6 ms·

I think the "it's too expensive" part is a very minor part of the issue. People had way less opportunities one or two generations ago, and my parents generatio

I think the "it's too expensive" part is a very minor part of the issue. People had way less opportunities one or two generations ago, and my parents generation in Italy bought their house with a mortgage and payed it in decades just like their kids did. What changed is expectations: you feel like you should travel before getting a kid. You should have plenty of sexual experiences before picking a partner. You should give priority to your career before settling in a given city, etc. Empowerment of women made "get married and out of your parents house" a less interesting option, education and options for people added up, and cultural shifts happened. Having children is just another bucket list item these days.

toxik 4y ago
Then why doesn’t the birth numbers in for example Sweden sit lower than Japan? To be clear, I take offense to explaining stagnation with women’s rights. You have made an absurd claim and backed it up with a weak argument.
- lmm 4y ago
  > Then why doesn’t the birth numbers in for example Sweden sit lower than Japan? Once you adjust for immigration, they do.
  - brabel 4y ago
    Even with plenty of incentives for families to have children, this is correct. Practically, all of the population growth Sweden has been experiencing in the last decades is due to immigration and immigrants having kids after moving to Sweden. > Idag föds i snitt 1,88 barn per vuxen kvinna. Det betyder att Sveriges befolkning skulle minska utan invandring. (Today, an adult woman has on average 1.88 children. This means the population would decrease if not for immigration) > Idag (2023) har Sverige 10,5 miljoner invånare ... År 1950 var bara en procent av den svenska befolkningen född utomlands. 1980 hade andelen ökat till drygt sju procent. 2020 var nästan 20 procent av Sveriges befolkning födda utomlands (Today, Sweden has 10.5 million inhabitants... in 1950, only one percent of the population was born overseas. In 1980, the amount had grown to 7%. In 2020, almost 20% of the population was born overseas). > Sedan 1980-talet har mer än två miljoner människor fått tillstånd att bo i Sverige, kortare tid eller permanent. (Since the 1980's, more than 2 million people have received permission to live in Sweden, including short-term and permanently. A lot of people think that Sweden is still an homogenous country, ethnically, like Japan, which couldn't be further from the truth. If I am not mistaken, Sweden is, today, about as "mixed race" (for lack of a better word) as countries like the USA and Australia. Source: https://www.so-rummet.se/kategorier/samhallskunskap/individers-och-gruppers-identitet-och-relationer/sveriges-befolkning-migration-och-integration# https://www.so-rummet.se/kategorier/samhallskunskap/individe...
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      And for an even better example, look at neighboring Finland. Finland famously gives tons of support for new moms, and their society is quite egalitarian. And their fertility rates have absolutely crashed to right around Japan's levels.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Tell me how women's rights could possibly not effect birth rates? It's a major factor. Also, Japan is nowhere near as expensive as other countries but they are declining the same rate or faster.
  - quartesixte 4y ago
    Japan had a near-apocalyptic financial disaster that to this day they haven’t really recovered from. Could have seriously affected the population’s psyche and stance towards things.
    - Mindless2112 4y ago
      Number of births in Japan has been falling since 1973 [1]. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2160/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2160/
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    You contradict yourself. Japan is widely known to be behind on gender equality, much more so than the U.S., and you point out that birth rates are declining faster there. Which means if anything that women's rights increases birth rates. The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all. So far the flawed (i.e. batshit insane) reasoning of "women are forced to marry less" doesn't hold.
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      > The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all. This is an odd challenge. The relationship between women's education levels and lower fertility rates is a famously strong correlation in the social sciences. There are tons and tons of studies that show that as women's education levels and status rise, fertility levels subsequently drop. Here is a page that links to a bunch of studies, https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertility-rates/ https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili... . But seriously, just Google "women's education levels fertility rates" and you'll find tons and tons of studies.
- refurb 4y ago
  You took offense? Why? When women didnt have as many rights they had more kids (fewer options to do anything else). Thats just the trade off - women are free to choose to not have kids and thats what they choose.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Believe it or not, women don't have to be forced into having kids. That you view this as important to birth rates is messed up TBH
    - refurb 4y ago
      I have no idea what you mean by forced. If you took a look at the data, youd realize it’s mostly people having fewer kids. Almost the same percent of American women give birth as 50 years ago. Women will choose to have fewer kids if given the option. Why does that offend you?
      - mxkopy 4y ago
        > Women will choose to have fewer kids if given the option. This right here. Having a kid is an intensely personal and individual decision. Generalizations like this are the essence of bigotry. Women that have more social responsibilities will choose to have fewer kids. Now, is that because they're women, or because of the responsibility? Which one do you think matters more? Also, the idea that women must be cajoled by society into having children is just profane. Women actually want to have kids, you know (I guess not from personal experience?). It's a biological fact. Women can have equal rights and also want kids because wanting kids is natural.
        refurb 4y ago
        Huh? “More social responsibilities”? Like what? Plenty of women choose to have lots of kids. There is no “responsibility” to have kids or not, its a choice. Not sure why you argue with empirical fact that has been seen across the global when countries develop. When given the option to have fewer kids, women have fewer kids. You seem offended with the choices women make. Like they shouldnt be making that choice for themselves.
mrtksn 4y ago
This explanation needs to be worded a bit more carefully because it sounds like you complain about "all that rights that women got are destroying the society" and that's pretty offensive. IMHO this is a more general problem of people making less kids as they get wealthier. It's a well known trend, the number of kids fall as the countries climb out of poverty. I'm sure there are plenty of studies about it and proposed solutions but the world's population is doing just fine and I don't think that we should walk away from having a life in order to have "more children from our kind". This is a theme in the "white genocide" circles and I don't believe that we should force women into being baby factories, instead we should create an equal world and embrace the high number of babies born in some places. Eventually everything will stabilize and the population pyramid will get into a healthy shape. Obviously, as the boomer generation climbs to the top of the pyramid we will have a period of distress. I'm sorry to offend armchair babyboomers but no, giving up rights and life to increase population and race share is something that no one is obligated to participate. If you feel like that, do it yourself.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  The solution is not to regress into some Handmaid's Tale etholudditism. Nor must we resign ourselves to demographic collapse. Technology got us into this, but it can get us out. The solution seems inevitable, when you think about it. People should be born in pods, in facilities run by the state. The population level will be directly controlled to whatever's desirable. At that level of biological mastery, many things become possible. People can be sexless, to eliminate whole hosts of problems we deal with today related to sex (like reproductive organ cancer risk, which is significant). People can mature faster. They can be raised in large creche-barracks, also run by the state, instead of having parents who can abuse or neglect them. The zygotes can be genetically curated and be edited free of malformations and made stronger, faster, smarter (think Gattaca). Once they reach adulthood, they'll work to pay off their generation debt through taxes as productive citizens. We will have more keenly harnessed the power of our biological inheritance, like hunter gatherers practicing agriculture instead of leaving our future to chance and animal whim. In the meantime, we just need to make the best of things. But, if we make it to pod clones, all of these problems will be distant memories, like death by gum disease.
earlyam 4y ago
I've met too many millenials who want kids but can't afford them or the stuff you should have before you have kids to agree with you. From what I've seen, it's lack of stable employment, stable housing and decent support system for parents. Wages have been declining relative to inflation and cost of living for a very long time, and that's for the job you get after you go into debt to get a degree which you didn't used to need.
- Isinlor 4y ago
  I can show you many countries with high fertility rates where people do not even have the idea of stable employment or social benefits. Then there are rich countries, great education, great child care facilities, government support and low fertility rates. Rich people are busy complaining about not being able to have children. Poor people just have them.
  - earlyam 4y ago
    Cat's out of the bag with family planning. If we want more kids we need to make it an option that doesn't impose severe economic penalties. You have one in America and childbirth alone can bankrupt you.
    - slowmovintarget 4y ago
      > Cat's out of the bag with family planning. It does seem that "family planning" is often a euphemism for planning how to avoid having a family.
msrenee 4y ago
Empowerment of women made not being forced to take a husband and pop out babies an option. The birth control pill gave women a choice and a ton of them immediately jumped on it to escape from the cycle of being constantly pregnant or breastfeeding. It's been a desire of women probably since the dawn of time to be able to choose whether and when to have kids. I take serious offense at the idea that it's just less interesting than other options. As if women were just content raising children before the idea of literally doing anything else crossed their minds. As if women today are being selfish by having lives outside of the home. How dare they want to live their life and establish financial stability before procreating? They should be raising 5 kids while struggling to make their hard-working husband's paycheck stretch far enough to feed the family. Because that's what my grandparents did.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Well, they are now miserable in a different and possibly less satisfying way. And time cannot be turned back, unfortunately.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    Where do you get the idea that women are miserable due to being able to choose not to have kids early in life? That they're still miserable without kids and that they'd be more satisfied if they had children and no freedom? There's not exactly a lot of women clambering to go back to having no rights, no choice, and no freedom because it's better than not being able to have kids at 18.
- riffraff 4y ago
  we're in violent agreement: the fact that women have options is a good thing. Men also have more options (e.g. no closeted gay man that marry women just to save appearance) and that is also good. A side effect of this is lower natality, and planet-wise that is _also_ a good thing, even if some economies will get screwed in the medium term.
mr_johnson22 4y ago
Does Japan have those values, though? Last I heard, Japanese mostly don't travel (not abroad at least); strongly promote monogomy / long-term relationships; abhor the notion of adult children living with their parents; mostly don't have trouble deciding on which city to live in; and still put a lot of pressure for mothers to stay at home instead of going to work. I should read TFA first but it seems like the root of their birth problem is simply that the financial & social costs of having children far outweigh the (short-term) benefits.
- NalNezumi 4y ago
  Respectfully, I think your idea of the value the Japanese have is quite off; adult children living with their parents is something almost all east Asian nations see not as big of an issues compared to almost every western nation. Japanese travels a lot, I'd say even more than your average American. They just travel inside the country (and why not? The best beaches and the best snow is in the south and north of their own country, and it's not like culture is lacking). I think the original comment you replied to is quite off too, most raw answers you'll get by actually asking the Youngs in Japan is that they're simply too busy; the neither have time or stability to pursue children. Almost all young people flocking to big cities doesn't help this trend either
  - mr_johnson22 4y ago
    Thank you for this insight!
alanfranz 4y ago
my n=1 experience (father of two, from Italy and living in Italy): I think the "too expensive" is part of the problem. Not the only one, but certainly a part. Very few people here choose to have a child in their 20s, and this matches with "other things to do in life" but then, when you get into your 30s or 35 at most, I think the feeling of wanting a child is definitely there. And, at that point, the "too expensive" and "too logistically difficult" parts start to get relevant. Even when childcare is there and you can afford it, a kid is often ill in its first three years of life, and requires a lot of attention. If both people in a family work, it's going to be a tremendous effort, and raising my two kids WAS a tremendous effort when they were very young; employers don't usually care a lot, and you don't have time to recharge. Personally, I was able to go with two kids because all four grandparents live reasonably close, are retired and willing to help, and they had enough savings to help us buying a flat. If we were doing everything on our own, I don't know if I'd have had a second kid. I know a few people making more money who are childless or with just one kid, because they (correctly) realize that, otherwise, it would be too difficult to go on with their career. And without their career they couldn't afford their flat/house, or a decent lifestyle for their children. So, I think it's a mix of reasons. What it would help, btw, is getting recurrent, actual money for a child (at least for the first child), like, I don't need to think about how much it will cost me, I even get some money on top so I can pay baby sitters, travelling grandparents, et cetera. On the contrary, you need to pay for childcare out of your pocket (some regions offer reimbursements, but they depend on income limits that may make it very hard to have a kid in the first place) and even in school/pre-school you've got some expenses (meals, transports) that aren't state-paid (currently it's about 200 EUR/month for my two kids for a not-so-great refectory service). Taxation isn't based on family size, so I get very little state contribution for my children, and I pay the same taxes as a single person, even though I do a lot of "work" - which is for me since the kids are mine, but it's for the future of my nation as well. I understand nobody forced me to have kids, but if nobody does, there's no future, nobody to pay pensions, et cetera. Kidless people expect "somebody somehow" to take care of them when they're older, because it makes sense in a large nation with a proper birth rate, but it could be not true anymore in this future. So yeah, there's a mix of reasons, but calling the economical reasons _minor_ is just wrong IMHO. More people have no desire for kids because they've got other things to do. But quite a lot of people with desire for kids have a very difficult time in having how many kids they like. I think a better tax planning would make it possible for the state to achieve the desired replacement rate - I think it's about 1.8 - 1.9 children per couple - to lead to a slow population decrease - which is not a problem per se, it's the sharpness of the decline which will be a problem.
Isinlor 4y ago
This is also well visible in post-communist countries. During communism there was nothing in the shops, big families were living in small apartment with parents sleeping on beds opening from the wall. There was no disposable diapers. In general people had not much career opportunities. And then communism collapsed, and as people became richer trough capitalism fertility rates plummeted. And there was no policies to convince people against having big families. The basic pattern is the same across the world poor countries have high fertility rates. Rich countries have low fertility rates. And as poor countries become rich their fertility rates go down.

toxik 4y ago

Then why doesn’t the birth numbers in for example Sweden sit lower than Japan? To be clear, I take offense to explaining stagnation with women’s rights. You have made an absurd claim and backed it up with a weak argument.

lmm 4y ago
> Then why doesn’t the birth numbers in for example Sweden sit lower than Japan? Once you adjust for immigration, they do.
- brabel 4y ago
  Even with plenty of incentives for families to have children, this is correct. Practically, all of the population growth Sweden has been experiencing in the last decades is due to immigration and immigrants having kids after moving to Sweden. > Idag föds i snitt 1,88 barn per vuxen kvinna. Det betyder att Sveriges befolkning skulle minska utan invandring. (Today, an adult woman has on average 1.88 children. This means the population would decrease if not for immigration) > Idag (2023) har Sverige 10,5 miljoner invånare ... År 1950 var bara en procent av den svenska befolkningen född utomlands. 1980 hade andelen ökat till drygt sju procent. 2020 var nästan 20 procent av Sveriges befolkning födda utomlands (Today, Sweden has 10.5 million inhabitants... in 1950, only one percent of the population was born overseas. In 1980, the amount had grown to 7%. In 2020, almost 20% of the population was born overseas). > Sedan 1980-talet har mer än två miljoner människor fått tillstånd att bo i Sverige, kortare tid eller permanent. (Since the 1980's, more than 2 million people have received permission to live in Sweden, including short-term and permanently. A lot of people think that Sweden is still an homogenous country, ethnically, like Japan, which couldn't be further from the truth. If I am not mistaken, Sweden is, today, about as "mixed race" (for lack of a better word) as countries like the USA and Australia. Source: https://www.so-rummet.se/kategorier/samhallskunskap/individers-och-gruppers-identitet-och-relationer/sveriges-befolkning-migration-och-integration# https://www.so-rummet.se/kategorier/samhallskunskap/individe...
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    And for an even better example, look at neighboring Finland. Finland famously gives tons of support for new moms, and their society is quite egalitarian. And their fertility rates have absolutely crashed to right around Japan's levels.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Beaver117 4y ago
Tell me how women's rights could possibly not effect birth rates? It's a major factor. Also, Japan is nowhere near as expensive as other countries but they are declining the same rate or faster.
- quartesixte 4y ago
  Japan had a near-apocalyptic financial disaster that to this day they haven’t really recovered from. Could have seriously affected the population’s psyche and stance towards things.
  - Mindless2112 4y ago
    Number of births in Japan has been falling since 1973 [1]. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2160/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2160/
- mxkopy 4y ago
  You contradict yourself. Japan is widely known to be behind on gender equality, much more so than the U.S., and you point out that birth rates are declining faster there. Which means if anything that women's rights increases birth rates. The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all. So far the flawed (i.e. batshit insane) reasoning of "women are forced to marry less" doesn't hold.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all. This is an odd challenge. The relationship between women's education levels and lower fertility rates is a famously strong correlation in the social sciences. There are tons and tons of studies that show that as women's education levels and status rise, fertility levels subsequently drop. Here is a page that links to a bunch of studies, https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertility-rates/ https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili... . But seriously, just Google "women's education levels fertility rates" and you'll find tons and tons of studies.
refurb 4y ago
You took offense? Why? When women didnt have as many rights they had more kids (fewer options to do anything else). Thats just the trade off - women are free to choose to not have kids and thats what they choose.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  Believe it or not, women don't have to be forced into having kids. That you view this as important to birth rates is messed up TBH
  - refurb 4y ago
    I have no idea what you mean by forced. If you took a look at the data, youd realize it’s mostly people having fewer kids. Almost the same percent of American women give birth as 50 years ago. Women will choose to have fewer kids if given the option. Why does that offend you?
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      > Women will choose to have fewer kids if given the option. This right here. Having a kid is an intensely personal and individual decision. Generalizations like this are the essence of bigotry. Women that have more social responsibilities will choose to have fewer kids. Now, is that because they're women, or because of the responsibility? Which one do you think matters more? Also, the idea that women must be cajoled by society into having children is just profane. Women actually want to have kids, you know (I guess not from personal experience?). It's a biological fact. Women can have equal rights and also want kids because wanting kids is natural.
      - refurb 4y ago
        Huh? “More social responsibilities”? Like what? Plenty of women choose to have lots of kids. There is no “responsibility” to have kids or not, its a choice. Not sure why you argue with empirical fact that has been seen across the global when countries develop. When given the option to have fewer kids, women have fewer kids. You seem offended with the choices women make. Like they shouldnt be making that choice for themselves.

mrtksn 4y ago

This explanation needs to be worded a bit more carefully because it sounds like you complain about "all that rights that women got are destroying the society" and that's pretty offensive. IMHO this is a more general problem of people making less kids as they get wealthier. It's a well known trend, the number of kids fall as the countries climb out of poverty. I'm sure there are plenty of studies about it and proposed solutions but the world's population is doing just fine and I don't think that we should walk away from having a life in order to have "more children from our kind". This is a theme in the "white genocide" circles and I don't believe that we should force women into being baby factories, instead we should create an equal world and embrace the high number of babies born in some places. Eventually everything will stabilize and the population pyramid will get into a healthy shape. Obviously, as the boomer generation climbs to the top of the pyramid we will have a period of distress. I'm sorry to offend armchair babyboomers but no, giving up rights and life to increase population and race share is something that no one is obligated to participate. If you feel like that, do it yourself.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
The solution is not to regress into some Handmaid's Tale etholudditism. Nor must we resign ourselves to demographic collapse. Technology got us into this, but it can get us out. The solution seems inevitable, when you think about it. People should be born in pods, in facilities run by the state. The population level will be directly controlled to whatever's desirable. At that level of biological mastery, many things become possible. People can be sexless, to eliminate whole hosts of problems we deal with today related to sex (like reproductive organ cancer risk, which is significant). People can mature faster. They can be raised in large creche-barracks, also run by the state, instead of having parents who can abuse or neglect them. The zygotes can be genetically curated and be edited free of malformations and made stronger, faster, smarter (think Gattaca). Once they reach adulthood, they'll work to pay off their generation debt through taxes as productive citizens. We will have more keenly harnessed the power of our biological inheritance, like hunter gatherers practicing agriculture instead of leaving our future to chance and animal whim. In the meantime, we just need to make the best of things. But, if we make it to pod clones, all of these problems will be distant memories, like death by gum disease.

earlyam 4y ago

I've met too many millenials who want kids but can't afford them or the stuff you should have before you have kids to agree with you. From what I've seen, it's lack of stable employment, stable housing and decent support system for parents. Wages have been declining relative to inflation and cost of living for a very long time, and that's for the job you get after you go into debt to get a degree which you didn't used to need.

Isinlor 4y ago
I can show you many countries with high fertility rates where people do not even have the idea of stable employment or social benefits. Then there are rich countries, great education, great child care facilities, government support and low fertility rates. Rich people are busy complaining about not being able to have children. Poor people just have them.
- earlyam 4y ago
  Cat's out of the bag with family planning. If we want more kids we need to make it an option that doesn't impose severe economic penalties. You have one in America and childbirth alone can bankrupt you.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    > Cat's out of the bag with family planning. It does seem that "family planning" is often a euphemism for planning how to avoid having a family.

msrenee 4y ago

Empowerment of women made not being forced to take a husband and pop out babies an option. The birth control pill gave women a choice and a ton of them immediately jumped on it to escape from the cycle of being constantly pregnant or breastfeeding. It's been a desire of women probably since the dawn of time to be able to choose whether and when to have kids. I take serious offense at the idea that it's just less interesting than other options. As if women were just content raising children before the idea of literally doing anything else crossed their minds. As if women today are being selfish by having lives outside of the home. How dare they want to live their life and establish financial stability before procreating? They should be raising 5 kids while struggling to make their hard-working husband's paycheck stretch far enough to feed the family. Because that's what my grandparents did.

pfortuny 4y ago
Well, they are now miserable in a different and possibly less satisfying way. And time cannot be turned back, unfortunately.
- msrenee 4y ago
  Where do you get the idea that women are miserable due to being able to choose not to have kids early in life? That they're still miserable without kids and that they'd be more satisfied if they had children and no freedom? There's not exactly a lot of women clambering to go back to having no rights, no choice, and no freedom because it's better than not being able to have kids at 18.
riffraff 4y ago
we're in violent agreement: the fact that women have options is a good thing. Men also have more options (e.g. no closeted gay man that marry women just to save appearance) and that is also good. A side effect of this is lower natality, and planet-wise that is _also_ a good thing, even if some economies will get screwed in the medium term.

mr_johnson22 4y ago

Does Japan have those values, though? Last I heard, Japanese mostly don't travel (not abroad at least); strongly promote monogomy / long-term relationships; abhor the notion of adult children living with their parents; mostly don't have trouble deciding on which city to live in; and still put a lot of pressure for mothers to stay at home instead of going to work. I should read TFA first but it seems like the root of their birth problem is simply that the financial & social costs of having children far outweigh the (short-term) benefits.

NalNezumi 4y ago
Respectfully, I think your idea of the value the Japanese have is quite off; adult children living with their parents is something almost all east Asian nations see not as big of an issues compared to almost every western nation. Japanese travels a lot, I'd say even more than your average American. They just travel inside the country (and why not? The best beaches and the best snow is in the south and north of their own country, and it's not like culture is lacking). I think the original comment you replied to is quite off too, most raw answers you'll get by actually asking the Youngs in Japan is that they're simply too busy; the neither have time or stability to pursue children. Almost all young people flocking to big cities doesn't help this trend either
- mr_johnson22 4y ago
  Thank you for this insight!

alanfranz 4y ago

my n=1 experience (father of two, from Italy and living in Italy): I think the "too expensive" is part of the problem. Not the only one, but certainly a part. Very few people here choose to have a child in their 20s, and this matches with "other things to do in life" but then, when you get into your 30s or 35 at most, I think the feeling of wanting a child is definitely there. And, at that point, the "too expensive" and "too logistically difficult" parts start to get relevant. Even when childcare is there and you can afford it, a kid is often ill in its first three years of life, and requires a lot of attention. If both people in a family work, it's going to be a tremendous effort, and raising my two kids WAS a tremendous effort when they were very young; employers don't usually care a lot, and you don't have time to recharge. Personally, I was able to go with two kids because all four grandparents live reasonably close, are retired and willing to help, and they had enough savings to help us buying a flat. If we were doing everything on our own, I don't know if I'd have had a second kid. I know a few people making more money who are childless or with just one kid, because they (correctly) realize that, otherwise, it would be too difficult to go on with their career. And without their career they couldn't afford their flat/house, or a decent lifestyle for their children. So, I think it's a mix of reasons. What it would help, btw, is getting recurrent, actual money for a child (at least for the first child), like, I don't need to think about how much it will cost me, I even get some money on top so I can pay baby sitters, travelling grandparents, et cetera. On the contrary, you need to pay for childcare out of your pocket (some regions offer reimbursements, but they depend on income limits that may make it very hard to have a kid in the first place) and even in school/pre-school you've got some expenses (meals, transports) that aren't state-paid (currently it's about 200 EUR/month for my two kids for a not-so-great refectory service). Taxation isn't based on family size, so I get very little state contribution for my children, and I pay the same taxes as a single person, even though I do a lot of "work" - which is for me since the kids are mine, but it's for the future of my nation as well. I understand nobody forced me to have kids, but if nobody does, there's no future, nobody to pay pensions, et cetera. Kidless people expect "somebody somehow" to take care of them when they're older, because it makes sense in a large nation with a proper birth rate, but it could be not true anymore in this future. So yeah, there's a mix of reasons, but calling the economical reasons _minor_ is just wrong IMHO. More people have no desire for kids because they've got other things to do. But quite a lot of people with desire for kids have a very difficult time in having how many kids they like. I think a better tax planning would make it possible for the state to achieve the desired replacement rate - I think it's about 1.8 - 1.9 children per couple - to lead to a slow population decrease - which is not a problem per se, it's the sharpness of the decline which will be a problem.

Isinlor 4y ago

This is also well visible in post-communist countries. During communism there was nothing in the shops, big families were living in small apartment with parents sleeping on beds opening from the wall. There was no disposable diapers. In general people had not much career opportunities. And then communism collapsed, and as people became richer trough capitalism fertility rates plummeted. And there was no policies to convince people against having big families. The basic pattern is the same across the world poor countries have high fertility rates. Rich countries have low fertility rates. And as poor countries become rich their fertility rates go down.