8 ms·
More Americans say they’re not planning to have a child, U.S. birthrate declines
- holonomically 5y agoThe world is expected to have ~11B people by the year 2100. There are plenty of people even if some countries have declining birth rates. [1] Better immigration policies solve any problems that nations with declining birth rates might have but that requires having politicians that are willing to put aside xenophobic concerns to implement sensible immigration policies. 1: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
- tuatoru 5y ago1. North America has less of a "problem" than nearly everywhere else, since (overall) it has traditionally tolerated extremely high immigration rates, and potential migrants see it as a desirable destination. Politicians reflect their voters' views. In most countries immigration rates are at least an order of magnitude too low to compensate for low fertility and will stay that way. 2. Most of the projected increase in global population is due to an expected increase in lifespan, meaning a greater number of old people. They don't have kids. The big reservoirs of working-age people are in sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. Not many of them have the skills and funds to enable intercontinental migration. Yet. Not sure why declining birth rate is a problem, though. Maybe we'll get around to automating some of the things.
- spfzero 5y agoAlso not sure why declining population is a problem. The sheer number of human beings on the planet, however, is the root cause of many problems, climate change, habitat loss, water shortages, on and on. When I imagine less traffic, less air pollution, more clean drinking water, grazing and farmland, per person; I see a better world, not a worse one.
- holonomically 5y agoGood points. I'll elaborate what I meant by sensible immigration policies. Sensible immigration policies includes a better social safety net and education programs to allow people to immigrate even if at the moment they don't have the right skills or funds.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomatofarmer 5y agoThat is sensible only to you. I love how policies are designated as 'common sense' to try to promote acceptance. Let me decide what is common sense.
- holonomically 5y agoWhat exactly in what I said is not sensible?
- tomatofarmer 5y agoThere is substantial untapped and underutilized potential already within the country. Using tax money to support immigration of those that possess neither skills nor funds, is frankly a slap in the face to all tax payers, and a signal to Americans that we are giving up on them. But of course one powerful group needs cheap labor, and the other powerful group needs more voters. Thus, with collaboration of the media apparatus, what you suggest will continue to be branded as sensible.
- holonomically 5y agoI really don't get how you inferred all that from what I said. A social safety net and better education programs are better for everyone, including the people in whatever country happens to be implementing those programs and policies. The issue with media bias is another matter entirely and is unrelated to what I was saying but I recommend you stop viewing everything with a conspiratorial lens. It is not helpful for having a productive discussion.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mercy_dude 5y agoDeclining birth rate is a symptom, not a disease. Immigration may be a workaround but not a fix. The key reason why young Americans don’t want to have children is because the cost of living including raising a child has been exploding for last 20yrs. Housing, healthcare, insurance, student loans and cost of education- all have gone up exponentially when the actual wages have not gone up. Immigration is a workaround but it has inevitable side effects. Including dilution of labor, assimilation and not to say many Of the core issues mentioned above affect immigrants alike.
- holonomically 5y agoThen it's better to address those problems directly instead of scare monger about declining birth rates because the world has plenty of people and will continue to have more for the foreseeable future.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoHow do you square this with the fact that the birth rate is also low in European countries with reasonable cost of living and robust safety nets. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Fertility_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Maybe people just don’t want kids when they’re educated. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...
- heavyset_go 5y agoCost of living has been rising across the EU, as well. You can see it most obviously in the international cities.
- 1270018080 5y agoIt's also still expensive to do have kids in Europe anyway. Safety nets aside. They purchasing power per capita is lower than in America.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Soapysmith 5y agoNot to mention that even absent immigration, internal populations will rebound due to the high reproductive rate of certain segments(read religious) of the population. Given current projections, 200 years from now most of the population in the United States will be Amish.
- Bostonian 5y agoThe Western world has gone beyond tolerance to approval and celebration of non-procreative lifestyles.
- eigengrau5150 5y agoParenting is the hardest unpaid job known to man. No wonder nobody wants to do it.
- akomtu 5y agoWell, in America, children are just leverage to extract money from parents: healthcare, kindergartens, universities, all of them try to grab as much money as they can. Insufficient birthrate will be covered by immigration, until one day, just like in Rome, immigrants outnumber the natives and tell them to disappear.
- thatcat 5y agoAssociated cost has a role in suppression of birth rate but even socialized countries have signifigant declines in birth rate
- toomuchtodo 5y agoThe value of children declines as a country develops and industrializes. China and the United States share a total fertility rate of 1.7.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoCorrection: China's fertility rate is 1.3 [1] [2]. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/04/china-one-child-policy-fertility-rates/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/04/china-one-child-policy-... [2] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1223141.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1223141.shtml (replied to my own comment as the edit window timed out)
- diego_moita 5y ago> one day, just like in Rome, immigrants outnumber the natives and tell them to disappear. Really? Wow, when did that happen? I went to Rome 3 years ago and the overwhelming majority of people there were Italians. Even many of the tourists in the Vatican were from other parts of Italy.
- cma 5y agoLooks like they got roped into the neonazi/"great replacement" stuff by someone (probably Facebook/YouTube algorithm).
- vmception 5y agoFinally one of these surveys that even allows for the answer that people just aren't interested. It is always hilarious how this sociology field only attracts people that think children are the most fulfilling thing they ever did and everyone else must want that so there must therefore be some other problem like economics. Turns out the onion satire article was spot on https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying-motherhood-because-1847112786 https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying...
- dionidium 5y agoI can't read that article, because I don't have a WaPo login, but previous evidence indicates that people are having fewer children than they'd like to. See here: * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... Matthew Yglesias also touches on this in this interview about his book, One Billion Americans, which argues (in part) for more pronatalist policies: * https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-on... It turns out that it's really difficult and expensive to raise children and more people will want to do it if you make it less so.
- vmception 5y agoIts a funnel which hasn't been considering the subset that just doesn't want them. It doesn't quantify the size of that subset. It takes the answer with the most externalities (economy, debt, cultural ability to provide) and elevates that as the answer.
- diveanon 5y agoGood, the world doesn't need more people. Adoption is always a great option if you want a child to raise.
- coolso 5y agoThis article isn't about the world, it's about America. If America has less people and the world has more, that's bad for Americans.
- klipt 5y ago> Adoption is always a great option if you want a child to raise Where do you think adopted kids come from? Someone still has to have biological kids.
- iammisc 5y agoPerfect. Will mean the future generations are much more religious.
- jl2718 5y agoAnecdotally, the problem is much worse among those that contribute more in taxes than consume in public benefits. This is the real problem. Low-skill high-fertility immigration will not solve it. Child tax credits will not solve it. Welfare programs will not solve it. These problems all exacerbate the problem by growing the population below the net-income line. You may say that these people are more necessary or useful than those above, but that is a different debate. Net-income-positive Americans are choosing not to be parents because the law is openly hostile to it. Some examples: Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k, that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo. The only way to survive here on that is in your car. (I have done this. Not a career enhancer.) Meanwhile, nobody needs $4000/mo extra to raise a child, unless they are paying somebody else to do it. This is why women have a hard time finding mates. The only men that are willing to take that risk of relationship breakup are those with nothing to lose. It’s horribly dysgenic, and frankly awful for the kids it is trying to protect, because now they end up with a working mother and a deadbeat father, by design. And by the way, this is not a gendered issue. The first I became aware of it was by a woman that was forced to both give up her kids and pay her ex. Child care: The licensing, certification, and insurance requirements have turned this into a human farming business. When I was growing up, kids just sort of roamed, and then the police started notifying parents that they had to send them to certified daycare, so my mom got the certification until some professional daycare moved in and started calling the inspectors any time we went outside to play in the woods. Now it’s much worse; daycare costs more than most jobs pay, and those with nothing to lose just ignore the law anyway. The only way it makes legal sense to have children is if both parents are either on welfare, or part of an immigrant community that operates outside of the rules. My recommendation to my children will be to move out of the country immediately after graduation to a place that is more financially and legally family-friendly, then start finding a partner and having children right away. The opportunities for this decline much faster than any goals other than professional athletics.
- crateless 5y agoI have been recently picturing a dystopia (utopia?) wherein women sell their eggs to some kind of govt. agency which in turn hires women who are willing to carry babies to term. These babies are then raised in child group homes by state employees all the way from infancy. Meanwhile the state pays for their education until they either graduate or until some kind of arbitrary deadline. Thus the problem could become cost effective due to economies of scale thereby partially mitigating the cost problem. However, it is still unclear whether to then make childbirth opt-in or something along those lines. If we are going to farm kids, then why not do it properly? /s
- riversflow 5y agoI’m surprised to see so few responses of the state of the world and climate change. huh. Also, whats up with Pew’s sample? ~9,700 people 18+ in the sample and only ~3,900 are 18-49. Surely that should be the bulk based on demographics… or at least more than 40%?
- nknealk 5y agoThe New York Times recently published this which I feel explains why a lot of my peers don’t want to have children. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-clim...
- 1270018080 5y agoI'm not having kids because kids suck and I'm doing my part to prevent climate change. I can look beyond the preprogrammed brain chemistry that tells you having kids was "the best thing that has happened to you in your life" as you lose 10 years off of your life in stress and all of your friends.
- dionidium 5y ago> as you lose 10 years off of your life in stress and all of your friends. In fact, people with children live longer and have more social interactions, on average. See: https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-expectancy https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-... And: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-kids-live-longer-2017042411562 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-kids-live-longer-20...
- klipt 5y agoI think what we are witnessing is an evolutionary paradigm shift. For most of human history, contraceptives didn't exist, so evolution just made us want sex and the reproduction part followed automatically. Now that contraceptives stopped that trick from working, only the people who genuinely want kids will be selected for, while the people who merely want sex will die off.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoOn the one hand, you do you. Also, others do what they do. Everyone has their own circumstances. For me, your "look beyond preprogrammed brain chemistry" comment smacked of elitism. As though people with kids are somehow bound by rules you have transcended. Seems arrogant to assume the reasons others do what they do and boil it down to something as trite as that. Will I say that my kid is "the best thing in my life" on my deathbed? Maybe. Is my kid worth it to me in a purely selfish personal happiness sense? Right now, I would do it again no question.
- joelbondurant 5y agoTax cattle state property objects must comply with breeding mandates or be visited by drone bombers.