I will note that there really is no 'one magic trick' to encouraging people to have babies. European states with strong welfare support have lower total fertility rates than America.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
The problem is of course that by mid century almost no one is projected to have a huge excess of immigrants to donate. And what do you do if you’re South Korea (birth rate in the toilet) or Latin America (not a ton of immigrants.)
Not deliberately raising successive generations of cultural resentment addled toxic kkkristofascist misogynist violence-ideating douchebags would probably be a good start though...
“One neat trick” to convince women to give up their lives for two decades, etc. Come on there’s gotta be a listicle out there somewhere on the topic! Where’s Mashable when you need it?
It's easy peasy. Cut down on education and opportunity. Replace enlightenment with superstition and religion then wait 9 months. BOOM! Babies everywhere.
also looking at all this material, one problem is that the advocates and researchers tend to be *people who have kids and wanted to have kids and like having them.*. And that creates a whole set of assumptions, conscious or otherwise, itself.
I know a shitload of people (of all ages and social classes) who wouldn't have babies if you paid them one million dollars and I am one of them. Being children-free is too good in 2024, especially in the first world, IMHO.
Yes the New Yorker review that kicked off all this discussion makes the point that Pakaluk’s naïveté isn’t that she doesn’t know about policy options; it’s that she thinks a culture shift is possible based on the atypical women she studied (
Fundamentally, once people, *especially* women, have the option not to have babies a lot of them take it, and much of the discourse around this is really 'how do we take away that choice from women.' So encouraging the 'support parents' discourse is good because it doesn't do that, but ...
I suspect that the dynamics that have caused the drop can't be reversed - and shouldn't be - by those policies alone. For one thing, you often get large families by women having kids *early.*
If *I* were a millionaire concerned with fertility, then, for instance, 'extending people's fertility window to later in life' would probably be a better research project than 'funding my local version of Orbanism', I mean, even on its own terms...it doesn't work!
Also things like providing childcare for working parents. Children are a major expense at a time when two adults working is required for many to get by. If one of those adults has to stop work, it greatly increases the expense. (alternately subsidizing stay at home parents, but childcare is cheaper)
Childcare for working parents is great for social justice, but it doesn’t move the dial at all on birthrates really. What has moved the dial is that people couple up later, and start having kids later as a result.
You can't tell me that being unable to work for 5-6 years, or paying ~$11,000/year in childcare isn't a factor in deciding when or how many children to have.
And this is why we’re seeing resistance to IVF in the RW evangelical community. Fertility drops with maternal age. IVF can help couples have children later in life, which creates more options for couples, and women in particular, to postpone childbearing.
Anecdotally I have definitely heard parents say that childcare costs stops them having an additional dial. When you say not moving the dial, does it have any positive effect?
I would be interested in studies into the impact of housing affordability rather than childcare costs, anecdotally "being able to afford a mortgage deposit" seems pretty strongly correlated with having children (although the causality obviously isn't one way)
See also increasing housing stocks to bring down prices
There are municipalities where having two children assigned different genders share a bedroom can get you looked at (or worse) by CFS, so if you can’t afford to upsize your housing, having a second kid may be off the table
Yes, and the evangelical-white supremacy supporters absolutely hate this. They no longer have a reliable supply of white babies for their infertile white couples to adopt.
This is also almost the entirety of the decline in birth rates as well! Births to women in their mid-20s and higher have remained the same, more or less...
I wonder how much of that is changing societal norms wrt having sex with teenagers; how much is access to birth control; how much is the availability of the internet to ask questions that schools and parents are determined not to answer; and how much is the easy access to porn as an alternative.
so ultimately the questions should be 'how do we support people who want to have kids' and 'how do we manage a society which has less kids, and the generational imbalance that comes with it for several decades'. And the answer for rich countries for the second is relatively easy: immigration.
Except that’s not easy (politically). I don’t think any of the choices are easy - but conditions which support those who want children to do so (housing, childcare) might be easiest.
a big answer to the first would be 'don't have it penalize your career for women, especially in your. twenties' - but casting mothers as successful workers is the *opposite* of the policies many of the birthrate people are interested in.
yet another way how our obsession with GDP and it not capturing domestic work gives a totally skewed economic view, which in turn totally skews our policy choices
This drives me nuts. I am not a parent but the moms I’ve worked with have mostly been among the most productive and efficient! They don’t waste time and they get s*** done, often while also running the household.
Not to be that guy, but the same goes for men/fathers too. Paid parental leave needs to be a guarantee for parents of any sex. And there needs to be more flexibility for people who need to care for kids at home.
right; this is like the periodic, historical “back-to-the-land” thing. As a rule, people don’t *want* homesteads unless they have no other choices; they prefer the division of labor.
a line that really changed the way I think about stuff was in Gawande's excellent BEING MORTAL, where he talks for pages about the experts praising multi-generational households and then devastatingly says something like 'but if you give people a choice, they universally avoid them'
The 21st century messaging that a solo family “19th-century style” homestead is the pinnacle of human achievement is fucking wild if you’ve read literally ANYTHING about how homesteading (didn’t) work in the actual 19thc
Homesteads, where you keep all your production, are massively superior to serfdom, where much of it is taken away, which is why so many immigrated to the USA in the 19th century.
But once you get past subsistence farming, no-one wants to go back to it.
My Mom grew up on a small farm in the 30s-40s. She just shook her head when idealistic kids wanted to "go back to the land." It's exhausting and oppressive full time work with no opportunity to pursue the things they take for granted.
Technology is the answer to both of these. Robot nannies, artificial wombs, in vitro gametogenesis on the one hand; labor saving technologies (including but not limited to robotics) on the other.
The goals should be to give the median rich country citizen access to the kind of easy childrearing experience aristocrats in 1900 had, but without the exploited servants whose disappearance has made that experience so rare today; AND to enable women to reliably bear healthy kids through age 50.
It does seem like this will become an issue in the medium to long term. Globally, I assume that there’s a point where shrinking population creates problems.
But wealthy countries can probably forestall that for a century at least. And by then the nature of the problem will probably change somehow
immigrants can also help with the first, providing services to help families with young children, such as child care, health care, indeed contributing to the overall economy and social welfare.
Ultimately population pressures around the world are part of destabilizing the environment. Why push for higher birthrates? In aggregate, people have more kids when things are hopeful and it seems advantageous.
No trends are permanent. Redistribution of world population while we adjust to climate change doesn't have to be dystopia. Stabilizing or even shrinkage of world population wouldn't mean that people wouldn't start having larger families later.
Inevitably people will leap up to point out that this 'only buys time'.
Which is true - but irrelevant.
Time is what you need when capacity to predict the future is so weak - a couple more decades without state implosion is what you want to get a sense of what longer-term solution is avail./needed
In 20 years time it might be clear that, actually, 'generic welfare' doesn't help total fertility - but targeted welfare/workplace reforms built around distributed childcare/breaks do.
Or we might be developing robots that make social care way more productive.
(FWIW, I don't think any flavour of US politician who has met Netanyahu has ever come away not thinking he's a narcissistic self-serving ****-stain. During the Cold War there were all sorts of geopolitical imperatives for keeping Israel onside - but now it's US domestic support that's the driver.)
The complicating factor here is that people (including women) tend to say, in polls, that they would, in theory, like to have more children than they have. It’s hard to know what to make of this; possibly people are just lying to themselves.
I would have liked to have a third child, but it would mean looking at different transportation and housing options. Kids don’t share rooms as much anymore and fitting three car seats in a sedan is a challenge.
This is aside from the childcare and health costs.
We went from 1 to 3 because twins and I really doubt we would have gone from 2 to 3. The cost differential in terms of housing, vehicles, travel, etc is very real.
Exactly! In theory, I'd like a second child. In reality, I do want one but I don't want any of the impacts it would cause to finances/career/living situation, so I probably won't do it. My ideal wants vs actual preferences don't line up.
Having several can be appealing in theory but so many of us know the reality of what it would take. Money, labour, more resources. And a lot of people don't have the money and their labour is already stretched. And there is the physical side of producing babies -stuff happens.
IIRC there’s also a bunch of research showing women are some of the most rational economic actors around: having a child with Mr. Wrong is worse than not having one with Mr. Right and the ratio of these two stock characters in the het dating pool is still not great.
Indeed. People are (broadly) having the number of children they want to have. In previous eras children were more often than not a byproduct of something else people really wanted to do rather than a goal in themselves.
I don’t understand why anyone gives a shit about fertility rates. Is the idea that the human race is in danger of dying out? On the one hand they’re screaming “America is full!” but also we need more people?
To be blunt, the idea is not that the human race is dying out, but that the "white race" is dying out, which isn't really true either, but that's the actual undergirding anxiety, that white people will wither away into a marginal force in national and global politics.
That's why the people most concerned about "fertility rates" also tend to be anti-immigration. Because it's actually not about the economic consequences of having a shrinking population at all, it's about preserving white power.
This is the basic thing for me - governments should make it easier for new parents to have kids and work/not bankrupt themselves, but that's only going to mitigate so much because women like controlling when they get pregnant & it turns out a lot of births have always been unplanned.
Agree. Also, a shrinking human population is moderately inconvenient for government budgets from one myopic point of view, but incredibly beneficial from a climate change POV. Our only hope, even.
Encouraging fertility is a bad idea, full stop, until the human population peacefully returns to, for example, under 1 billion. Voluntary, peaceful, bottom-up decline far preferable to the coercive, non-consensual decline we face otherwise.
my dumbass take: from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, resource pressure (food, water, roof) is typically the driver. and in modern society things like healthcare and not being shot up while going to school could be considered "resources".
As this Census report discusses, Utah is one state that has a relatively large number of children. Some of the factors at play: (1) strong Mormon social networks for childcare & emergency support, (2) societal expectations, and (3) strong anti-birth control ethos.
Does Utah have a relatively large amount of women with diagnoses of depression? Real question. Women socially pressured into having children, even with support, are not really making a free choice. Children are an emotional responsibility to a mother, no matter how much support.
One question I have about that is whether they really *do* have support that’s strong enough for women to be able to have children without giving up a lot of autonomy and safety.
Lois McMaster Bujold's "Ethan of Athos" is from male-only society where babies are uterine-vat-gestated. *One-third* of government spending goes to support child rearing & education...because there is no designated source of Free Childcare Labor.
Currently total US gov't (fed+state+local) spending is ~$10T, o/w education is ~$1.5T. So ed+childcare+other support would have to *at least* double, I think, to be in the ballpark of giving enough support.
I read somewhere (unfort can't find it now) that there's a hockey stick curve to fertility rate by wealth - the poorest and the very wealthiest have the most kids. That seems optimistic about what policy can achieve.
I don’t know. I hope so, but I suspect that it would require pretty dramatic changes to the economic system that we don’t have anything close to a model for.
And immigration is the obvious answer in the short term, but long-term, it’s really dependent on ongoing exploitation of oppressed women in other countries.
It’s not really an alternative to figuring out how to make equality compatible with childbearing.
there is but i don't think people actually want to do it. say you gave children $50,000 or $100,000 in guaranteed income at birth, payable to their guardians until whenever.
yes, but a lot of Americans are strongly wedded to this idea anyway. you can point out all the great childcare policies in (say) Finland still give it a TFR of less than 1.5; doesn't matter.
True. But it’s also important to note that welfare support is not career support. European countries with strong welfare support still penalize mothers as workers - still less represented in fields they are educated for, upper management etc. while it is not the same for fathers in those countries.
It seems like countries will do anything but put any kind of burden on fathers. Which, given that most countries are still predominantly run by men, is not surprising, but irritating.
I was just going to say what Deva said. Germany, for example, has pretty strong welfare support, as well as job protections for pregnant moms, guaranteed maternity leave, etc., but in practice moms are discriminated against, as can be seen by how few women with children are in white collar jobs.
A German child's elementary school day may not begin at the same time every day, will end before 2pm but not necessarily at the same time every day, and may have sudden gaps when the child comes home.
Ten years of that kind of juggling is rough on a career.
Yeah I was talking with one of my friends there how he dealt with his kid coming home so early and asked him why the kid wasn't in an after school program. He said, because there aren't any!
Yep. Welfare provision without the intent to change anything about the gendered distribution of labor - and indeed arrangements like this that reinforce it - is not a particularly good neat trick as it turns out.
Who knew, yeah? I mean, we have three and the youngest is almost through high school, so we have pretty much made it. (I'm not native German, so immigration-is-an-answer also applies.) Social benefits were helpful, but a) were not the reason we had kids and b) structural issues were still there.
It was a special time! I was a freelance writer and editor, so there was a greater amount of flexibility, but I was also very much the secondary earner in those years.
It's definitely a structural problem that limits people's, mainly women's, careers.
Also from what I understand even though childcare is subsidized in Germany it’s VERY hard to access, with long waiting lists that one must be on while pregnant with the hope of getting in during the child’s first year of life.
I keep up with this sort of thing as a professional woman who’s a mother that likes mothering and would have had additional children if it were at all feasible. It was not. And would have been only slightly more so in Europe.
Something I learned in researching parental leave policies for work was that while European countries have longer mandated leave, it seems to barely pay anything? It's been a few yrs since I checked. (Better than no mandate like the US, but still)
I guess I’d say I’m skeptical that the stronger welfare support results in a holistic increase in the things that make having kids easier? Like there probably is a level of societal development where the average person wants to have 2.1 kids again that is simply genuinely hard to reach.
I think this may well be true but I think those things are really hard to manage, and one of them is 'having it not hamper your career in your twenties'
We could also do a lot more to change the assumption that it specifically hampers women's careers. Outside of a relatively small time window around delivery there's not that many parenting tradeoffs that can't be made just as easily by fathers.
it's more equitable to make it so the tradeoff is split 50-50 between male & female parents but that's still not what you really want if you're trying to encourage more kids
This is more than a little optimistic, but when you're talking about delaying career advancement the implicit question is relative to what? If the vast majority of workers make sacrifices in their twenties then at some point that just becomes a normal career trajectory.
There's always going to be a bunch of people who don't have kids. If they get ahead in career terms, they become overrepresented in the powerful classes.
I guess one option is just to hold them back (tax people for not having kids or something)
yeah if as a society we really want women having more babies in their early 20s or whenever, the support would need to be way more than "this won't impoverish you"
It would need to be more along the lines of - we will financially support every single person in their 20s, and also prevent universities from admitting students under 30.
which is a thing society could try out if 100 years from now every country in the world is prosperous enough to be on the other side of the demographic transition and there's actually some danger of the globe being on the bad side of that graph the population decline alarmists like
Oh yeah definitely a very hard problem. I think it probably is genuinely solvable though. But a lot of countries that claim to be doing as much as they can are actually doing not that much (Japan obvious example here)
Thoughtful thread on fertility and family size, now easily scrolled with the enhanced Bluesky threading capabilities.
Thanks @pfrazee.com @bsky.app @jay.bsky.team
The housing shortage didn't cause fertility rates to drop and solving it won't be sufficient to turn them around, but I do think the housing shortage is an important marginal factor in parents stopping at one or two kids rather than going for three or four
And because this site is dominated by millenials, people are prone to project their own and their social environment's reasons for having and not having kids on the population l
Which i very much get as a human (cant have kids due to circumstances either myself) but does not work well as analysis
Finally, to me it seems like the clearest most proven factor in the declining birth rate in the usa is declining teen pregnancy which does not really feature structurally in a lot of the explanations
And I'm betting wherever you see fewer teen pregnancies, you're also getting fewer unplanned pregnancies at all ages, which is probably harder to measure
What would be an interesting study is to assess for each country what the big narrative is as the cause for lower birth rates (e.g. in my country the main line is "lack of housing") and then compare these variables and birth stats over time cross country
I think about this all the time! Economic support for parents is a great idea regardless of its impact on birth rates, nonetheless its clear as people become wealthier, they seem to have fewer kids. As the world becomes wealthier hard to see that it won't continue to drop.
The pro-birth people gloss over the fact that at the end of the day, birthing children is extremely physically taxing. Then having gone through it, you have a person to raise for 18+ years. They act like it’s chickens laying eggs or something!
My fringe futurism belief is that babies grown in vats is a good thing actually, and should be pursued fullheartedly as a humane alternative to in-vivo gestation.
That combined with child-*rearing* support as in welfare states is a pro-birthrate policy, IMHO.
I too believe this - but labor or not, the process of pregnancy is a rather meaningful ask. There's permanent bodily changes, significant risk, and yes, labor and lifestyle changes that occur as part of it. Plus, automating gestation would open the door for more non-traditional parentage as well.
No one has ever really understood these things in detail. The great decline of the French birthrate in the 19th century which had o/c such significant consequences remains basically unexplained.
What I haven't found is any speculation of the *method* of birth control. I think it must have been "no equipment" methods, bcuz so available to all classes. So, coitus interruptus...but maybe also non-PiV sex, not a traditional method of BC in W. Europe but common in e.g. China
The explanation that was accepted when I was learning French history 25 years ago was that it stemmed from the Napoleonic Code saying that inheritance had to be shared evenly between sons rather than all going to the eldest. So farmers had much fewer children to stop their land being subdivided.
The conditions under which I'd have kids: lots of money, hired help, artificial wombs (pregnancy is a horror), social support, able bodied partner who will genuinely take on equal work, less global fascism & poverty & war, fixed environmental problems. I won't bring a child into this shitty future.
I’m not for stopping people from having babies if they want them. But making people have babies or even encouraging them to have babies is both wrong and stupid.
Really depends on the mechanism and aim of welfare. Pronatalist places with "cash-for-kids" policies like Hungary have some of the lowest TFRs, while Scandinavia which prioritizes gender equality and supporting the parental lifestyle through labor rules fares the best.
the world had a quarter of its current population a century ago - we could probably move back to that without too much disruption given the generations necessary to make the change. (the trick is avoiding people who have a plan for making it happen faster, or who have a list of who should go.)
The work required to do this would be incredibly unpleasant for all involved. Mass abandonment of infrastructure, stagnating in come per capita, huge tax burdens to support elderly generations with far worse employment to population ratios than exist anywhere today. It’d be like Japan on steroids.
(the list thing BTW is also what to avoid if someone wants _more_ babies - as long as they don't have a list of what kind of babies specifically, that's a conversation at least worth having)
(and this isn't saying 'return to the utopia of 1925', just that I think we could plausibly have a very pleasant world with 1925's population, given continued tech advancements)
Although that's a huge problem, at a certain level of decline the problem becomes a lack of civilisation itself - as in, you need a critical mass of teachers, scientists, and specialists to maintain and advance knowledge in myriad spheres.
it's elder care. the US went from the elderly being the most impoverished cohort in the country to hand over fist the richest, due to adoption of lifecycle policies. but it doesn't do much good if it can't be translated into dignified care and support.
And not even pensions in particular per se, but just "retirement" in general. Decline too fast (say the generational halving SK is experiencing) and you'll have lots of jobs still need doing and a dwindling prime working age base to do those jobs.
Labor scarcity would evaporate retirement savings.
Worth lampshading that this isn't a problem you can financially engineer your way out of either. If there are more necessary jobs than people to do them the options are to somehow make people work more or to lower standards of living. There is no door #3.
Or maybe advances in robotics would continue to serve as an increasing labor force multiplier and it'd all be fine.
Either way, it's a problem for a future generation. World population is on a steady trend right now, some countries just need to be less weird about immigration.
Maybe fewer paid working hours are a result of greying populations.
That means a drag on overall output, but like you say, we've had a lot of productivity/hr growth, so I hope that we muddle through the sandwich generation(s) without too much hardship.
Maybe that set the stage for more kids later?
I do think immigration helps solve most of this just because you can grow the economy pretty damn fast with new workers if you're got a bunch of capital on the other side of the ledger
I don’t think so. If you look at the countries with high birth rates they have less or no welfare. They have kids to look after them in their old age. Often more than one in case one dies
Fundamentally, the state should help make life better and easier for people living lives however they live them. A state biased for or against people having children will likely fall into policies of direct or indirect harm to its people.
Comments
It’s challenging!
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encoding$y$data$concept=children_per_woman_total_fertility&source=fasttrack&space@=geo&=time;;&scale$domain:null&zoomed:null&type:null;;&trail$data$filter$markers$gbr=1876;;;;;;;;&chart-type=bubbles&url=v2
There are municipalities where having two children assigned different genders share a bedroom can get you looked at (or worse) by CFS, so if you can’t afford to upsize your housing, having a second kid may be off the table
But once you get past subsistence farming, no-one wants to go back to it.
But wealthy countries can probably forestall that for a century at least. And by then the nature of the problem will probably change somehow
Which is true - but irrelevant.
Time is what you need when capacity to predict the future is so weak - a couple more decades without state implosion is what you want to get a sense of what longer-term solution is avail./needed
Or we might be developing robots that make social care way more productive.
Or ... pretty much anything.
This is aside from the childcare and health costs.
The things that actually increase fertility rates are almost all antithetical to individual liberty and autonomy
More poor white people willing to do shitty jobs without creeping them out by being all dusky-colored.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/aging-united-states-population-fewer-children-in-2020.html#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20population%20also%20aged,and%2030s)%20a%20decade%20later.
It’s not really an alternative to figuring out how to make equality compatible with childbearing.
Ten years of that kind of juggling is rough on a career.
1/
Kindergeld: Cash benefit every month, A++ a huge help, would Geld again
Universal health coverage: We have never had to worry about the cost of health care; insurance does what it is supposed to do — it insures
2/
It's definitely a structural problem that limits people's, mainly women's, careers.
1/
Parent: Why are you here?
Child: Class was cancelled.
[Parent holds tongue while brain explodes.]
2/
I guess one option is just to hold them back (tax people for not having kids or something)
Thanks @pfrazee.com @bsky.app @jay.bsky.team
People often pose single/primary cause explanations for declining birth rates in the USA but
- it is multicausal
- we see declining birth rates in many many countries and these explanations don't hold when controlling and comparing variables
Which i very much get as a human (cant have kids due to circumstances either myself) but does not work well as analysis
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2023/20230601.htm
What would be an interesting study is to assess for each country what the big narrative is as the cause for lower birth rates (e.g. in my country the main line is "lack of housing") and then compare these variables and birth stats over time cross country
The issues of "the amount of people having babies" and "how many babies are people having" are not the same
together they affect the birth rates but their causes and the possible policy options to address them can be quite different
That combined with child-*rearing* support as in welfare states is a pro-birthrate policy, IMHO.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&q=Modernization+Before+Industrialization%3A+Cultural+Roots+of+the+Demographic+Transition+in+France&btnG=
while Perrin (2022) links that to increased female emancipation in particular, post-Revolution
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13158151983340685903&hl=en&as_sdt=0,31
#history #histsky
I’m not for stopping people from having babies if they want them. But making people have babies or even encouraging them to have babies is both wrong and stupid.
Labor scarcity would evaporate retirement savings.
Either way, it's a problem for a future generation. World population is on a steady trend right now, some countries just need to be less weird about immigration.
That means a drag on overall output, but like you say, we've had a lot of productivity/hr growth, so I hope that we muddle through the sandwich generation(s) without too much hardship.
Maybe that set the stage for more kids later?
but seriously - that I think is a solvable or at least tackleable problem.