7 ms·
Global fertility isn't just declining, it's collapsing
- Flatcircle 3y agoAs the trend continues the book children of men becomes more and more prescient. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men
- oldpersonintx 3y agoIn the US, having kids is for the top 1% who can afford it or the bottom 5% who have always been poor. Want to fix this in the US? Offer stable child-rearing families FREE housing, and I mean in decent neighborhoods. I don't mean a stipend or low-interest loan, I mean FREE including utilities, maintenance and property tax. You will see strollers everywhere within two years.
- post_break 3y agoYou must be joking, we don't get free healthcare, let alone free tape at the post office.
- RajT88 3y agoHealthcare is just one piece of the puzzle. Birth rates are collapsing in countries with socialized healthcare as well.
- data_Is_Raciss 3y ago[dead]
- bottlelion 3y agoSolve declining populations with this one simple trick!
- ponector 3y agoPopulation declines in rich countries and increases in poor. Make world poor again and that will resolve the issue! /s
- edgyquant 3y agoThere is also something seriously wrong with what we’re consuming or being exposed to. I’m a millennial and it seems like more of my friends have had trouble conceiving than the opposite. Just in my small friend group a couple of people are unable and the ones that have had them tried for quite a long time. I’m currently at a year of trying at 31 years old (partner is 30.). We are all otherwise healthy.
- NeonVice 3y agoBirth rate decreases as income increases. The highest income earners have the lowest birth rates.
- dsr_ 3y agoAs Clinton famously said: "It's the economy, stupid." (I'm not calling you stupid.) Housing, healthcare, education, and transportation are all generally unaffordable, and those are precisely the costs most associated with having children. Add in the tradeoff of one partner staying home vs making money but paying it to childcare for several years, and it's much easier to say "maybe next year".
- BoxFour 3y agoI'd suggest that the main issue might not be housing, but rather childcare. The cost of childcare is incredibly high, more than many (most?) mortgages or rent payments. Unlike previous generations who settled in the suburbs close to family support, many of us are now gravitating back to city centers away from relatives who could help with childcare. Raising children requires a substantial commitment of time – they're undoubtedly rewarding for many who choose to have them, but it's completely reasonable why some people would be hesitant or even opposed to the idea.
- shagie 3y agoWhat about Finland or Sweden? 2.1 children per woman is the steady "not declining" rate... and Scandinavia tends to have people pointing there and saying "this is how you do support for new families..." Sweden is at 1.66 children per woman and Finland is at 1.37. United States is at 1.64 and Canada is at 1.40.
- BoxFour 3y agoNo one thing will be sufficient, but eliminating obstacles to child rearing is the only solution governments have short of nonsensical interventions (or just accepting the situation).
- ponector 3y agoBut what is the outcome? Children in families where people are getting everything for free from the government. They will not be an active working class, because why should you work if government is giving everything for free? But more affordable child care and more tax brakes for families with kids is a key. These days having a kid is like going to prison: woman destroys career and burns savings.
- VoodooJuJu 3y agoEveryone used to be able to afford it until states and corporations worked together to convince everyone that a mother's time is better spent in a corporation generating tax revenue & profits for shareholders so that she can take some of that money she earns to afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working so that she can afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working so that she can afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working
- rhombocombus 3y agoI’m an old dad (by my standards, 41 with two toddlers), and this is the reason. It took me most of my young adult life to even get to a stable configuration where kids felt remotely possible. No regrets over here, but I have less energy than I did when I was 30!
- stronglikedan 3y ago> Offer stable child-rearing families FREE housing, and I mean in decent neighborhoods. This has been done, often abused, and the neighborhoods don't always remain decent. How about just a UBI instead?
- jejeyyy77 3y agolol
- john025 3y agosocialism is youth tax so what are you accomplishing taxing the youth to pay the youth (minus bureaucrats hefty cut)? we really need to stop taking money from kids to give to boomers, and take money from boomers to give to kids, unpopular political suicide changes like delete medicare
- grondo4 3y agoAs others have pointed out you should really do some research, in the United States birth rates are inversely correlated with income. [1] If anything, if we wanted to dramatically raise birth rates we would want a poorer population, not a wealthier one. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThat trend is reversing. https://medium.com/impact-economics/rich-families-are-having-more-kids-1c0b80d5a16e https://medium.com/impact-economics/rich-families-are-having...
- WithinReason 3y agoDiscovering the unintended consequences of this policy is left as an exercise for the reader.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoHow do you offer free housing in "decent neighborhoods"? "Decent" is not an immutable quality of a place, its a property that emerges largely from the people that live there. Decent people are decent neighborhoods.
- slaw 3y ago> There were 134 million babies born in 2023. > There were 61 million people who died in 2023. https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths
- HPsquared 3y agoIt's not everywhere. North Korea has higher fertility than South Korea, for instance. See population pyramids: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_North_Korea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_North_Korea
- rrssh 3y agoThat's the same thing.
- T-zex 3y ago... except the difference in rate.
- questinthrow 3y agoTo be honest I live in one of the most pampered eras doing the cushiest job from home. But even so I dont understand how people motivate themselves to make children, especially if they have a 1-2 hour commute and are forced by debt to take on shittier jobs than mine (probably 99% of jobs out there). Why even do this for 60 years and also condemn your kids to the same thing? It might seem like bragging but I basically won the game and I dont see anything worth it up here. I guess the struggle is what gives you meaning or something and children can be your cope because they will have a better life than yours if yours sucks.
- czbond 3y agoOne word - "Feelings". Kids invoke feelings, people are susceptible and ruled by them. Logic is then applied to the decision to justify.
- throw4847285 3y agoWay to tell on yourself. Most emotionally mature people understand when feelings are driving their decision making, and don't try to justify it with self-serving logic. Only weird nerds claim to be ruled by logic and are actually motivated mostly by their feelings (the most prominent one in my experience being inadequacy).
- czbond 3y agoNothing I stated is untrue. Humans are prone to err on the side of feelings, even if they are what make us human. They are also what make us generally illogical or at least non-strategic. The difference is people who can segment feelings from impacting making logical decisions.
- throw4847285 3y agoI think we agree except that I believe that most people who claim to have "segmented their feelings" have actually repressed their feelings, and are far more prone to motivated reasoning than people who are overtly emotional. Edit: Or, you know what? I deny the entire individualistic framing. I think to actually make logical decisions about anything of substance, it takes more than one person. For things that don't matter, like what to eat for lunch or what book to buy, it's fine letting your emotions take the wheel. I think the individual logical person is a myth. We're social animals. Logical reasoning is a collective enterprise.
- liveoneggs 3y agoFinally some good news!
- pixel_tracing 3y agoI never understand this argument, we have lots of space on this planet for humans, it’s the industrialization that’s harming the planet not more people
- liveoneggs 3y agoIndustrialization is done in support of human populations. As populations get bigger more and more space must be industrialized. Your existence (eating, drinking, living) requires X acres of farmland, Y acres of ocean, Z acres of landfill, N tonnes/watts of energy, etc etc etc. No matter how "ethical" you eat or how much housing density you can tolerate, the resources much be spent or you will die. I suppose it is true that we could all stand shoulder to shoulder connected to IV drips like some kind of sci-fi nightmare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon) but I view this as a bad outcome.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago40% of all bioavailable nitrogen produced on this planet is produced industrially. Most human beings exist only due to industrialization, they would not exist if industrialization wasn't a reality. Feeding people and having people cannot be separated. You can't have an earth with this many people without industrialization, short of razing all forest land and farming on it, which seems to me to be much more destructive than industrialization.
- orwin 3y agoJust a remark about birth rate *85 method: the author isn't taking into account that women are having children later. Sadly real fertility statistics are doomed to be late by 40 years, which is way too late, so we have to be satisfied by birthrate, but if I had to calculate the real fertility rate of a country, I would take the number of children per infertile women over 16 or something like that. Its not political, I'm not saying anybody's right or wrong, I just wanted to geek on fertility statistics
- officeplant 3y agoI for one welcome our new childless overlords.
- whalesalad 3y agoIs fertility being conflated with birthrate / desire or ability to have kids? I do believe fertility is declining due to environmental factors (pesticides, seed oils, etc) and autism is spiking out of control ... but I also think that a lot of younger generations are just choosing not to have children.
- eb123 3y agoThis is a common misunderstanding, one which I was fairly confused by until recently. "Fertility differs from fecundity, which is defined as the biological capacity to reproduce irrespective of intention for conception [...] In demographic contexts, fertility refers to the actual production of offspring, rather than the physical capability to produce which is termed fecundity. While fertility can be measured, fecundity cannot be" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility
- SamuelAdams 3y agoWhy does the global population need to grow? What is wrong with only having 9 billion people instead of 10 billion?
- nairboon 3y agoIt helps the economy, more people = more demand and bigger markets. Now one might ask why the economy needs to grow.
- romusha 3y agoCuz the old billionaires
- cjbgkagh 3y agoMore people is more demand and higher prices and depressed wages equals higher profits. Natalism is being pushed by corporatism. Plus the modern economy is a giant ponzi scheme and people don’t want it to collapse on their watch.
- HPsquared 3y agoOwners of land, and operators of various Ponzi schemes, demand it.
- safety1st 3y agoThose Ponzi schemes include practically everyone's retirement plans. Whether it's a tax-funded benefit or a private fund levered to the market it needs growth.
- cjbgkagh 3y agoThe assumption of continued economic growth is what makes the numbers in dodgy ponzi economic theory work. Society will have to go to ever increasing extremes to make it work. At some point the cost of that will exceed even the imagined gains and the economy will implode. Politically people don’t want their dose of reality so we’re stuck in a boom/bust business cycle of ever increasing amplitude. The rollercoaster we can’t get off. I think we’re already at the limits of what can be done and the social fabric keeping things together does appear to be at a breaking point.
- waldothedog 3y agoTo clarify for myself… humans aren’t losing the physical capacity to reproduce? It’s that we aren’t reproducing as much due to choice/circumstance?
- pixel_tracing 3y agoThis is pure speculation, but I wonder if endocrine disrupters present in plastics are leading to a decline in testosterone and therefore decline in fertility (I also wonder how those disrupters affect women)
- throw4847285 3y agoNot only is that pure speculation, but it replaces a simple sociological explanation (changing gender roles) with a crackpot "scientific" one.
- pixel_tracing 3y agoHow is your explanation simple and where is the data to back that? This theory isn’t crackpot, global sperm rates are declining, the average testosterone of men is lower than it was during your grand-fathers time. Certain plastics have been shown to be endocrine disrupters. Your theory might work in westernized countries but this trend is global according to the article, certain countries enforce more traditional values for men and women and those countries are also seeing a decline.
- throw4847285 3y agoI'm a novice, but from the research I've done, the evidence is far from conclusive. There is growing evidence of the negative impact of microplastics on human health in a number of ways, but it is a massive leap to claim it is the primary cause for the phenomena you're describing. In fact, the biggest contribution to declining birth rates is people have fewer children, not men being incapable of having children. And there are plenty of great sociological explanations for that. Changing gender roles, economic mobility, access to birth control, etc. Edit: As somebody else said, it's a birthrate crisis, not a fertility crisis. "Fertility" is a loaded and inaccurate framing. PSS: Even crisis is loaded. It just leads to people channeling their existing personal insecurities into large scale social phenomena.
- 1over137 3y agoOur planet is seriously overpopulated (with humans), so this is good news.
- infecto 3y agoDoomer logic without evidence.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI can’t help but to think about the Population Bomb hysteria. This time in reverse!
- reportgunner 3y agoOK and ?
- happiness_idx 3y agoWhy should we care? We can supplement a new tax base with removal of the border. I won't fall for the nationalist trap that, "my people being born on soil is magically better than people from over seas". Its never made sense to me why we need more children. Additionally we probably need a degrowth mindset in general in order to combat over consumption, and man-made climate change.
- naasking 3y ago> I won't fall for the nationalist trap that, "my people being born on soil is magically better than people from over seas". It's not a matter of "better" so much as assimilated vs. not. A country is shaped by the voters. If you change voter demographics too quickly, the new voter base won't have any innate familiarity or respect for the laws that make your country work. It's a basic system stability problem. Consider this oversimplified scenario: the US has 300m people, do you agree or disagree that bringing in 200m Taliban would be a problem? If you disagree, then you're living in a dream world. Otherwise you too agree that there's some limit to the rate of immigration that can ensure the stability of the country, we may simply disagree on exactly what that number might be. People who have much lower thresholds just think there are undesirable second and third order effects that push that number lower.
- sanitycheck 3y agoSo, looks like the "problem" is that by 2080 we'll be back to the same global population we have now? Perhaps that's good news, we'll have to learn how to live sustainably instead of basing everything on constant growth. Also, global surface temperature will probably be around 2°C higher, sea levels will have risen maybe a metre, and we'll have been really lucky if large portions of the planet aren't a nuclear wasteland by then. At least we won't have to worry about overpopulation!
- slashdev 3y agoI'm not sure why this gets flagged, because it's very interesting and concerns all of us. I think it's great, in my mind, there's too many people on the planet already, and we're stressing the biospehere near the breaking point in multiple ways. 9-10 billion people is plenty. This news is a welcome bit of good news in an otherwise scary future.
- nodoodles 3y agoAgreed, it's curious the article never mentions sustainability or benefits of not having uncontrolled population growth, but uses negative language for the trend (collapse, doom, disappearing..)
- slashdev 3y agoYeah, some people are very alarmed that population growth, and thus economic growth might slow down. Elon Musk for example, is very alarmed about it. I think we have to find a sustainable future, or it will find us on terms we won't like at all. This is a good thing.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI believe that it is actually just a racist / eugenics dog whistle because if you look at who is actually making babies, it is Africans
- slashdev 3y agoThere's always one moron who wants to bring race into the discussion
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI want you to ask yourself, how scary would it be if the population was 70% over the age of 60? You have three scenarios: old people working themselves into a grave, starving in the streets, or you're being taxed like a slave at 70% just to feed them. That sounds like a really scary future to me.
- stephc_int13 3y agoAm I the only one seeing the intricate relationship between population growth and the housing market? When the population grows, the housing price increases, and at some point it becomes too difficult for young couples to have extra rooms to raise kids (many still live with their parents). When the population decreases or collapses, the housing market crashes, and then, one or two generations later, the population increases again. The thing is that we've been accustomed to a quick and unprecedented population growth since the end of WW2, and the housing market of big cities are reaching its limits all over the world. My take is that it won't be a problem, au contraire, the population will stabilize around 10B, and this is a good thing on many dimensions. Think about it.
- jejeyyy77 3y agoPeople just move further out.
- stephc_int13 3y agoYes, this is what they do, up to a point. Thanks to modern transportation (cars and good roads) and telecommunication (phones and internet) we've been able to expand our cities to levels that were unachievable during ancient times. But with current tech, there are still practical limits. The undeniable proof is the huge pressure on the housing market. If it was practical to simply build houses in the middle of nowhere, people would do that instead of fighting for small space in large cities.
- naasking 3y agoPopulation growth isn't the only variable, there's also housing regulations and zoning that influence how much gets constructed. For example, if property taxes increased quadratically based on property size, then there would be a very strong incentive against mega mansions and towards denser housing.
- stephc_int13 3y agoThe housing market is complex and driven by many factors. But the main one, long-term, is population density. The regulations and zoning are side effects of the fact that the housing market is used as a stable investment, precisely because population growth as been so steady for many decades now. Ultimately, speculators and finance are acting as pricing agents, and they also skew the market to extract as much juice as possible from it. But in the end, the usefulness, and thus the value, of houses, is determined by the good old market rules, supply and demand, everything else is high-frequency noise, not the signal.
- r0ckarong 3y agoSo at what point can we point at the few percent that are stacking wealth while the rest is too busy surviving to keep the species alive? I'm ready. My wife and I make good money, by no means riches, and I'm all but done with the idea of trying for a second child. I don't even know how to take care of the first one if things keep getting shitter at this pace.
- hogepiyo 3y ago"Birth rate" probably would have been the better term to use in the article title if you ask me, but then I suppose it wouldn't have the whole alarmist children of men angle behind it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spants 3y agoInterested to know the following: 1) The delta change over time for the regions. As countries with typically larger familes have access to better healthcare, it should have increased. 2) the delta change for countries plotted with covid vaccination acceptance.