I think there is no single answer, the causes probably vary a lot across countries. However here in France we can see several important parameters : first, jobs. My children are 26 and 28, have master degrees, speak several languages, but still don't have completely stable jobs with decent pay (I mean like even slightly higher than median and/or average). Therefore, they certainly aren't close to having children. Because also second : housing. There is a massive housing crisis, in part because of AirBnB, in part because of insufficient construction, and largely because of the way people (don't) live together : in my town, the number of apartments exploded in the past 20 years, but the number of inhabitants remained exactly the same, just because people live alone more and more. This creates a huge pressure on housing demand, and makes existing home too big (nobody needs a 5-person flat anymore), and that compounds with the poor job status because you need to earn insane money to be able to afford a decent home. My son rents a single room in a squalid neighbourhood for 700€ a month.
So imagine that : a single room costs half of full-time minimum wage, but to rent a place you're required to earn 3 times the price. OTOH median salary for non-management workers is less than 1.5x minimum wage... Therefore at least half the population can't even rent a single room. Now start planning having children on top of that? Yeah, sure.
Emmanuel, I agree. The causes here are multivariate. You fingered housing and the state of the economy as the primary impediments. These are probably related causes. At least in the US, overzealous zoning regulations have made it difficult to build housing where it is in the most demand.
This means that parents have less disposable income than they should. It also means that labor cannot settle where it is most productive, creating drag on the entire economy on the macro level.
As I have written, I think the single best way to tackle this problem is to replace property taxes with LVT and ease zoning regulations.
Metropolisation plays a role, too : there is a massive glut of available housing (often in poor shape, and at very low prices) in small, deindustrialised towns. But near big cities, prices are ridiculous. Example : in the cozy town of Nevers, you can buy a pretty, stone-built 150 m2 house with a garden in the centre for 200k€. In Paris, 200k€ will buy a single room, 15 to 20 m2, on the 6th floor with no lift : 8 to 10 times more expensive. It was not always like this, in the past there were thriving industries around Nevers, metallurgy, rail, automobile, chemistry... But everything's gone to Poland or China. So more and more the only remaining people are retirees holding their homes as stranded assets, and the young people are working in the very low productivity service jobs, delivering food and packages, mopping flors and and washing old asses for minimum wage... Unsurprisingly, they vote en masse for the fascists now.
The opportunity-cost theory is basically Baumol's cost disease applied to childrearing. Part of me wonders how quickly humanity will see a natural self-correction or rebound in aggregate fertility. Intuitively it feels like we are headed for a very sudden selection bottleneck for whatever heritable traits make individuals' fertility resistant to Baumol's cost disease -- like, talk about punctuated equilibrium! In a generation or two (i.e., almost instantly), people whose heritable traits cause them to react to modernity by having no or few kids will fall out of the population, leaving the fertile remainder to radiate rapidly, essentially taking over the gene pool all at once.
I'm sure one could describe this with a system of differential equations given some assumptions about heritability, assortative mating, and so on.
Yes, I also suspect the problem will be self-correcting, because when people have a choice about breeding, only those who want to breed will do so, and there's probably some heritable factors affecting this choice, as well as obvious issues like cost, opportunity cost, reduced income, later adulthood, increased standards, etc. which apply to all, or to all but the richest.
Agreed with the selection part but not sure about Baumol. Child rearing also has benefitted massively from technology and education specifically has been industrialized long ago.
Yes but technology and education have also, simultaneously, massively benefited all of the alternatives to childrearing, increasing the absolute opportunity cost. I don't think it's a settled matter, and it would depend on how it all balances out, but I still think Baumol is a leading contender for the basic explanation. It's also potentially consistent with Hanania's point about fertility declining over time *even when controlling for income*, because, on this theory, we are just seeing how headline national income time series underestimate the true change in opportunity cost because of the residual non-comparability of "real" incomes across time due to the invention of non-comparable goods and technologies.
The Georgian example is great - making having 3+ kids high status again - but unfortunately it's impossible to replicate in the West.
Who would the children need to get baptized by? An Instagram influencer? A Super Bowl quarterback? A political pundit? A technocrat and/or an Epstein island visitor?
Literally just do a Taylor Swift concert for 3+ child families. A special day at the beginning of every month for 3+ child families only at Disneyland. A whole section of stands at every NFL game restricted for 3+ families.
There’s a lot to complain about in America in 2026, but *lack of cultural heavyweights* is not one of those things!!!
We have this sort of thing here in Poland, but it's a "large family card" and you only get like 10% discounts on stuff. More like a barely significant relief rather than something that makes the decision to have a third child a no brainer.
Yeah I have no idea how to induce TSwift to follow through on my suggestion, but the idea that she wields less cultural power than the Patriarch of Georgia is pretty comical.
I like these ideas in theory. It's true that her cultural pull is enormous, but if she were inclined, on any level, to do what you're describing, she wouldn't be the superstar that she is. That's why it's impossible to visualize getting from here to there.
It's not a coincidence or historical accident that Taylor Swift is implicitly anti-natal. Implicitly anti-natal values are attractive, especially to women, but to many men also. The girls like what Taylor is selling.
EXPLICIT anti-natalism and pro-natalism are both unattractive. They're zero fun. The appealing attitude is, "Sure, babies are cute, I guess. Not for me, at least not right now, but maybe in the future, who knows? Why are we even talking about this?"
Implicit anti-natal values have conquered the world because the world loves them. As soon as people from any culture are exposed to them, they adopt them en masse. They are the path of least resistance.
Look, if a twenty-something pop star with a fanbase of teenie boppers started singing natality carols, sure she’d lose those fans, but TSwift is now a 30-something whose fans are in what’s now prime childbearing years, and she has a song that includes the following lyrics:
“Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you”
We literally just need her to replace “couple” with “bunch of” and boom, she’s a pro-natalist. It would actually make the song make more sense; since two kids are not “the whole block”!!
I don't think her saying a few things about kids -- without actually having kids! -- does very much.
Even if she goes through with the marriage and has a kid or two around age 40 through a surrogate, does that really change the message in a way that persuades women to live differently?
That entire life story is implicitly anti-natal when scaled to society. "I went through a ton of boyfriends before finally getting married in my late 30s, using my wealth to defray any and all of the inconveniences of childbearing that normal people face. And I regret none of it."
And more than this: she is not someone who can even conceive in terms of wanting to advocate for pro-natalism. Her entire message is one of, "Look, this was my path. You will have to find your own authentic path. And don't let anyone else tell you what that path is." That message is, again, implicitly anti-natal.
I'm becoming less and less concerned with fertility.
Firstly, while there are certainly negative effects flowing from an aging population with not enough younger workers to replace them - nothing we can really do at this point will stop this. We needed to do something back in 2006, not wait until 2026. The ship has already sailed.
Secondly, Japan has proved that you can have a managed population decline without descending into disaster. Replacing workers with immigrants is not ideal, but should work for America as we are traditionally really good at assimilation.
Thirdly, since we really don't know how the revolution of AI is going to impact humanity in the next few decades, how do we really know that lack of fertility is really a problem? Perhaps most jobs will be replaced/automated and we won't need a bigger generation to take over.
I certainly agree that people should have help having the children they do want to have, and for this reason I support pro-natalist benefits (I think I also just really like babies and kids - and desperately want grandkids). But acting like we're in the middle of the plot of Children of Men* is a bit much.
If anything, the answer to fertility and most of our other social problems today is less internet, and more in-person interactions. A treatment that is good for everyone, all of the time, even those who will never have kids.
A big part of how Japan has managed it's decline is because it's pension system is being heavily leverage in foreign equities and bonds. If everyone starts declining like Japan then there's not going to be foreign markets to help prop the system up. See the first article in this journal.
America doesn't even fund its own pension system, but instead runs it like a shady Ponzi scheme, so I don't think we have to worry about that same problem. We will have to manage our own population decline in some creative way.
One underrated thing that I think explains low East-Asian fertility is the phenomenon of Idols. Specifically that Idols are not allowed to date (publicly) or form families while they are working. This means that some of the biggest role models for young people are all both sexless and childless.
- For how many kids have you been the primary care taker?
I suppose I could also ask a third question:
- How many kids have you supported financially from birth through adulthood (or their current ages, if not yet adult)?
For the record, my theory about the birthrate decline is that being a child's primary caretaker is a really rotten job, or, at best, less attractive than most people's available alternatives. This is particularly true in e.g. modern North America, but I recall my mother hating it quite vocally 55 years ago.
I'm thus extremely suspicious of people of a gender or class not normally responsible for child care, when they express concern about the falling birthrate. If you care that much, volunteer to raise someone's children, maybe even your own, and do a decent job of it. Then we can talk.
> [...] my theory [...] is that being a child's primary caretaker is a really rotten job [or worse than alternatives for most ppl]
Not my experience at all! I had a job I loved - six figures, traveling the world, solving cool problems with great coworkers - but quit to be the full-time caretaker for my (at the time) two young children. And it's one of the best decisions I've made. Hard to express how amazing every day is.
Now, this is NOT what I would have expected prior to having kids. I suspect part of the issue is a disconnect between how amazing kids often are once you have them, and how unpleasant it can look beforehand.
(Obviously YMMV - caretaker is a bad fit for some, I'm lucky to be so financially secure, etc. Most of my close friends who have had kids are extremely glad to have done so - 85%? - but I can think of one exception and a couple of borderline cases.)
(I also think it's fine for non-parents to comment on falling fertility. Cf: If you care so much about climate change, why aren't you a green energy scientist yourself? I don't think the bar for commenting on social issues should be 'has reoriented one's life around it'.)
I'm glad this worked so well for you. Doubtless the descendants of people like you will inherit the earth, along with the descendants of those who manage to convince people like you to rear *their* kids.
Note by the way that I'm not talking about simply siring children, or even providing for those children and perhaps their caretaker(s). I think the sticking point is that enough people would much much rather do something other than caring for children to make a major contribution to keeping the birthrate below the replacement level. They/we aren't the only cause, and several other likely causes have been mentioned here. But given my life experience, "don't want to" seems like a fairly major factor, that somehow isn't mentioned as much as I think it should be.
--
Anyone can comment on anything. But I'm always of suspicious of anyone who wants to solve some problem by convincing *other people* to do something those people have chosen not to do, even while being unwilling to do the same thing themselves.
e.g. "Those poor people should be happy to work for peanuts. How else can the economy (aka stock market) do well, and my investments gain in value?"
e.g. "Those young men should be happy to fight and die to defend the financial interests of rich old people/women like me".
Also, I think your comment gets at something hard about this issue. You seem like a smart and reasonable person, yet even you jumped from "people expressing concern about falling birth rates" to "people asking others to have more kids than they have chosen to". Even putting aside "we should be able to talk about problems without being judged in advance over possible solutions", it's worth pointing out that in this case the solution you're criticizing problem-noticers over is just not one that I ever see advocated for. (Granted, I'm not really that plugged into this discussion, but the things I've seen discussed are helping people close the gap between the number of kids they say they want and those they manage to have, and ways to make parenting more attractive like tax breaks or better leave policy that let parents capture some of the societal gains.)
Anyway, my point is not to criticize you, my takeaway is that this is a sensitive and tricky issue to talk about.
I guess I get around the net more. I have encountered a small number of people explicitly advocating restricting options available to women, so that our best available life choice would be broodmare.
Some were generous enough to offer alternatives for those who'd be made especially miserable by the job requirement of copulation; they could become something like a nun, provided this option was kept unpleasant and low status enough that "wife" (aka broodmare) would seem better to anyone not extremely averse to the role society really needed them to take.
I figure that for every person willing to say something like this, which is sure to get angry pushback, there's a larger number who agree with it, and an even larger number who'd think it no big issue, if for example they happened to be in a country where this was a live political option.
Fair enough - then again, my impression is you can find any depravity you wish in the dark corners of the internet. My strong expectation, based mostly on people I know in real life, is that 99% of people would react with horror to the ideas you're referencing.
Regardless, it definitely helps clarify where you're coming from - if I thought that a substantial number of people thought this way, or that it had any chance of being politically viable, I'd be worried about it too!
Thanks! But my view is even more generous toward people like me - I think we already have inherited the earth, and most people would enjoy kids way more than they expect. Not everyone of course, but I think I was making an enormous mistake prior to having kids re: my expectations on how kids would impact my well-being. (I thought mildly positive with wide uncertainty, the answer is it made my life, like, 10x better, from a high baseline.)
The thing that makes me most sad about this issue is the happiness, flourishing, and Pareto improvements that I think are being left on the table due to information gaps/misleading cultural messaging/etc.
Neither of us have statistics, so the best thing we can do is advocate for the freedom to choose, including the economic underpinnings of a meaningful choice.
I suspect that your position is much more socially acceptable - so people who feel like you talk about it more than people who feel like me. But I could so easily be wrong.
My impression (fwiw) is that the 'socially approved' view is something like "kids are really hard, and stressful, and you will be sick and frazzled and sleep-deprived and won't be able to see your friends or do your hobbies, but you also love them so much and it's amazing".
This is...exaggerated but basically right? My main worry is that for non-parents attempting to evaluate this tradeoff, the downsides are very clear and comprehensible, while the upsides are kind of vague and unconvincing. It's only once you have kids that you realize that while those downsides are real, they are trivial compared to an upside you hardly could have imagined.
My honest opinion, which I do not consider to be socially acceptable - or polite - and hence avoid saying in real life, is that many, many people who choose not to have kids are doing so for reasons that would seem so very small to them from the other side of the mountain. I think that if they could live both lives and choose 'from on high', they would very often have an immensely strong preference for the fuller, more vibrant life with children - a life bursting with color and love and deep fulfillment and meaning that they likely didn't even realize was missing in their child-free life.
One very personal example, because I'm anonymous (I think?) is that my brother is choosing not to have kids. I think he's probably making a huge mistake, and because I love him, it makes me sad to think about what he is missing. But even with my brother, there is just no way to really close this epistemic gap. It's a sensitive topic, and I don't want to be pushy or damage our relationship.
Anyway - overall I often feel that the cultural messaging on kids is way too negative (in some online spaces, grotesquely so), but I also acknowledge that I clearly just like kids a lot more than many people, and could also be wrong about how much other people would enjoy kids!
3) Do not educate daughters. Education gives girls needless distractions
4) Identify girls at infancy with the desirable genes and race to become 'super-moms"
5) Similarly, shortlist future 'super-dads' who not only have desirable genes and race but also economic potential to nurture a big family
6) Or, the government should totally finance the family so the super-dads can focus on fathering
7) Legalize polygamy for these super-dads?
8) Institutionalize volunteer foster grandparents / or pay them
9) Create communes to bring up children
10) Have another world war to be followed by another baby boom
Or we could share some space with the other living beings on earth?
Apologies for this somewhat tongue-in-cheek list. I was reminded of Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick.
There's not enough discussion of Israel in the fertility conversation. What differentiates Israelis from other westerners that makes them so much more fertile? I would wager the answer to the fertility question lies in research of that question.
Secular Israelis are hovering just around replacement rate, but will be below it by the end of the decade probably. It's mostly the ultra religious that are keeping it up which is a pattern you see elsewhere.
But yes secular Israelis are a little ahead of the west. Why? Israel has very pro family welfare policies for one and has for decades. Healthcare, payment for birth of a child, paid leave, monthly payments per kid, etc. But also even secular Israelis have in general strong religious ties. More than secular Americans I would wager. Celebrating shabbat every week is common, celebrating the holidays, and so a pro family culture leaks in through religious association even absent belief in God.
I also think you can't discount the effect of the holocaust. Losing so many of your people in a short time gives rise to a feeling that we have to repopulate. We survived. It's our duty to continue to survive.
Actually, a significant section of the Israeli population are ultra-religious Jews where the men do not work and collect endless welfare, with their wives popping out children like its going out of style. But I have to wonder if this is actually good for Israel? Creating a huge population of essentially useless welfare recipitents - but most certainly conservative party voters. This kind of short term thinking could destroy Israel in the long run - and maybe already has.
Comparing only Secular Israelis to western populations is unfair, because you are comparing the most liberal portion of Israeli society to other western societies, which include some conservatives. Secular Israelis ought to be compared to their counterparts (think Democrats, Labor voters etc.) then the difference remains stark.
I'm not sure it's so stark really. Secular Israeli birth rates have declined by about .5 in just 10 years to about 2.1. Assuming that's not temporary, which it could be, then they are really just one decade behind the rest of the west if they continue to decline to closer to 1.5.
Being one decade behind isn't some big mystery to be solved, it's probably just some unique outcome of the causes I stated above having a marginal effect, but one that ultimately can't stop the trend.
If they don't continue to decline, or go back up, then I would call it worth investigating further.
1° they live in stable families and 2° they know their children have zero chance to starve. Stability, and security. That's my uneducated hunch, anyway.
The standard Israeli women isn't “much more fertile”. They average slightly more children than in the West, but still below the replacement rate. Orthodox Jews and Arabs are what make Israel an outlier.
Even granting that, the widespread stagnation and economic contraction caused by the population significantly shrinking will likely harm people who currently exist. So you can support natalist policies for that reason.
Will there be “widespread stagnation and economic contraction caused by the population significantly shrinking?” That is an hypothesis. It is not a fact.
Furthermore, even as the population shrinks, there is still a large installed base of capital (homes, buildings, etc.) that exists and that will be used by fewer people. This means everyone’s per capita capital allocation increases.
Like many folks commenting here, I am unconvinced that a shrinking human population is a problem.
Suppose we’re stuck with traditional “biological” intelligence, meaning no artificial intelligence capable of either solving major problems itself or augmenting human intelligence to solve the previously unsolvable. If so, then more people = more “rolls of the dice” to get enough geniuses in the global population to keep trying. This would also justify other good policies, like ending or else greatly reducing hunger and poverty in the world to capitalize on the potential we already have. But fundamentally you solve this with more brain.
But if AI can help us solve the big, seemingly intractable problems, or just help us move the intelligence needle for the people already here, then I tend to agree that a falling population is not inherently a problem. The 10,000 foot view seems obvious: having at least one child is generally viewed as rewarding (after all, while the bottom may not have fallen out yet, at least we haven’t yet dropped under 1.0 TFR), having a big gaggle of them not so much, or else people would still be doing it. I agree with Richard and the other pro-natalists when it comes to removing inefficient or arbitrary barriers to raising families, like removing barriers to building more housing supply and not structurally favoring the old with what feels like every damn entitlement on the planet. But if we do all that and we still only stabilize at 1.8 TFR, shrug. Hopefully AI gets us where we need to be.
There is no "quick fix" or even slow fix for the falling birthrate. But for what it's worth, I think it's pretty easy to identify the cause of the high fertility in Orthodox Jewish communities, and connect that to worldwide high fertility in the past and poor countries in the present. And that is the separation of genders.
Orthodox Jews have strict gender separation, which means that boys and girls have completely separate and wildly different educational tracks. Boys are taught mostly Talmud. Girls are not taught any Talmud and are taught more Bible, hebrew grammar, and secular studies than boys. Girls are inculcated that the highest achievement in life is to be a good wife and mother and bring up their children in the ways of the Torah. Preferably, they should marry a Talmud scholar, and support him in his learning until he needs to join the workforce. This is something they absorb quite naturally, with basically zero resistance, and is reinforced casually in all other family, community, and religious settings. It's easy to see why high fertility flows naturally from this.
By contrast, modern society has no gender separation, and girls are taught to aspire to the same things as boys. It's easy to see why several cumulative years of pregnancy, recovery, and breastfeeding and many more years of child-rearing would be viewed as a major inconvenience at best.
You have hit on something about ultra high fertility subcultures - they actually have very strict expectations for male behavior. I think women correctly realize that in a free for all world having kids (especially a lot of kids) fundamentally limits their freedom in a way it doesn't for men and when given the choice many opt out.
Cultures like the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and even Salafi Muslims put a lot of demands on men too. How many normal men are willing to give up drinking, smoking, drugs, porn, strip clubs, dress like they walked out of the 17th century, wake up early(er) for prayer(s) etc.?
Correct. A different point than mine, but connected. To maintain traditional gender roles in modern society, you need a culture that actively separates itself from modern culture in an all-encompassing way, for both genders, for adults and children. In such an environment, women's natural femininity asserts itself and tends towards a strong desire for motherhood, which is also encouraged at every step as the highest aspiration for a woman.
This is quite possibly just me being a bit dim but I can never understand why people so often compare baby boom era fertility to today as if it's apples to apples. Isn't the key difference here contraception rather than wealth or culture? Not to mention legal abortion? Why do we compare pre-Pill fertility to post-Pill fertility and then bang on about GDP and phones and whatnot?
I'm not sure today even compares to the 70s, 80s or 90s in contraceptive terms. The Pill was way more effective than methods that came before it, but much less effective than many options available today in terms of typical use--it can be hard to take a pill at the same time every single day without fail. And the pill is especially dangerous that way if you ever forget to take it even once, because you will immediately ovulate once its effect has worn off, so being on the pill and forgetting to take it is worse than using nothing. Today's landscape of IUDs, Nova rings, patches, injections, etc. etc. etc. has to knock a bit off the TFR on its own even compared to a couple decades ago, without considering cultural or economic changes.
I disagree. 100 years ago most people could not afford real estate as well, but they had a lot of children. I agree with the author. It’s only the culture and values. We need to grow them again! And support policies won’t hurt of course.
I don't understand the concern. Less people equates to more resources at a time when every resource from water to energy is under stress. Quality of life has always been more desirable than quantity of life. New technologies are automating labor in ever field from heavy industry, farming, mining, construction, medicine down to making the most delicate electronics. There is no longer a needs for masses of workers. Let's save our world and afford workers the dignity they deserve by living well without the stress of more humans scrambling for the last of diminishing resources.
By the logic of natural selection, the problem always fixes itself. Whatever it is that currently suppresses fertility in most, but not all people, some people are "resistant" to its effects. This cohort will out-reproduce everyone else. In a few generations, only the bearer of genes resistant to modern civilization's sterilizing effects will be around. And case closed.
Your analysis demonstrates why TTF matters: you've diagnosed fertility collapse as external forces (wealth, technology, time) acting on passive populations, which leads inevitably to pessimism. But the data refutes this victim-strategy framing.
Three cases prove identity determines outcomes, not economics:
Utah County maintains TFR 2.1-2.4 without Nordic subsidies. Sweden spends $30-35K per child and achieves 1.43 TFR.
Israel demolishes your entire thesis. At $55,000 GDP per capita PPP—wealthier than France or Japan—Israel sustains 2.9 TFR, highest in the developed world. Even secular Israeli Jewish women maintain 1.96 TFR, exceeding France's overall rate despite France spending 4% of GDP on family policy. Non-Haredi Jewish women achieve 2.45 TFR. Same wealth level as collapsing East Asian nations, opposite fertility outcome—because national identity incorporates family formation as existential purpose, not lifestyle choice.
You note Brazil's fertility fell despite conservative policies, attributing this to Rede Globo soap operas spreading "emancipatory values." But you miss the pattern: soap operas didn't cause decline through external force—they spread Malthusian identity treating children as consumption goods rather than creative investment. Julian Simon identified this in 1981: conventional accounting treats children as costs, not as agents who create wealth.
Georgia's Patriarch baptism story isn't about finding cultural equivalents of external authority. It's about identity environments normalizing family formation. Utah County and Israel created this through infrastructure + meaning frameworks + migration/national purpose that concentrated architect-strategy families.
The fertility crisis isn't wealth vs. time. It's victim identity (children as unaffordable burdens requiring external solutions) vs. architect identity (children as central purpose organizing life choices). Your framework can't see Creative responses because it locates agency externally.
Here's one take on this: nowadays it takes a lot of generosity, or rather, of knowing the joy of loving and giving to loved ones, to have kids. It also requires being able to get along with another person, usually of the opposite sex.
This is very recent - until now, you just needed some sex drive, and in the case of females, even just the desire for status/resources were sufficient. These latter two drivers are gone, so people with culture/genes that don't value loving are selected out of the cultural/gene pool. The process should be quite rapid - such traits would become extinct in just a few generations. Most people will have descendance - I mean, most people even in low fertility countries have two kids.
If that is so fertility should rebound and stabilise at or near replacement level, when a country's population is almost entirely made of people that can get along with a significant, value giving love more than career/material wealth, and have two or more kids.
So fear not: this may be just the next phase in evolutionary pressure - darwinism moving from survival to love.
I realise this is quite mean to my single friends... Not a very loving comment, in fact. But I wonder why this take has so little traction - may be many people with kids quietly think this but have less time to shout online than incels and lonely fems?
I think there is no single answer, the causes probably vary a lot across countries. However here in France we can see several important parameters : first, jobs. My children are 26 and 28, have master degrees, speak several languages, but still don't have completely stable jobs with decent pay (I mean like even slightly higher than median and/or average). Therefore, they certainly aren't close to having children. Because also second : housing. There is a massive housing crisis, in part because of AirBnB, in part because of insufficient construction, and largely because of the way people (don't) live together : in my town, the number of apartments exploded in the past 20 years, but the number of inhabitants remained exactly the same, just because people live alone more and more. This creates a huge pressure on housing demand, and makes existing home too big (nobody needs a 5-person flat anymore), and that compounds with the poor job status because you need to earn insane money to be able to afford a decent home. My son rents a single room in a squalid neighbourhood for 700€ a month.
So imagine that : a single room costs half of full-time minimum wage, but to rent a place you're required to earn 3 times the price. OTOH median salary for non-management workers is less than 1.5x minimum wage... Therefore at least half the population can't even rent a single room. Now start planning having children on top of that? Yeah, sure.
Emmanuel, I agree. The causes here are multivariate. You fingered housing and the state of the economy as the primary impediments. These are probably related causes. At least in the US, overzealous zoning regulations have made it difficult to build housing where it is in the most demand.
This means that parents have less disposable income than they should. It also means that labor cannot settle where it is most productive, creating drag on the entire economy on the macro level.
As I have written, I think the single best way to tackle this problem is to replace property taxes with LVT and ease zoning regulations.
Metropolisation plays a role, too : there is a massive glut of available housing (often in poor shape, and at very low prices) in small, deindustrialised towns. But near big cities, prices are ridiculous. Example : in the cozy town of Nevers, you can buy a pretty, stone-built 150 m2 house with a garden in the centre for 200k€. In Paris, 200k€ will buy a single room, 15 to 20 m2, on the 6th floor with no lift : 8 to 10 times more expensive. It was not always like this, in the past there were thriving industries around Nevers, metallurgy, rail, automobile, chemistry... But everything's gone to Poland or China. So more and more the only remaining people are retirees holding their homes as stranded assets, and the young people are working in the very low productivity service jobs, delivering food and packages, mopping flors and and washing old asses for minimum wage... Unsurprisingly, they vote en masse for the fascists now.
Correct.
The opportunity-cost theory is basically Baumol's cost disease applied to childrearing. Part of me wonders how quickly humanity will see a natural self-correction or rebound in aggregate fertility. Intuitively it feels like we are headed for a very sudden selection bottleneck for whatever heritable traits make individuals' fertility resistant to Baumol's cost disease -- like, talk about punctuated equilibrium! In a generation or two (i.e., almost instantly), people whose heritable traits cause them to react to modernity by having no or few kids will fall out of the population, leaving the fertile remainder to radiate rapidly, essentially taking over the gene pool all at once.
I'm sure one could describe this with a system of differential equations given some assumptions about heritability, assortative mating, and so on.
Yes, I also suspect the problem will be self-correcting, because when people have a choice about breeding, only those who want to breed will do so, and there's probably some heritable factors affecting this choice, as well as obvious issues like cost, opportunity cost, reduced income, later adulthood, increased standards, etc. which apply to all, or to all but the richest.
Agreed with the selection part but not sure about Baumol. Child rearing also has benefitted massively from technology and education specifically has been industrialized long ago.
Yes but technology and education have also, simultaneously, massively benefited all of the alternatives to childrearing, increasing the absolute opportunity cost. I don't think it's a settled matter, and it would depend on how it all balances out, but I still think Baumol is a leading contender for the basic explanation. It's also potentially consistent with Hanania's point about fertility declining over time *even when controlling for income*, because, on this theory, we are just seeing how headline national income time series underestimate the true change in opportunity cost because of the residual non-comparability of "real" incomes across time due to the invention of non-comparable goods and technologies.
The Georgian example is great - making having 3+ kids high status again - but unfortunately it's impossible to replicate in the West.
Who would the children need to get baptized by? An Instagram influencer? A Super Bowl quarterback? A political pundit? A technocrat and/or an Epstein island visitor?
We no longer have a monoculture.
Literally just do a Taylor Swift concert for 3+ child families. A special day at the beginning of every month for 3+ child families only at Disneyland. A whole section of stands at every NFL game restricted for 3+ families.
There’s a lot to complain about in America in 2026, but *lack of cultural heavyweights* is not one of those things!!!
We have this sort of thing here in Poland, but it's a "large family card" and you only get like 10% discounts on stuff. More like a barely significant relief rather than something that makes the decision to have a third child a no brainer.
Yeah I have no idea how to induce TSwift to follow through on my suggestion, but the idea that she wields less cultural power than the Patriarch of Georgia is pretty comical.
I like these ideas in theory. It's true that her cultural pull is enormous, but if she were inclined, on any level, to do what you're describing, she wouldn't be the superstar that she is. That's why it's impossible to visualize getting from here to there.
It's not a coincidence or historical accident that Taylor Swift is implicitly anti-natal. Implicitly anti-natal values are attractive, especially to women, but to many men also. The girls like what Taylor is selling.
EXPLICIT anti-natalism and pro-natalism are both unattractive. They're zero fun. The appealing attitude is, "Sure, babies are cute, I guess. Not for me, at least not right now, but maybe in the future, who knows? Why are we even talking about this?"
Implicit anti-natal values have conquered the world because the world loves them. As soon as people from any culture are exposed to them, they adopt them en masse. They are the path of least resistance.
Look, if a twenty-something pop star with a fanbase of teenie boppers started singing natality carols, sure she’d lose those fans, but TSwift is now a 30-something whose fans are in what’s now prime childbearing years, and she has a song that includes the following lyrics:
“Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you”
We literally just need her to replace “couple” with “bunch of” and boom, she’s a pro-natalist. It would actually make the song make more sense; since two kids are not “the whole block”!!
I don't think her saying a few things about kids -- without actually having kids! -- does very much.
Even if she goes through with the marriage and has a kid or two around age 40 through a surrogate, does that really change the message in a way that persuades women to live differently?
That entire life story is implicitly anti-natal when scaled to society. "I went through a ton of boyfriends before finally getting married in my late 30s, using my wealth to defray any and all of the inconveniences of childbearing that normal people face. And I regret none of it."
And more than this: she is not someone who can even conceive in terms of wanting to advocate for pro-natalism. Her entire message is one of, "Look, this was my path. You will have to find your own authentic path. And don't let anyone else tell you what that path is." That message is, again, implicitly anti-natal.
Doesn’t have to be the same for every family
Works best if it is though.
I'm becoming less and less concerned with fertility.
Firstly, while there are certainly negative effects flowing from an aging population with not enough younger workers to replace them - nothing we can really do at this point will stop this. We needed to do something back in 2006, not wait until 2026. The ship has already sailed.
Secondly, Japan has proved that you can have a managed population decline without descending into disaster. Replacing workers with immigrants is not ideal, but should work for America as we are traditionally really good at assimilation.
Thirdly, since we really don't know how the revolution of AI is going to impact humanity in the next few decades, how do we really know that lack of fertility is really a problem? Perhaps most jobs will be replaced/automated and we won't need a bigger generation to take over.
I certainly agree that people should have help having the children they do want to have, and for this reason I support pro-natalist benefits (I think I also just really like babies and kids - and desperately want grandkids). But acting like we're in the middle of the plot of Children of Men* is a bit much.
If anything, the answer to fertility and most of our other social problems today is less internet, and more in-person interactions. A treatment that is good for everyone, all of the time, even those who will never have kids.
*An excellent film if you haven't seen it.
A big part of how Japan has managed it's decline is because it's pension system is being heavily leverage in foreign equities and bonds. If everyone starts declining like Japan then there's not going to be foreign markets to help prop the system up. See the first article in this journal.
https://www.aeaweb.org/full_issue.php?doi=10.1257/jep.39.4
America doesn't even fund its own pension system, but instead runs it like a shady Ponzi scheme, so I don't think we have to worry about that same problem. We will have to manage our own population decline in some creative way.
One underrated thing that I think explains low East-Asian fertility is the phenomenon of Idols. Specifically that Idols are not allowed to date (publicly) or form families while they are working. This means that some of the biggest role models for young people are all both sexless and childless.
Two questions for you:
- How many kids have you sired?
- For how many kids have you been the primary care taker?
I suppose I could also ask a third question:
- How many kids have you supported financially from birth through adulthood (or their current ages, if not yet adult)?
For the record, my theory about the birthrate decline is that being a child's primary caretaker is a really rotten job, or, at best, less attractive than most people's available alternatives. This is particularly true in e.g. modern North America, but I recall my mother hating it quite vocally 55 years ago.
I'm thus extremely suspicious of people of a gender or class not normally responsible for child care, when they express concern about the falling birthrate. If you care that much, volunteer to raise someone's children, maybe even your own, and do a decent job of it. Then we can talk.
> [...] my theory [...] is that being a child's primary caretaker is a really rotten job [or worse than alternatives for most ppl]
Not my experience at all! I had a job I loved - six figures, traveling the world, solving cool problems with great coworkers - but quit to be the full-time caretaker for my (at the time) two young children. And it's one of the best decisions I've made. Hard to express how amazing every day is.
Now, this is NOT what I would have expected prior to having kids. I suspect part of the issue is a disconnect between how amazing kids often are once you have them, and how unpleasant it can look beforehand.
(Obviously YMMV - caretaker is a bad fit for some, I'm lucky to be so financially secure, etc. Most of my close friends who have had kids are extremely glad to have done so - 85%? - but I can think of one exception and a couple of borderline cases.)
(I also think it's fine for non-parents to comment on falling fertility. Cf: If you care so much about climate change, why aren't you a green energy scientist yourself? I don't think the bar for commenting on social issues should be 'has reoriented one's life around it'.)
I'm glad this worked so well for you. Doubtless the descendants of people like you will inherit the earth, along with the descendants of those who manage to convince people like you to rear *their* kids.
Note by the way that I'm not talking about simply siring children, or even providing for those children and perhaps their caretaker(s). I think the sticking point is that enough people would much much rather do something other than caring for children to make a major contribution to keeping the birthrate below the replacement level. They/we aren't the only cause, and several other likely causes have been mentioned here. But given my life experience, "don't want to" seems like a fairly major factor, that somehow isn't mentioned as much as I think it should be.
--
Anyone can comment on anything. But I'm always of suspicious of anyone who wants to solve some problem by convincing *other people* to do something those people have chosen not to do, even while being unwilling to do the same thing themselves.
e.g. "Those poor people should be happy to work for peanuts. How else can the economy (aka stock market) do well, and my investments gain in value?"
e.g. "Those young men should be happy to fight and die to defend the financial interests of rich old people/women like me".
Also, I think your comment gets at something hard about this issue. You seem like a smart and reasonable person, yet even you jumped from "people expressing concern about falling birth rates" to "people asking others to have more kids than they have chosen to". Even putting aside "we should be able to talk about problems without being judged in advance over possible solutions", it's worth pointing out that in this case the solution you're criticizing problem-noticers over is just not one that I ever see advocated for. (Granted, I'm not really that plugged into this discussion, but the things I've seen discussed are helping people close the gap between the number of kids they say they want and those they manage to have, and ways to make parenting more attractive like tax breaks or better leave policy that let parents capture some of the societal gains.)
Anyway, my point is not to criticize you, my takeaway is that this is a sensitive and tricky issue to talk about.
I guess I get around the net more. I have encountered a small number of people explicitly advocating restricting options available to women, so that our best available life choice would be broodmare.
Some were generous enough to offer alternatives for those who'd be made especially miserable by the job requirement of copulation; they could become something like a nun, provided this option was kept unpleasant and low status enough that "wife" (aka broodmare) would seem better to anyone not extremely averse to the role society really needed them to take.
I figure that for every person willing to say something like this, which is sure to get angry pushback, there's a larger number who agree with it, and an even larger number who'd think it no big issue, if for example they happened to be in a country where this was a live political option.
And yes, my internet time is limited - I have 3 kids to take care of! :-)
Fair enough - then again, my impression is you can find any depravity you wish in the dark corners of the internet. My strong expectation, based mostly on people I know in real life, is that 99% of people would react with horror to the ideas you're referencing.
Regardless, it definitely helps clarify where you're coming from - if I thought that a substantial number of people thought this way, or that it had any chance of being politically viable, I'd be worried about it too!
Thanks! But my view is even more generous toward people like me - I think we already have inherited the earth, and most people would enjoy kids way more than they expect. Not everyone of course, but I think I was making an enormous mistake prior to having kids re: my expectations on how kids would impact my well-being. (I thought mildly positive with wide uncertainty, the answer is it made my life, like, 10x better, from a high baseline.)
The thing that makes me most sad about this issue is the happiness, flourishing, and Pareto improvements that I think are being left on the table due to information gaps/misleading cultural messaging/etc.
Neither of us have statistics, so the best thing we can do is advocate for the freedom to choose, including the economic underpinnings of a meaningful choice.
I suspect that your position is much more socially acceptable - so people who feel like you talk about it more than people who feel like me. But I could so easily be wrong.
Yes, I mostly agree with this.
My impression (fwiw) is that the 'socially approved' view is something like "kids are really hard, and stressful, and you will be sick and frazzled and sleep-deprived and won't be able to see your friends or do your hobbies, but you also love them so much and it's amazing".
This is...exaggerated but basically right? My main worry is that for non-parents attempting to evaluate this tradeoff, the downsides are very clear and comprehensible, while the upsides are kind of vague and unconvincing. It's only once you have kids that you realize that while those downsides are real, they are trivial compared to an upside you hardly could have imagined.
My honest opinion, which I do not consider to be socially acceptable - or polite - and hence avoid saying in real life, is that many, many people who choose not to have kids are doing so for reasons that would seem so very small to them from the other side of the mountain. I think that if they could live both lives and choose 'from on high', they would very often have an immensely strong preference for the fuller, more vibrant life with children - a life bursting with color and love and deep fulfillment and meaning that they likely didn't even realize was missing in their child-free life.
One very personal example, because I'm anonymous (I think?) is that my brother is choosing not to have kids. I think he's probably making a huge mistake, and because I love him, it makes me sad to think about what he is missing. But even with my brother, there is just no way to really close this epistemic gap. It's a sensitive topic, and I don't want to be pushy or damage our relationship.
Anyway - overall I often feel that the cultural messaging on kids is way too negative (in some online spaces, grotesquely so), but I also acknowledge that I clearly just like kids a lot more than many people, and could also be wrong about how much other people would enjoy kids!
10 solutions to the Fertility Problem:
1) Take away phones
2) Destroy TVs
3) Do not educate daughters. Education gives girls needless distractions
4) Identify girls at infancy with the desirable genes and race to become 'super-moms"
5) Similarly, shortlist future 'super-dads' who not only have desirable genes and race but also economic potential to nurture a big family
6) Or, the government should totally finance the family so the super-dads can focus on fathering
7) Legalize polygamy for these super-dads?
8) Institutionalize volunteer foster grandparents / or pay them
9) Create communes to bring up children
10) Have another world war to be followed by another baby boom
Or we could share some space with the other living beings on earth?
Apologies for this somewhat tongue-in-cheek list. I was reminded of Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick.
Good point. I wonder why ‘educate and integrate the people we actually have into the world economy’ is never an option with this crowd?
There's not enough discussion of Israel in the fertility conversation. What differentiates Israelis from other westerners that makes them so much more fertile? I would wager the answer to the fertility question lies in research of that question.
Secular Israelis are hovering just around replacement rate, but will be below it by the end of the decade probably. It's mostly the ultra religious that are keeping it up which is a pattern you see elsewhere.
But yes secular Israelis are a little ahead of the west. Why? Israel has very pro family welfare policies for one and has for decades. Healthcare, payment for birth of a child, paid leave, monthly payments per kid, etc. But also even secular Israelis have in general strong religious ties. More than secular Americans I would wager. Celebrating shabbat every week is common, celebrating the holidays, and so a pro family culture leaks in through religious association even absent belief in God.
I also think you can't discount the effect of the holocaust. Losing so many of your people in a short time gives rise to a feeling that we have to repopulate. We survived. It's our duty to continue to survive.
Actually, a significant section of the Israeli population are ultra-religious Jews where the men do not work and collect endless welfare, with their wives popping out children like its going out of style. But I have to wonder if this is actually good for Israel? Creating a huge population of essentially useless welfare recipitents - but most certainly conservative party voters. This kind of short term thinking could destroy Israel in the long run - and maybe already has.
Comparing only Secular Israelis to western populations is unfair, because you are comparing the most liberal portion of Israeli society to other western societies, which include some conservatives. Secular Israelis ought to be compared to their counterparts (think Democrats, Labor voters etc.) then the difference remains stark.
I'm not sure it's so stark really. Secular Israeli birth rates have declined by about .5 in just 10 years to about 2.1. Assuming that's not temporary, which it could be, then they are really just one decade behind the rest of the west if they continue to decline to closer to 1.5.
Being one decade behind isn't some big mystery to be solved, it's probably just some unique outcome of the causes I stated above having a marginal effect, but one that ultimately can't stop the trend.
If they don't continue to decline, or go back up, then I would call it worth investigating further.
1° they live in stable families and 2° they know their children have zero chance to starve. Stability, and security. That's my uneducated hunch, anyway.
The standard Israeli women isn't “much more fertile”. They average slightly more children than in the West, but still below the replacement rate. Orthodox Jews and Arabs are what make Israel an outlier.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-highest-in-oecd-by-far-at-2-9-children-per-woman/
I’m still unconvinced that an increasing human population is inherently a good thing.
Even granting that, the widespread stagnation and economic contraction caused by the population significantly shrinking will likely harm people who currently exist. So you can support natalist policies for that reason.
Will there be “widespread stagnation and economic contraction caused by the population significantly shrinking?” That is an hypothesis. It is not a fact.
Furthermore, even as the population shrinks, there is still a large installed base of capital (homes, buildings, etc.) that exists and that will be used by fewer people. This means everyone’s per capita capital allocation increases.
Like many folks commenting here, I am unconvinced that a shrinking human population is a problem.
It comes down to AI for me.
Suppose we’re stuck with traditional “biological” intelligence, meaning no artificial intelligence capable of either solving major problems itself or augmenting human intelligence to solve the previously unsolvable. If so, then more people = more “rolls of the dice” to get enough geniuses in the global population to keep trying. This would also justify other good policies, like ending or else greatly reducing hunger and poverty in the world to capitalize on the potential we already have. But fundamentally you solve this with more brain.
But if AI can help us solve the big, seemingly intractable problems, or just help us move the intelligence needle for the people already here, then I tend to agree that a falling population is not inherently a problem. The 10,000 foot view seems obvious: having at least one child is generally viewed as rewarding (after all, while the bottom may not have fallen out yet, at least we haven’t yet dropped under 1.0 TFR), having a big gaggle of them not so much, or else people would still be doing it. I agree with Richard and the other pro-natalists when it comes to removing inefficient or arbitrary barriers to raising families, like removing barriers to building more housing supply and not structurally favoring the old with what feels like every damn entitlement on the planet. But if we do all that and we still only stabilize at 1.8 TFR, shrug. Hopefully AI gets us where we need to be.
There is no "quick fix" or even slow fix for the falling birthrate. But for what it's worth, I think it's pretty easy to identify the cause of the high fertility in Orthodox Jewish communities, and connect that to worldwide high fertility in the past and poor countries in the present. And that is the separation of genders.
Orthodox Jews have strict gender separation, which means that boys and girls have completely separate and wildly different educational tracks. Boys are taught mostly Talmud. Girls are not taught any Talmud and are taught more Bible, hebrew grammar, and secular studies than boys. Girls are inculcated that the highest achievement in life is to be a good wife and mother and bring up their children in the ways of the Torah. Preferably, they should marry a Talmud scholar, and support him in his learning until he needs to join the workforce. This is something they absorb quite naturally, with basically zero resistance, and is reinforced casually in all other family, community, and religious settings. It's easy to see why high fertility flows naturally from this.
By contrast, modern society has no gender separation, and girls are taught to aspire to the same things as boys. It's easy to see why several cumulative years of pregnancy, recovery, and breastfeeding and many more years of child-rearing would be viewed as a major inconvenience at best.
You have hit on something about ultra high fertility subcultures - they actually have very strict expectations for male behavior. I think women correctly realize that in a free for all world having kids (especially a lot of kids) fundamentally limits their freedom in a way it doesn't for men and when given the choice many opt out.
Cultures like the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and even Salafi Muslims put a lot of demands on men too. How many normal men are willing to give up drinking, smoking, drugs, porn, strip clubs, dress like they walked out of the 17th century, wake up early(er) for prayer(s) etc.?
Correct. A different point than mine, but connected. To maintain traditional gender roles in modern society, you need a culture that actively separates itself from modern culture in an all-encompassing way, for both genders, for adults and children. In such an environment, women's natural femininity asserts itself and tends towards a strong desire for motherhood, which is also encouraged at every step as the highest aspiration for a woman.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/oppression-of-males-is-the-gender
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/girls-dont-want-to-have-fun
2 excellent articles on the subject.
On the topic of the culture necessary for fertility, in particular based on analyzing Ultra-Orthodox (and Amish) culture I recommend this substack.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/archive
This is quite possibly just me being a bit dim but I can never understand why people so often compare baby boom era fertility to today as if it's apples to apples. Isn't the key difference here contraception rather than wealth or culture? Not to mention legal abortion? Why do we compare pre-Pill fertility to post-Pill fertility and then bang on about GDP and phones and whatnot?
I'm not sure today even compares to the 70s, 80s or 90s in contraceptive terms. The Pill was way more effective than methods that came before it, but much less effective than many options available today in terms of typical use--it can be hard to take a pill at the same time every single day without fail. And the pill is especially dangerous that way if you ever forget to take it even once, because you will immediately ovulate once its effect has worn off, so being on the pill and forgetting to take it is worse than using nothing. Today's landscape of IUDs, Nova rings, patches, injections, etc. etc. etc. has to knock a bit off the TFR on its own even compared to a couple decades ago, without considering cultural or economic changes.
I disagree. 100 years ago most people could not afford real estate as well, but they had a lot of children. I agree with the author. It’s only the culture and values. We need to grow them again! And support policies won’t hurt of course.
I don't understand the concern. Less people equates to more resources at a time when every resource from water to energy is under stress. Quality of life has always been more desirable than quantity of life. New technologies are automating labor in ever field from heavy industry, farming, mining, construction, medicine down to making the most delicate electronics. There is no longer a needs for masses of workers. Let's save our world and afford workers the dignity they deserve by living well without the stress of more humans scrambling for the last of diminishing resources.
By the logic of natural selection, the problem always fixes itself. Whatever it is that currently suppresses fertility in most, but not all people, some people are "resistant" to its effects. This cohort will out-reproduce everyone else. In a few generations, only the bearer of genes resistant to modern civilization's sterilizing effects will be around. And case closed.
"a few" no
Your analysis demonstrates why TTF matters: you've diagnosed fertility collapse as external forces (wealth, technology, time) acting on passive populations, which leads inevitably to pessimism. But the data refutes this victim-strategy framing.
Three cases prove identity determines outcomes, not economics:
Utah County maintains TFR 2.1-2.4 without Nordic subsidies. Sweden spends $30-35K per child and achieves 1.43 TFR.
Israel demolishes your entire thesis. At $55,000 GDP per capita PPP—wealthier than France or Japan—Israel sustains 2.9 TFR, highest in the developed world. Even secular Israeli Jewish women maintain 1.96 TFR, exceeding France's overall rate despite France spending 4% of GDP on family policy. Non-Haredi Jewish women achieve 2.45 TFR. Same wealth level as collapsing East Asian nations, opposite fertility outcome—because national identity incorporates family formation as existential purpose, not lifestyle choice.
You note Brazil's fertility fell despite conservative policies, attributing this to Rede Globo soap operas spreading "emancipatory values." But you miss the pattern: soap operas didn't cause decline through external force—they spread Malthusian identity treating children as consumption goods rather than creative investment. Julian Simon identified this in 1981: conventional accounting treats children as costs, not as agents who create wealth.
Georgia's Patriarch baptism story isn't about finding cultural equivalents of external authority. It's about identity environments normalizing family formation. Utah County and Israel created this through infrastructure + meaning frameworks + migration/national purpose that concentrated architect-strategy families.
The fertility crisis isn't wealth vs. time. It's victim identity (children as unaffordable burdens requiring external solutions) vs. architect identity (children as central purpose organizing life choices). Your framework can't see Creative responses because it locates agency externally.
Here's one take on this: nowadays it takes a lot of generosity, or rather, of knowing the joy of loving and giving to loved ones, to have kids. It also requires being able to get along with another person, usually of the opposite sex.
This is very recent - until now, you just needed some sex drive, and in the case of females, even just the desire for status/resources were sufficient. These latter two drivers are gone, so people with culture/genes that don't value loving are selected out of the cultural/gene pool. The process should be quite rapid - such traits would become extinct in just a few generations. Most people will have descendance - I mean, most people even in low fertility countries have two kids.
If that is so fertility should rebound and stabilise at or near replacement level, when a country's population is almost entirely made of people that can get along with a significant, value giving love more than career/material wealth, and have two or more kids.
So fear not: this may be just the next phase in evolutionary pressure - darwinism moving from survival to love.
I realise this is quite mean to my single friends... Not a very loving comment, in fact. But I wonder why this take has so little traction - may be many people with kids quietly think this but have less time to shout online than incels and lonely fems?