The Great Baby Deficit
Most of the biggest countries in the world have birth rates below replacement level.
The latest edition of the Lawfare Institute’s Rational Security podcast, “The ‘Active Listening Noises’ Edition,” began with an amusing dissection of The Daily podcast host Michael Barbaro’s weird habit of making loud noises into the microphone in reaction to guest comments, followed by a characteristically thoughtful discussion of the Biden administration memo concluding the high likelihood that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza but yet had not met the threshold for cutting off arms support.
This was followed, alas, by a maddeningly unhelpful discussion of a recent WSJ report “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed.” (ungated here) Natalie Orpett treated the whole discussion as a right-wing plot to take away women’s rights and advance a white nationalist agenda while Quinta Jurecic argued that the notion that we needed more babies was without any empirical basis and likely rooted in Industrial Age notions. Scott Anderson and Alan Rozenshtein were a bit more grounded in the debate but seemed embarrassed to be discussing the issue at all.
The author of the WSJ essay, chief economics commenter Greg Ip, lays out the stakes pretty well in the intro:
The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
Some demographers think the world’s population could start within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
Donald Trump, this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called collapsing fertility a bigger threat to Western civilization than Russia. A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has prioritized raising the country’s “demographic GDP.”
Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
That Trump and Meloni support the agenda is certainly unhelpful in persuading progressives of the urgency of the problem. Ditto, as noted later on, that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban is taking draconian steps to solve it.
Still, Ip does a pretty good job in the piece addressing Jurecic’s question. Societies with below-replacement-level births face a demographic inversion, with more old people relying on social welfare systems and fewer young people paying into them. Economies stagnate as fewer workers are available. Schools and colleges close as there are fewer students. The progressive project simply isn’t sustainable without a vibrant workforce.
As noted in the piece, several countries, most notably Japan and South Korea, have tried without much success to reverse the trend by offering various incentives to ameliorate the burdens of childcare. But this isn’t enough to offset the plain fact that, for many women, the burdens of child-bearing and -rearing, most notably the long-term impact on their careers, are too high to offset. And there’s something of a social contagion effect, wherein those in a cohort having fewer children create subtle pressures on others to do the same.
The most obvious solution to low birth rates is immigration. It’s how the United States has coped so well with it over the years. But, as Ip rightly notes, this is a “zero-sum game,” where one country’s gain is another’s loss.
Additionally, as Ip observes, “High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance, often over concerns about cultural and demographic change. A shrinking native-born population is likely to intensify such concerns. Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigration.” Orpett is certainly right that this is at least intertwined with white nationalism if not outright racism. But there’s also a near-universal desire among peoples to preserve their native culture and social mores. For smaller countries, in particular, it would be easy for rapid migration to radically reshape societies.
This may simply be a case wherein, as Shimon Peres put it long ago, “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact – not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.” Low birth rates may well be a natural outcome of modernity.
One of the male panelists (I can’t recall whether it was Anderson or Rozenshtein) emphasized that there are indeed many women who want to have more children but, for whatever reason, can’t. Policy changes like making access to IVF and other fertility treatments cheaper and more readily available and increased funding for family leave, daycare, and the like would certainly be helpful in those cases. How much this would offset the overall deficit, though, I haven’t the foggiest.
Many countries have tried to raise birth rates, I don’t know of any that have succeeded. Interesting confluence of trends. As machine learning, robotics and AI makes more humans superfluous, we’re creating fewer humans. I’m not suggesting cause and effect, but the timing is interesting, especially since it’s the advanced countries, the more high-tech countries that are showing the most dramatic drops.
It’ll be fascinating to see how, or whether, the world copes. Will the last South Korean please turn out the lights?
But it is not in fact Zero Sum.
Remittances, which are enormous sources of funds for a significant swatch of developing countries, are a direct result of emmigration – although fade into the 3rd or 4th generation depending on the physical distance which of course is fundamental to ties of the emmigrant to the home country. Although Development Agencies like USAID, GIZ have been dreaming of converting these flows into equity (or their own agenda on develop programs), they are regardless significant and sometimes much more important than Development Finance or Agency financing flows into a developing country. And typically flow to the least developed portions of such countries as typically these are the “emitting regions” and provide critical $$ and €€ to houesholds.
The emmigration also takes off pressure domestic job markets which generally has a labour reimbursement raising effect (as in updwards pressure on wages).
In my own experience the safety value economically is quite signifcant and non-statistically / economically informed comment that presumes the emmitting countries economies will look entirely the same is a poor analysis – they almost certainly would not and likely look rather more poverty driven (it’s rather like the great European emmigration to the Americas in the end looking at 18-19th c.).
In the face of the acceleration of AI and automation, the idea that future labour needs require a 20th century type population seems rather again taking a past and extrapoloting to future sans adjustment to extremely significant economic – material shifts.
AI and automation in Japan rather is suggestive of the quite possible trend.
The fact is, the social welfare state depends on an ever growing body of upcoming worker labor to exploit. It spread as modernity was expanding which caused more children to survive creating the illusion of an ever increasing workforce. Doesn’t help that they shipped jobs elsewhere creating a growing under employed body of individuals who also needed social welfare. And while immigration can mitigate the decline, having uncontrolled migration of individuals who will also be a burden on the social welfare funds is the exact opposite of what is needed. Seems the Cloward-Piven strategy pursed by Progressives to create a societal crisis has flaw.
I think it is very unlikely that a fertility rate below replacement is going to be stable long term. I do think a net-zero growth rate is quite possibly going to be a long term scenario.
And it does mean we have to rethink how we are going to fund some projects. The problem is most acute during a transition, however. We will likely have issues funding entitlements for the Baby Boomers, but not for the Gen Xers. And by the way, the issues we have are absolutely manageable financially, it’s the politics that are at issue. We might have to tax some people a bit more, and slow down benefit growth a bit.
The decline in births in the US is due to fewer women having children as mothers still tend to have around the same number of children.
The teen (15-19) birth rate has dropped from 96 per 1000 in 1958 to below 20 per 1000 in 2018. A small rise happened around 1990 before resuming the decline.
The birth rate among women 20-24 has declined by half since 1990 with a big drop off after 2008 from 120 per 1000 in 1990 to 60 per 1000 in 2022. A small, persistent decline in women 25-29 also has happened dropping from 120 to 100 per 1000.
Births to women over 30+ have risen but only by 20 more per 1000 from 1990-2022.
So the “problem” is that young women of school age are not having babies. Hardly surprising with college fetish for the last 40 years.
A societal change, not one that can be mandated by laws, is to somehow figure out how a young woman can leave the school-work pipeline early in her 20s, have children, and then return to the treadmill. The problem is the system is set up to go to college right out of high school then go to work right out of college. If there is a glitch the system punishes the person. College is recoverable at an older age, but if you don’t get the job within a couple years out of college, the employers are looking that the fresher meat coming out behind you. If you leave the career path by choice or unemployment it is hard to get back on it.
Perhaps we need to return to a more entrepreneurial society where the whims of the corporate HR lady matter less to earning money.
@JKB:
Gee, if only feminists had been calling for a way for women to have families and also have careers. Things like family leave, affordable daycare, job protection for pregnant women and universal health care. You know, the things your ilk have opposed for decades because communism and socialism and also, somehow, Jesus.
The assumption that economic growth=good often goes un-examined.
There’s a need for the economy to grow, because the population also grows. If there are more popel this year as opposed to last year, then this year we need more food, more clothing, more medicine, etc.
If the population stops growing, or shrinks, then there’s no need to produce more of everything, and then economic growth stops. This is as natural and normal, and necessary, as shutting off the tap when the bucket you’re filling is full.
We’re not there yet. Currently there are about 8 billion humans in the world. The global population will likely peak around 10 billion in the coming decades, and then may go down. The economy overall may stop growing, holding a steady output at the level needed to maintain the population. I fail to see a problem with that.
The effects on programs like social security are more serious and pressing. But see what @Lounsvury said. Especially the part about remittances.
The problem seems to be more that a fraction of the population in high income countries is dead set against immigration from places they deem to be, as Herr Fuhrer declared, s**t-hole countries. Meaning they are not white. My advice: learn to deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be.
The other problem is that without economic growth, the rich and ultra-rich can’t grow their fortunes as big as they want. We could solve this problem, and part of the social programs problem as well, by relieving them of much of their fortunes, seeing as it’s become a burden they can no longer carry.
@Kathy:
If only this drop in fertility had come 30 years earlier, we’d worry a lot less about climate change.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think this is the heart of the matter. We are in the midst of huge changes that affect what people are avaiable to do certain types of work, how productive they are, how the benefits of that product it are allocated, and a dozen more considerations. Declining birth rates are just one issue and to try to analyze its effect without considering the others is futile.
I can hear the murmurings of a new conservative slogan… “Knock them up! Knock them up!”
Nice mythology but reality is starting to bite. A lot of late 20s women are going to social media now that they see the conditioning of their feminist teachers to not marry and become a “girl boss” is leaving them with the real possibility of never marrying and/or having children.
Your little list doesn’t deal with the reality that anyone, male or female, who takes a break from a career early on is left behind. And it doesn’t matter if that break is supported by law or not.
In any case, the feminist screed is for women to not marry until they reach their late 20s. As my comment on birth rates points out, the decline is in births to women 15-29 is the driving force behind fewer children.
The median age of never married adults was 22 in 1970. It was 28 in 2020.
@Kathy: Economic growth is good. The other choice is stagnation and for most of the world population this is stagnation in poverty. The comparatively wealthy comfortable developed world Left professional class “questioning” growth is the equivalent of Victorian tea room reflection on labour organisation benefit or not. (or alternatively like the Bolsheviks response to the Kulaks)
Gross economic growth without adjustment to Per Capita however is a myopic view.
GDP per capita growth is fully possible with flat to declining population, see for example Japan GDP per Capita under (WB) international Purchasing Power Parity analysis and constant dollars
@JKB:
The feminist screed is that women be allowed to choose what life they want — working mother, stay at home mom, child-free, in a lesbian polycule, etc.
It’s diabolical. It grants women agency over their lives.
Most people think a decline in the birthrate for 15 year old girls is a good thing. It’s a rare 15 year old girl who is mature enough to raise a child.
@Gustopher:
Have you ever considered disciplining your intellect so you can have an actual thought rather than just embracing the dysregulation of your emotions?
The decline in teen birth rate is a data point. One we don’t want to reverse. But it has the knock on effect that a woman having had on child is more likely to have more if time and economic situation allow. Young women have multiple children, while a first child after 30 means a lower likelihood of a woman having more children simply due to the fertility window closing.
And if a woman is not married or in a serious relationship at 30, the likelihood she will not have children increases precipitously simple due to the time involved in finding, marrying, the couple deciding to have children.
I have a friend that went to church with her father recently. In the sermon, the preacher asserted that women working outside the home was sinful. This isn’t that far off “Knock them up!” it seems to me.
The preacher also asserted that sexual sin was the worst kind of sin, beyond murder. And homosexuality was at the top of the list of sexual sins.
It grieves me to see so many of the people I once communed with so far off the path.
@Gustopher:
Word. My mother was 16. Look how that turned out. There’s a cautionary tale for you.
@JKB:
Uh huh. A lot of people coming up to and telling you that, do they? Same people who keep coming up to Trump and telling him things? This is MAGA epistemology: unidentified, uncounted, non-specific ‘people,’ often named Q or the Late Great Hannibal Lecter, keep telling you things for which no actual evidence exists. I miss the days when idiots just got anal probes from aliens. Much more entertaining.
Here’s what a lot of people keep coming up and telling me: they’d have babies if men weren’t such weak-ass c*nts. How many kids have you had?
The people most agitated about low birthrates are upset about white women not reproducing at more than replacement rate. That’s what all this anti-abortion and anti-birth control business is about. Trump et al. don’t give a crap about nonwhite kids.
@Gustopher:
Well, after all, they’re ripe and fertile, to paraphrase a NH R.
@JKB:
RIP irony, time immemorial – May 23, 2024. You had a good run.
@Michael Reynolds:
JKB is just pissed that his kind is seen as less attractive than a dildo + cat.
In his mind, this means that there is something wrong with women. Of course, that’s exactly what a guy who can’t compete with a piece of plastic would think.
@JKB:
That doesn’t sound like fun.
It doesn’t really sound like you really want to keep teenage pregnancy rates low. You’re repeatedly grouping 15-29 year old girls and women together as if there is no significant difference. And you offer nothing other than “if women start having kids young, they can have more kids.”
How about actually making it easier for women who want to have a career (or have to have a career, as raising a family on a single income is incredibly hard) to also have kids?
Longer guaranteed maternity and paternity leave, financial supports for child care, bringing back the larger Child Tax Credit and making it permanent so families know they can count on it.
Creating paths to a middle class life that don’t require taking on crushing debt that needs to be paid off during the peak childbearing years.
Maybe even building enough housing that we can fix the housing crisis that sucks up so much of people’s incomes that might otherwise let them have more kids. But that last one is just me wedging my pet peeve into everything.
I know some women who have focused on their career more than on having babies. I think that’s a legitimate choice. I know one such woman who was convinced to have one child by her husband (who now dotes on his daughter who is in college, and interested in STEM, like Mom and Dad.) I respect her choices, as I know from personal experience that parenting is hard work. I feel it’s worth it, but that’s not for me to decide for everybody else.
What if we made it easier to be a parent and hold down a serious job? This conflict is easily felt here in Silicon Valley. I constantly felt tension between the demands of my job (they would love it to be completely normal to spend 12 hours a day at work, and then checking email while at home.) and the demands of my family. I felt that every working day while my children were young. Women, in the culture we have, would feel it even more.
Some folks think the answer to this is for fathers to be unegaged at home and completely engaged at work and mothers completely engaged at home and not working.
I do not support that. I do not regret my engagement with my family. It enriched me personally. I quite like being around children, so much so that I volunteered to help teach jujitsu to kids.
So that answer is a non-starter for me. I would prefer that we relax a bit more about the demands of the workplace, and support working parents more.
The screed of private citizen Republican Donald Trump and his toadies is:
Grab ’em by the pussy!
@Mister Bluster:
Well, of course. They only exist to be grabbed by the pussy.
The real reason we have fewer babies is that kids no longer make any economic sense. They used to be free labor, now they’re economically disastrous. A family spends, on average, $237,482 to raise a kid to age 18. And guess what? It doesn’t end at 18. So, more like 300K. And that’s not counting the money lost when a potentially employed parent stays home. Just to reach the magic 2.1 fertility rate means you’re shelling out north of half a million dollars, plus lost opportunities.
The wonder is that anyone has kids.
@Michael Reynolds:
The vast majority don’t give any thought to the downside.
I once had a colleague who gave birth to a much-wanted baby. Two months later she was wailing “why didn’t anyone tell me it would be so hard?” I thought–but didn’t say–“why didn’t you think about it for five minutes?”
Having had a kid, I can say childbirth is dangerous and hurts like hell. Women and babies die everyday in the process.
Something to keep in mind in discussion of birth rates.
This ‘great baby deficit’ is common in many other advanced nations. Affluence and Feminism.
As women have availed themselves of higher education and are free to pursue career opportunities, many have postponed or moved back their child bearing plans into their mid-to-late thirties or even forty.
Anecdote: Three female colleagues of mine, two in their late thirties and one over 40, recently had their first child, and to the extent that their benefits include good leave policy, and with WFH flexibility, each of them have continues on with the careers.
@JKB:
Bahaha! Muttering to yourself in the mirror, again?
Your now-uneditable comments full of unhinged rightwing beta male insecurity are available for all to read, did you forget?
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have reliable birth control.
An exercise for the reader. If you were the benevolent dictator of the world, would you rather have to deal with:
A. Reduced birth rates and resultant changes in age cohort ratios?
OR
B. Overpopulation?
@al Ameda:
I really do wonder whether allowing a 10 year, interest-free deferment of student loans for people who have kids would change that so more women would be delaying starting a family until their mid-to-late-20s, rather than their mid-30s. (Interest free means their loans are whittled away by inflation too!)
But more generally…
Remember when Republicans were worried about welfare queens pushing out kids to collect those sweet, sweet government subsidies? If we assume they were right, then the answer is clear — pay people to have kids.
I don’t think the problem is quite that simple, but there are definitely people who would like to have kids who just can’t afford to.
Do I owe anything to the people of 2150? I don’t litter, support enviromentalistic legislation, and don’t drive a gas-guzzler. How much personal expense and emotional hassle should I subject myself to on behalf of the 22nd century?
And how many kids do you have, JKB?
I read and comment on some libertarian/conservative sites. Its is dogma at those place that this is all the fault of women since they dont want to stay home and have babies. I like to point out if it is so important then men should also be willing to make sacrifices. That doesnt go over so well. It’s clear from their POV that women should give up having careers and concentrate on kids.
A lot of attention has been paid in particular to Sought Korea which has a very low TFR. They have tried throwing a lot of money at the issue and are about to throw more with our much evidence that it will do anything. Reading sites that claim to represent the women’s POV it sounds as thought the issue is not so much money, though that and housing are issues, but more that the men are expected to work very long hours and while they are at work women are generally relegated to support roles and wait on the men. Women know if they have kids they will be responsible for the child care and waiting on their husband. In the past that was their only choice but now they have other options and it turns out that is not a popular one.
Steve
@Lounsbury: Per capita. I’ve of late seen right wing commentary to the effect we should increase population even if it reduces per capita GDP. It’s argued as Utilitarianism. Isn’t 60% as good for twice as many people the greatest good for the greatest number?
SEP. SEP SEP.*
*somebody else’s problem
@JKB:
Have you looked at the pay for jobs that don’t have a college degree or trade school? And even in the trades, you really need a decent union shop (or an employer competing for workers with a union shop) to make a decent wage.
I do think that we should be treating college and trade school equally — there’s as much merit to becoming an electrician or a plumber as getting a degree in STEM.
(And the best software engineers I’ve worked with have a shockingly high number with degrees in literature and history — the job is a lot of writing and communicating, and that’s where those skills are taught, so I’m not that big on STEM. The current push for STEM is going to leave us without people who can lead projects)
Anyway, the choice is to pursue higher education, of some form, or be stuck in low wage jobs forever.
If you want people to skip college and start having kids younger, you need to create paths to a middle class life that don’t require college.
I think this is a problem even if you aren’t trying to maximize child births.
I’m not quite sure what you mean “not one that can be mandated by law”. If you mean we cannot conscript young women, put them in camps, and have them churn out a few kids, and then release them back into the world, then I would agree.
But, there are lots of things the government can do to ensure that women (and men with uteruses, and the sperm producers they shack up with) can have children early on without sacrificing their potential future.
There’s also the very general problem of how do you get the long-term unemployed back into the work force. A problem that Democrats think can be handled by retraining, and that Republicans think can be handled by cutting off all benefits so they are so desperate they will take anything.
I suspect there is a third solution, that would reek of socialism, involving the government being the employer of last resort, and various hybridized plans along those lines where private employers are incentivized to hire the unemployed.
I’m going to toss out another thought: professional part time.
I don’t know where this idea goes, but my vague guess is that there are a lot of women who would be able to return to work sooner if it wasn’t a 40+ hr/week commitment, and that if this were an option, they would be more likely to have kids in the first place.
But, if it was something just for women who have recently had kids, you would be creating strong incentives for employers to discriminate against women of child-bearing age when hiring. It’s easier to manage 5 full time employees than 8 part time, at least in professional settings where there are large projects and you have to coordinate many tasks to create a larger whole (I expect that jobs where there are many small, independent projects would have it easier — the plumbing company sending people out to fix broken toilets, for instance)
@steve:
This is something I was trying to write in my long winded response to JKB (which also involved a break for food, so I didn’t see your response).
Long working hours are anti-family.
If the expectation is that men work that long, and women don’t, then it creates a huge incentive to not hire women, and men don’t have the time to do their part around the house.
If the expectation is that both men and women work those hours, then there’s no one to do their part around the house, or the women will end up working two jobs (and often choose not to work that job at home having and raising kids)
Feminism may require a thirty hour work week. For everyone.
@Michael Reynolds:
This. The cumulative opportunity cost of children is vast.
Two reasonably well-educated people with decent careers can either have kids and be comfortable, or not have kids and end up wealthy*. Less well-educated people with jobs (as opposed to careers) can either have kids and scrape by, or not have kids and be comfortable. The rational self-interest that conservative economists are so fond of militates against having kids unless you live on a small farm.
*It’s of course possible to screw this up through poor choices, such as living beyond your actual means, but you have to work at it.
@gVOR10: “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have reliable birth control.”
You haven’t been reading much about the Supreme Court, I’m thinking…
@Michael Reynolds:
Why is it whenever I make the claim overpopulation is the root cause of a lot of problems, I get bad Thanos jokes?
While having government and society provided more support for families and hopefully they would have more children, that really hasn’t worked out. Western European countries are in the same or greater decline in birth rates as the US. Even France that perhaps has the gold standard for family support systems is below replacement rate at 1.83 kids per woman. The simple truth is that given the choice of having more kids or a more comfortable life, families are choosing life style.
Which of course is why the reactionaries are attacking abortion and birth control.
While having government and society provided more support for families and hopefully they would have more children, that really hasn’t worked out. Western European countries are in the same or greater decline in birth rates as the US. Even France that perhaps has the gold standard for family support systems is below replacement rate at 1.83 kids per woman. The simple truth is that given the choice of having more kids or a more comfortable life, families are choosing life style.
Which of course is why the reactionaries are attacking abortion and birth control.
@DrDaveT:
I will note that this concept pre-dates both feminism and affluence–noted as fact9rs in the current problem upstream–and quietly slip away.
@Michael Reynolds:
The incentives now, if having children at all, is to have fewer children and invest more (college for all) in them since the child mortality (under age of 5) is now in single digits. It was 100 per 1000 in 1930.
In earlier times, births in England were controlled through late marriage (after 25) and never marrying. We have late marriage now. And in 2022, 25% of 40-yr-olds (those born in 1982) had never married. It was 16% in 1910, then declined until 1980, for those born in 1940, then started rising again to 16% in 2000, those born in 1960.
Contraception and early stage abortion are very unlikely to go away regardless of the current scare churning for electoral reasons. Well, unless the Progressive Project decides it needs to turn the tide on this decline in future working slaves to pay taxes to the welfare state.
@Sleeping Dog:
Thats not nothing, though. Compared to their neighbors that do less for parents they have a substantially higher birth rate.
While we are in for massive disruption in the next couple of centuries, this is only one of the contributors. Japan is an interesting study. They have had the lowest or near the lowest birth rate for decades, so they can be considered a bellwether. Given their low birth rate and their extreme xenophobia it was predicted they would hit population disaster 15-20 years ago with an accompanying economic collapse. Instead the economy has held pretty steady as they’ve made a number of accommodations. It’s included the obvious such as automation and robotics but also a concerted effort to did employment for people into stories golden years. I remember visiting a friend in a Tokyo suburb more than ten years ago and walking along the very well maintained streetscape from the subway only to come upon dozens of elderly people improving upon the already beautiful flowers, bushes and trees, all wearing city jumpers and many up on low ladders wielding clippers.
On another front, I was going to make a point a month ago or so about Japan’s total opposition to immigration only to discover they appear to be attempting a 180. The Japanese government website seems to be encouraging actual immigration, not just guest workers.
I honestly don’t think population decline will be a species or society wrecking problem until at least the 23rd century and perhaps significantly later. Who knows what will happen by then.
@CSK:
I resisted having kids for a long time. But my wife wanted kids, and that’s a pretty big thing to deny the person you love. So I signed on, and once I agree, I’m in, no backsies, and equal shares of whatever happens. (One of the reasons I am so reluctant to agree to things.) But you know, those averages for child cost are a hell of a lot higher in expensive states like California. I. don’t think we had any opportunity cost, though, we couldn’t have written any more than we did.
I would just like to point out that in the art for this piece, we have four babies: Black, White, Brown and. . .Ginger? Are redheads a race, now? Do we have to include them as a component of diversity? I would argue that ginger men may actually be a discriminated-against minority, I don’t think anyone has an issue with redheaded women. Especially big nasty ones.
@Michael Reynolds:
Why not? It’s not like “brown” is a meaningful category. And “black” includes (for instance) both Ethiopians and Nigerians – who don’t look alike at all.
When it comes to race, we can do whatever the fuck we want. It’s all bullshit anyways.
I’m willing to bet that almost all the men who seem convinced that women can be negotiated into returning to some earlier state would lose their minds if you suggested there’s a nudge or two which would lower carbon footprints.
The whole thing is ridiculous. Anyone who uses the fertility re: human beings is a freak. You can’t trick people into being de-emancipated, no matter how hard you argue in reddit/the Supreme Court. No matter what the GOP/Trump manage to do if they win, they can’t make you think that these people are possessed of life’s secrets, which involve having lots of children and raising them stupidly. There’s no Big Brother 2+2=5 conditioning which can make that hpapen.
@Michael Reynolds:
The Mayflower Madam said she never could sell redheaded women to her clientele.
@Michael Reynolds: I was recently at the doctor’s about a pain complaint, which she summarily dismissed with a “you’re a redhead!” and recommended an over the counter. I will not be going back to that doctor.
Oh noes: the system that was invented and developed before the silicon age with increasing population won’t work forever with world-changing technology at our fingertips? Oh no, we can’t possibly change a thing about the system now.
OK, source?
@OzarkHillbilly: That was just nonsense. No sources necessary.
I’ve been crushed at work this week with no time for commenting, but I wanted to pop in quickly and recommend two back-t0-back Ezra Klein podcasts from a couple of months ago on this topic, which are excellent and highly recommended:
– First
– Second
The TLDR version is that there are no easy explanations or answers. If it was an issue of supporting families and the ability of parents, and especially mothers, to work and have careers and kids, then why is Sweden’s birth rate the same as ours? No country has more parent and family-friendly work and career policies than they do. And on the other hand, if the right-wing moralists were right, then Putin’s Russia and even less authoritarian efforts to change cultural norms to incentivize more babies have not worked either – anywhere they’ve been tried. And most of these just want to return to social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of the past that can’t be recreated even if most in society wanted that, which we don’t.
That this is a global phenomenon that spans cultures and also huge variations in economic and government policy suggests to me that the boilerplate right and left-wing “solutions” to this problem – which have all been tried and have failed – are useless and not much worth debating as solutions. Therefore, we either need to stop worrying about the problem and assume it will fix itself over time or think more deeply about what’s going on in human societies everywhere, and consequently, human beings generally that is the actual root cause(s) of this.
Anyway, I’m back to work now. I hope you all have a good weekend. Unfortunately, it will mostly be a working one for me.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s not how it works. The opportunity cost is what you would have earned on the interest / capital gains / etc. from the money you instead spent on raising kids. It’s a significant amount.
Now, to be fair, in less-advanced societies some of that is investment in who will care for you when you’re old. In actual first-world societies, old people don’t have to eat pet food for lack of blood heirs to care for them.
@Mikey: So sad.
@Slugger:
And do they still talk to him?
@Andy is correct. Given the widespread nature of this issue, there are likely multiple factors in play and that many, many countries have tried a variety of responses and still see declining birth rates shows clearly that governmental intervention is not going to work.
Stop investing time and money into “solutions.” Start solving the problems this creates by investigating alternatives.
@Andy:
I think that’s generally right. I do think, however, that lefty solutions could ameliorate a subset of the problem. As noted in the OP, “women who want to have more children but, for whatever reason, can’t” might have more kids if they could cheaply access IVF or had low-cost childcare. But while there are a lot of such women, I would guess it’s a drop in the bucket of the overall problem.
@Michael Reynolds:
Redheads are a distinctly denigrated and discriminated-against minority in the UK, and “ginger” has been enough to start a fight in various times and places. Most US kids don’t get the whole point of the Weasley family in Harry Potter. I’ve always assumed that it’s a side-effect of the whole England/Ireland thing.
I’m not really seeing declining birthrates as a serious long term problem.
In the short term while nations have large populations of elderly it is a problem, but only temporary.
As the Boomers age and die off (which we are already doing), in 30 years time there won’t be any such thing as a Baby Boomer to support.
Not to mention the advances in technology which can assist in elder care.
The vision of fewer people consuming fewer natural resources just doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.
@James Joyner: I think those policies have merit for reasons other than increasing national birthrates. For the purpose of increasing birthrates, evidence is pretty compelling they don’t work. Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons to support those policies.
@DrDaveT:
I have three kids and they are all gingers. My wife and I are not at all gingers and we attributed it to her dad who had kind of reddish hair. I made a lot of jokes about the pool boy (we didn’t have a pool). But then it all became clear when I discovered my birth mother who is a ginger’s ginger. Somehow that gene skipped me.
But you’re right about the UK and Ireland. I had some unpleasant experiences with that during the Troubles in the 80’s and 90’s.