It can be even simpler. People would choose low fertility if they could. People in very underdeveloped countries simply lack the human capital needed to control their fertility.
If people have the capacity to control fertility then they choose to do it, so every country with near universal literacy has low or very low fertility.
The standard Becker/Mincer increasing opportunity cost and quality quantity trade off, as a first approximation doesn't make much evolutionary sense. That a refined version would say that for some evolutionary reason our preference for consumption as opposed to reproduction is stronger, in part due to consumption becoming more pleasurable in recent times. The problem with this refinement is that large parts of consumption in contemporary society are related to status etc. that is conspicuous consumption. And of course allocating resources on signalling status etc. is what one would expect if Hanson is correct, as such the increasing opportunity cost model is best viewed as a description of some trade off, but it doesn't tell you why we evolved such a trade off.
It's also important to note that contemporary behaviour is clearly maladaptive, such that when thinking about such issues we should almost certainly have the framing of "what went wrong evolutionarily speaking"
They often kept their family size low with relatively primitive techniques, or exposure of unwanted infants, rather than a pill.
But doesn’t the simple opportunity cost model still seem quite plausible? When a civilization hits a certain point, maybe too many people would just rather spend time philosophizing, playing Olympic sports, dancing and hosting parties, etc.
It’s not mutually exclusive of your theories, of course.
That's definitely part of the mistake evolution made (humans don't even value sex robustly, so much so that they can be easily fooled by various approximations), but that it seems strange to say that humans evolved such preferences towards conspicuous consumption and reproduction, without offering some nice evolutionary explanation.
I'm not intimately familiar with the relevant history or empirics but my guess is that you could tease out which theory is better.
I think you misunderstood the "various approximations" I was referring to the various substitutes people have for actual sex nowadays, and I think a lot of people (especially young men) do in fact get fooled, and that this will only worsen as technology advances. Albeit this is somewhat orthogonal to the discussion.
"People evolved conspicuous consumption to find the best mates." This seems roughly like part of Hanson's explanation (minus the specifics about the status detection mechanism, and the various other consequences of being status drunk). Alternatively you could be saying that we evolved a preference for such signalling for such a reason, and that now that we can do things that satisfy such a preference for signalling to a more extreme degree (albeit at the cost of reproduction), but that this is not related to some evolutionary heuristic of limiting reproduction and signalling harder when you are richer. That signalling harder (as you get richer and have contraception) is something you would expect given that people prefer status and sex over reproduction. Under this view the evolutionary mistake of valuing sex not reproduction is given more primacy.
What I find strange about this view is that you have all the pieces for such a theory, and that such a heuristic seems to make lots of historical sense so much so I would find it fairly plausible even if we stayed poor and never observed modern low fertility. Albeit relatedly after thinking through what I think is your position, it does in fact seem like you can make many of the same status drunk predictions etc. without such a heuristic, just with that single mistake, so I'm less confident that this part of Hanson's view is correct.
I don’t understand: “What I find strange about this view is that you have all the pieces for such a theory, and that such a heuristic seems to make lots of historical sense so much so I would find it fairly plausible even if we stayed poor and never observed modern low fertility.”
It sounds like you are saying this theory is super plausible in all ways — and that we would even find it plausible without the modern era observations — therefore it is “strange”? To me that is the opposite
precisely! people seek to maximise status within the current cultural landscape they are in. I do not think we have some "king threshold" that's universal and biologically embedded in us. It's a much less parsimonious explanation.
It's not even consistent imo with empirical historical data- it seems that fertility correlated positively with status for much of human history (although this is being debated as well- in any case, it does not seem that there was some cross cultural obvious inverse relationship )
You are making this waaaaaay too complicated. If you were to visit some of these poorer countries, you would immediately find that in most of them, the idea of parents providing a quarter century or more of full financial support for their children is a totally alien concept. Before WW2 in this country, it was still pretty common for kids to start working full time immediately upon completing primary school. They would continue to live with their parents, helping with the household expenses, until they got married in their teens and began the cycle for a new generation. Children in such societies are a huge financial boon for their parents. Not having them makes survival more difficult. In our society, parents are expected to shovel most of their life's earnings into the bottomless pit of child rearing and college educations in the hope that maybe their kids will one day help defray the cost of three bowls of gruel a day in a nursing home.
There's truth to this. Families were economic units where everyone was expected to contribute., children and the elderly. Grandparents helped raised the small children and older children worked inside or outside the home.
I find this theory unconvincing. Rapid urbanization + decline in religion + lower status for large families are the main culprits in a falling TFR. The pill and modern feminism which denigrates motherhood are also to blame.
Everyone worried about declining fertility rates but how many of you have more than 2 children? Be the change you want to see in the world.
I have 3 kids, I'm highly educated and have a prestigious career. When I was pregnant with my third, people remarked how I was crazy to have a third and commented on how I would have a "big" family. I get looks when I walk into a store with my kids trailing behind me, like Mother Goose, or comments like "Wow, 3!". Rarely does someone comment on how wonderful it is to have 3 children and how it's a blessing. I tell people I wish I had started having children earlier so I could have had more. That always shocks them.
While the relationship between falling fertility and wealth is well explored here, I am unconvinced by the Kings and Queens explanation.
It is completely lost when looking at overall TFR that there are actually at least two separate phenomena that have happened worldwide to lower fertility, and these likely have very different underlying causes. Phenomenon one is the traditionally understood "demographic transition" of average family size for women who become mothers falling to 2 to 3 children. This transition is still happening in Africa (in some places barely started), but pretty much done everywhere else is the world. The second, newer, phenomenon is the rise in women who never have children at all.
The first fertility transition started in the West as early as the eighteenth century (e.g., France) and was basically complete across the West (and in places like Japan) by the end of the baby boom. It is unclear to me whether desired family size actually changed over the centuries (this may well be linked to rising income and urbanization) or whether 2-3 (surviving to adulthood) kids was always the ideal average family size for women deep down, and now technology and culture had changed in a way to allow us to achieve it. Regardless, as Stephen Shaw has explored very well in his recent documentary project, Birthgap, this ideal has basically been constant across the West since the 70s. It is important to emphasize that average family size for women who have any children has held steady in developed countries for decades, even while overall fertility falls.
What is happening, instead, is a relentless and continuing rise in women who are childless. Birthgap summons good evidence that a large majority of childless women today wanted to have children, but simply don't find a committed partner in time (or at all). Shaw calls it "unplanned childlessness", and it is pretty global. Some middle income countries have an even worse childlessness problem today than places like the USA. It is a mating crisis leading to fertility collapse, and it seems to be closely linked to women spending more years in education (especially relative to men?). Rising wealth may be connected to the mating crisis story, but the Kings and Queens theory does not really fit here.
I'll note that there may be a third phenomenon happening today. Namely, a rising number of women genuinely not wanting to have children. Shaw couldn't find much evidence for this, but it may just take more time to emerge in the data. Certainly, there seems to be more expression of anti-natalism in culture and media in the last 10 years. It is possible that the "I don't want children" mantra is just cope for victims of the mating crisis or performative environmentalism that does not reflect real views or even a transient phase that kids grow out of by their thirties. It could also be a lasting and growing attitude that will further swell the ranks of the childless and push down fertility even more.
Finally, I think that, as the mating crisis deepens and average age of marriage rises further, we will see average family size for women with children erode while their desired family size holds steady at an average of 2 to 3 kids. Basically, more couples will hit the fertility wall before they can have their hoped-for second kid. I would be surprised if there is a growing number of people who specifically want to have an only child. I have only met one such person in my life, actually. All my friends with one kid wanted two, but started too late.
The growing population of childless women, who wanted children but did not have them because they could not find suitable partners, is additional evidence that declining fertility is causally related to women's higher education. As I wrote before, the more a western woman invests in her higher education and professional career, the fewer years she has to bear children.
However, a big reason for childless women is female hypergamy. Hypergamy is the natural female drive to marry up, to be attracted to males of a higher socioeconomic and prestige class. Aspirational Disney movies about Princess Jasmine marrying down Aladdin notwithstanding, women will often marry men at least of the same socioeconomic and prestige class. One could also say that hypergamy is the natural desire of women to marry and have children with alpha men.
Female hypergamy causes women to reject men who are less educated and less financially successful than they are. But when women are the majority of college graduates and graduate schools, the pool of suitable men dramatically shrinks for them. The hypergamy of female doctors, lawyers, and business executives pushes them to forgo children than marry male firefighters, auto mechanics, and other blue-collar workers.
In my mind, the simplest explanation for the u-curve is an economic one. I do agree with the initial assumption that wealth surpasses a certain threshold whereby people gain more opportunities (particularly women) and become more invested in other pursuits.
However, the decline at the upper levels is more straightforwardly explained in terms of the economic costs of raising children. Once you surpass a certain level of wealth, you have more means available for raising children and thus they become less of an opportunity cost than they did before. For instance, you can rely on just one salary or hire a nanny part time or whatever. You have options available that a middle income family doesn't have access to.
I agree. Low income parents don't think their kids have any chance of being successful and so they don't see much reward in investing a lot in their children. But middle income parents do think their children have a chance to be high income/high status, so they restrict their fertility in order to invest more on each child. And high income parents, well they have the economic resources to invest (almost) as much as they want on each children without affecting their quality of life (up to a point, granted, but probably 3 or even 4 children), so they don't feel like they need to restrict their fertility.
In many developed countries most of the population (80%? 90%?) consider themselves as middle income, and they act accordingly.
I'd also be wary of drawing too strong a parallel with past societies since that was before the widespread use of contraception, which is an enormous game changer for fertility.
There is a simpler explanation, which passes Occam's Razor test. Fertility is related to women's college education. In poorer third world countries, women do not go to college. They get married at a young age and have bigger families. In wealthier third world countries, women go to college. They spend their most fertile years in colleges of higher education and advancing their professional careers. Once the higher educated women realize that their biological clock is ticking loudest, they only have time to make one or two children.
No amount of "encouragement" is gonna get Whites and Asians to have more kids. It's an economics issue -- they know that 50% of their income is going toward black & brown families they have unwillingly adopted. Thus, they have fewer resources to have and support their own children. Take away blackies & brownies from the earth, and you'll see the White and Asian birthrates go up rapidly.
Worldwide negative eugenics is needed, and that can be found here:
That's not even remotely true. Most of that 50% goes to the elderly, welfare is a relatively small tranche of tax revenue. I also seriously doubt that most high status whites and asians spend so much time seething over the welfare state. Most cite careerism for their own low fertility. Time spent in education is also a more likely factor. I don't know where racists get this notion that deep resentment towards brown and black people is a universal trait. This is your own private autistic obsession.
This is nuts. Even hardened racists don't think in these terms. If people want kids the percentage of welfare spent on minorities simply isn't going to enter into their heads.
Spoken like your average voter who doesn't understand the interplay bw microeconomics and consumer behavior. A negative eugenics program like CBC's is the only thing out there than can increase White & Asian childbirths. https://childfreebc.com/candidates/ - private, voluntary, strongly EUGENIC.
Eh, Eastern Europe has some among the lowest fertility rates in the world without giving any percent of their resources to any other colour families than their own kind. And Korea - do you think their record low fertility is explained by their money getting spent on other-race families?
Again, it is 2023 and the global economy is connected. Everyone -- yes even those in Poland and Hungary -- pay for blackies & brownies in Africa, in the US, in the middle east, and in India & China. Higher prices on goods, inflation, crime, airline security (it is estimated that the increased security after 9/11 and the extra time it causes us all to lose is worth $1T+ annually), tariffs, taxes, etc. It is naive to think that any place is in a bubble and immune to redistribution to blackies & brownies; it's just not as overt there. If there were no blackies & brownies we'd all have much more money in our pocket, and we'd live in a much nicer, better, safer world, one with a positive outlook... and people world-over would have more children. You can rationalize how great blackies & brownies are till the cows come home; I challenge you you to show me one example of a society that they created that comes anywhere close to that of Western Civilization.
If this were remotely true, low fertility would be a non-issue in yellow countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, which don't have any black or brown people aside from guestworkers, tourists, and pro-athletes. But their fertility rates are the worst of any countries on Earth. You must be extremely, autistically racist to think this is a factor.
You love throwing around the word "racist" don't you? Tip: That's not an argument. I acknowledged above that there are other factors influencing birthrates. A global decline in QoL and safety, secondary to more blackies & brownies in world, definitely also contributes. And seeing as you don't seem to understand economics, allow me to make it clear: The global economy is connected. If you don't think our redistribution to PoC affects those countries, you are truly clueless. Since you like PoC so much, why don't you move to Detroit, to strongly virtue signal to us and show your moral superiority? What a joke.
"You love throwing around the word 'racist' don't you?"
I used it once. To describe you. Because you are, Stefan Molyneux.
"A global decline in QoL and safety"
This has nothing to do with fertility rates declining! The decline is most prominent in countries with the lowest crime rates! and declines the worst among the on-average most wealthy people both societally and nationally! The countries with the highest fertility rate in the world today are Niger, Chad, the DRC, Somalia, the CAR, and Mali, all of which actually are poor and unstable to a degree that hasn't existed anywhere in the US since the 19th Century, and in the rest of the civilized world, post-WWII. Nor is that racially ghettoized. Japan had an almost-as-high fertility rate as those six SSA countries have now back as recently as 1950, when they'd just been through a war that killed more of their people than all the Americans who've died in all the wars we've ever fought in our history combined, including our pre-colonial history.
Assuming you're even attempting to argue in good faith, you're extremely stupid and totally wrong, to the point of being downright backwards. If anything, the better argument is that instability greatly increases fertility. Now, I don't actually think it does, as correlation is not necessarily causation, nor do I think it'd be worth the costs even if it could be proven, but it's a way better and more likely theory than your bullshit theory, Stefan.
i am so confused by some assumptions....low fertility is bad ? why ? can our country maintain itself with a population of 15,000,000 instead of 350,000,000 ? why is growth (increase in number) of any sort assumed to be ideal ? i think modern society will do just fine as the number of children women gestate decreases.
there are individuals who believe society will develop solutions to reproduction, if more humans are required for a "healthy" society. it may not be a "brave new world" but what happens when reproduction becomes a technological process independent of human bodies ? will fertility matter then ?
"can our country maintain itself with a population of 15,000,000 instead of 350,000,000"
This isn't like Elon firing 75% of Twitter staff without the company collapsing. The US of A could probably "function" with 5% of the population numbers-wise, but we don't get to pick who constitutes that 5%.
> This means we have to imagine something in our evolutionary programming that says “limit fertility when you are close to becoming a king, but be fruitful when you actually become a king.”
Couldn't polygamy explain this? For peasants, optimal reproductive strategy is for a monogamous couple to have a dozen kids together. For royalty, optimal reproductive strategy is for the King and Queen to have two or so kids that they invest as much as possible into while the King has a dozen concubines on the side pumping out kids.
My personal speculation is that the fertility crisis is essentially a game theory problem.
Say you’re a woman in a developing country, whose economy is growing year-after-year. You’re optimistic about your personal prospects and want to escape poverty, so you pursue education instead of early marriage to increase your income potential.
If you’re the only woman in your community to do so, this is a no-brainer. You get an income boost and you have your community/parents to help you with childcare while you and your husband work.
Now let’s imagine the same scenario, but in a society where more and more women are pursuing education. Not only do you not have a community to help with child-rearing, since everyone is at school or work, the relative costs of living are increased such that an education is required to provide the same relative standard of living (and status) as it was before any women in your community were educated.
An indicative phenomenon of this dilemma is the HCOL couple where the woman reluctantly quits her job in order to raise the kids, because childcare would cost more than she earns.
White & Asian elderly have retirement savings, pensions, 401Ks, Roth IRAs, and adult children who help take care of them. blacks & hispanic elderly have none of these -- we paid for them during their younger years, and we'll pay for them until they die... bc someone has to pay for their Democrat votes.
Feminism, more education, etc are contributing factors for lower White & Asian fertility, yes. But economics influences behavior, whether people realize it or not. Raise the prices of a Snickers bar by 1 cent, and you will sell fewer Snickers bars. It requires an understanding of Microeconomics to grasp this, but it's an indisputable concept.
Your ad hominem attacks are unwarranted, and reveal your lack of any real argument.
What about the link between belief in Abrahamic religion and income in high-income societies? Generally speaking, even in the oil-rich Gulf countries, the more one makes, the less religious one gets. The Abrahamic religions all have heavily promoted having as many children as possible, so if high-income people don't have religious faith, they don't feel a purpose to have children.
There is a simple theory that explains the fall of fertility better than status theory: people don't like raising kids. So when they can choose how many kids to have, they choose few. To be able to choose you need to have some human capital to use methods to control fertility.
Middle income countries are countries where the population is accumulating human capital fast so the population is transitioning to the capacity of control fertility. After median incomes are above 20,000 dollars, then most people can control fertility.
This theory can help to explain the population collapses in Ancient Greece and Rome BTW (I don't think it's possible to use a single dimensional variable to compare their living standards with modern ones):
This is nonsense. Do you actually know anyone who's raised kids? They're almost always significantly happier than people who haven't.
Sure, there's lots of challenge to it, but there's also lots of challenge to the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki, and he's made some of the most popular, beloved, and acclaimed videogames ever made. Easiness is not correlates with satisfaction.
Actually, Kings and Queens have more kids (within their own societies). And probably true historically too - Genghis Khan impregnated half of Eurasia/had a sizeable harem. The lowest Mongol warriors most certainly did not.
While I think these are fascinating theories that likely have some degree of truth...
What about the very simple theory that people have fewer kids when their opportunity cost to having kids rises?
I bet that explains most of the decline.
It can be even simpler. People would choose low fertility if they could. People in very underdeveloped countries simply lack the human capital needed to control their fertility.
If people have the capacity to control fertility then they choose to do it, so every country with near universal literacy has low or very low fertility.
The standard Becker/Mincer increasing opportunity cost and quality quantity trade off, as a first approximation doesn't make much evolutionary sense. That a refined version would say that for some evolutionary reason our preference for consumption as opposed to reproduction is stronger, in part due to consumption becoming more pleasurable in recent times. The problem with this refinement is that large parts of consumption in contemporary society are related to status etc. that is conspicuous consumption. And of course allocating resources on signalling status etc. is what one would expect if Hanson is correct, as such the increasing opportunity cost model is best viewed as a description of some trade off, but it doesn't tell you why we evolved such a trade off.
It's also important to note that contemporary behaviour is clearly maladaptive, such that when thinking about such issues we should almost certainly have the framing of "what went wrong evolutionarily speaking"
It seems pretty obvious what went wrong evolutionarily speaking: Evolution didn’t anticipate birth control.
So evolution didn’t program a ton of conscious “I want to have a kid now” and instead focused on sex drive, which we have plenty of.
So I think that solves the point you raise.
Modern fertility decline started long before birth control. Ancient societies also often had below replacement fertility among elites.
They often kept their family size low with relatively primitive techniques, or exposure of unwanted infants, rather than a pill.
But doesn’t the simple opportunity cost model still seem quite plausible? When a civilization hits a certain point, maybe too many people would just rather spend time philosophizing, playing Olympic sports, dancing and hosting parties, etc.
It’s not mutually exclusive of your theories, of course.
That's definitely part of the mistake evolution made (humans don't even value sex robustly, so much so that they can be easily fooled by various approximations), but that it seems strange to say that humans evolved such preferences towards conspicuous consumption and reproduction, without offering some nice evolutionary explanation.
I'm not intimately familiar with the relevant history or empirics but my guess is that you could tease out which theory is better.
The vast majority of people don’t get fooled, even in the modern era. It’s up there with food etc.
I’m not sure what seems strange. People evolved conspicuous consumption to find the best mates.
I think you misunderstood the "various approximations" I was referring to the various substitutes people have for actual sex nowadays, and I think a lot of people (especially young men) do in fact get fooled, and that this will only worsen as technology advances. Albeit this is somewhat orthogonal to the discussion.
"People evolved conspicuous consumption to find the best mates." This seems roughly like part of Hanson's explanation (minus the specifics about the status detection mechanism, and the various other consequences of being status drunk). Alternatively you could be saying that we evolved a preference for such signalling for such a reason, and that now that we can do things that satisfy such a preference for signalling to a more extreme degree (albeit at the cost of reproduction), but that this is not related to some evolutionary heuristic of limiting reproduction and signalling harder when you are richer. That signalling harder (as you get richer and have contraception) is something you would expect given that people prefer status and sex over reproduction. Under this view the evolutionary mistake of valuing sex not reproduction is given more primacy.
What I find strange about this view is that you have all the pieces for such a theory, and that such a heuristic seems to make lots of historical sense so much so I would find it fairly plausible even if we stayed poor and never observed modern low fertility. Albeit relatedly after thinking through what I think is your position, it does in fact seem like you can make many of the same status drunk predictions etc. without such a heuristic, just with that single mistake, so I'm less confident that this part of Hanson's view is correct.
I don’t understand: “What I find strange about this view is that you have all the pieces for such a theory, and that such a heuristic seems to make lots of historical sense so much so I would find it fairly plausible even if we stayed poor and never observed modern low fertility.”
It sounds like you are saying this theory is super plausible in all ways — and that we would even find it plausible without the modern era observations — therefore it is “strange”? To me that is the opposite
precisely! people seek to maximise status within the current cultural landscape they are in. I do not think we have some "king threshold" that's universal and biologically embedded in us. It's a much less parsimonious explanation.
It's not even consistent imo with empirical historical data- it seems that fertility correlated positively with status for much of human history (although this is being debated as well- in any case, it does not seem that there was some cross cultural obvious inverse relationship )
You are making this waaaaaay too complicated. If you were to visit some of these poorer countries, you would immediately find that in most of them, the idea of parents providing a quarter century or more of full financial support for their children is a totally alien concept. Before WW2 in this country, it was still pretty common for kids to start working full time immediately upon completing primary school. They would continue to live with their parents, helping with the household expenses, until they got married in their teens and began the cycle for a new generation. Children in such societies are a huge financial boon for their parents. Not having them makes survival more difficult. In our society, parents are expected to shovel most of their life's earnings into the bottomless pit of child rearing and college educations in the hope that maybe their kids will one day help defray the cost of three bowls of gruel a day in a nursing home.
There's truth to this. Families were economic units where everyone was expected to contribute., children and the elderly. Grandparents helped raised the small children and older children worked inside or outside the home.
I find this theory unconvincing. Rapid urbanization + decline in religion + lower status for large families are the main culprits in a falling TFR. The pill and modern feminism which denigrates motherhood are also to blame.
Everyone worried about declining fertility rates but how many of you have more than 2 children? Be the change you want to see in the world.
I have 3 kids, I'm highly educated and have a prestigious career. When I was pregnant with my third, people remarked how I was crazy to have a third and commented on how I would have a "big" family. I get looks when I walk into a store with my kids trailing behind me, like Mother Goose, or comments like "Wow, 3!". Rarely does someone comment on how wonderful it is to have 3 children and how it's a blessing. I tell people I wish I had started having children earlier so I could have had more. That always shocks them.
While the relationship between falling fertility and wealth is well explored here, I am unconvinced by the Kings and Queens explanation.
It is completely lost when looking at overall TFR that there are actually at least two separate phenomena that have happened worldwide to lower fertility, and these likely have very different underlying causes. Phenomenon one is the traditionally understood "demographic transition" of average family size for women who become mothers falling to 2 to 3 children. This transition is still happening in Africa (in some places barely started), but pretty much done everywhere else is the world. The second, newer, phenomenon is the rise in women who never have children at all.
The first fertility transition started in the West as early as the eighteenth century (e.g., France) and was basically complete across the West (and in places like Japan) by the end of the baby boom. It is unclear to me whether desired family size actually changed over the centuries (this may well be linked to rising income and urbanization) or whether 2-3 (surviving to adulthood) kids was always the ideal average family size for women deep down, and now technology and culture had changed in a way to allow us to achieve it. Regardless, as Stephen Shaw has explored very well in his recent documentary project, Birthgap, this ideal has basically been constant across the West since the 70s. It is important to emphasize that average family size for women who have any children has held steady in developed countries for decades, even while overall fertility falls.
What is happening, instead, is a relentless and continuing rise in women who are childless. Birthgap summons good evidence that a large majority of childless women today wanted to have children, but simply don't find a committed partner in time (or at all). Shaw calls it "unplanned childlessness", and it is pretty global. Some middle income countries have an even worse childlessness problem today than places like the USA. It is a mating crisis leading to fertility collapse, and it seems to be closely linked to women spending more years in education (especially relative to men?). Rising wealth may be connected to the mating crisis story, but the Kings and Queens theory does not really fit here.
I'll note that there may be a third phenomenon happening today. Namely, a rising number of women genuinely not wanting to have children. Shaw couldn't find much evidence for this, but it may just take more time to emerge in the data. Certainly, there seems to be more expression of anti-natalism in culture and media in the last 10 years. It is possible that the "I don't want children" mantra is just cope for victims of the mating crisis or performative environmentalism that does not reflect real views or even a transient phase that kids grow out of by their thirties. It could also be a lasting and growing attitude that will further swell the ranks of the childless and push down fertility even more.
Finally, I think that, as the mating crisis deepens and average age of marriage rises further, we will see average family size for women with children erode while their desired family size holds steady at an average of 2 to 3 kids. Basically, more couples will hit the fertility wall before they can have their hoped-for second kid. I would be surprised if there is a growing number of people who specifically want to have an only child. I have only met one such person in my life, actually. All my friends with one kid wanted two, but started too late.
The growing population of childless women, who wanted children but did not have them because they could not find suitable partners, is additional evidence that declining fertility is causally related to women's higher education. As I wrote before, the more a western woman invests in her higher education and professional career, the fewer years she has to bear children.
However, a big reason for childless women is female hypergamy. Hypergamy is the natural female drive to marry up, to be attracted to males of a higher socioeconomic and prestige class. Aspirational Disney movies about Princess Jasmine marrying down Aladdin notwithstanding, women will often marry men at least of the same socioeconomic and prestige class. One could also say that hypergamy is the natural desire of women to marry and have children with alpha men.
Female hypergamy causes women to reject men who are less educated and less financially successful than they are. But when women are the majority of college graduates and graduate schools, the pool of suitable men dramatically shrinks for them. The hypergamy of female doctors, lawyers, and business executives pushes them to forgo children than marry male firefighters, auto mechanics, and other blue-collar workers.
In my mind, the simplest explanation for the u-curve is an economic one. I do agree with the initial assumption that wealth surpasses a certain threshold whereby people gain more opportunities (particularly women) and become more invested in other pursuits.
However, the decline at the upper levels is more straightforwardly explained in terms of the economic costs of raising children. Once you surpass a certain level of wealth, you have more means available for raising children and thus they become less of an opportunity cost than they did before. For instance, you can rely on just one salary or hire a nanny part time or whatever. You have options available that a middle income family doesn't have access to.
I agree. The people I encounter with 4 kids tend to be low-income or high-income. The massive middle are having 1-2 kids.
I agree. Low income parents don't think their kids have any chance of being successful and so they don't see much reward in investing a lot in their children. But middle income parents do think their children have a chance to be high income/high status, so they restrict their fertility in order to invest more on each child. And high income parents, well they have the economic resources to invest (almost) as much as they want on each children without affecting their quality of life (up to a point, granted, but probably 3 or even 4 children), so they don't feel like they need to restrict their fertility.
In many developed countries most of the population (80%? 90%?) consider themselves as middle income, and they act accordingly.
I'd also be wary of drawing too strong a parallel with past societies since that was before the widespread use of contraception, which is an enormous game changer for fertility.
“but humans can’t choose the sex of their babies.”
Yes they can. Infanticide is historically common.
There is a simpler explanation, which passes Occam's Razor test. Fertility is related to women's college education. In poorer third world countries, women do not go to college. They get married at a young age and have bigger families. In wealthier third world countries, women go to college. They spend their most fertile years in colleges of higher education and advancing their professional careers. Once the higher educated women realize that their biological clock is ticking loudest, they only have time to make one or two children.
No amount of "encouragement" is gonna get Whites and Asians to have more kids. It's an economics issue -- they know that 50% of their income is going toward black & brown families they have unwillingly adopted. Thus, they have fewer resources to have and support their own children. Take away blackies & brownies from the earth, and you'll see the White and Asian birthrates go up rapidly.
Worldwide negative eugenics is needed, and that can be found here:
https://childfreebc.com/candidates/ - private, voluntary, strongly EUGENIC. Donate & share. Save the West.
That's not even remotely true. Most of that 50% goes to the elderly, welfare is a relatively small tranche of tax revenue. I also seriously doubt that most high status whites and asians spend so much time seething over the welfare state. Most cite careerism for their own low fertility. Time spent in education is also a more likely factor. I don't know where racists get this notion that deep resentment towards brown and black people is a universal trait. This is your own private autistic obsession.
This is nuts. Even hardened racists don't think in these terms. If people want kids the percentage of welfare spent on minorities simply isn't going to enter into their heads.
Spoken like your average voter who doesn't understand the interplay bw microeconomics and consumer behavior. A negative eugenics program like CBC's is the only thing out there than can increase White & Asian childbirths. https://childfreebc.com/candidates/ - private, voluntary, strongly EUGENIC.
Eh, Eastern Europe has some among the lowest fertility rates in the world without giving any percent of their resources to any other colour families than their own kind. And Korea - do you think their record low fertility is explained by their money getting spent on other-race families?
Again, it is 2023 and the global economy is connected. Everyone -- yes even those in Poland and Hungary -- pay for blackies & brownies in Africa, in the US, in the middle east, and in India & China. Higher prices on goods, inflation, crime, airline security (it is estimated that the increased security after 9/11 and the extra time it causes us all to lose is worth $1T+ annually), tariffs, taxes, etc. It is naive to think that any place is in a bubble and immune to redistribution to blackies & brownies; it's just not as overt there. If there were no blackies & brownies we'd all have much more money in our pocket, and we'd live in a much nicer, better, safer world, one with a positive outlook... and people world-over would have more children. You can rationalize how great blackies & brownies are till the cows come home; I challenge you you to show me one example of a society that they created that comes anywhere close to that of Western Civilization.
If this were remotely true, low fertility would be a non-issue in yellow countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, which don't have any black or brown people aside from guestworkers, tourists, and pro-athletes. But their fertility rates are the worst of any countries on Earth. You must be extremely, autistically racist to think this is a factor.
You love throwing around the word "racist" don't you? Tip: That's not an argument. I acknowledged above that there are other factors influencing birthrates. A global decline in QoL and safety, secondary to more blackies & brownies in world, definitely also contributes. And seeing as you don't seem to understand economics, allow me to make it clear: The global economy is connected. If you don't think our redistribution to PoC affects those countries, you are truly clueless. Since you like PoC so much, why don't you move to Detroit, to strongly virtue signal to us and show your moral superiority? What a joke.
"You love throwing around the word 'racist' don't you?"
I used it once. To describe you. Because you are, Stefan Molyneux.
"A global decline in QoL and safety"
This has nothing to do with fertility rates declining! The decline is most prominent in countries with the lowest crime rates! and declines the worst among the on-average most wealthy people both societally and nationally! The countries with the highest fertility rate in the world today are Niger, Chad, the DRC, Somalia, the CAR, and Mali, all of which actually are poor and unstable to a degree that hasn't existed anywhere in the US since the 19th Century, and in the rest of the civilized world, post-WWII. Nor is that racially ghettoized. Japan had an almost-as-high fertility rate as those six SSA countries have now back as recently as 1950, when they'd just been through a war that killed more of their people than all the Americans who've died in all the wars we've ever fought in our history combined, including our pre-colonial history.
Assuming you're even attempting to argue in good faith, you're extremely stupid and totally wrong, to the point of being downright backwards. If anything, the better argument is that instability greatly increases fertility. Now, I don't actually think it does, as correlation is not necessarily causation, nor do I think it'd be worth the costs even if it could be proven, but it's a way better and more likely theory than your bullshit theory, Stefan.
i am so confused by some assumptions....low fertility is bad ? why ? can our country maintain itself with a population of 15,000,000 instead of 350,000,000 ? why is growth (increase in number) of any sort assumed to be ideal ? i think modern society will do just fine as the number of children women gestate decreases.
there are individuals who believe society will develop solutions to reproduction, if more humans are required for a "healthy" society. it may not be a "brave new world" but what happens when reproduction becomes a technological process independent of human bodies ? will fertility matter then ?
Below-replacement fertility is not sustainable, and that is becoming the norm even in countries significantly poorer than the US.
"can our country maintain itself with a population of 15,000,000 instead of 350,000,000"
This isn't like Elon firing 75% of Twitter staff without the company collapsing. The US of A could probably "function" with 5% of the population numbers-wise, but we don't get to pick who constitutes that 5%.
> This means we have to imagine something in our evolutionary programming that says “limit fertility when you are close to becoming a king, but be fruitful when you actually become a king.”
Couldn't polygamy explain this? For peasants, optimal reproductive strategy is for a monogamous couple to have a dozen kids together. For royalty, optimal reproductive strategy is for the King and Queen to have two or so kids that they invest as much as possible into while the King has a dozen concubines on the side pumping out kids.
My personal speculation is that the fertility crisis is essentially a game theory problem.
Say you’re a woman in a developing country, whose economy is growing year-after-year. You’re optimistic about your personal prospects and want to escape poverty, so you pursue education instead of early marriage to increase your income potential.
If you’re the only woman in your community to do so, this is a no-brainer. You get an income boost and you have your community/parents to help you with childcare while you and your husband work.
Now let’s imagine the same scenario, but in a society where more and more women are pursuing education. Not only do you not have a community to help with child-rearing, since everyone is at school or work, the relative costs of living are increased such that an education is required to provide the same relative standard of living (and status) as it was before any women in your community were educated.
An indicative phenomenon of this dilemma is the HCOL couple where the woman reluctantly quits her job in order to raise the kids, because childcare would cost more than she earns.
White & Asian elderly have retirement savings, pensions, 401Ks, Roth IRAs, and adult children who help take care of them. blacks & hispanic elderly have none of these -- we paid for them during their younger years, and we'll pay for them until they die... bc someone has to pay for their Democrat votes.
Feminism, more education, etc are contributing factors for lower White & Asian fertility, yes. But economics influences behavior, whether people realize it or not. Raise the prices of a Snickers bar by 1 cent, and you will sell fewer Snickers bars. It requires an understanding of Microeconomics to grasp this, but it's an indisputable concept.
Your ad hominem attacks are unwarranted, and reveal your lack of any real argument.
What about the link between belief in Abrahamic religion and income in high-income societies? Generally speaking, even in the oil-rich Gulf countries, the more one makes, the less religious one gets. The Abrahamic religions all have heavily promoted having as many children as possible, so if high-income people don't have religious faith, they don't feel a purpose to have children.
There is a simple theory that explains the fall of fertility better than status theory: people don't like raising kids. So when they can choose how many kids to have, they choose few. To be able to choose you need to have some human capital to use methods to control fertility.
Middle income countries are countries where the population is accumulating human capital fast so the population is transitioning to the capacity of control fertility. After median incomes are above 20,000 dollars, then most people can control fertility.
This theory can help to explain the population collapses in Ancient Greece and Rome BTW (I don't think it's possible to use a single dimensional variable to compare their living standards with modern ones):
https://rafaelrguthmann.substack.com/p/fertility-and-the-life-cycle-of-civilizations
This is nonsense. Do you actually know anyone who's raised kids? They're almost always significantly happier than people who haven't.
Sure, there's lots of challenge to it, but there's also lots of challenge to the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki, and he's made some of the most popular, beloved, and acclaimed videogames ever made. Easiness is not correlates with satisfaction.
Using GDP without marrying it with income distribution seems like a suboptimal way to measure individual behaviors by class.
https://medium.com/impact-economics/rich-families-are-having-more-kids-1c0b80d5a16e
https://www.romper.com/life/when-people-cant-afford-another-child-we-know-big-families-are-only-for-the-rich-15649230
Actually, Kings and Queens have more kids (within their own societies). And probably true historically too - Genghis Khan impregnated half of Eurasia/had a sizeable harem. The lowest Mongol warriors most certainly did not.