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You can look at fertility rates across rich countries, and what you'll notice is a rapid secular decline starts literally the exact same year that the birth con
by eldritch_4ier 4y ago
You can look at fertility rates across rich countries, and what you'll notice is a rapid secular decline starts literally the exact same year that the birth control pill becomes legal.
Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year.
Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause).
I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops".
No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.
- klipt 4y agoEvolution took the lazy shortcut of making us want sex, not children, and for millions of years that hack worked. Now that birth control exists, there will be much stronger selection for actually wanting children. People who only want sex will be removed from the gene pool.
- jackcosgrove 4y agoI wouldn't call it lazy but parsimonious. At least among mammals, newborns seem to have vastly different requirements from the parents depending on the species. Optimizing for sex rather than nurturing just covers more cases.
- orangepurple 4y agoIt is difficult to afford raising more than two children on your own as a married couple. You have to enlist outside help. If you don't have a family to fall back on you have to purchase help. At some point one of the married couple needs to stop working instead of paying for childcare as the cost of childcare will exceed the income of one of the partners. Both partners want to maintain careers in the western world which applies further strain to the arrangement. I would have ten children if I had affordable childcare and additional help around the house. It is clear to me.
- mpreda 4y ago> I would have ten children if I had affordable childcare and additional help around the house. It is clear to me. Why would you have ten children? what is the need, or the benefit, or the reason.
- eldritch_4ier 4y agoNot the same person you're responding to, but I'd have tons of children too if the economics weren't a factor at all. There's just something incredibly fulfilling about raising a child. It's similar to the feeling you get when helping somebody else out in need, except you also get to experience all the magical parts of the world all around you with them as they experience them for the first time. A lot of other things feel trivial by comparison once you've experienced that.
- watwut 4y agoI do know families with many children. After some amount, you don't have time needed to fulfill all kids needs even if you are stay at home. At some point, educational and emotional needs of older kids go sideways since they are needed for work. And the stay at home partner seems super ultra tired all of the time. Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.
- sethammons 4y agoMormons have entered the chat. Generally, lots of well behaved kids.
- unmole 4y agoUtah with a 55% Mormon population has a TFR of 1.92. While it's higher than the US average of 1.66, I don't think the assumption that they generally have a lot of kids holds.
- orangepurple 4y ago
- RajT88 4y agoYou have missed the causality. Birth control has a huge wealth benefit where starting a family can be delayed until careers are more established. The number of children can be limited as well. Kids are expensive!
- bobthepanda 4y agoAlso, in rich countries, people have much higher standards for raising kids. In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?
- RajT88 4y agoI know plenty of parents for whom private school is a must-have. Even if they themselves went to public school.
- bluecalm 4y agoNo surprise there. Public school experience varies from traumatic to just a gigantic waste of time during the best development years. Once you go through that you don't want your children to have the same experience.
- RajT88 4y agoIt was as fine for me as it was for other successful people I know. I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.
- eldritch_4ier 4y agoA wealth benefit for who? Maybe in terms of aggregate societal wealth, but in terms of relative wealth things have gotten worse (you can't buy a home and raise a family on a single income anymore for instance). Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality. After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality. Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago> There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. The original family planning, infanticide, or abandonment of eggs for egg laying species, is practiced by a variety of animals.