5 ms·

The defaults changed, at least in the West. When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had t

The defaults changed, at least in the West. When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. That was in part helped by the lack of widespread use of contraceptives. The norm in my primary school was two or three kids per family. I remember only one classmate with no brothers or sisters. Of course zero children families were not represented in there. Now the default is single-no-children and you have to make an explicit choice to marry (you used to be nudged into it by society) and to have kids, by stopping to use contraceptives and to do all the things that long time singles are used to do. Cost of housing, living, parenting is also an issue but I think that the default mindset is more important and sets the conditions for higher general costs: if on average people can spend all their money for themselves, the society and the market adjust and people who have to spend time and money also for kids are at a disadvantage. If the default is changing in China too, their population is going to shrink no matter what.

KaiserPro 3y ago
The "west" and china have _very_ different demographic pressures. For example china famously had(has?) the one child rule. This meant a deliberate shift in how children were raised (all your eggs in one basket) > Now the default is single-no-children and you have to make an explicit choice to marry (you used to be nudged into it by society) and to have kids, by stopping to use contraceptives and to do all the things that long time singles are used to do. I suspect you probably want to look deeper into the causes of that more. Yes contraceptives have a role to play, but they are not automatic, they require a deliberate choice, sometimes daily (https://www.statista.com/statistics/573210/contraceptive-use-among-women-by-type-and-age-in-england/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/573210/contraceptive-use... granted this is for the UK, and doesn't account for people not taking it. The point is that younger women are taking pills daily) Why are people not having kids? the answers are more complex than you seem to be suggesting.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, but a) that's not suggestive that the pill doesn't work or that it isn't responsible for a significant drop in realized fertility (the birth rate data makes that clear), and, b) the medical advances and cultural shift the pill enabled (casual sex is okay, sex outside of marriage is okay, children outside of marriage still pretty undesirable for most people) also paved the path for emergency contraception and the widespread acceptance and availability of abortion (to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year - that's a top-20 country, by population, per year). In summary, is it more complex than "the pill did it"? Yes, but not much more. Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Agreed, from everything I've seen the catalyst for this [low birth rates] is birth control and women's rights. Both gave women choices [a good thing]. When they use these choices it creates large demographic shifts. Enough time has passed that 2-earner households are required for a similar QoL, which makes children more expensive.
    - lucubratory 3y ago
      Birth control + abortion + IVF are what makes fertility rates a choice for those with the wealth + health to choose them, but like you (I think) I wouldn't actually call the existence of the choice the root cause of declining fertility. Instead, the lack of choice covered up the fact that many people would not choose to have children in our society, which is the root cause of falling fertility rates and a failure of our society. As well, there is structural bias against the choice to have children, because birth control is extremely cheap & accessible compared to IVF - if we imagined a population overall neutral on having children, the higher availability of birth control compared to fertility increasing treatments would bias it towards less children anyway, the same way that a tax on cigarettes leads to less people smoking. Why don't people choose to have children? Part of it is cultural, aggressively anti-child beliefs. A big part of it in my generation is depression about the future - many people feel the future is hopeless because the government is not doing enough about climate change and we seem to be getting closer and closer to a large war. Most of my friends would express that sentiment when asked why they don't want children. A big part of it is financial & health related - a lot of people don't feel comfortable having children unless they are in perfect health & quite wealthy, because of proto-eugenicist ideas that are just accepted as part of our culture. Some of this is individually rational choices: if no one will provide you with appropriate financial & medical support for the full-time, critical-to-society job of raising children, some people accurately believe their standard of living will drop dramatically if they have a(nother) child. All of these issues can be solved. The government can act on climate change and de-escalate tensions rather than preparing for war in order to let people have hope for the future again. The government can make IVF and other fertility increasing treatments free to the end user and otherwise as accessible as possible to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. The government can choose to compensate people for the critical-to-society job of making & raising children, ensuring that having children is not a financial burden compared to not having children, & structure healthcare + educational outcomes such that people do not feel they and their children's lives will be worse after having a child, or at least that that isn't a true statement in terms of personal standards of living. Western governments choose not to do these things because they don't need to, because they can rely on other countries having widespread lack of choice + poverty & instability to push young people to emigrate to the West & keep Western demographics very healthy. This solution works (at the expense of poorer countries), and while it can't last forever it can last for a very long time from our perspective. Eventually though, countries will need to solve the fundamental problem or accept widespread decreases in wealth & standards of living as population decreases.
saiya-jin 3y ago
While I agree with that shrink part, you must be living in a bubble for the family part. Literally all my colleagues in past 5 jobs (that few hundreds guys) have kids if they are over say 35. All colleagues of my wife. All of our friends. I cover western (Switzerland) and eastern Europe here. Same for Swiss colleagues and foreigners. Folks with nannies or family close but also raising their kids just by themselves, like us. 2 kids are standard, 3 are actually slowly becoming a norm. 1 is rare and more related to medical issues rather than an actual decision. From my own personal experience being raised as a single child, it sucks in many ways and will affect you negatively for rest of your life, regardless of all the love you received from parents (which of course helps but doesnt mitigate this).
- seper8 3y ago
  Your anecdotes don't nullify the data
- sverhagen 3y ago
  Surely there must be some downsides to siblings too. I also don't celebrate being an only child, but it didn't turn me into a misfit either. And to your anecdotal evidence, let me respond with anecdotal evidence... aren't we constantly hearing news about declining birth rates and an aging population? I have heard this from Korea, Japan, the United States, generally about Europe and specifically about the Netherlands.
- speeder 3y ago
  I am curious what country and industry you work. Most developed countries and some major developing ones have less than 2 children per couple in their data. The data is probably correct thus your anecdote would be an exception. Thus makes me wonder what industry is so exceptional?
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    we're in HN, its IT, software dev to be more precise
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
dathinab 3y ago
> If the default is changing in China too, their population is going to shrink no matter what. yes, that might actually be _the_ biggest incoming issue china has (through much much less because of housing prices). Basically by combining one child politics with various cultural and economic effects lead to a very strongly favor for having a boy over a girl. Combine that with natural reduction in birthrate due to reduction of poverty and some other factors it lead to a situation where China isn't just approaching a shrinking of population size but more like a collapse which could easily lead to various social and economic emergencies (like collapse of rent system, collapse of health system, problems to feed all elderly people etc.). Given the current "moral" direction of their government I wouldn't be surprised that if they don't find a better solution they might either start a war to kill many of their young and mid aged single men and/or start to mass euthanizing old people, at least if sick and/or poor. They even have the perfect excuse wrt. of they PR represent that: "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining".
- fnordian_slip 3y ago
  Maybe I missed something as a European who doesn't always see what's happening over the great pond, but the sentence "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining" confuses me. Did I miss Canada embarking on a policy of euthanasia? I know that the treatment of native people had quite a few scandals in recent decades, did you want to allude to that? Without wanting to make light of that situation, I think it is rather different in scale to what you propose.
  - akarlsten 3y ago
    Canada allows medically assisted suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada
    - fnordian_slip 3y ago
      Thank you. I have responded to you, since you were one minute earlier. I won't repeat the whole comment that I had written and lost due to my phone running out of battery, but still wanted to at least add part of it with thanks for the information. This kind of euthanasia (voluntary, with a review board, like in Switzerland) is something I feel should be a human right, though I'm not sure about the intricacies of the Canadian system. I think one should be very much aware of the extreme chasm between this and the kind of euthanasia committed in the early half of the last century in the third Reich, and not confuse them because of the common name. From the grandparent comment, I had assumed they meant to imply that Canada had implemented something closer to the latter.
barrysteve 3y ago
Porn and contraceptives did a lot of damage. It used to be that deciding to conceive made parents get their child into schooling and a lifelong career. Instutions were built and maintainted to support inflow of children and stable corporations were kept alfoat by a growing populace. Making conception optional for sex has knocked over most of the stability there was in the west and people are scrambling to replace it with electronics and authority. Tack on top of that, these country wide changes were not made by local governments, but by factories and corporations gradually dragging in the tools to break our society. And immigration on top to plug the gaps. Something's gone terribly wrong with the West and there's no weasling out of it. It's time to stand up.
- toyg 3y ago
  > Instutions were built and maintainted to support inflow of children and stable corporations were kept alfoat by a growing populace. It's absurd to attribute the failure of modern capitalism to demographic flows or contraception. Western corporations were relatively stable only because the rate of technological disruption was lower and, more importantly, the rate of overall financialization of the economy was so much lower. Capital moved very slowly, and financial instruments were few, often strictly regulated. Most capital was in steady manufacturing and agriculture business, rather than in volatile service industries. That made for a view of the economy where businesses were an institutional part of society, with roles and responsibilities and connections to locality. Once technological disruption and financialization accelerated, unshackled capital steamrolled society into doing what it's best for capital pretty much all the time, demographics be damned. Part of the push towards later and later parenthood is due to the increased specialization necessary to tech-intensive capital-fuelled businesses, requiring longer and longer training times and complete dedication for several years on top of that - all to earn unstable jobs that disappear very shortly, thanks to more and more automation. Yes, something is broken in the West: the needs of capital have trumped the needs of people for two generations, and now we're paying the price for it. You won't fix this through demographic tinkering, but through societal and political change. In fact, increasing demographic pressure on Western societies, at this point, is courting disaster.
- hector_vasquez 3y ago
leoedin 3y ago
> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent. I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm in my early 30s and I wouldn't say staying single and not marrying is the "default" - yes, there's more people doing it, but I still know a lot of people who have coupled up and got married. I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone. I have 2 kids, and the main reason people I talk to aren't considering a third is cost. Cost of an extra bedroom, cost of a larger car, incredibly high childcare costs - there's a very large real reduction in living standards that comes from going from 2 to 3. Compare that to my parents generation, where 3 or more siblings was the norm. I suspect a large part of falling birth rates isn't that loads more people are living child free lives, but that the people choosing to have kids are having fewer of them.
- everforward 3y ago
  My feeling is that it's heavily friend-group or clique dependent, or potentially geography-dependent (metropolitan vs rural). I'm also in my early 30s, but the majority of people I know are not married. I know about the same number of people who are polyamorous as married despite not running in those circles. I know I'm an outlier because the stats don't hear anything close to that. I will say that in the major metros, marriage still feels relatively uncommon. I think I've been to one wedding in several years, and it was a work acquaintance more than a friend (I was surprised to be invited, really). Most of the people I knew that were married were in their late forties and beyond. > I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone. I think it's important to delineate between people who want a relationship and people who want to get married. Relationships can exist absent a marriage, and marriages can exist absent a relationship. Some people don't want to be single, but don't want to be married. That's the demographic that I've seen growing. I don't see people pulling away from relationships so much as marriage. Marriage comes with so much baggage, and a lot of the traditions are based around historic assumptions that don't hold true anymore.

KaiserPro 3y ago

The "west" and china have _very_ different demographic pressures. For example china famously had(has?) the one child rule. This meant a deliberate shift in how children were raised (all your eggs in one basket) > Now the default is single-no-children and you have to make an explicit choice to marry (you used to be nudged into it by society) and to have kids, by stopping to use contraceptives and to do all the things that long time singles are used to do. I suspect you probably want to look deeper into the causes of that more. Yes contraceptives have a role to play, but they are not automatic, they require a deliberate choice, sometimes daily (https://www.statista.com/statistics/573210/contraceptive-use-among-women-by-type-and-age-in-england/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/573210/contraceptive-use... granted this is for the UK, and doesn't account for people not taking it. The point is that younger women are taking pills daily) Why are people not having kids? the answers are more complex than you seem to be suggesting.

argiopetech 3y ago
If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, but a) that's not suggestive that the pill doesn't work or that it isn't responsible for a significant drop in realized fertility (the birth rate data makes that clear), and, b) the medical advances and cultural shift the pill enabled (casual sex is okay, sex outside of marriage is okay, children outside of marriage still pretty undesirable for most people) also paved the path for emergency contraception and the widespread acceptance and availability of abortion (to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year - that's a top-20 country, by population, per year). In summary, is it more complex than "the pill did it"? Yes, but not much more. Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Agreed, from everything I've seen the catalyst for this [low birth rates] is birth control and women's rights. Both gave women choices [a good thing]. When they use these choices it creates large demographic shifts. Enough time has passed that 2-earner households are required for a similar QoL, which makes children more expensive.
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    Birth control + abortion + IVF are what makes fertility rates a choice for those with the wealth + health to choose them, but like you (I think) I wouldn't actually call the existence of the choice the root cause of declining fertility. Instead, the lack of choice covered up the fact that many people would not choose to have children in our society, which is the root cause of falling fertility rates and a failure of our society. As well, there is structural bias against the choice to have children, because birth control is extremely cheap & accessible compared to IVF - if we imagined a population overall neutral on having children, the higher availability of birth control compared to fertility increasing treatments would bias it towards less children anyway, the same way that a tax on cigarettes leads to less people smoking. Why don't people choose to have children? Part of it is cultural, aggressively anti-child beliefs. A big part of it in my generation is depression about the future - many people feel the future is hopeless because the government is not doing enough about climate change and we seem to be getting closer and closer to a large war. Most of my friends would express that sentiment when asked why they don't want children. A big part of it is financial & health related - a lot of people don't feel comfortable having children unless they are in perfect health & quite wealthy, because of proto-eugenicist ideas that are just accepted as part of our culture. Some of this is individually rational choices: if no one will provide you with appropriate financial & medical support for the full-time, critical-to-society job of raising children, some people accurately believe their standard of living will drop dramatically if they have a(nother) child. All of these issues can be solved. The government can act on climate change and de-escalate tensions rather than preparing for war in order to let people have hope for the future again. The government can make IVF and other fertility increasing treatments free to the end user and otherwise as accessible as possible to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. The government can choose to compensate people for the critical-to-society job of making & raising children, ensuring that having children is not a financial burden compared to not having children, & structure healthcare + educational outcomes such that people do not feel they and their children's lives will be worse after having a child, or at least that that isn't a true statement in terms of personal standards of living. Western governments choose not to do these things because they don't need to, because they can rely on other countries having widespread lack of choice + poverty & instability to push young people to emigrate to the West & keep Western demographics very healthy. This solution works (at the expense of poorer countries), and while it can't last forever it can last for a very long time from our perspective. Eventually though, countries will need to solve the fundamental problem or accept widespread decreases in wealth & standards of living as population decreases.

saiya-jin 3y ago

While I agree with that shrink part, you must be living in a bubble for the family part. Literally all my colleagues in past 5 jobs (that few hundreds guys) have kids if they are over say 35. All colleagues of my wife. All of our friends. I cover western (Switzerland) and eastern Europe here. Same for Swiss colleagues and foreigners. Folks with nannies or family close but also raising their kids just by themselves, like us. 2 kids are standard, 3 are actually slowly becoming a norm. 1 is rare and more related to medical issues rather than an actual decision. From my own personal experience being raised as a single child, it sucks in many ways and will affect you negatively for rest of your life, regardless of all the love you received from parents (which of course helps but doesnt mitigate this).

seper8 3y ago
Your anecdotes don't nullify the data
sverhagen 3y ago
Surely there must be some downsides to siblings too. I also don't celebrate being an only child, but it didn't turn me into a misfit either. And to your anecdotal evidence, let me respond with anecdotal evidence... aren't we constantly hearing news about declining birth rates and an aging population? I have heard this from Korea, Japan, the United States, generally about Europe and specifically about the Netherlands.
speeder 3y ago
I am curious what country and industry you work. Most developed countries and some major developing ones have less than 2 children per couple in their data. The data is probably correct thus your anecdote would be an exception. Thus makes me wonder what industry is so exceptional?
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  we're in HN, its IT, software dev to be more precise
KptMarchewa 3y ago

dathinab 3y ago

> If the default is changing in China too, their population is going to shrink no matter what. yes, that might actually be _the_ biggest incoming issue china has (through much much less because of housing prices). Basically by combining one child politics with various cultural and economic effects lead to a very strongly favor for having a boy over a girl. Combine that with natural reduction in birthrate due to reduction of poverty and some other factors it lead to a situation where China isn't just approaching a shrinking of population size but more like a collapse which could easily lead to various social and economic emergencies (like collapse of rent system, collapse of health system, problems to feed all elderly people etc.). Given the current "moral" direction of their government I wouldn't be surprised that if they don't find a better solution they might either start a war to kill many of their young and mid aged single men and/or start to mass euthanizing old people, at least if sick and/or poor. They even have the perfect excuse wrt. of they PR represent that: "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining".

fnordian_slip 3y ago
Maybe I missed something as a European who doesn't always see what's happening over the great pond, but the sentence "hey we just copied Canada why are you complaining" confuses me. Did I miss Canada embarking on a policy of euthanasia? I know that the treatment of native people had quite a few scandals in recent decades, did you want to allude to that? Without wanting to make light of that situation, I think it is rather different in scale to what you propose.
- akarlsten 3y ago
  Canada allows medically assisted suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada
  - fnordian_slip 3y ago
    Thank you. I have responded to you, since you were one minute earlier. I won't repeat the whole comment that I had written and lost due to my phone running out of battery, but still wanted to at least add part of it with thanks for the information. This kind of euthanasia (voluntary, with a review board, like in Switzerland) is something I feel should be a human right, though I'm not sure about the intricacies of the Canadian system. I think one should be very much aware of the extreme chasm between this and the kind of euthanasia committed in the early half of the last century in the third Reich, and not confuse them because of the common name. From the grandparent comment, I had assumed they meant to imply that Canada had implemented something closer to the latter.

barrysteve 3y ago

Porn and contraceptives did a lot of damage. It used to be that deciding to conceive made parents get their child into schooling and a lifelong career. Instutions were built and maintainted to support inflow of children and stable corporations were kept alfoat by a growing populace. Making conception optional for sex has knocked over most of the stability there was in the west and people are scrambling to replace it with electronics and authority. Tack on top of that, these country wide changes were not made by local governments, but by factories and corporations gradually dragging in the tools to break our society. And immigration on top to plug the gaps. Something's gone terribly wrong with the West and there's no weasling out of it. It's time to stand up.

toyg 3y ago
> Instutions were built and maintainted to support inflow of children and stable corporations were kept alfoat by a growing populace. It's absurd to attribute the failure of modern capitalism to demographic flows or contraception. Western corporations were relatively stable only because the rate of technological disruption was lower and, more importantly, the rate of overall financialization of the economy was so much lower. Capital moved very slowly, and financial instruments were few, often strictly regulated. Most capital was in steady manufacturing and agriculture business, rather than in volatile service industries. That made for a view of the economy where businesses were an institutional part of society, with roles and responsibilities and connections to locality. Once technological disruption and financialization accelerated, unshackled capital steamrolled society into doing what it's best for capital pretty much all the time, demographics be damned. Part of the push towards later and later parenthood is due to the increased specialization necessary to tech-intensive capital-fuelled businesses, requiring longer and longer training times and complete dedication for several years on top of that - all to earn unstable jobs that disappear very shortly, thanks to more and more automation. Yes, something is broken in the West: the needs of capital have trumped the needs of people for two generations, and now we're paying the price for it. You won't fix this through demographic tinkering, but through societal and political change. In fact, increasing demographic pressure on Western societies, at this point, is courting disaster.
hector_vasquez 3y ago

leoedin 3y ago

> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent. I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm in my early 30s and I wouldn't say staying single and not marrying is the "default" - yes, there's more people doing it, but I still know a lot of people who have coupled up and got married. I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone. I have 2 kids, and the main reason people I talk to aren't considering a third is cost. Cost of an extra bedroom, cost of a larger car, incredibly high childcare costs - there's a very large real reduction in living standards that comes from going from 2 to 3. Compare that to my parents generation, where 3 or more siblings was the norm. I suspect a large part of falling birth rates isn't that loads more people are living child free lives, but that the people choosing to have kids are having fewer of them.

everforward 3y ago
My feeling is that it's heavily friend-group or clique dependent, or potentially geography-dependent (metropolitan vs rural). I'm also in my early 30s, but the majority of people I know are not married. I know about the same number of people who are polyamorous as married despite not running in those circles. I know I'm an outlier because the stats don't hear anything close to that. I will say that in the major metros, marriage still feels relatively uncommon. I think I've been to one wedding in several years, and it was a work acquaintance more than a friend (I was surprised to be invited, really). Most of the people I knew that were married were in their late forties and beyond. > I don't think I know anyone who's completely checked out of the idea of a relationship yet - the single people are still dating, often with the expressed desire of finding someone. I think it's important to delineate between people who want a relationship and people who want to get married. Relationships can exist absent a marriage, and marriages can exist absent a relationship. Some people don't want to be single, but don't want to be married. That's the demographic that I've seen growing. I don't see people pulling away from relationships so much as marriage. Marriage comes with so much baggage, and a lot of the traditions are based around historic assumptions that don't hold true anymore.