Children have become so expensive to raise in the west that there is _no_ country which is not in demographic collapse. This is being offset by mass immigration which only works so long as the developing world is producing a surplus of people. Something that is no longer happening.
Because of laws like this we have set up a demographics time bomb where in any country richer than India there aren't enough women under 40 to give birth to a generation of the same size as the previous one.
It's rather bizarre listening to people praise a model which is so unsustainable it produces more 80+ year olds than >30 year olds.
i don't think it is these laws that reduce the birthrate. as far as i can see the birthrate correlates with living standards and education levels. higher education, access to and knowledge about contraception, more opportunity for alternative entertainment, not needing kids to take care of you in old age, are all factors that lower the birthrate. cost may be a factor too, but i believe that the cost of raising kids in 3rd word countries is still takes a greater part of their income than it is in 1st world countries.
france has the highest birthrate in europe, followed by ireland and sweden. i don't know what ireland and sweden are doing, but i understand that france offers infant daycare, allowing more parents to work.
as for this article, it specifically talks about families getting a third child when they already have two in car-seat age. it looks to me that the problem is not cost, but possibly the fact that many cars can't fit three car seats in the back.
this comment from the original discussion, and the study authors response also seem to support that idea:
But correlation is not the same as causation. In the past those of means and education continued to raise large families, and in the present exceptions abound. Israel: 3rd most educated country in the world, strong economy, fertility rate of 3. Thailand: about 50% do not even complete high school, relatively poor country, fertility rate of 1.5 - even lower than the US (1.8).
European numbers are largely controlled by Islamic populations. Pew carried out an interesting study [1] on the numbers. The Islamic fertility rate in France is 2.9, the non-Islamic fertility rate is 1.9. In Sweden it's 2.8 vs 1.8. There is no European country with a non-Islamic fertility rate over 2. Ireland is the highest at exactly 2.0.
The fact that these extreme trends exist even within Western countries, emphasize that it's primarily a cultural issue. I am not implying the West should adopt Islamic social views, but the irony is that we will end doing exactly that if nothing changes simply because they are reproducing in healthy numbers while non-Islamic groups are not.
those are good points, but they don't contradict livingstandards as a cause.
what caused the culture in europe to change?
the islamic population in europe is very young. first and second generation mostly. if living standards and education are the cause it's going to take a few more generations before the effect of that set in.
Perhaps so, it'll be interesting to see. As for my opinion of what caused culture to change, I think there's a nice way to reshape the question in an identical way. There's the interesting issue of how a middle class individual may state that they can't have kids right now because of the cost. Yet a lower class individual will happily do so and make things work, one way or the other.
Obviously the middle class individuals could afford to have children and make it work if they genuinely wanted to do so, but it might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice. So it all comes down to priorities. So the question isn't why people stopped having children, but why priorities shifted so radically away from what is ultimately the most fundamentally important responsibility of humanity?
In the US from 1960-1980 many things happened. And one of these was a precipitous decline in fertility rates, plummeting by about 50% to where it would roughly stay to present day. It's quite unfortunate so many things happened in such a short time frame, because it enables one to create a reasonably compelling case for nearly any argument, including the common economic and educational (though those have many issues outside of this time frame).
One thing that also happened during that period was a dramatic decline in religiosity. And IMO that left a vacuum for meaning in society. And that vacuum seems to have been filled, for most, by indulgent hedonism that would gradually transition into consumerism. Drugs, the "sexual revolution", and various other issues skyrocketed during this period. This would further transition into the endless pursuit of the ever more expensive next shiny thing, be those Jordans, iThing, or exotic/expensive selfies for social media image crafting.
And what could be more antithetical to this shift in values and priorities than doing something that "might be uncomfortable and require some sacrifice"? There's certainly nothing more rewarding or fulfilling than raising a family, but that reward comes at immense cost and time.
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Ok, I wanted to hit more on how this hypothesis can also work as a casual explanation for the commonly observed correlations (education, income, etc) related to lower birth rates, but this post is already getting far longer than intended.
thinking about this some more, i realized there might be a correlation between birthrate and the emancipation of women. that would explain the islamic birthrate, and i also found a paper that argues this for israel. only ireland is a bit more difficult to explain.
Child birth is a traumatic event which has negative impacts on your body for the rest of your life in a large minority of cases. That women choose not to is not a surprise. That a minority choose to is.
The question is do we think that individual decisions should be allowed to kill our society?
If you think it's acceptable to let women do so then do you think men ought to be able to refuse conscription without any consequence in a time of war?
that is a very strange conclusion. there are way more factors than just the pain of childbirth. if that pain were really an issue, this should be a well known discussion point. since this is not commonly discussed, i very much doubt that it has any influence in the majority of women who decide not to have children.
what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
that's not the kind of world i want to live in.
i think there are a few tv series that show where that leads to.
no, the solution is to help families with children, so that the children are not a burden, but something to enjoy and look forward to.
the USA especially is famously failing at that. european countries are doing better, but obviously way more needs to be done.
as for conscription. we should aim to stop all wars. there should be no tolerance for any aggression today. any aggression should be stopped by a global, neutral police force without exception.
> that is a very strange conclusion. there are way more factors than just the pain of childbirth. if that pain were really an issue, this should be a well known discussion point. since this is not commonly discussed, i very much doubt that it has any influence in the majority of women who decide not to have children.
Pain is the least problem of child birth. If you want to realize what childbirth can do to a womans body look up what a prolapsed uterus is. That women aren't having that discussion with you probably means that women just don't want to have children with you.
>what is the alternative to individual decisions? force women to have children?
If a society has conscription for men yes. Alternatively you can have both men and women reject the social contract and only use society as a way to make money before it collapses. We don't live in a fairy tale, we don't all get to ride off into the sunset.
there are all kinds of reasons why people don't want children. and these reasons are discussed in many places. pain of childbirth is not often a topic, which suggests that it is not a common reason, so it can hardly be the cause for the birthrate to drop
pain of childbirth and any of the negative after effects are not often a topic, which suggests that they are not a common reason for not wanting children, and so that can hardly be the cause for the birthrate to drop
The exact scale might be transitory, but the issue won't be. Any society with a fertility rate below replacement will trend towards producing a larger elderly than youthful population. The lower the fertility rate, the higher this disproportion will be. Imagine you start with a population of 100 who were just born, and a fertility rate of 1. For simplicity, we'll assume everybody gives birth at 20 years old, and dies at 80:
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
There's always the same ratio people above a given age as there are below, for a given fertility rate, once an equilibrium is established. In cases where your fertility rate is above 2, this ratio will be below 1 (more young than elderly). In cases where your fertility rate is below 2, it will be above 1. Both relationships are exponential, not linear.
I think another interesting issue that demonstrates is the sort of exponential snap, the "demographic bomb", in fertility related issues. In spite of an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubles to 187 by year 60, before suddenly collapsing down to 22 over the next 60 years.
And these are numbers that are not entirely out of question anymore in many places. South Korea's fertility rate has dropped to 0.84.
The non-transient condition is extinction of all western societies. That the same model is being exported to the developing world just means that the extinction will be general rather than localized.
Then we get eventually get a population reduction. If you're an economist this is bad. If you're old, this ain't great. If you're interested in preserving at least a little bit of nature and the environment on this planet though, it's likely a good thing.
At some point you need birth rates to stabilize for a population to survive. This is not something that _any_ country with a GDP over $5,000 PPP is currently managing.
The result isn't a population reduction, it is a population extinction. Too few births is just as bad as too many. It's just that you don't notice you've decided to go extinct until 30 years after the point of no return.
They first show up sometime in their 20s or 30s, have more children than the average for the country, then their children have more children than the average too.
When you look at the demographics of people who are third or later generation immigrants the demographics look apocalyptic.
The west is the first fully parasitic society which can't survive without constant colonialism of human capital from the rest of the world.
Children have become so expensive to raise in the west that there is _no_ country which is not in demographic collapse. This is being offset by mass immigration which only works so long as the developing world is producing a surplus of people. Something that is no longer happening.
Because of laws like this we have set up a demographics time bomb where in any country richer than India there aren't enough women under 40 to give birth to a generation of the same size as the previous one.
It's rather bizarre listening to people praise a model which is so unsustainable it produces more 80+ year olds than >30 year olds.