Fascinating topic. I personally suspect that it has more to do with attitude and life style priorities rather than economics. But I remember reading a very recent article in the Economist that argued that birth rates declined mostly in low income families, which would contradict that.
> Underpinning these policies is an assumption that poorer women are more likely to respond to incentives to have more children. Indeed, their fertility rates do seem more elastic than those of professional women. Whereas the fertility rates of older, college-educated women have remained fairly steady over the past six decades, most of the collapse in fertility in America and Britain since 1980 stems from younger and poorer women having fewer children, particularly from unplanned pregnancies.
Just like with many of these topics, most sources seem to contradict each other.
pjc50 · 20h ago
> fewer children, particularly from unplanned pregnancies
Yes. Let's be clear, public opinion hates young mothers having unplanned pregnancies, because then the support cost falls on someone else, so this is a win of decades of policy.
(under-mentioned factor: people are very, very judgy about the parenting of others, a traditional problem which has been made worse by social media, so when faced with the choice of a lot of hassle for sub-perfect parenting a lot of women simply opt not to)
spwa4 · 19h ago
1) it used to be the case that child allowance for 3 kids was better paid than a supermarket job. So both for women directly this was a win. For a woman: 3 kids? Reasonably comfortable life without the need for a job. But of course, judgement and getting bothered by child services. And for families. 3 kids? Stay-at-home wife (and in one of twenty cases, dad-at-home)
2) Just throwing kids out used to be perfectly acceptable. They'd go to school, then play in the street or park and weren't welcome home until it was time for dinner. After dinner? Bedtime with maybe 20-30 minutes of time with parents.
That is how things worked. 100 years ago in most places, and that's how it still works in places with high fertility.
Now societies (not just America) have collectively decided kids are like pets. You want one? You take care of them and you pay for them. And we'll just magically make up the ever-larger shortage of people with immigration, while complaining ever more about how evil and negative immigration is.
dogma1138 · 12h ago
Other than the cost of raising children that’s how it worked until the 90’s. I don’t know what happened I still remember I was in shocked when the school called social services on my sister when they found her 8 year old was alone with her 13 year old in the early to mid 2000’s at home after school.
I don’t know what happened but we’ve started treating children like they are made out of glass and it doesn’t feel really like the threat landscape is any different.
I used to walk from school and play outside until dark every day and everyone else was exactly the same.
pjc50 · 19h ago
> it used to be the case that child allowance for 3 kids was better paid than a supermarket job.
For what time period in what country?
bryanlarsen · 15h ago
> it used to be the case that child allowance for 3 kids was better paid than a supermarket job.
Which says a lot more about the pay of low-end "female" jobs in the past than it does about child allowance, which has always been pretty niggardly.
bryanlarsen · 13h ago
It's always a risk using "niggardly" in a comment given that you're likely to be downvoted by someone who doesn't understand the word. But it's a good word.
exiguus · 19h ago
There is a study[1] that backup this claim.
The two main key findings are:
Women from disadvantaged backgrounds and lower early achievement levels experience a more significant fertility-decreasing effect from college education.
And the effects of college on fertility attenuate as the likelihood of college attendance and completion increases.
But I have to say, that it rely on data from 1979, that is nearly 50 years old.
However, there are many studies that back up the claim that 'higher education levels are associated with lower birth rates.' The key findings of the linked study here close the gap between the poor and the educated in my opinion.
Personally, I prefer to follow this theory because life style means that no partner is needed to have children, and that having children is not a problem even at an age over 40. Of course, both are only possible if you are really rich and they are the other extreme of the spectrum. But in my opinion, this is what life style means.
This doesn't explain why Afghan fertility rates under Taliban are also declining.
chithanh · 20h ago
Or in North Korea which has outlawed birth control
Henchman21 · 14h ago
No I think “despair” covers both NK & Afghanistan pretty well as an explanation
varjag · 7h ago
See, that's the thing. Fertility rates fall globally and while you can come up with a plausible sounding explanation for each isolated case they don't cover the other nations and territories.
SiempreViernes · 20h ago
Economics is a pretty strong driver of "life style" priorities, for example the amount of people working so they can afford housing is not insignificant.
Anyway, they say it's not just economics already in the abstract:
> We refer to this phenomenon as “shifting priorities” and propose that it likely reflects a complex mix of changing norms, evolving economic opportunities and constraints, and broader social and cultural forces.
msgodel · 6h ago
I think the problem is that many of these countries have a cultural idea of economic milestones you're supposed to reach in life (moving out, getting a real job, becoming stable, getting married etc) before having kids and the mass migration from countries with different ideas of how economics work have made these unreachable.
v5v3 · 21h ago
>more to do with attitude and life style priorities
Which are values 'sold' to them via the media.
Havoc · 21h ago
Because for most rich countries this graph applies:
- Many urban areas have even worse shortages of family housing. Availability of 2+ bedroom apartments is even worse than studios and 1-bedrooms. Many new multi family buildings have plenty of low-income units but no family units.
- Car seat laws are well intentioned but make it very annoying to transport children in car-dependent areas unless parents use their own car for everything.
- Childcare and education prices are very high. Of course, part of this cost is the cost of living of educators.
- Many industries are geared toward people with few or no children. Hotel rooms with capacity for more than two children are unusual, and most travel sites barely understand the idea of searching for such rooms. Even rooms with comfortable capacity for two children are a bit unusual — the common two-queen-bed configuration requires that kids share a bed.
AndrewDucker · 20h ago
Importantly, the housing market now assumes that two people will be contributing to a mortgage, which makes having one of you take significant time off to look after a child (or spending a very significant percentage of your income on childcare) tricky, to say the least.
One kid was doable for us. Two kids really stretched things and basically destroyed our savings (2 kids both costing £1k a month in nursery fees was not sustainable). A third kid would have meant either moving to a much cheaper house or some other significant financial compromise.
YuukiRey · 20h ago
I suggest taking a closer look at section 5 ("V. Shifting Priorities and Social Influences"), which starts on page 24 for alternative explanations.
The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:
> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
Ontonator · 20h ago
While I don’t disagree that houses have become less affordable, that graph is rather misleading. A graph of the ratio, as posted in one of the comments [0], would be more informative.
Israel has arguably the worst income to house price ratio in the OECD at 160 monthly wages (~13 annual salaries) which is more than twice the US at 68 but they have also the highest TFR in the developed world even when you exclude the Orthodox Jews…
So it’s not as simple as housing is not affordable… it does feel like it’s very much cultural/social I can more than afford to have children but I’m at almost 40 and I don’t. And speaking from the pool of a rented villa in Greece I got on whim for 2 weeks because I got annoyed at work I can’t even begin to think about having them…
lmpdev · 21h ago
Sadly I think you’re on the money here, especially for Australia and Canada
squishington · 19h ago
The threat of being evicted every 12 months in Melbourne has reduced me to not being able to plan much at all. Rental market is cooked. It's exhausting.
thefz · 20h ago
Ah, the subreddit where all data is made up and the discussion is irrelevant
roenxi · 20h ago
When looking at that sort of graph you do need to hold in mind that we had a substantial period of our evolutionary history where owning a house wasn't an option because houses didn't exist. It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility - if it was, all animal species would die out with rare exceptions. Humans are perfectly capable, as a race, of population growth without any houses at all. Indeed, you might even find that the houses most of your ancestors lived in are illegal to build in many parts of the world by virtue of being too basic.
That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
surgical_fire · 19h ago
Evolution is such a terrible way to look at this. The incentives of a hunter-gatherer nomadic group of people living in prehistoric African savannah and the incentives of people living in a modern urban environment are worlds apart.
Back then it was probable that most children would just die before reaching maturity, and most humans would not live much past their early adulthood. Life was fulfilled by the most basic subsistence, and that was all.
I don't think most humans nowadays, be them rich or poor, would want to live in such an environment.
Am I soft because I enjoy playing videogames or watching a movie after my daughter is sound asleep in her girl's bedroom in a house with proper heating? Probably. I still wouldn't want to team up with my neighbor to go into the wilderness to hunt a boar while the wife and daughter freeze in a mud hut.
> That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
When given a choice, people enjoy some mild comfort. Oh the horror.
Havoc · 20h ago
Yes we're still the same evolutionary humans, but you can't set up a subsistence farm with your 8 children as free labour and go hunting in lower Manhattan.
Unless you're proposing mass de-urbanization and rolling back 100+ years of societal evolution it's practically just not all that relevant that this worked fine in an earlier era and humans could hypothetically just go back to slumming it medieval style.
> It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility
Find some 20 somethings in a major 1st world metro and ask them.
roenxi · 20h ago
I'd propose that if you can't give your children a good life you shouldn't have them. It seems a comfortingly large chunk of the world agrees to some degree.
Havoc · 19h ago
>if you can't give your children a good life you shouldn't have them
Which brings us neatly back to dropping fertility is driven by the divergence between salary and cost of housing. Bunch of young people looking at their budget and concluding society has made it impossible for them to provide said good life to a potential offspring
roenxi · 19h ago
If you want the thread to do a couple of laps I'm game - this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history. People are demanding a standard for their children that only the tinyest of slivers of prior generation has been capable of providing. If any were at all, after accounting for standards of medical care.
Being unable to afford a home isn't the major factor here, that has pretty much always been a factor. It is standards, priorities and options changing.
surgical_fire · 17h ago
Be the change you want to see.
Have 12 children in homelessness and prove to us that it is a better way to live life.
If you want it for others but not for yourself, you are just being hypocritical.
roenxi · 15h ago
Well, you might think that is an acceptable standard of living. I don't.
surgical_fire · 15h ago
Great counter argument to GP:
> this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history.
Oh wait, that was you.
roenxi · 15h ago
Yeah. I can repeat the same point a 3rd time if you think that will help? I haven't changed my mind.
surgical_fire · 14h ago
I can repeat myself ad eternum too.
If you think it is acceptable to be homeless with plenty of children because evolution, you should do it yourself. Be the change you want to see.
Since I have little interest in keeping up this cycle with someone that is incidentally (or worse, purposefully) too dense to understand basic contradictions, I'll leave you to have the last word.
Have a wonderful weekend.
roenxi · 6h ago
Gotta say, I can understand one or two levels of commenting persisting in misreading something but this level of commitment to it has me confused.
1) I never said that it was acceptable to be homeless with lots of children. (1a) You've tried and failed to find a quote where I did, so I know you've read what I wrote and can't source that belief to anything I actually said; even stripped of context.
2) Misreading a comment is something that happens, so y'know, ok no worries maybe I wrote an unclear one. But I've explicitly told you I don't believe that. And it is a crazy belief that nobody holds so I don't know why it would be a hard thing to accept after a few clarifying words.
3) Third time a charm. In the article we've got a 100-word abstract that lays the position out nice and clearly. The major factor here is not house prices, it is changing - shifting if you will - priorities. We've had situations where house prices were absurdly high in the past - for most of our evolutionary history a house has been an unattainable luxury and fertility was off the charts by modern standards. High house prices are obviously not a root cause.
salawat · 17h ago
You seem dense and fairly committed to not seeing the fact that we've pretty much tapped the developable wilds, and set bars so high in terms of barriers of economic entry you can't just plop out a kid and rely on opportunity existing anymore. My grandmother was one of 13 children reared on a farm. Each of them could meaningfully contribute to the operation of the farm back then in ways that would be non-starters today, and for a myriad of good reasons. There was a smaller population to carry, higher attrition rates, more and deadlier wars, and many other factors.
Also, ffs, it's called resource crunch and wealth centralization, and I'm not entirely convinced we aren't staring down the smoldering barrel of some serious shit Stateside over the next decade.
amluto · 20h ago
> we had a substantial period of our evolutionary history where owning a house wasn't an option because houses didn't exist.
The population density at the time was much, much, much lower than it is now.
pjc50 · 20h ago
Exactly. We have a historical fertility rate that's much higher to go with our historical early fatality rare, which was much higher. Population grew gradually from the development of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, being basically starvation-limited or disease-limited along the way, and then exploded.
socalgal2 · 20h ago
The point of the paper is that that graph is irrelevant
They looked at economic influence and found it does not account for the drop in child birth
AstralStorm · 20h ago
Did they even attempt to scale it against housing prices?
praxulus · 14h ago
Yes, part III section C is all about the effect of house prices on fertility. There's certainly an effect, but previous studies have shown that housing costs can only account for a small share of the drop in fertility.
a_humean · 21h ago
Part of the reason is probably that nearly all high income countries have terrible housing policies that make it impossible for ordinary people to have stable housing until their late 30s/early 40s.
krona · 21h ago
Up until 5 minutes ago, 'stable housing' meant living with your parents and then the neighbourhood where you grew up surrounded by an extensive support network of people you knew you could trust. No 'housing policy' or government required.
energy123 · 20h ago
You'd need to ship cultural change to make it culturally acceptable to live with your parents in your 30s. It's not happening soon. People would rather live in rental or mortgage stress than engage in strange lifestyles that confer low status. I wish Western culture didn't have such sicknesses, but it does.
pjc50 · 20h ago
The UK has had housing policy since WW2, balancing the competing objectives of trying to replace the large amounts of housing destroyed in the war with the dislike of urban sprawl into farmland.
tuatoru · 13h ago
Maybe living with parents was the norm where you're from, but in the Paris basin, the low countries and England, from late Medieval times the life pattern was to leave your parents' home as a teenager and work for several years in another household/enterprise until you could afford to form your own household.
Leaving home early is deeply ingrained in Anglo culture.
It's also coz people have moved en masse to cities for better opportunities and end up physically not having enough space for kids even if the housing is stable.
The war on affordable housing is probably going to continue in the west until there is some kind of systemic break (war, societal collapse, rise of a "caesar", etc). There is simply too much wealth riding on it and too much wealth feeding political corruption for any kind of sudden trend reversal.
willguest · 20h ago
TIL - fertility is used interchangably with birth rate in demographic studies. What I think of as fertility - the ability to have offspring, in a purely biological sense - is apparently termed 'fecundity'.
This is only mentioned briefly in the 'infertility' subsection, and then only attributed to age, with mention of IVF as a mitigating factor.
However, there is evidence that, due to a variety of factors, there is a steady but persistent decline in sperm count globally, and that this had a sizable impact on birth rates/fertility.
TLDR: It's complicated, but the science seems to be decidedly up in the air. We don't actually know if sperm counts are declining, let alone the cause.
willguest · 11h ago
This is a well-written piece, but I generally found the author to lean too much in to the 'we can't be absolutely sure, so we know nothing for certain' type of argument. He points this out himself, saying that the presence of conflicting data suggest that we need to "reason under uncertainty".
I think his approach is characterised well by the following section:
"1. Yes, okay, that line is pointing very slightly down, and apparently this is statistically significant.
2. But also, the data are very noisy. Some studies from 2005 show higher sperm counts than most studies from the 1970s. The biggest pre-1980 study shows sperm counts very similar to today’s."
The style of language "yes, okay" and "apparently" soften the position of statistical significance and the counterpoint is vague and dated. Again, there seems to be a bias towards claiming "we just don't know", whereas the data show that there is a statistical trend.
I am not saying that I take any single paper as gospel, but the general conclusion he comes to: 'let's wait 20 years and see what happens", feels like a call to inaction, which can be risky.
Also, for a meta-analysis, the article is not very well-referenced and doesn't seem all that broad. Having done a couple of these myself, I would have expected some kind of summary of the number and size of studies pointing to each/no conclusion. This shortcoming makes it easier to come to his stated conclusion that 'we just don't know'.
lz400 · 20h ago
I think at this point the better question is: why in the past fertility was so high? and I think the reasons were mainly that people _relied_ on their children to grow up and take over the farm and take care of their parents. They were also mortally bored and children are fun. They had them for selfish reasons.
But nowadays? why would you have a child? for a middle class+ family in a developed country, having a child is a 6 figures expense over their lifetime, limits your career, holidays, etc. From a selfish point of view, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I don't think it's the only explanation but children are, individually, optional so you can, for selfish reasons, do it or not.
pjc50 · 20h ago
Don't forget that reliable contraception is (with some exceptions) a 20th century invention.
HDThoreaun · 14h ago
> why in the past fertility was so high?
1. No birth control
2. Harder to find scary stories of parents being unhappy without the internet
3. Much less entertainment. Sex and kids are substitutes for other forms of entertainment.
4. Kids are a much larger commitment than they used to be. Having 5+ kids is basically unheard of in my area.
I agree with the paper, declining birth rates is much more about shifting priorities than any economic factors.
krapp · 14h ago
5. Women had fewer rights and culturally far less automony beyond being a wife, mother and caregiver.
nlitened · 21h ago
I’ve seen somewhere an uncomfortable chart which shows that fertility rate is almost perfectly inversely correlated with a single number: average years of women education. Also what’s interesting, allegedly, reducing the average woman education seems to be the only reliable way of growing diminished TFR. Please don’t kill the messenger, I’d love to be shown it’s false.
Couldn’t find any details about this on a quick skim of this paper on my phone.
Also, I think, to many people it’s becoming obvious that increasing birth rates cannot be achieved with measures that make people feel good, unfortunately. It will likely be a tough choice between bad and worse.
missedthecue · 7h ago
This is true, but fiercely denied due to the unpleasant implications. The UN itself used to officially advise that the best way to lower TFRs, out of fear of overpopulation, was through increasing the education of young women.
bflesch · 20h ago
Correlation != Causation
If you keep humans as sex slaves obviously there will be more kids.
With education, women can more realistically assess costs and risks of children, and will hesistate to have children until these risks are addressed (housing, childcare, income, opportunity costs, stable partner).
missedthecue · 7h ago
You just described the way that education causes TFRs to drop, while saying it's not causal.
cubefox · 17h ago
It's the opposite. The more women earn and the higher their career prospects, the higher the opportunity cost of becoming a mother:
Which explains why fertility is inversely correlated with educational attainment.
nlitened · 20h ago
> Correlation != Causation
I agree 100%, and I also like to frame it more productively: strongly correlated A and B mean:
1. either B is caused by A,
2. or A is caused by B,
3. or both A and B are caused by some other common thing C.
↑ this gives more food for thought.
> With education, women can more realistically assess costs and risks of children
I don't remember any of my mostly-technical university's classes touching these topics at all. What kind of education are you talking about, and what does it teach?
bflesch · 19h ago
Edit: I missed part of your sentence, but will keep my reply
You're missing option (4) which is A is caused by C and B is caused by D but C and D are different things..
fjfaase · 21h ago
In high income countries, you have to provide your child with higher education to have a competitive income. Because education is expensive, having more children makes it impossible to give them a good education. On top of that higher education occurs during the period that humans are the most fit. Fitness and fertility rates drop quickly after the age of 30.
mfjordvald · 20h ago
This argument kind of falls apart when you consider Europe has virtually free education and some parts like Scandinavia pay a sizeable stipend to students of higher education.
It might be a contributing factor in some countries, but there's definitely more going on.
fjfaase · 20h ago
In the Netherlands, higher education used to be free and supported with a reasonable stipend, but in the past decades, students have to pay a few thousands of Euro to attend education and the stipend are no longer sufficient to cover costs of living. So, instead of earning an income sufficient to start a family they have to make extra costs for about half of that. If they do not have rich parents that can support them, they have to have jobs (often causing extra delays) or borrow money. Both of the latter causes delays in when they can start a family. I have some colleagues who are not able to buy a house due to the debts they have. Although the interest rates for these debts are low and rules with respect to paying the debs are relaxed, the banks still take them into account when applying for a mortgage.
nradov · 20h ago
Higher education costs are a factor for some couples, but those are far off in the future. Housing and day care costs are larger and more immediate. It's pretty miserable to have children if you're stuck living in a small apartment.
badestrand · 20h ago
As a counter point, education in Germany and other European countries is completely free and people still get less and less children.
fjfaase · 20h ago
That is true and there are also stipend that allow you to cover cost of basic living. But that is not true in all European countries, such as the Netherlands.
There are not many students that raise a family at the same time or earn a income sufficient for supporting a family.
Balgair · 14h ago
I mean, if anything this makes the point. Germany's fertility rate is 1.45 and the Netherlands' is 1.43. There is very little difference despite the change in education policy. So, extrapolating from this very little bit of data, it seems that education policy has a negligible effect on fertility rate.
NalNezumi · 16h ago
This topic pops up on HN a lot so question to people that follow this topic: maybe someone know if there's study or argument about linking "financialization" of economy to fertility rate?
These day we take for granted that we can "save" and "grow" money through investment. Almost everyone does it more or less, through pension saving or simply investing.
Yet this hasn't always been the case for humanity. Take for example: a hunter that just scored big game (deer). He can't possibly eat it all or process it all before it rots. What does he do? He shares it to his tribes men, with the implicit agreement that when they also score, they'll share back. Investing (for future) is favors and personal agreements. In this, raising a child (to become a good hunter, a skill you can share) is included.
These days you can just invest any surplus productivity(wealth) directly in to sophisticated financial markets. The fact that availability of services purchaseable (Healthcare and elderly care) increased, have made the "just invest surplus productivity to your future savings" a better alternative than investing it to a child.
A child today is financially equivalent to a pet. Cost a lot, you can't expect (or force) much in return. It's probably not that "fun" either, for many. (especially in East Asia; so much more fun entertainment than raising a kid!)
I'm in my mid 30s soon and most (college educated) women around me usually struggle with the child or not question but the ones doing financially well often land on "eh I'll just save the money I have to spend on kids on entertainment and pension saving. It will be fine" as a option (the anxious ones freeze their eggs).
As a hypothetical thought scenario: if financial system collapsed (no more pension saving, or money simply growths with investment) would fertility rate go up?
At the basic level, even the idea of growing money to hedge for the deteriorating health at old age doesn't even make sense. In a aging population, the supply (young, working) and demand (old, requiring care) might be so flipped, whatever gain you had will evaporate in price increase. Unless immigration or other unpopular policies.
navane · 8h ago
Interesting. Acoup.blog had an unrelated post about this. How in certain societies where you can't save up capital (because all things worth were perishable goods), windfalls were instead gifted to the near community, creating goodwill for when bad times hit. In a similar way, kids could be windfalls turned into future safety nets, but now has to compete with savings.
Balgair · 14h ago
> At the basic level, even the idea of growing money to hedge for the deteriorating health at old age doesn't even make sense. In a aging population, the supply (young, working) and demand (old, requiring care) might be so flipped, whatever gain you had will evaporate in price increase. Unless immigration or other unpopular policies.
I've been through this with an elderly relative. She had a very good pension that paid for ~$10k/mo memory care for ~7 years before she passed in her 90s. About $850k total over the run at that one facility, very likely over $1M for the whole retirement.
Even with that quality of medical care, we were over there helping her for every little thing. The facility was great, the people were too. But the legal landscape was such that every fall or trip was an ER visit or we had to come over. I get it, but it's exhausting as a non-primary caregiver.
When people say that they'll skip kids and just make a ton of money and that will take care of them when they are enfeebled, I don't think they understand reality. No one, no matter how much you pay them, is going to take care of you when you're blind and have lost your marbles and it's 3am and you can't get up.
Unless they love you. Only love will go through that long sad ordeal and only love is going to give you that 'kind' death. Even then, it's a total mess.
Money is not going to save you or let you exit stage right on your terms. Do not delude yourself into thinking that.
rickydroll · 6h ago
OTOH, my partner has a kid with disabling autism. He will never live alone and cannot survive without some caregiver support for basic needs like shopping for food or handling money. So instead of having children to care for you as you age, you spend the rest of your life caring for a child who will never be independent, and you beat yourself up for not finding the magic something that would have enabled the child to live an independent life.
yea, kids are such a joy
twelvechairs · 21h ago
Its not just high income countries. Fertility rates are similar in a huge range range of other diverse countries (Colombia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey, Iran, etc.).
sajithdilshan · 20h ago
I’m a 35-year-old living in Berlin, and according to government statistics, I fall into the higher earners category. However, having a child here feels completely out of the question for several reasons:
1. Lack of quality healthcare –> I have statutory health insurance and pay a substantial amount for it, yet it often takes weeks to get a doctor’s appointment. I can’t imagine dealing with that level of delay and bureaucracy when a child might need immediate medical attention.
2. Housing crisis –> Finding decent housing in Berlin (or any major German city) is incredibly difficult. Even a small room in a shared apartment costs around €600–700 per month if you’re lucky enough to find one. Securing a reasonably priced apartment suitable for a family could take years.
3. Rising cost of living –> Back in 2018, €50 could cover quite a lot; today it barely pays for a single grocery trip covering just a few days. Adding a child to the equation would make it feel like living paycheck to paycheck.
Many of my friends are also postponing having kids or have decided against it entirely due to financial concerns. In addition, quite a few of my female friends don’t want to have children because of the physical toll pregnancy would take and the loss of freedom it would mean, especially when compared to their male partners. It’s simply not something they’re willing to accept.
NativeBerliner · 20h ago
As a Berliner, have you ever considered that you might be part of the problem causing the housing crisis? The number of Indians and people from the subcontinent living in Berlin and other major cities around the world has exploded in recent years. Couldn't this phenomenon also increase the housing market pressures locals are facing?
sajithdilshan · 17h ago
That very well might be the case. It's not only the South Asians, but also the influx of Ukrainians/Russians after the war have caused the increase in house/rental prices. Uncontrolled migration without the development of houses and other facilities (healthcare, education, etc.) to match the rate of migration has definitely contributed to the overall decline in services and affordability.
FinnLobsien · 21h ago
I think there's a few components.
One is opportunity cost: You simply have more options (especially women), so having children now comes at the cost of many other potential paths whereas it used to be the default.
Housing costs: Most people want to live in a few cities per country and every desirable city I've ever heard of has an affordable housing crisis. When you can barely afford enough space for yourself, how are you going to have a room for a baby, let alone multiple.
cubefox · 17h ago
> One is opportunity cost: You simply have more options (especially women), so having children now comes at the cost of many other potential paths whereas it used to be the default.
Exactly. Traditionally, the man was supposed to be the breadwinner, women weren't expected to have a career, and what would she do all day at home after getting married? Of course she would get a lot of kids.
> Housing costs: Most people want to live in a few cities per country and every desirable city I've ever heard of has an affordable housing crisis. When you can barely afford enough space for yourself, how are you going to have a room for a baby, let alone multiple.
Not sure how strong this effect really is. I'm not aware available housing space having decreased over time.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 13h ago
I am 40 and live in Germany. In my 20s I was too poor to start a family. Now I live with a woman who has no desire to go through pregnancy and become a mother. There are personal reasons for this, and I do understand them. I like children and would like to be a father. But I work full-time, as does my partner. I'm always busy after work: Riding or wrenching on my motorcycle, cycling, personal programming projects, gardening, etc. Yesterday I spent the afternoon cleaning a carburetor and pressing bearings into wheels. I spend the weekends doing sports or visiting friends. Becoming a father would be like a second full-time job.
I saw a homeless man lying on a patch of grass in a dirty sleeping bag on my way to work yesterday. The idea of bringing a child into the world and exposing it to the risk of ending up in a situation like that just makes me sad. We are currently buying a house. If I could have afforded this ten or fifteen years ago, I might have kids now. Looking back, I'd say I've had enough to do with growing up and providing for myself financially. I simply didn't have the capacity to start a family.
A friend of mine has two children. She barely has enough money and is trying to finish her university studies. Another friend is a chief surgeon and earns so well that his children are not a big financial factor for him. He is divorced from the children's mother and has another partner. Another friend is a pastor and has two children. I guess, for him it was always a matter of course to have children. He is now also divorced, so he no longer lives in the picture-book family world that he probably once dreamed of.
The other people around me are grown-up children like me, who for various reasons did not become parents. One friend of mine is a gay man. His sister is a lesbian. Both much to the annoyance of their parents, who would like to be grandparents. A couple at my office in their thirties mainly play computer games after work and have pets instead of children. One of my best friends is a woman who lives with a trans man. They are currently planning to become parents via in-vitro fertilization, which will cost a total of ~20,000 euros. The world is strange and apparently no longer properly calibrated for having children.
I am glad that there is no more social pressure pushing people into parenthood. But that has to be compensated for somehow and I don't see any socio-political willingness to tackle this. Raising children is a service to society! We cannot expect children to grow like grass in an unattended meadow. If society is not committed to guarantee healthy soil and to water the gras properly, then nothing will grow.
627467 · 17h ago
Do most people even care about this question/topic? Maybe that's part of the answer.
Culturally, fertility topic has gone through "we will never be able to feed everyone in the world" to "we should have absolute control over when/how many kids to have" and "I can't afford having kids and keep my lifestyle" and "why kids?"
Even when in economic discussions around labour availability, retirement sustainability, the topic just essentially focuses on migration policy.
Societies have moved towards a group of "empowered individuals" model, leaving behind families as a fundamental unit model
dinfinity · 16h ago
The distress is due to a lack of imagination about how the future could look and reasoning from the world model people are familiar with.
1. "We need kids to make money for us!" — Economic output (not per capita, but just absolutely) is still almost monotonically rising. Whether done by human or artificial labor is irrelevant. The idea that a small, young generation can't economically support aging populations is only true if we let all the capital accumulate in places where it hardly contributes to supporting the population and demand that all of the required resources come from labor.
2. "We need kids to wipe our asses!" — Contentious, but long-term AI and robots will 'take (a lot of) our jobs'; it is a matter of when, not if. There is an incredible disconnect between being afraid for "too few people to do the jobs" and "there won't be any jobs for humans anymore". The idea that we will have too few people to care for the aging population is not compatible with being afraid all white-collar human jobs will disappear.
Changing our societies to work with the impending new reality will require moving past our primitive notions of what is "fair" (unemployed == moocher) and past the ever-frustrating false dichotomy between free-market capitalism and 'communism' (We should introduce a variant of Godwin's law where whenever somebody mentions communism or socialism as the alternative in a discussion on capitalism, their argument is immediately void).
cmitsakis · 20h ago
Although they gave birth to more children before the industrial revolution, most died, so the population was almost constant. If we define "birth rate" as the number of children that survive long enough to have their own children, then I believe birth rate was close to 2 back then. I believe long term the birth rate (according to my definition) always converges to 2 because anything else is not sustainable. Nothing can exponentially increase forever. Maybe the population can exponentially decrease to 0 but it's unlikely because there always be some group that will be willing to have more children for cultural or religious reasons.
hackinthebochs · 20h ago
Social media is the largest single factor in collapsing birthrates. Social media made widely accessible depictions of lifestyles that glorify wealth, travel, living carefree lives. This increased the baseline expectations people have of their own lives. Children are just an impediment to that lifestyle. Social media also massively raises the expectation of the costs of raising kids. It's no longer enough to keep them fed and clothed. A child's existence must be maxxed in terms of attention, simulation, enrichment, etc. Anything less is deemed borderline abusive.
thefz · 20h ago
Not enough people are on social media for it to make an impact.
pjc50 · 20h ago
Facebook claims 3 billion MAU, which is basically half of the world's non-China population. Social media is the major way in which "public opinion" and culture gets formed.
hackinthebochs · 20h ago
Anti-fertility memes arent contained to social media, but are spread widely due to social media. Think small-world network dynamics. We're well past the point of there being a meaningful online/offline distinction (or on/off social media).
jmsflknr · 21h ago
The paper interestingly finds that fertility rates have fallen to historically low levels in virtually all high-income countries due to a fundamental reordering of adult priorities rather than economic factors.
zx8080 · 21h ago
> due to a fundamental reordering of adult priorities rather than economic factors.
Insurance companies vs children won 1:0, for the support in old age.
viraptor · 21h ago
That implies adult priorities are independent of economic factors. Which is rather weird - many lives would be so different if they involved less future worries and fight for survival.
YuukiRey · 20h ago
I don't think that's the implication.
So far I've only skimmed the paper, but here's an interesting quote:
> Among respondents of a 2018 survey conducted for the New York Times, the desire to “have more leisure time” is offered as the leading reason for not having children among adults who...
If your assumption is that economic reasons cause the decline in fertility rates, it's tempting (and natural!) to view every alternative explanation in the context of economics. In other words: all alternative explanations are symptoms of economic problems, so the root cause remains money.
But quotes like this can also be interpreted as people changing their priorities regardless of income and worries about housing. Maybe, freed of traditional role models, people would rather watch Netflix all day long in their single person household.
brazzy · 21h ago
Fact is, people in the past had far more worries and were fighting for survival much harder than the average person in rich countries today - and still had far more children.
viraptor · 20h ago
It depends on how much in the past. Pre birth control? Pre retirement funds? Pre free hospitals? That all impacts things.
brazzy · 20h ago
Absolutely, yes. There's lots of factors, and any answer that just says "Because this one reason obviously", without giving arguments and statistics showing why it's that and not something else, is worthless.
It's pretty clearly not simply household income vs. cost of living, though, the data just doesn't support it.
chongli · 21h ago
It’s called sour grapes or more charitably: people adjust their expectations according to their opportunities. It’s entirely rational to cease wanting what you cannot have.
Saline9515 · 20h ago
The reason for the fertility decline is particularly difficult to get approach. Our rational mind wants to find a single unifying theory to explain why it is happening, but reality is likely more complex.
There isn't a single reason why people have fewer children. Each society experiences challenges, such as housing, which bear some similarities but differ a lot in practice, so it's easy to find counter-examples if you're looking for a single-factor explanation.
The article cites "changing norms", which reflects the broad social evolution happening—even rather conservative societies such as Iran or North Korea[1] have a below-replacement TFR! My pet theory is that this change is accelerated by the wide adoption of smartphones, which tend to “flatten” cultures toward global, westernized norms. It even happened in North Korea, which led the country to take radical, Orwellian measures[2].
Women's education and smartphone proliferation are the only universal links I have found. In Iran, over 60% of university students are women, and it's even higher in science degrees.
richardw · 20h ago
Housing costs, cost of education for yourself and kids, needing to work and study longer to provide more. More women want careers longer.
Basically we compete more until everything costs more. Now we need multiple salaries because everyone we’re competing against is a highly paid couple. Rinse and repeat so everything of value is too expensive for “average people”.
energy123 · 20h ago
As our economies have become more productive, non-scarce goods like electronics have become cheaper. But that wealth creation gets put into scarce store of value assets like housing. Special tax treatment and government protection, and a culture of house investment, add fuel to the fire. Regulations that prevent private supply, and a lack of will to build public housing, is more fuel on the fire. In the late-stage of the cycle, a majority of the electorate is staked in this perverse system, creating the fait accompli where democratically elected politicians are bound by the voter to perpetuate the pathology, soon they will resort to populist solutions like rent control which will increase house prices even more. Within a democratic context there is no clear mechanism that will cause us to change course.
vodou · 21h ago
Whatever the reasons are, decent countries should not fall for the temptation to launch embarrassing campaigns to rise the fertility rate. That is what totalitarian countries do. And all these campaigns seem to fail anyway. Sure, low fertility rates (if they prevails) will cause disturbances on society, but then societies must adapt.
v5v3 · 20h ago
>should not fall for the temptation to launch embarrassing campaigns to rise the fertility rate.
Entire generations of women have been told that it is ok to delay having children into late 30s and early 40s.
The science clearly shows that both fertility rate and increase of an unhealthy baby increase with age.
There should be 'embarassing campaigns' to revert this.
pjc50 · 20h ago
Entire generations of women have been told that it's not OK to have children unless you're in a stable relationship and can afford them, which requires waiting.
Are you really going to run the "we need more eighteen year olds to be welfare mothers" campaign?
v5v3 · 20h ago
Not 18, obviously.
But ideally a woman should be having a first child before 30 so a second and possibly 3rd in early 30s.
A large percentage of marriages end in divorce. Stability is statistically an illusion.
ben_w · 19h ago
> Not 18, obviously.
Why "obviously"? If they're not old enough to start families, why is the age of consent that low in many places?
(When I was 16 and living in the UK, it was 16, but back then so too was the age of the end of mandatory schooling).
v5v3 · 14h ago
Generally speaking, the more life experience you have, the better a parent you would be.
At 18 most people will have just come out of a regimented education system, never had to pay bills etc
ben_w · 13h ago
Humans are unusual: we live long enough to be grandparents. It is suspected that this is because we evolved for them to be an important part of raising the next generation.
Working with the grain on this rather than against it, it wouldn't matter that new parents were kinda noobs at adult life, so long as they were actually adults.
v5v3 · 13h ago
Yes, I read that some scientists believe that the reason women go through menopause and can longer have kids, and also lose their ability to attract male attention (relative to younger) is so they can focus on grand kids
The problem is that human being used to live in family clans, and the western state institutions deliberately pushed the nuclear family as family clans were powerful.
And then as cities became popular for jobs, kids moved away from family.
And presently the parents buy a house and raise kids, but with ever increasing house prices and gentrification many can't afford to then live down the street from their parents.
surgical_fire · 18h ago
Me and the wife had our only child past the age of 40. Only then our finances were in order that we could properly raise a child, to our own acceptable definition of "properly".
Life sucks in the best of times. I was not going to bring a human to the world so she would suffer, replacement levels be damned.
If I was unable to give my daughter a comfortable life, I would rather have no child.
I think many people would agree with this sentiment. If we want more people to have children in early adulthood, we need a major social upheaval so that people can achieve financial stability earlier in life.
Most people that seem overly concerned with fertility and population replacement, also happen to consistently vote against any policy that could nudge things in a direction where people would be able to achieve financial stability earlier in life.
My answer to that is a vague shrug.
v5v3 · 14h ago
Many people don't understand kids.
Kids don't care about a comfortable life, as long as they are loved and supported.
I've worked with Devs in the west who came from tiny rural villages in India, and with love and support got into the leading universities in India and did well.
Lots of middle class western kids get screwed up, despite 'having everything'.
Money, a bedroom not shared with a sibling and so on do not matter to a child.
surgical_fire · 12h ago
> Kids don't care about a comfortable life, as long as they are loved and supported.
It's a lot more difficult to give love and support when you can get evicted for not paying rent.
v5v3 · 5h ago
In most western countries, parents with kids will always be housed with no risk of being on the streets.
mr90210 · 20h ago
How is Japan adapting?
M95D · 18h ago
Quote from the PDF:
> estimates suggest that individuals in their early 20s who receive access to housing credit would have twice the completed fertility relative to those who do not obtain that credit until their early 30s.
Al-Khwarizmi · 20h ago
I mostly only have anecdata, but I don't agree that the main reason are "priority changes". My son's classroom is full of parents that wanted to have two or three children but stuck with one due to already having a very hard time to achieve work–family balance with one (in fact, we are in that set). The desire to have more children is still there, but unfulfilled. There are many polls about this, see for example https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-want-more-kids-why... for the US (figure "How many kids Americans have vs. how many they think are ideal"). In my country, Spain, polls about this give very similar results, most people want 2 or even 3 kids and end up not having them.
Really rich people, on the other hand, very often have 3+ kids (as poor people do, but for different reasons). In the US, Bill Gates has 3, Bezos has 4, Zuckerberg has 3, Musk, well, I've lost count :)
The thing is that, of course, typical measures like giving some small economic aid to parents, slight improvements of a few weeks in maternity/paternity leave, etc., which are the kind of things the article focuses on, just don't move the needle. This is hardly surprising. None of those things significantly improve work-family balance. Much more radical measures would be needed, like multi-year maternal/paternal leaves with measures to guarantee that there is no or small impact on career, or a significant reduction of standard full-time working hours to, say, 30 or so a week (be it for parents or for everyone). But for all the talk about fertility being a problem that needs fixing, no country seems to be willing to do anything even remotely close to that.
Note that the measures I'm proposing are focusing on time, not money, because time is really the limiting resource for raising a child in a high-income country. Of course, with money you can buy time (daycare, caregivers, etc.) - so I'm sure things like massive building of public housing to bring down prices can also help. But it should be more efficient to focus directly on time - and more fulfilling for the parents to actually, well, have time to raise the kids themselves.
Saline9515 · 20h ago
Tech billionaires are a cultural and economic subset that is so specific that it's difficult to even use to talk about "rich people." They have little in common with the average affluent earner bringing home $300k+ in the US, often sacrificing their private lives on the way.
Yes, if they could erase any material difficulty, most people would like to have 3 children. However, they can't, and the "priority change" means people arbitrage more in favor of enjoying the leisure of a child-free life over the hardship (and rewards) of parenting.
Al-Khwarizmi · 19h ago
I'm not saying the system should erase any material difficulty, but surely if it was possible for a couple in the 60s to cover standard expenses with one income, it should be viable now to cover standard expenses without the couple working 80 hours/week in total. If you reduce those 80 to 60, let alone 40, the hardship you mention would be much milder.
Parents of past generations just didn't have the same hardships. Juggling work and family life was easier back then.
thefz · 20h ago
One day I will understand the causes behind the fixation of HN (and other social media sites) with fertility. However I am not sure I want to.
missedthecue · 7h ago
It takes about 10 minutes of middle school math to think through the rather catastrophic consequences and their second and third order effects. The consequences will literally be worse for civilization than the worst IPCC projections of climate change, and arrive much sooner! I'm honestly shocked we talk about anything else.
bdangubic · 7h ago
I'm honestly shocked we talk about anything else.
It is 2025, we only talk about what people that are in control of our lives (politicians) decide we should talk about. this is why at thanksgiving and christmas dinners we all talk more about two transgender teenage athletes (in a country of 350m people) than IPCC projections or anything else that matters for future generations :)
hackinthebochs · 20h ago
Birthrate collapse precedes societal collapse. Everyone should be concerned about it.
No comments yet
pjc50 · 20h ago
It's right-wingers obsessed with "replacement" memes, combined with the usual doomerism.
thefz · 18h ago
Yeah.
And generally obsessed with what women do with their reproductive organs
Saline9515 · 20h ago
Left-wingers use depopulation to justify an increase in immigration[1]. Both sides talk about this, this isn't just an obsession.
The high income countries can continue to attract an endless supply of pre-manufactured labour resources from lower income countries, so are not manufacturing it at home.
dvh · 21h ago
I think it's hundreds of different reasons that eventually stem from one. Urbanization.
maxglute · 20h ago
My wild speculation is that TFR is more correlated to simply not being bored, i.e. internet pentration. Cursory LLM wank shows strong & tight correlation. Even more than income. Academically I know strongest correlation is suppose to be female education levels, but women with < middle school, or high school education in developed/OECD countries still have TFR mostly >2. VS women from developing countries, who still manage secondary still hover around 4. Maybe religion? Then you have very religious and wealthy MENA countries with access to basically cheap labour and TFR still crashing below replacement. Unless ultra religious, i.e. some jewish cohorts.
Other point is seems like pro natalist policies will only get you so far... certainly not 2.1 replacement TFR. Note every 0.1 in TFR is about 5% missing birth for stablized population. Pronatalist policies seems to icnrease TFR by 0.1-0.3, usually settle at 1.6-1.7, i.e. still down 20% net bodies. My unpleasant conclusion is positive policies not enough, need very punitive policies, i.e. high income/wealth transfer tax to really incentivize natavist replacement TFR. AKA historic incentive - if you don't have lots of kids you die poor and uncared for. All the cheap housing, free daycares, xyz subsidies is not enough. % of population will have a shit time raising their first kid and decide 1 is good enough.
Or you know... immigration, which of course going forward means disproportionately brown and black skin. Queue Family guy skin color chart meme.
mrjay42 · 17h ago
Just came here to say:
I've started to read the paper (thanks to the downloadable PDF, the web version is not accessible apparently for me)
Starting at page 8 (total) or page 6 (as written in the footer), there's horrible graphs, even if you zoom in, they're all blurry and partially unreadable
I'm legit surprised we let research articles be published with poorly designed graphs using poor definition/resolution :')
#justRanting
mrjay42 · 17h ago
Ok, I'm replying to my own comment to keep ranting
I was scrolling through the paper...and at page 24 (total) or 22 (footer) -> there's another graph.
I CHALLENGE anyone with a human brain to understand that graph
My initial comment WASN'T in that mood, but now I am gonna say it: this hasn't been peer reviewed.
There's NO WAY an article with such graphs passes peer reviewing.
dr_dshiv · 20h ago
The thought of having kids is frankly terrifying. (It was for me!) I think most responsible people wait until they are “ready.”
But, despite advances in fertility science, it can be truly challenging to have kids in your 40s.
graycat · 20h ago
One case: VERY much, FULLY, wanted home and family with love and emotional and financial security.
Tried. Never could. The reason:
ECONOMIC!!!!! For higher education and jobs, had to keep moving, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, NY. The moving was EXPENSIVE in all of time, money, effort. Couldn't put down roots.
Worst part: NEVER could make money enough for a house, so always RENTED, which, long term, is a financial disaster.
Due to the financial stresses, my wife, back with her mother on her childhood farm home, killed herself.
For me, the sheriff came with several assistants and guns and dragged from my rented house all my belongings and left them on the grass. Lost my large professional library -- math, physics, computing -- piano, furniture, clothes, etc.
The shame and humiliation -- my brother's family, with 4 houses, made a place for me.
Looking back, the families that owned nice houses or even just one house, ALL were founders and owners of small-medium BUSINESSES and were NOT "employees". They were financially able to have children and DID.
Education? Wife was Valedictorian and then PBK, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, and Ph.D. My Ph.D., applied math and computing. These educations took time and money and made us welcome only as university research professors, and the ones I knew who had a house and children (darned few children) were all poorly paid and had other income, e.g., one was in the USAF, got a Ph.D., retired, became a professor.
Net, the US had kids from 1940 to 1960, and after that kept losing to the present where, literally, the birth rate is so low we are going extinct. Why? For good family formation, the US is a big LOSER.
Why? The US economy moved from farms to cities. The city business owners did well, but their employees didn't. So, e.g., Dad grew up in a small, country town. His father ran the general store, and his step father ran the feed and grain mill. They did well financially. Nearly everyone else in the area was a FARMER living on a FARM or working for farmers, e.g., a blacksmith, carpenter, etc. Once we visited, and I saw cows being milked and hay being loaded into the hayloft. Dad's family supported him well in college. After college, he got a job as an employee and never again did nearly so well. Wife's father? Farmer but on the side head of the local REMC (rural electric membership cooperative). Families broke up and scattered
Am still good at math and computing, so doing a startup: Hopefully from my work the children in my brother's family will have plenty of money for a good, private, college, good marriages, nice houses, close enough to keep the family together. But I don't know what they will do to be successful financially on their own.
So far it looks like in the US we need to have the population shrink by 50-75%, have people leave the big cities, have plenty of farm land per person, and live on farms, rely on the Internet and small businesses with much of the needed production automated and with the physical distribution and retailing as in Amazon.
rapsey · 21h ago
In a developed country the cost in terms of time, effort and money for a child is much higher. The modern world is simply incompatible for large families. Having more than 2 children means driving a giant car and it means a crazy amount of time and planning around after school activities in addition to needing to be up to date with their school activities.
I have 2 and I already spend most afternoons driving/picking them up from sports, If I had 3 it would literally be every day including weekends.
drivingmenuts · 6h ago
For years, scientists have said we're either overpopulated or headed to overpopulation. Now, economists are saying we're not going to have enough population. Either way, if we could get the scientists and the economists to settle this once and for all, some of us would be really … well, not grateful, but happy for the peace and quiet for a bit.
(Really, I suspect that both sides think there's not going to be enough rich, white people to make more slightly-less rich white people - but I'm a cynic).
Balgair · 13h ago
Lots of hot takes here in the comments. I think that reading the paper is more informative than just reading these comments (something I am often guilty of).
My thoughts on the paper:
These are economists, not demographers or social workers. Their tools are crude for this task and they acknowledge that many times in the article.
Honestly, the abstract is well written and covers a lot of what other HNers are saying here. But I'll just quote it again anyways:
"We review existing research and conclude that period-based explanations
focused on short-term changes in income or prices cannot explain the widespread decline. Instead,
the evidence points to a broad reordering of adult priorities with parenthood occupying a
diminished role. We refer to this phenomenon as “shifting priorities” and propose that it likely
reflects a complex mix of changing norms, evolving economic opportunities and constraints, and
broader social and cultural forces. We review emerging evidence on all these factors. We conclude
the paper with suggestions for future research and a brief discussion of policy implications."
These policy implications are at the very end of the paper and don't really amount to much:
"That said, we do have a better understanding of the kinds of policies that could make a
difference. Policies that encourage births today may simply lead to a retiming of births, resulting
in a short-term increase in births but no lasting effect on population trends. To be effective at
boosting completed fertility, policies must influence the decisions women make early in their
reproductive lives. Interventions targeting women well into their childbearing years are less
likely to have large effects, as many life choices will have already been made. This may explain
why past empirical studies often fail to find large effects of pro-natalist policies. Our review of
the evidence also suggests that incremental policy changes or interventions are unlikely to have
sizable effects, and boosting fertility will likely require much larger changes that alter the
lifetime calculation to have and raise a child or multiple children given prevailing options,
constraints, and social norms. "
What I think this paper adds to the pro-natalist discussion is that, yes, this is a really hard question with no easy answers or fixes. If it is a recipe that we must follow to get a higher birthrate, then it is not stir-fry but rather lobster thermidor. The one thing that we can say is that delaying childbirth is likely to be bad for fertility. But there are little resources for how to address that.
Good paper overall and well worth the read if you are into this pro-natalist stuff. Not a lot of new data, but a great summary of the economist viewpoint of the problem and it's tenacity.
tuatoru · 13h ago
> To be effective at boosting completed fertility, policies must influence the decisions women make early in their reproductive lives. Interventions targeting women well into their childbearing years are less likely to have large effects, as many life choices will have already been made.
That implies offering child subsidies only to people in their twenties.
Imagine the outrage.
Balgair · 9h ago
In some of the pro-natal online discourse there is an idea to mortgage the future earnings of children against current childless people. I think I have that right but, honestly, it's a bit confusing of an idea to me. I think these people are saying that we should get banks to give people money now to have kids, contingent upon the banks getting a percentage of the earnings of any resultant children.
Like, such ideas are wildly crazy, clearly. But that seems to be where the discourse is right now in the pro-natalism sphere.
They're looking for just about anything to get fertility rates to change. I've seen ideas float around about Mongolia and how they give mothers special parking permits and feathered caps (?) and how that's responsible for their birthrate anomalies.
The whole scene is just deliciously strange in the way that 1990's UFO boards were too.
What seems to me to be happening is that fertility in humans has a pretty steep fall off. We've attacked some of that with technology like IVF. But it's still very hard to have a healthy baby at higher ages. Like, miscarriages are really traumatic and you're going to get a bigger chance at them as you try when you're older. So it's not just biochem, it's mental too.
However, at the same time, we've increased the life expectancy by a lot, and we're set to do so even more this century. Now, a bit of a jag here. There's this thing called the marriage problem in mathematics. You can only court serially and the number of courtiers is fixed and you can't go back and court people again. So, how do you choose to stop and who with? You might have passed by the best spouse and then be left with a dud. The mathematically best solution is to court the first 37.8% of the courtiers and then marry the next person that beats the ones you've courted. (Look, I know I'm butchering this).
Anyway, my point is that as life expectancy is growing, you get to this point where when it comes to spouses and jobs and cities and all the big stuff in life, that 38.7% of the time you've got to 'calibrate' yourself, that point goes past your fertility window. People are trying to figure themselves out, and since that takes so long now, that point of being mentally 'settled' is past when you can have kids easily.
I'm not really sure we can fix that either. Family is central to being human, we're a social animal. So I think technology is really the only key here.
hereaiham · 14h ago
Because people are getting poorer. Simple, you don't need a paper.
socalgal2 · 20h ago
Summary from ChatGPT
1. Fewer people ever have kids. In every rich country the share of women who remain childless at age 45 is climbing, and it is rising at all intermediate ages as well. This is not just postponement.
2. Total family size is shrinking. Even among parents, second- and third-birth rates are trending down, so completed fertility is falling toward or below 1.5 children per woman in most of the OECD.
3. Short-run economics don’t add up. Recessions, housing booms, or pandemic shocks temporarily nudge annual births, but they neither align in timing nor in magnitude with the long-run fall.
4. Money helps, but only a little. Large cash allowances or cheap housing can raise births, yet estimates show gains of only a few hundredths of a child per woman—far from the 0.5–0.7 needed to reach replacement fertility.
5. Attitudes have flipped. Surveys across Europe, North America, and East Asia reveal a marked decline in the share of young adults who view marriage and children as central life goals; career, leisure, and personal autonomy score higher.
TL:DR; it’s culture. People don’t want kids anymore. It is not housing costs, lack of support, etc…
incomingpain · 18h ago
Economics is a scapegoat for liberal policies that have backfired.
We simultaneously have the 'paradox of female unhappiness' that isnt a paradox at all; and male loneliness epidemic.
Pretty hard to have babies when men are lonely and women are unhappy.
cubefox · 20h ago
I think it's mainly about our modern gender roles and expectations, where both partners tend to work and earn a similar amount. With traditional gender norms, the husband was expected to be the main breadwinner, while the wife wouldn't earn much. So her subjective opportunity cost of quitting her job, staying at home and having children was quite low.
Not saying that one is better than the other, just that this seems the most plausible explanation I've heard so far.
anthk · 20h ago
Poor people used to have kids as a free work force and free elder support too. Pure selfishness. Today in Spain you are required to take care of your elder parents by law. Oh, back in the day often a third of the children died before reaching age 3 under very recently relatively speaking.
So, that's it. Conservatives love to bitch out about family duties, because once you are a slave of your elder relatives ON TOP of your children caring, you will never succeed against rich people.
Dear Brits and Germans, think twice before settling down a family there because of an easy retirement.
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LAC-Tech · 21h ago
It's a bit of a meme at this point, isn't it?
Middle income countries like China have low fertility.
Lower-middle income countries like India are around replacement level (I think officially it's lower than replacement but lot of births are "unofficial").
West African fertility rates are high... but A LOT lower than they were 50 years ago, and still trending downwards.
Whatever the reason, it's happening everywhere.
viraptor · 21h ago
For West Africa and many other places, the reason looks like this: (dramatically falling child mortality)
Not enough to offset the declining fertility rate though.
viraptor · 20h ago
Add the mortality and disabilities later on. Overall I mean that once you don't have to have 4+ kids to assure at least 1 can take care of you later in life, that is great for lowering fertility rates.
PicassoCTs · 21h ago
Because we have a "No-Future"-ideology in the cultural lead - and no story lined up we wont to tell on, no societal level projects.
miningape · 21h ago
I wonder if decades of fear mongering about birthrates might have something to do with it?
isodev · 21h ago
I still don't understand why we see lower birth rates as a problem when overall the population of the planet is still increasing. There are actual and a lot more impactful sustainability issues to address but how many children people are having is absolutely not one of them.
miningape · 13h ago
> I still don't understand why we see lower birth rates as a problem when overall the population of the planet is still increasing
This is like saying "I still don't see why gravity is a problem when the overall height of the ball is still increasing."
The problem isn't today, it's tomorrow - after the large population starts dying off and the population starts shrinking. People don't live forever.
mathverse · 21h ago
Because elderly voting for social policies that basically make living in such country a nigthmare. It's one of the reasons why a lot of Eastern European countries are stuck and not evolving (economically and culturally speaking).
> Underpinning these policies is an assumption that poorer women are more likely to respond to incentives to have more children. Indeed, their fertility rates do seem more elastic than those of professional women. Whereas the fertility rates of older, college-educated women have remained fairly steady over the past six decades, most of the collapse in fertility in America and Britain since 1980 stems from younger and poorer women having fewer children, particularly from unplanned pregnancies.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/19/why-magas-pro-n...
Just like with many of these topics, most sources seem to contradict each other.
Yes. Let's be clear, public opinion hates young mothers having unplanned pregnancies, because then the support cost falls on someone else, so this is a win of decades of policy.
(under-mentioned factor: people are very, very judgy about the parenting of others, a traditional problem which has been made worse by social media, so when faced with the choice of a lot of hassle for sub-perfect parenting a lot of women simply opt not to)
2) Just throwing kids out used to be perfectly acceptable. They'd go to school, then play in the street or park and weren't welcome home until it was time for dinner. After dinner? Bedtime with maybe 20-30 minutes of time with parents.
That is how things worked. 100 years ago in most places, and that's how it still works in places with high fertility.
Now societies (not just America) have collectively decided kids are like pets. You want one? You take care of them and you pay for them. And we'll just magically make up the ever-larger shortage of people with immigration, while complaining ever more about how evil and negative immigration is.
I don’t know what happened but we’ve started treating children like they are made out of glass and it doesn’t feel really like the threat landscape is any different.
I used to walk from school and play outside until dark every day and everyone else was exactly the same.
For what time period in what country?
Which says a lot more about the pay of low-end "female" jobs in the past than it does about child allowance, which has always been pretty niggardly.
The two main key findings are:
Women from disadvantaged backgrounds and lower early achievement levels experience a more significant fertility-decreasing effect from college education.
And the effects of college on fertility attenuate as the likelihood of college attendance and completion increases.
But I have to say, that it rely on data from 1979, that is nearly 50 years old.
However, there are many studies that back up the claim that 'higher education levels are associated with lower birth rates.' The key findings of the linked study here close the gap between the poor and the educated in my opinion.
Personally, I prefer to follow this theory because life style means that no partner is needed to have children, and that having children is not a problem even at an age over 40. Of course, both are only possible if you are really rich and they are the other extreme of the spectrum. But in my opinion, this is what life style means.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3449224/
Anyway, they say it's not just economics already in the abstract: > We refer to this phenomenon as “shifting priorities” and propose that it likely reflects a complex mix of changing norms, evolving economic opportunities and constraints, and broader social and cultural forces.
Which are values 'sold' to them via the media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/oc_...
- Many urban areas have even worse shortages of family housing. Availability of 2+ bedroom apartments is even worse than studios and 1-bedrooms. Many new multi family buildings have plenty of low-income units but no family units.
- Car seat laws are well intentioned but make it very annoying to transport children in car-dependent areas unless parents use their own car for everything.
- Childcare and education prices are very high. Of course, part of this cost is the cost of living of educators.
- Many industries are geared toward people with few or no children. Hotel rooms with capacity for more than two children are unusual, and most travel sites barely understand the idea of searching for such rooms. Even rooms with comfortable capacity for two children are a bit unusual — the common two-queen-bed configuration requires that kids share a bed.
One kid was doable for us. Two kids really stretched things and basically destroyed our savings (2 kids both costing £1k a month in nursery fees was not sustainable). A third kid would have meant either moving to a much cheaper house or some other significant financial compromise.
The preceding section does mention studies that show a cause and effect relationship between e.g., income and fertility, but the effect is surprisingly small. The authors conclude the section with:
> “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/e1jrvw/com...
So it’s not as simple as housing is not affordable… it does feel like it’s very much cultural/social I can more than afford to have children but I’m at almost 40 and I don’t. And speaking from the pool of a rented villa in Greece I got on whim for 2 weeks because I got annoyed at work I can’t even begin to think about having them…
That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
Back then it was probable that most children would just die before reaching maturity, and most humans would not live much past their early adulthood. Life was fulfilled by the most basic subsistence, and that was all.
I don't think most humans nowadays, be them rich or poor, would want to live in such an environment.
Am I soft because I enjoy playing videogames or watching a movie after my daughter is sound asleep in her girl's bedroom in a house with proper heating? Probably. I still wouldn't want to team up with my neighbor to go into the wilderness to hunt a boar while the wife and daughter freeze in a mud hut.
> That suggests it is still a priorities question - people would much prefer to embrace the luxury and comforts of the modern world and work to maximise them rather than starting a family.
When given a choice, people enjoy some mild comfort. Oh the horror.
Unless you're proposing mass de-urbanization and rolling back 100+ years of societal evolution it's practically just not all that relevant that this worked fine in an earlier era and humans could hypothetically just go back to slumming it medieval style.
> It isn't the lack of a house that is causing the drop in fertility
Find some 20 somethings in a major 1st world metro and ask them.
Which brings us neatly back to dropping fertility is driven by the divergence between salary and cost of housing. Bunch of young people looking at their budget and concluding society has made it impossible for them to provide said good life to a potential offspring
Being unable to afford a home isn't the major factor here, that has pretty much always been a factor. It is standards, priorities and options changing.
Have 12 children in homelessness and prove to us that it is a better way to live life.
If you want it for others but not for yourself, you are just being hypocritical.
> this is the point where I point out homelessness was the normal standard of living for most of humanities evolutionary history.
Oh wait, that was you.
If you think it is acceptable to be homeless with plenty of children because evolution, you should do it yourself. Be the change you want to see.
Since I have little interest in keeping up this cycle with someone that is incidentally (or worse, purposefully) too dense to understand basic contradictions, I'll leave you to have the last word.
Have a wonderful weekend.
1) I never said that it was acceptable to be homeless with lots of children. (1a) You've tried and failed to find a quote where I did, so I know you've read what I wrote and can't source that belief to anything I actually said; even stripped of context.
2) Misreading a comment is something that happens, so y'know, ok no worries maybe I wrote an unclear one. But I've explicitly told you I don't believe that. And it is a crazy belief that nobody holds so I don't know why it would be a hard thing to accept after a few clarifying words.
3) Third time a charm. In the article we've got a 100-word abstract that lays the position out nice and clearly. The major factor here is not house prices, it is changing - shifting if you will - priorities. We've had situations where house prices were absurdly high in the past - for most of our evolutionary history a house has been an unattainable luxury and fertility was off the charts by modern standards. High house prices are obviously not a root cause.
Also, ffs, it's called resource crunch and wealth centralization, and I'm not entirely convinced we aren't staring down the smoldering barrel of some serious shit Stateside over the next decade.
The population density at the time was much, much, much lower than it is now.
They looked at economic influence and found it does not account for the drop in child birth
Leaving home early is deeply ingrained in Anglo culture.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
The war on affordable housing is probably going to continue in the west until there is some kind of systemic break (war, societal collapse, rise of a "caesar", etc). There is simply too much wealth riding on it and too much wealth feeding political corruption for any kind of sudden trend reversal.
This is only mentioned briefly in the 'infertility' subsection, and then only attributed to age, with mention of IVF as a mitigating factor.
However, there is evidence that, due to a variety of factors, there is a steady but persistent decline in sperm count globally, and that this had a sizable impact on birth rates/fertility.
https://rbej.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12958-023-0... "Infertility affects one in every six couples in developed countries, and approximately 50% is of male origin."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-...
TLDR: It's complicated, but the science seems to be decidedly up in the air. We don't actually know if sperm counts are declining, let alone the cause.
I think his approach is characterised well by the following section: "1. Yes, okay, that line is pointing very slightly down, and apparently this is statistically significant.
2. But also, the data are very noisy. Some studies from 2005 show higher sperm counts than most studies from the 1970s. The biggest pre-1980 study shows sperm counts very similar to today’s."
The style of language "yes, okay" and "apparently" soften the position of statistical significance and the counterpoint is vague and dated. Again, there seems to be a bias towards claiming "we just don't know", whereas the data show that there is a statistical trend.
I am not saying that I take any single paper as gospel, but the general conclusion he comes to: 'let's wait 20 years and see what happens", feels like a call to inaction, which can be risky.
Also, for a meta-analysis, the article is not very well-referenced and doesn't seem all that broad. Having done a couple of these myself, I would have expected some kind of summary of the number and size of studies pointing to each/no conclusion. This shortcoming makes it easier to come to his stated conclusion that 'we just don't know'.
But nowadays? why would you have a child? for a middle class+ family in a developed country, having a child is a 6 figures expense over their lifetime, limits your career, holidays, etc. From a selfish point of view, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I don't think it's the only explanation but children are, individually, optional so you can, for selfish reasons, do it or not.
1. No birth control
2. Harder to find scary stories of parents being unhappy without the internet
3. Much less entertainment. Sex and kids are substitutes for other forms of entertainment.
4. Kids are a much larger commitment than they used to be. Having 5+ kids is basically unheard of in my area.
I agree with the paper, declining birth rates is much more about shifting priorities than any economic factors.
Couldn’t find any details about this on a quick skim of this paper on my phone.
Also, I think, to many people it’s becoming obvious that increasing birth rates cannot be achieved with measures that make people feel good, unfortunately. It will likely be a tough choice between bad and worse.
If you keep humans as sex slaves obviously there will be more kids.
With education, women can more realistically assess costs and risks of children, and will hesistate to have children until these risks are addressed (housing, childcare, income, opportunity costs, stable partner).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Which explains why fertility is inversely correlated with educational attainment.
I agree 100%, and I also like to frame it more productively: strongly correlated A and B mean:
1. either B is caused by A,
2. or A is caused by B,
3. or both A and B are caused by some other common thing C.
↑ this gives more food for thought.
> With education, women can more realistically assess costs and risks of children
I don't remember any of my mostly-technical university's classes touching these topics at all. What kind of education are you talking about, and what does it teach?
You're missing option (4) which is A is caused by C and B is caused by D but C and D are different things..
It might be a contributing factor in some countries, but there's definitely more going on.
There are not many students that raise a family at the same time or earn a income sufficient for supporting a family.
These day we take for granted that we can "save" and "grow" money through investment. Almost everyone does it more or less, through pension saving or simply investing.
Yet this hasn't always been the case for humanity. Take for example: a hunter that just scored big game (deer). He can't possibly eat it all or process it all before it rots. What does he do? He shares it to his tribes men, with the implicit agreement that when they also score, they'll share back. Investing (for future) is favors and personal agreements. In this, raising a child (to become a good hunter, a skill you can share) is included.
These days you can just invest any surplus productivity(wealth) directly in to sophisticated financial markets. The fact that availability of services purchaseable (Healthcare and elderly care) increased, have made the "just invest surplus productivity to your future savings" a better alternative than investing it to a child.
A child today is financially equivalent to a pet. Cost a lot, you can't expect (or force) much in return. It's probably not that "fun" either, for many. (especially in East Asia; so much more fun entertainment than raising a kid!)
I'm in my mid 30s soon and most (college educated) women around me usually struggle with the child or not question but the ones doing financially well often land on "eh I'll just save the money I have to spend on kids on entertainment and pension saving. It will be fine" as a option (the anxious ones freeze their eggs).
As a hypothetical thought scenario: if financial system collapsed (no more pension saving, or money simply growths with investment) would fertility rate go up?
At the basic level, even the idea of growing money to hedge for the deteriorating health at old age doesn't even make sense. In a aging population, the supply (young, working) and demand (old, requiring care) might be so flipped, whatever gain you had will evaporate in price increase. Unless immigration or other unpopular policies.
I've been through this with an elderly relative. She had a very good pension that paid for ~$10k/mo memory care for ~7 years before she passed in her 90s. About $850k total over the run at that one facility, very likely over $1M for the whole retirement.
Even with that quality of medical care, we were over there helping her for every little thing. The facility was great, the people were too. But the legal landscape was such that every fall or trip was an ER visit or we had to come over. I get it, but it's exhausting as a non-primary caregiver.
When people say that they'll skip kids and just make a ton of money and that will take care of them when they are enfeebled, I don't think they understand reality. No one, no matter how much you pay them, is going to take care of you when you're blind and have lost your marbles and it's 3am and you can't get up.
Unless they love you. Only love will go through that long sad ordeal and only love is going to give you that 'kind' death. Even then, it's a total mess.
Money is not going to save you or let you exit stage right on your terms. Do not delude yourself into thinking that.
yea, kids are such a joy
1. Lack of quality healthcare –> I have statutory health insurance and pay a substantial amount for it, yet it often takes weeks to get a doctor’s appointment. I can’t imagine dealing with that level of delay and bureaucracy when a child might need immediate medical attention.
2. Housing crisis –> Finding decent housing in Berlin (or any major German city) is incredibly difficult. Even a small room in a shared apartment costs around €600–700 per month if you’re lucky enough to find one. Securing a reasonably priced apartment suitable for a family could take years.
3. Rising cost of living –> Back in 2018, €50 could cover quite a lot; today it barely pays for a single grocery trip covering just a few days. Adding a child to the equation would make it feel like living paycheck to paycheck.
Many of my friends are also postponing having kids or have decided against it entirely due to financial concerns. In addition, quite a few of my female friends don’t want to have children because of the physical toll pregnancy would take and the loss of freedom it would mean, especially when compared to their male partners. It’s simply not something they’re willing to accept.
One is opportunity cost: You simply have more options (especially women), so having children now comes at the cost of many other potential paths whereas it used to be the default.
Housing costs: Most people want to live in a few cities per country and every desirable city I've ever heard of has an affordable housing crisis. When you can barely afford enough space for yourself, how are you going to have a room for a baby, let alone multiple.
Exactly. Traditionally, the man was supposed to be the breadwinner, women weren't expected to have a career, and what would she do all day at home after getting married? Of course she would get a lot of kids.
> Housing costs: Most people want to live in a few cities per country and every desirable city I've ever heard of has an affordable housing crisis. When you can barely afford enough space for yourself, how are you going to have a room for a baby, let alone multiple.
Not sure how strong this effect really is. I'm not aware available housing space having decreased over time.
I saw a homeless man lying on a patch of grass in a dirty sleeping bag on my way to work yesterday. The idea of bringing a child into the world and exposing it to the risk of ending up in a situation like that just makes me sad. We are currently buying a house. If I could have afforded this ten or fifteen years ago, I might have kids now. Looking back, I'd say I've had enough to do with growing up and providing for myself financially. I simply didn't have the capacity to start a family.
A friend of mine has two children. She barely has enough money and is trying to finish her university studies. Another friend is a chief surgeon and earns so well that his children are not a big financial factor for him. He is divorced from the children's mother and has another partner. Another friend is a pastor and has two children. I guess, for him it was always a matter of course to have children. He is now also divorced, so he no longer lives in the picture-book family world that he probably once dreamed of.
The other people around me are grown-up children like me, who for various reasons did not become parents. One friend of mine is a gay man. His sister is a lesbian. Both much to the annoyance of their parents, who would like to be grandparents. A couple at my office in their thirties mainly play computer games after work and have pets instead of children. One of my best friends is a woman who lives with a trans man. They are currently planning to become parents via in-vitro fertilization, which will cost a total of ~20,000 euros. The world is strange and apparently no longer properly calibrated for having children.
I am glad that there is no more social pressure pushing people into parenthood. But that has to be compensated for somehow and I don't see any socio-political willingness to tackle this. Raising children is a service to society! We cannot expect children to grow like grass in an unattended meadow. If society is not committed to guarantee healthy soil and to water the gras properly, then nothing will grow.
Culturally, fertility topic has gone through "we will never be able to feed everyone in the world" to "we should have absolute control over when/how many kids to have" and "I can't afford having kids and keep my lifestyle" and "why kids?"
Even when in economic discussions around labour availability, retirement sustainability, the topic just essentially focuses on migration policy.
Societies have moved towards a group of "empowered individuals" model, leaving behind families as a fundamental unit model
1. "We need kids to make money for us!" — Economic output (not per capita, but just absolutely) is still almost monotonically rising. Whether done by human or artificial labor is irrelevant. The idea that a small, young generation can't economically support aging populations is only true if we let all the capital accumulate in places where it hardly contributes to supporting the population and demand that all of the required resources come from labor.
2. "We need kids to wipe our asses!" — Contentious, but long-term AI and robots will 'take (a lot of) our jobs'; it is a matter of when, not if. There is an incredible disconnect between being afraid for "too few people to do the jobs" and "there won't be any jobs for humans anymore". The idea that we will have too few people to care for the aging population is not compatible with being afraid all white-collar human jobs will disappear.
Changing our societies to work with the impending new reality will require moving past our primitive notions of what is "fair" (unemployed == moocher) and past the ever-frustrating false dichotomy between free-market capitalism and 'communism' (We should introduce a variant of Godwin's law where whenever somebody mentions communism or socialism as the alternative in a discussion on capitalism, their argument is immediately void).
Insurance companies vs children won 1:0, for the support in old age.
So far I've only skimmed the paper, but here's an interesting quote:
> Among respondents of a 2018 survey conducted for the New York Times, the desire to “have more leisure time” is offered as the leading reason for not having children among adults who...
If your assumption is that economic reasons cause the decline in fertility rates, it's tempting (and natural!) to view every alternative explanation in the context of economics. In other words: all alternative explanations are symptoms of economic problems, so the root cause remains money.
But quotes like this can also be interpreted as people changing their priorities regardless of income and worries about housing. Maybe, freed of traditional role models, people would rather watch Netflix all day long in their single person household.
It's pretty clearly not simply household income vs. cost of living, though, the data just doesn't support it.
There isn't a single reason why people have fewer children. Each society experiences challenges, such as housing, which bear some similarities but differ a lot in practice, so it's easy to find counter-examples if you're looking for a single-factor explanation.
The article cites "changing norms", which reflects the broad social evolution happening—even rather conservative societies such as Iran or North Korea[1] have a below-replacement TFR! My pet theory is that this change is accelerated by the wide adoption of smartphones, which tend to “flatten” cultures toward global, westernized norms. It even happened in North Korea, which led the country to take radical, Orwellian measures[2].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-kim-jong-un-birthrate...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/north-koreas-smartphones-are...
Basically we compete more until everything costs more. Now we need multiple salaries because everyone we’re competing against is a highly paid couple. Rinse and repeat so everything of value is too expensive for “average people”.
Entire generations of women have been told that it is ok to delay having children into late 30s and early 40s.
The science clearly shows that both fertility rate and increase of an unhealthy baby increase with age.
There should be 'embarassing campaigns' to revert this.
Are you really going to run the "we need more eighteen year olds to be welfare mothers" campaign?
But ideally a woman should be having a first child before 30 so a second and possibly 3rd in early 30s.
A large percentage of marriages end in divorce. Stability is statistically an illusion.
Why "obviously"? If they're not old enough to start families, why is the age of consent that low in many places?
(When I was 16 and living in the UK, it was 16, but back then so too was the age of the end of mandatory schooling).
At 18 most people will have just come out of a regimented education system, never had to pay bills etc
Working with the grain on this rather than against it, it wouldn't matter that new parents were kinda noobs at adult life, so long as they were actually adults.
The problem is that human being used to live in family clans, and the western state institutions deliberately pushed the nuclear family as family clans were powerful.
And then as cities became popular for jobs, kids moved away from family.
And presently the parents buy a house and raise kids, but with ever increasing house prices and gentrification many can't afford to then live down the street from their parents.
Life sucks in the best of times. I was not going to bring a human to the world so she would suffer, replacement levels be damned.
If I was unable to give my daughter a comfortable life, I would rather have no child.
I think many people would agree with this sentiment. If we want more people to have children in early adulthood, we need a major social upheaval so that people can achieve financial stability earlier in life.
Most people that seem overly concerned with fertility and population replacement, also happen to consistently vote against any policy that could nudge things in a direction where people would be able to achieve financial stability earlier in life.
My answer to that is a vague shrug.
Kids don't care about a comfortable life, as long as they are loved and supported.
I've worked with Devs in the west who came from tiny rural villages in India, and with love and support got into the leading universities in India and did well.
Lots of middle class western kids get screwed up, despite 'having everything'.
Money, a bedroom not shared with a sibling and so on do not matter to a child.
It's a lot more difficult to give love and support when you can get evicted for not paying rent.
> estimates suggest that individuals in their early 20s who receive access to housing credit would have twice the completed fertility relative to those who do not obtain that credit until their early 30s.
Really rich people, on the other hand, very often have 3+ kids (as poor people do, but for different reasons). In the US, Bill Gates has 3, Bezos has 4, Zuckerberg has 3, Musk, well, I've lost count :)
The thing is that, of course, typical measures like giving some small economic aid to parents, slight improvements of a few weeks in maternity/paternity leave, etc., which are the kind of things the article focuses on, just don't move the needle. This is hardly surprising. None of those things significantly improve work-family balance. Much more radical measures would be needed, like multi-year maternal/paternal leaves with measures to guarantee that there is no or small impact on career, or a significant reduction of standard full-time working hours to, say, 30 or so a week (be it for parents or for everyone). But for all the talk about fertility being a problem that needs fixing, no country seems to be willing to do anything even remotely close to that.
Note that the measures I'm proposing are focusing on time, not money, because time is really the limiting resource for raising a child in a high-income country. Of course, with money you can buy time (daycare, caregivers, etc.) - so I'm sure things like massive building of public housing to bring down prices can also help. But it should be more efficient to focus directly on time - and more fulfilling for the parents to actually, well, have time to raise the kids themselves.
Yes, if they could erase any material difficulty, most people would like to have 3 children. However, they can't, and the "priority change" means people arbitrage more in favor of enjoying the leisure of a child-free life over the hardship (and rewards) of parenting.
Parents of past generations just didn't have the same hardships. Juggling work and family life was easier back then.
It is 2025, we only talk about what people that are in control of our lives (politicians) decide we should talk about. this is why at thanksgiving and christmas dinners we all talk more about two transgender teenage athletes (in a country of 350m people) than IPCC projections or anything else that matters for future generations :)
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And generally obsessed with what women do with their reproductive organs
[1] For instance: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/lets-have-more-immigrants... - note that the author has founded a non-profit to actively promote birth control.
1) weakening of fanatic religious regimes
2) increased women education and employment
Guess what is happening in high income countries.
Other point is seems like pro natalist policies will only get you so far... certainly not 2.1 replacement TFR. Note every 0.1 in TFR is about 5% missing birth for stablized population. Pronatalist policies seems to icnrease TFR by 0.1-0.3, usually settle at 1.6-1.7, i.e. still down 20% net bodies. My unpleasant conclusion is positive policies not enough, need very punitive policies, i.e. high income/wealth transfer tax to really incentivize natavist replacement TFR. AKA historic incentive - if you don't have lots of kids you die poor and uncared for. All the cheap housing, free daycares, xyz subsidies is not enough. % of population will have a shit time raising their first kid and decide 1 is good enough.
Or you know... immigration, which of course going forward means disproportionately brown and black skin. Queue Family guy skin color chart meme.
Starting at page 8 (total) or page 6 (as written in the footer), there's horrible graphs, even if you zoom in, they're all blurry and partially unreadable
I'm legit surprised we let research articles be published with poorly designed graphs using poor definition/resolution :')
#justRanting
I was scrolling through the paper...and at page 24 (total) or 22 (footer) -> there's another graph.
I CHALLENGE anyone with a human brain to understand that graph
My initial comment WASN'T in that mood, but now I am gonna say it: this hasn't been peer reviewed. There's NO WAY an article with such graphs passes peer reviewing.
But, despite advances in fertility science, it can be truly challenging to have kids in your 40s.
Tried. Never could. The reason:
ECONOMIC!!!!! For higher education and jobs, had to keep moving, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, NY. The moving was EXPENSIVE in all of time, money, effort. Couldn't put down roots.
Worst part: NEVER could make money enough for a house, so always RENTED, which, long term, is a financial disaster.
Due to the financial stresses, my wife, back with her mother on her childhood farm home, killed herself.
For me, the sheriff came with several assistants and guns and dragged from my rented house all my belongings and left them on the grass. Lost my large professional library -- math, physics, computing -- piano, furniture, clothes, etc.
The shame and humiliation -- my brother's family, with 4 houses, made a place for me.
Looking back, the families that owned nice houses or even just one house, ALL were founders and owners of small-medium BUSINESSES and were NOT "employees". They were financially able to have children and DID.
Education? Wife was Valedictorian and then PBK, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, and Ph.D. My Ph.D., applied math and computing. These educations took time and money and made us welcome only as university research professors, and the ones I knew who had a house and children (darned few children) were all poorly paid and had other income, e.g., one was in the USAF, got a Ph.D., retired, became a professor.
Net, the US had kids from 1940 to 1960, and after that kept losing to the present where, literally, the birth rate is so low we are going extinct. Why? For good family formation, the US is a big LOSER.
Why? The US economy moved from farms to cities. The city business owners did well, but their employees didn't. So, e.g., Dad grew up in a small, country town. His father ran the general store, and his step father ran the feed and grain mill. They did well financially. Nearly everyone else in the area was a FARMER living on a FARM or working for farmers, e.g., a blacksmith, carpenter, etc. Once we visited, and I saw cows being milked and hay being loaded into the hayloft. Dad's family supported him well in college. After college, he got a job as an employee and never again did nearly so well. Wife's father? Farmer but on the side head of the local REMC (rural electric membership cooperative). Families broke up and scattered
Am still good at math and computing, so doing a startup: Hopefully from my work the children in my brother's family will have plenty of money for a good, private, college, good marriages, nice houses, close enough to keep the family together. But I don't know what they will do to be successful financially on their own.
So far it looks like in the US we need to have the population shrink by 50-75%, have people leave the big cities, have plenty of farm land per person, and live on farms, rely on the Internet and small businesses with much of the needed production automated and with the physical distribution and retailing as in Amazon.
I have 2 and I already spend most afternoons driving/picking them up from sports, If I had 3 it would literally be every day including weekends.
(Really, I suspect that both sides think there's not going to be enough rich, white people to make more slightly-less rich white people - but I'm a cynic).
My thoughts on the paper:
These are economists, not demographers or social workers. Their tools are crude for this task and they acknowledge that many times in the article.
Honestly, the abstract is well written and covers a lot of what other HNers are saying here. But I'll just quote it again anyways:
"We review existing research and conclude that period-based explanations focused on short-term changes in income or prices cannot explain the widespread decline. Instead, the evidence points to a broad reordering of adult priorities with parenthood occupying a diminished role. We refer to this phenomenon as “shifting priorities” and propose that it likely reflects a complex mix of changing norms, evolving economic opportunities and constraints, and broader social and cultural forces. We review emerging evidence on all these factors. We conclude the paper with suggestions for future research and a brief discussion of policy implications."
These policy implications are at the very end of the paper and don't really amount to much:
"That said, we do have a better understanding of the kinds of policies that could make a difference. Policies that encourage births today may simply lead to a retiming of births, resulting in a short-term increase in births but no lasting effect on population trends. To be effective at boosting completed fertility, policies must influence the decisions women make early in their reproductive lives. Interventions targeting women well into their childbearing years are less likely to have large effects, as many life choices will have already been made. This may explain why past empirical studies often fail to find large effects of pro-natalist policies. Our review of the evidence also suggests that incremental policy changes or interventions are unlikely to have sizable effects, and boosting fertility will likely require much larger changes that alter the lifetime calculation to have and raise a child or multiple children given prevailing options, constraints, and social norms. "
What I think this paper adds to the pro-natalist discussion is that, yes, this is a really hard question with no easy answers or fixes. If it is a recipe that we must follow to get a higher birthrate, then it is not stir-fry but rather lobster thermidor. The one thing that we can say is that delaying childbirth is likely to be bad for fertility. But there are little resources for how to address that.
Good paper overall and well worth the read if you are into this pro-natalist stuff. Not a lot of new data, but a great summary of the economist viewpoint of the problem and it's tenacity.
That implies offering child subsidies only to people in their twenties.
Imagine the outrage.
Like, such ideas are wildly crazy, clearly. But that seems to be where the discourse is right now in the pro-natalism sphere.
They're looking for just about anything to get fertility rates to change. I've seen ideas float around about Mongolia and how they give mothers special parking permits and feathered caps (?) and how that's responsible for their birthrate anomalies.
The whole scene is just deliciously strange in the way that 1990's UFO boards were too.
What seems to me to be happening is that fertility in humans has a pretty steep fall off. We've attacked some of that with technology like IVF. But it's still very hard to have a healthy baby at higher ages. Like, miscarriages are really traumatic and you're going to get a bigger chance at them as you try when you're older. So it's not just biochem, it's mental too.
However, at the same time, we've increased the life expectancy by a lot, and we're set to do so even more this century. Now, a bit of a jag here. There's this thing called the marriage problem in mathematics. You can only court serially and the number of courtiers is fixed and you can't go back and court people again. So, how do you choose to stop and who with? You might have passed by the best spouse and then be left with a dud. The mathematically best solution is to court the first 37.8% of the courtiers and then marry the next person that beats the ones you've courted. (Look, I know I'm butchering this).
Anyway, my point is that as life expectancy is growing, you get to this point where when it comes to spouses and jobs and cities and all the big stuff in life, that 38.7% of the time you've got to 'calibrate' yourself, that point goes past your fertility window. People are trying to figure themselves out, and since that takes so long now, that point of being mentally 'settled' is past when you can have kids easily.
I'm not really sure we can fix that either. Family is central to being human, we're a social animal. So I think technology is really the only key here.
1. Fewer people ever have kids. In every rich country the share of women who remain childless at age 45 is climbing, and it is rising at all intermediate ages as well. This is not just postponement.
2. Total family size is shrinking. Even among parents, second- and third-birth rates are trending down, so completed fertility is falling toward or below 1.5 children per woman in most of the OECD.
3. Short-run economics don’t add up. Recessions, housing booms, or pandemic shocks temporarily nudge annual births, but they neither align in timing nor in magnitude with the long-run fall.
4. Money helps, but only a little. Large cash allowances or cheap housing can raise births, yet estimates show gains of only a few hundredths of a child per woman—far from the 0.5–0.7 needed to reach replacement fertility.
5. Attitudes have flipped. Surveys across Europe, North America, and East Asia reveal a marked decline in the share of young adults who view marriage and children as central life goals; career, leisure, and personal autonomy score higher.
TL:DR; it’s culture. People don’t want kids anymore. It is not housing costs, lack of support, etc…
We simultaneously have the 'paradox of female unhappiness' that isnt a paradox at all; and male loneliness epidemic.
Pretty hard to have babies when men are lonely and women are unhappy.
Not saying that one is better than the other, just that this seems the most plausible explanation I've heard so far.
So, that's it. Conservatives love to bitch out about family duties, because once you are a slave of your elder relatives ON TOP of your children caring, you will never succeed against rich people.
Dear Brits and Germans, think twice before settling down a family there because of an easy retirement.
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Middle income countries like China have low fertility.
Lower-middle income countries like India are around replacement level (I think officially it's lower than replacement but lot of births are "unofficial").
West African fertility rates are high... but A LOT lower than they were 50 years ago, and still trending downwards.
Whatever the reason, it's happening everywhere.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oluwaseun-Kilanko-2/pub...
This is like saying "I still don't see why gravity is a problem when the overall height of the ball is still increasing."
The problem isn't today, it's tomorrow - after the large population starts dying off and the population starts shrinking. People don't live forever.