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?
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.
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.
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 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.
Richard, while I agree that the collapse in fertility rates presents a threat to continued human prosperity (I have written extensively on this), there is also a chance we are all engaging in a kind of reverse Malthusianism here.
Technology saved us the last time. In the 1930s, the Baby Boom began just as it looked like the Western world was about to step off a population cliff. Advancements in medicine dramatically lowered infant mortality, child mortality, and maternal mortality.
The same could happen this time, even if we acknowledge that the situation is much worse this time around. The proliferation of, for example, humanoid robotic assistants could increase leisure time and make it easier for couples to afford and care for children.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Richard, while I agree that the collapse in fertility rates presents a threat to continued human prosperity (I have written extensively on this), there is also a chance we are all engaging in a kind of reverse Malthusianism here.
Technology saved us the last time. In the 1930s, the Baby Boom began just as it looked like the Western world was about to step off a population cliff. Advancements in medicine dramatically lowered infant mortality, child mortality, and maternal mortality.
The same could happen this time, even if we acknowledge that the situation is much worse this time around. The proliferation of, for example, humanoid robotic assistants could increase leisure time and make it easier for couples to afford and care for children.
Time will tell.