That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like lower-income young adults are more likely to start families.
Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households.
Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often).
It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).
Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like.
So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure.
It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation.
People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening...
Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor.
If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births.
It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious.
There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex.
Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries?
There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s.
That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring.
This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing.
Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
What makes you think China and Japan have cultures "most divergent" from western cultures? Have you ever even been to these countries? I live in Japan and it's very much like a western country, though a couple decades behind in some ways (like smoking rates), and a lot safer (compared to the US where half the population is armed); the main difference is language, and that it isn't so individualistic. Birthrates are down just like other western nations, because of many of the same factors: contraception is readily available, women are educated and have careers which are incompatible with being full-time mothers (what I mean here is that a woman, anywhere, having a career is generally incompatible with parenthood).
If you want to see a highly-divergent culture, go to Afghanistan or parts of Africa.
The fundamental "problem" I see is that, in developed nations, women have rights and agency and are able to make decisions about their lives and bodies. This is fundamentally incompatible with a high birth rate. In traditional and religious cultures, it isn't this way. So I think we have 3 choices:
1) Continue on our current path, where women are allowed to be full and equal citizens, and see continued drops in birthrates, though some policy changes (financial assistance for parents etc.) might help a little bit.
2) Revoke women's rights and make them second-class citizens. Ban contraception and abortion. Don't allow them to go to college or have real jobs. Adopt a state religion that promotes having lots of children, and force everyone to follow it, or else. Basically, emulate the Taliban.
3) Adopt some rather radical change to society (and maybe human biology) that avoids #2 and allows for equality and freedom while still having the effect of birthrates over 2.1. I'm not too sure about what this might be, though I have some ideas that have variously appeared in sci-fi.
Oh I think it's ultimately modernity that's the cause; the "Death of God" as Nietzsche put it. As religion recedes around the world, humans have found no real replacement for the meaning it provided and perhaps no reason to continue things. I think that's ultimately why I never had any desire to have children myself; I see no reason to put them through the same suffering I went through to no real purpose and then presumably go on to face their own philosophical (and other) struggles.
That's me; I don't really know what reason everyone else has (though increasingly I find I'm not really such an outlier), but the more practical stuff like health insurance, cost of education, housing, childcare, etc... sure looks like death by a thousand cuts. Perhaps as you say they are excuses. I've been told that I must be bitter when I point out all the money I saved since I never wanted children, but really the main thing I've felt is relief - I have plenty of anxiety over the state of things, and knowing that I don't have to try and provide for dependents for a few decades is one of the things that keeps me from over-worrying. I've literally known people to kill themselves over such pressures, and I don't think I'd handle them that well either.
I don't want to tell you not to worry (when has that ever helped anyone?); you have the right to your feelings, but I think your timeline is quite a bit more aggressive than most current population projections.
Back then in those times, children were also your social security. Expectation and very strong one was that they will help you in the old age. Including when parent was abysive or conteolling. Expectation now is that you care yourself and kids have zero responsibility. Living with parents shameful, giving money to parent signifies lack of boundaries.
Plus back then, anticonception available to everyone was simply not a thing. Sex meant kids.
Nothing is more primal than procreation. Nothing. It predates religion, cities, agriculture, and humanity itself.
You cite a cultural thing, religion, but birthrates are down exclusive of culture, it is why I mentioned cultures quite foreign to the West.
You mention costs, which is why I mentioned historical birth control, for example, plenty of children were born during the great depression!
Let me put this another way. We know that tiny changes in the chemical balance of the brain, can turn a calm, cultured person into a raving lunatic. Just see what happens with an excess of calcium in the blood, for example!
We have a myriad of treatments for depression, for psychosis, for other issues often derived from more than pure genetics.
We know that levels of testosterone in males have declined.
Yet when I mention that the problem could be biological, most scoff. I find this, in my opinion, delusional stance to be quite concerning.
People love to believe that their actions, in their entirety, are the outcome of their rational thought.
But this is procreation, the most powerful, primal drive a species has.
Oh, I'm not all that dogmatic or sure of anything in life, so I don't think it's crazy to suspect some sort of environmental/biological factor. But I think the "Death of God" is reality; it's true across all cultures and people eventually realize it. My understanding is that religiosity is the biggest predictor of fertility.
What environmental factor would correlate with fertility? My understanding is that Africa and Israel as examples still have high fertility rates - what environmental factor are they missing that affects most of the rest of the world?
The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage.
But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.
