumption, less environment impact, less carbon footprint, and in general fewer damn evil people who are destroying the mother earth. For the right, everyone is responsible for their own destiny including their retirement life so they worry about their retirement spending solely on their own anyway. In practice, Japan seems to be fine. In particular their young people have so many job openings to fill.
So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
For me, it was choosing between having kids or caring for my aging parents. With social security probably getting cut in the next 5-10 years, I just couldn't swing it. So I prioritized the already living over the potentially living. Hopefully we'll have robots for when I get old.
Arranging society in such a way that women would rather have a career than be a mother will have profound consequences. The value of motherhood needs to be properly valued in society's collective mind.
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self. My sister and her husband get 1-2 hours of time for themselves per day, and then they are too tired to do anything but watch TV. They've ceased to exist as individuals, basically. To them, work and the office are their places of relaxation.
They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
Robots may fill the gap. Really. It seems silly now, but give it twenty years.
The developed world may end up with a modest human population and a large robotic population. Asimov explored that idea in SF decades ago.
The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
What's the problem? The US is simultaneously flirting with potential AI. If the AI proves to be productive, we won't need as many workers. The economy can shift from a human worker only base to a human + AI base. The solution is merely to tax the AI part too!.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR?
(Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
I don't think the ideas linking immigration to population growth or decline are productive. It hides the root cause of potential population decline. Why aren't people who are raised in the US having children? I think it's because most of us are lonely and miserable.
Perhaps we can try and take care of each other, and many other things will show signs of improving? There needs to be more access to things like healthcare, childcare, education, entertainment, leisure, arts, recreation, and so much more. There needs to be more love in our societies and the numbers that indicate well-being will follow. After all, what is the point of all of this? To get a promotion?
All the comments are about having babies but as the article points out the actual proximate reason the US population is declining right now is the immigration enforcement approach taken by the Trump administration. Fewer people are coming the the US (including legally), and more people (including legal residents) are being deported or are leaving, and as a result there is net outflow of people from the country. The situation will only worsen with the incipient war on H1B and other visas.
After a brief look at this discussion I am surprised that little reference is made of the evolutionary aspects of having children. Posts tend to center on "It's all about me!" rather than "it's all about the genes!"
Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).
Good? Population can't grow forever. We're not even fucking close to going extinct, and if we did start trending that direction countries like the USSR demonstrated that simple objectives like promising a medal to anyone who pops out 7 kids solves that problem overnight.
Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
Every country will have to figure out how to deal with this. Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? It's impossible. The only question is whether or not countries can retain their culture and population or whether they will be replaced by outsiders.
Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.
I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
That doesn't seem to be supported by the data, the "nicer" and richer a country becomes, birth rates drop.
And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate.
How do you square those facts with your view here?
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were:
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
> No amount of baby cash
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
I think there are two steps: 1) Make people want to have kids. 2) Make it feasible for them to do so.
People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
> My take on it is:
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
The data doesn't support your position.
Birthrates historically increase when the world is burning. They fall during times of peace and prosperity.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
It’s surprising that effective, cheap contraceptives aren’t on the list.
We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards?
Thats kind of the point.
Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I have tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
> Since the fertility problem is worldwide
Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.
The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo
Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
Israel had a net birth rate increase from 2000-2025 despite being at war and under regular rocket barrages for much of that time.
While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
> I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5.
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
Mean age was 21.5 in 1970.
I personally think we over urbanised. If i look at my friends circle, most of the urban ones are childless and the rural ones have 2~4 kids.
Super anecdotal and totally non scientific observation.
No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
It's all of it. We need cheaper housing, we need cheaper childcare, and cheaper food.
Basically all of the things the current administration is sabotaging. Not going to end well.
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. [..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
I used to think similarly but I disagree.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
Great comment.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
Theyre probably all correct.
Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
> I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
This is why I love the internet because this sentence alone holds so much treasure.
Seriously, the issue is more our economic system. It is certainly not humanity in danger of dying out with 8 billion people, on the contrary...
Some argue the wrong people procreate, but meh...
Personally I just think less people want children because they find other things to do.
s/fertility/any other complex issue in the world/
and the rest of the comment still applies. The issue here is trying to make sense of any of it on Twitter.
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
Has coercion ever been tried?
There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
My darwinian theory:
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
Most of the developed countries are facing this.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
Honest question: why are we so afraid of population decline? For people on the left, it means less consumption, less environment impact, less carbon footprint, and in general fewer damn evil people who are destroying the mother earth. For the right, everyone is responsible for their own destiny including their retirement life so they worry about their retirement spending solely on their own anyway. In practice, Japan seems to be fine. In particular their young people have so many job openings to fill.
So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
New Yorker has a detailed article on this phenomenon that's a great read.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
https://archive.ph/LdA0d
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
If the US wants to increase its population, maybe it should stop sending masked agents out to kick in doors, directly reducing the population.
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
Maybe if young folks could afford housing they'd have kids...there's a thought.
(Comedy writing mode ON: )
"We need to flatten the curve..."
(Comedy writing mode OFF: )
You know, to re-quote the powers-that-be and the mainstream news media...
What, no takers?
You know, "flatten the curve... of population increase?" -- what, still not funny?
Hey, I'm just re-quoting what other people said... (a whole lot of people, incidentally!) but in the context of the article, above!
What, still no takers?
You people have no sense of (dark, very dark, let's be completely honest about that!) humor!
:-)
For me, it was choosing between having kids or caring for my aging parents. With social security probably getting cut in the next 5-10 years, I just couldn't swing it. So I prioritized the already living over the potentially living. Hopefully we'll have robots for when I get old.
An unsolvable problem that will correct itself homeostatically. Also: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Arranging society in such a way that women would rather have a career than be a mother will have profound consequences. The value of motherhood needs to be properly valued in society's collective mind.
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self. My sister and her husband get 1-2 hours of time for themselves per day, and then they are too tired to do anything but watch TV. They've ceased to exist as individuals, basically. To them, work and the office are their places of relaxation.
They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
We should ask ourselves a question, if the system we're living in is not rewarding having kids, is a good system at all?
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
That sounds like a horrible way to flirt.
Robots may fill the gap. Really. It seems silly now, but give it twenty years. The developed world may end up with a modest human population and a large robotic population. Asimov explored that idea in SF decades ago.
The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
This inspired me to make https://poputrend.clodhost.com/
You can mess with assumptions and see how it projects out the population of any country/continent/the globe (based on 2024 data and trends).
Is this a stupid question? Why do we want high fertility rates anyway? Isn't the world overpopulated?
What's the problem? The US is simultaneously flirting with potential AI. If the AI proves to be productive, we won't need as many workers. The economy can shift from a human worker only base to a human + AI base. The solution is merely to tax the AI part too!.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.
Mass human behavior in regards to fertility, climate destruction, and social decay is much more sensical if you frame it as species-wide suicidality.
I believe the trend of population decline coupled with the wave of retirees when coupled with "AI" will produce a net benefit for everyone.
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
All it takes is a demographic trend to make the entire population a bunch of crackpots! Behold.
Let's reiterate:
* kids are and were always born in severely underdeveloped places like Africa and during hard times like famines or wars
* worldwide in the last 100 years and maybe throughout all history the education level and social freedom of woman severely impacts her fertility
Draw your own conclusions about the causes and solutions of the demographic problem
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
Maybe they should have a look to what other countries are doing. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
Total Fertility Rate (births per woman) un US:
2015 | 1.83
2016 | 1.80
2017 | 1.75
2018 | 1.71
2019 | 1.68
2020 | 1.62
2021 | 1.63
2022 | 1.67
2023 | 1.62
2024 | 1.62
2025 | 1.62
2026 | 1.61
Politizacion of long term trend wont help here.
I don't think the ideas linking immigration to population growth or decline are productive. It hides the root cause of potential population decline. Why aren't people who are raised in the US having children? I think it's because most of us are lonely and miserable.
Perhaps we can try and take care of each other, and many other things will show signs of improving? There needs to be more access to things like healthcare, childcare, education, entertainment, leisure, arts, recreation, and so much more. There needs to be more love in our societies and the numbers that indicate well-being will follow. After all, what is the point of all of this? To get a promotion?
All the comments are about having babies but as the article points out the actual proximate reason the US population is declining right now is the immigration enforcement approach taken by the Trump administration. Fewer people are coming the the US (including legally), and more people (including legal residents) are being deported or are leaving, and as a result there is net outflow of people from the country. The situation will only worsen with the incipient war on H1B and other visas.
After a brief look at this discussion I am surprised that little reference is made of the evolutionary aspects of having children. Posts tend to center on "It's all about me!" rather than "it's all about the genes!"
Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).
Poor people. Start pumping out kids to be future wage slaves in this corpo dominated country. Carls Jr loves you.
Good? Population can't grow forever. We're not even fucking close to going extinct, and if we did start trending that direction countries like the USSR demonstrated that simple objectives like promising a medal to anyone who pops out 7 kids solves that problem overnight.
Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.
I approve. The population shrinks until we build more god damn housing in these major cities where all the fucking jobs are!!
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
I'm struggling to see why this is a problem.
Marvelous.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
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ICE works :0
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Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
Sounds hellish.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
Deporting hundreds of thousands of people might have something to do with that. Economic contraction seems to be a certainty.
Most men can’t even get a date anymore, but we’re not allowed to talk about the reasons why.
Every country will have to figure out how to deal with this. Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? It's impossible. The only question is whether or not countries can retain their culture and population or whether they will be replaced by outsiders.
Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.