21 ms·

The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

74 points by hectorchu 1y ago

hectorchu 1y ago
This post argues that collapsing birth rates aren’t just about housing or money — they’re a rational response to the sense that the future is unstable, meaningless, or even dangerous. It introduces the concept of “temporal inflation” — the idea that just like money loses value in hyperinflation, time loses value when people can’t trust the future. Would love to hear if this resonates with others.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  I don't know. Did people do this in the midst of world war 2, for example?
  - odyssey7 1y ago
    The war was likely to eventually end. The price of food will continue to increase exponentially, at some variable rate of inflation, forever. Skilled professions were likely to remain useful after the war. AI makes their future value seem uncertain.
  - Jedd 1y ago
    Covered in TFA.
  - tw04 1y ago
    Tough to say. It was difficult to have children in the middle of WW2 when all the men of appropriate age were fighting on the frontlines. The results would also likely be skewed by Germany quasi-forcing people to have children in support of the party.
    - baxtr 1y ago
      Look up birth rates in Syria for the past 10 years.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - cjfd 1y ago
    I am not sure. I was not alive during world war 2. I would think, though, that during world war 2 it was relatively easy to think that we just need to wait until the bad guys are defeated. Now the rise of dictatorships and populism makes me wonder whether humanity as a whole is not just too stupid to survive.
- _dark_matter_ 1y ago
  Is this AI generated?
  - anilakar 1y ago
    Too many em dashes?
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      The iPhone—a fairly popular type of smartphone—produces em dashes automatically if you hit the hyphen button twice.
  - raymondgh 1y ago
    Summary of original post written in ChatGPT style with no original substance… my guess is yes!
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    Yes, and it still gets replies. Maybe from other bots. Welcome to our dumb future.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Would be nice to clarify that you're the OP? If I'm right about your username.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  It's a way to frame the problem that will work well for some people, and I don't see any real downsides to it. I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation. And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
- baxtr 1y ago
  Not getting kids is a cultural issue. My mom used to say exactly the same, but she still got 3 kids with very little money because her social groups expected her to have children.
  - ggandv 1y ago
    “social groups expected” Catholic?
- kaibee 1y ago
  > Yes, kids are expensive. But countries like Korea and Singapore are pouring money into incentives and still seeing fertility drop to record lows. This is what you're missing. They are not. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink. In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on... Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value. And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
  - chuankl 1y ago
    > Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value. I think this is the key insight, on this specific topic and many others.
    - joquarky 1y ago
      Bob was right. Don't let them take your slack.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    Exactly. "Pouring money" is what, a one-time $2000 payment? How is that going to get anywhere near balancing what you've already described. Unfortunately most politicians seem very out of touch and are just there to keep the status quo.
- freehorse 1y ago
  I think treating it as a rational process and looking at the reasons behind makes sense, as opposed to "attitudes", in the sense that attitudes and culture are shaped through some processes. I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.
incomingpain 1y ago
In canada, aged 20-29, 46% were still living with their parents. If you live in a big city like toronto, the number is way higher. Kids living at home aren't saying "I still live in my parent's basement" "oh, lets have a baby!" this really is the depth of the issue. Confidence isn't going to have you change this answer.
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  Not surprised. Housing went up a lot in recent years and it is not affordable for most young people. And if you have to rent, why not rent your parent's?
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    Housing in the West was basically turned into another pillar of retiree funding. Old people extract tremendous financial gains from younger generations by either a) selling them decrepit real estate at extremely high prices or b) collecting very high rents on buildings that are even older than themselves (even in the US, which is the king of corporate landlording, they are a small minority; most landlords are natural persons, mostly retirees or near-retirees). It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible. (Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)
    - jplrssn 1y ago
      Young people may be checking out of that system but BlackRock and others are doing the opposite. Why wouldn’t they, when government policy has made it an asset class that can never fall in value?
    - 1y ago
FrankWilhoit 1y ago
He is right, if he also stops well short of saying what he might. But "the politicians", as always, are only doing what the people are telling them to. The human species has decided to shut down.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  The human species has eight billion people. If the birthrate is still low when it's four billion, or two billion, I'll start to have concern for the species.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Would that it were a game of SimCity. If/when we get to 4B, 2B, it will be only after displacements of whole populations, mass-starvation, and likely brutal war.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      That is quite possible, but I was thinking more that several generations of people not reproducing above replacement rate isn't really a disaster by itself. If we don't have war, displacement, and mass starvation, and people still decide just to not have as many kids for a few generations, the species will survive (and from a resource consumption standpoint the planet will probably be better off).
    - UncleMeat 1y ago
      It's amazing that we had oodles of "population growth will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries on the run up from 2B to 8B and now we've got "population decline will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries. And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.
      - shadowgovt 1y ago
        Good news, unfortunately, rarely radiates with the power or urgency of bad news. The mass-starvation concerns of the '70s-'80s were resolved by an army of agriculture and biological scientists developing revolutionary breakthroughs in staple food crops and farming techniques. These fundamentally staved off the "cold equations" starvation risk (most starvation in the modern era is logistical error; the food exists, it isn't where people are). Unfortunately, key pieces of the solutions involved practices we know aren't sustainable indefinitely (fertilizer production is fossil-fuel heavy), so there's more work to be done (and some non-zero benefit if we were to discover that the global human population was falling without some mass-tragedy causing it).
pestatije 1y ago
see correlation house affordability vs. birth rates...im sure which one is cause and which one is consequence
bee_rider 1y ago
We certainly aren’t going to do anything about climate change, so any kid born now is going to live to see some rough times.
nemomarx 1y ago
Makes me think of Future Shock a little? We've known that cultural and technological change has been accelerating for decades, though. I suppose the question is if there's been an inflection point even in that.
pjc50 1y ago
> Nobody knows Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision? South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul. This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance.
- blagie 1y ago
  No, the population has not "levelled out" in Korea. These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass. The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File:South_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m... Learn how to read these plots and what they mean. There are almost no young people. There are almost no kids in South Korea. Unless there is mass immigration, the population of South Korea will implode. Even if people began breeding like rabbits today, there is nothing that can be done; when the 0-20 year old population is of working age, there will be a massive number of old people, and almost no one of working age.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    > There are almost no kids in South Korea. That page says 11% of the population is under 15. Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      And a population where, say, everyone uniformly lives to 75 should have 20% of its population under 15. So that page says that South Korea has just over half as many kids as it should have for a stable population.
Fricken 1y ago
French Aristocrats had difficulty affording children as well. My theory is that as a society becomes wealthier, the acceptable minimum standard for child rearing grows at an even faster rate, until it becomes unattainable for a growing number of people. Raising kids is cheap. People who live in mud huts who have never heard of money can afford to raise kids. Avoiding negative social stigma is what people can't afford.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > Avoiding negative social stigma is what people can't afford. This is a very important factor. The West has successfully more or less eliminated teenage pregnancy thanks to very heavy stigma plus enabling choice and information. People are simply deferring having children until conditions are perfect - as they were told to do.
  - odyssey7 1y ago
    I would say they don’t need to be perfect, but mere stability seems to be a thing of the past. The millennial generation has seen repeated waves of economic crises and layoffs and the invention of a gig economy. Mere stability is lacking. At least the people in mud huts know they can afford their mud hut next year. Maybe people don’t want to be economically corralled into a large city a thousand miles from home and then to have their children in that city where they moved for career advancement, particularly as the social contract between employees and employers grows increasingly vacuous.
- moduspol 1y ago
  Indeed. Likewise, there has never been a time where wide swaths of potential parents feel like they can "afford" having children. Before birth control, it was less of a choice. This narrative that "people aren't having children because the future is bleak and they're expensive," is wildly overblown. Yes, it's what people say when you ask them. That's not the same as it being the actual reason.
steveBK123 1y ago
I think we very rapidly went from a world with high child mortality rates, no access to birth control and children being at least moderately useful on the farm or doing some other work quite young to a world where having children is both a choice and very very expensive. This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations. We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Also from a world where the ability of women to access decently paying jobs outside the home was heavily restricted to one approaching equality. Motherhood is one choice of many, with negative pay.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household. My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today. In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years. It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years. My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work. Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
    - sseagull 1y ago
      Spot on, but this in particular > people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course). Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away. Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare. Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
drooopy 1y ago
Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m legally responsible for and could go to jail over if I can’t afford to feed them. Sounds like a solid plan.
- kspacewalk2 1y ago
  Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
  - drooopy 1y ago
    You're right that many aspects of life have improved since the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean the current conditions for raising children are good or sustainable. In high-income countries, lower birth rates correlate with rising housing costs, lack of affordable childcare, stagnant wages, and job insecurity. People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.
  - louthy 1y ago
    When people are considering having children, of course the first thing they think is “our lives are objectively better than the 1930s, let’s go for it!” As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now. I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.
    - kspacewalk2 1y ago
maxglute 1y ago
Not having kids is too inexpensive.
- pearlsontheroad 1y ago
  I disagree. Even though I'm childless, taxes I've paid my whole life help finance public schools which I'll never use.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Maybe you used the public schools when you were growing up? A generation often pays for the previous one, or up and coming one.
  - gwd 1y ago
    > which I'll never use. Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund. Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.
    - pearlsontheroad 1y ago
      Agree 100%. Not saying I don't benefit indirectly from public education. In fact, I actually feel good about contributing to the education of my fellow citizens. My comment was related to the insinuation that childfree choice is "too inexpensive". What's next, let's tax childfree people more than parents?
Jedd 1y ago
Is this a new theory? I'm sure this has been a fairly commonly perceived trope amongst late-X and millenials for several years now. Presumably accelerated during 2016-2020, and once again ramping up quickly, for our stateside friends - but I haven't heard of any part of the planet being burdened by an over-abundance of optimism about the (affordability of the) future.
easywood 1y ago
"On a farm, a child is an investment. In a city, it's a liability". In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city. Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm. But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.
Zealotux 1y ago
Surprised to see such a poor and superficial article reach the front page, the collapsing birth rates are a multifactorial problem, there's nothing of substance in that article.
lnsru 1y ago
In shrinking economy like current Germany’s economy the future does not look bright. White collar jobs are moved to Malaysia, Poland and Serbia at extreme rate. And will never come back. I recently worked at the companies moving whole departments to the mentioned countries. I am sure, living from salary to salary in a rented apartment does not provide much optimism about future. Especially when one can barely afford rent of bigger apartment. Having a child in a city adds a pile of extra cost: bigger apartment plus few hundred for kindergarten. Children are simply for very rich families.
BLenkomo 1y ago
We are enough people on the planet. Why does this read like we have to have kids? I'm completly fine not having kids surprise \o/
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  It's how society will break down without a younger generation in quantity that is paying for social security, earning taxes for society, etc.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    Oh well, just have to accept that there won't be retirement, only burning your savings and then euthanasia. Better have fun while you can afford it.
    - joquarky 1y ago
      That sounds like a rational strategy to me. Counting on a retirement takes faith.
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      That might be preferable to rotting in an old age home with dementia.
    - BLenkomo 1y ago
      When i look at most people what they do when they retire, it doesn't feel like most people actually have a good strategy for it anyway. Less work, longer work, using more and leaving without a dime in the pocket sounds a lot better.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    Tax AI and we let the bullshit jobs die.
  - spiffyk 1y ago
    If the society is built upon the assumption of its own infinite growth in terms of population—an assumption which is very blatantly nonsensical—then maybe it deserves to break down.
throwaway984393 1y ago
[dead]
nisa 1y ago
I'm in my 40ies and in Germany and basically from my friends and surroundings I've realized the only people that have children are academics / people with established careers where both partners earn very well and have stable jobs or people on welfare where at least all necessities are covered. What's missing is people in-between, people with limited contracts, people without money in the family and people working a job that hardly pays more than what you would get with welfare. If you look at birth rates in eastern europe after the fall of the soviet union and the establishment of neoliberal economics everwhere and the development of eastern europe economies as workbenches for western corporations with low wages the birth rates fell and are only slowly recovering now. Before that - while circumstances where surely not better in a lot of ways - essentials like housing, childcare (kindergarden and so on) where provided and you could be assured to be fine no matter what is going on in your job. Now you are only fine if you either on welfare and have nothing to loose anyway or earn so much that you can afford everything and risk having children. If you are in between (like most of the population around 20-40 here) it's perceived as a risky gamble.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  Yeah, I do wonder if a survey question getting at "how concerned am I about the risk that I won't be able to find good work in 15 years" would be pretty well correlated with fertility rate decline. Most things I see look at current economic conditions, but I think you're right that it's the perception of future earning potential, a decade or two out, that is most stressful to parents of young children.
silvestrov 1y ago
I would add another item: Today you need to be "the perfect mother". Just "being a parent" isn't good enough anymore for the middleclass. Today's grandparents spend their time and money on themselves instead of helping out. So not only do you need to be perfect as a parent, there is also less support from the people who have done this once before. If does not help much to consult the internet as you will mostly get told the world is about to fall apart if your kid gets as much as a skin rash.
echo-lot 1y ago
Its pretty related to the other article that was posted here yesterday (?) about the american dream. I dont think its the perception of the future, because people in the cold war / WWII surely didnt believe the future is going to be bright. Just read about the youth protests in America during 1940-1945. Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents. Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc. Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.
aetherspawn 1y ago
If someone had asked me I would have probably struggled to find words to explain this exact thing, but the article explains it well. And in the words of my wife, “It seems like a bad idea to bring a kid into this world”
- DoingIsLearning 1y ago
  I hope not to sound like some sort of birth evangelist but could we not flip that statement? That portraits a child as someone that you need to protect from suffering at all costs. If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult, you would argue that it is perhaps condescending and removes somewhat your own agency. There is a _chance_ that any children that you bring into this world become not only an adult but an agent for (positive) change.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    > If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult "Hey, it was unfair of us to bring you into this situation, so we were thinking maybe we should kill you." This does not follow. A person's resistance to having their shitty life terminated doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin it.
pearlsontheroad 1y ago
Funny, not a single mention of the collapse of communities as a possible contributing factor. Strong communities provided support to young parents and also pressured them to have kids.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Yep. Especially if shrinking families and high mobility result in few young couples having extended family around for support.
spicyusername 1y ago
Everyone is going to want to reach for their favorite modern problem, but every point in history is fraught with sociopolitical and economic challenges. Today is not special, in that regard. My personal favorite reason is just that this is the outcome of birth control. At no other point in history could people decide how many kids they want, and when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.
- gwd 1y ago
  Birth control was available to the Baby Boomers's parents, and the result was... a baby boom. My two grandmothers had 7 and 5 children respectively in spite of the availability of birth control.
  - spicyusername 1y ago
    The percentage of the population taking birth control has increased significantly since that time. Cultural shifts, in this case due to the availability of birth control, take time to materialize.
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      You've just moved the problem to explaining why "the percentage of the population taking birth control has increased significantly since that time". Your initial claim was that it was the availability of birth control. That is, that birth control was the cause. But this new claim is that it is the choice to use birth control. That is, choosing to use birth control is now an effect, which must have some other cause.
      - spicyusername 1y ago
        when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    Griswold was in 1965. We had laws banning birth control. The Pill was first used in 1960. Yes, condoms existed. But they were stigmatized, sometimes criminalized, and substantially less effective than hormonal birth control methods developed and popularized during the 60s and 70s.
kspacewalk2 1y ago
Like any single-cause explanations of the fertility collapse, it's fairly easy to poke holes in it. Usually, you just name countries as a counter-argument. For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility. What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war for an additional drop). Eritrea and Ethiopia are right next door to each other, they have high birth rates dropping completely in lock-step, despite Eritrea being essentially shut off from the outside world in terms of disruptive tech - no Internet for most, no social media or whatever other bogey man you can come up with and blame for "disrupting the culture". Countries that are essentially ignoring climate change have falling birth rates too, as do countries where people aren't into Western-style contemplative existential dread. I haven't come up with an alternative answer, mind you. So far, I've just been noting how easy it is to poke holes in all available single-cause explanations.
- pjc50 1y ago
  The usual one is "availability of contraception and related education for women". I don't think even the fundamentalist states have chosen to and managed to reverse that. Least feminist most collapsed country Afghanistan is still falling: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afghanistan/birth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afg... We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    Plausible. But what about sub-Saharan Africa? Do they not have access to birth control? (Or are they falling too, just started later?)
    - pjc50 1y ago
      Much less so, it's extremely poor and more likely to be starvation or war limited. But even there it's going down.
isodev 1y ago
The post definitely highlights some of the reasons a person would (rightfully) choose not to start a family. I would add that addressing those reasons should absolutely not be "just to increase the birth rate". There are currently a little over 8 billion humans on Earth - the survival of the species is not even remotely at stake. It's possible we're nearing a moment when we have to re-evaluate what it means to be human. Do we live just to procreate? Just to work to support 'the system'? I don't know the answer, but I can't stop thinking about that line from Star Trek First Contact: "... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves..."
124123124 1y ago
The post is very unconvincing, I doubt that the outlook for today's situation is more severe than back in the middle of the coldwar for example.
rdm_blackhole 1y ago
I think that the various studies on this subject do not take into account a simple explanation. Choice. Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore. Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids. From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume. According to this study https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-in-5-stay-at-home-parents-in-the-us-are-dads/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-..., only 18% of stay at home parents are dads, which means that in 80% of the cases, it's the woman who has to sacrifice their career to raise the kids. If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood? As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.
Tade0 1y ago
I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it. Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking. Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment. I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear. Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident. We've become too cautious for our own good.
- rdm_blackhole 1y ago
  I disagree with you. It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids. Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years. This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
  - Tade0 1y ago
    I'm not arguing that. But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born. Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce. I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.
theturtle 1y ago
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CommenterPerson 1y ago
Our World in Data has a great chart showing negative correlation between women's education level and fertility: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain... This was particularly experienced in India, where the birthrate went down when literacy went up. Maybe more educated people do worry about the future?
tsimionescu 1y ago
Isn't Korea, one of the countries that they use explicitly as a counter-example to prosperity or monetary incentives helping with fertility, also a country where people still tend to expect the same job for their entire life? If so, then much of this idea fails on the same arguments it uses against other possible explanations.
lossolo 1y ago
What happened in the 1960s in the USA?[1] This seems to correlate with women's emancipation and the rise of contraception. Are there any other theories? 1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-United-States-1920-2014_fig1_316893597 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-...
Balgair 1y ago
I think a more humane (and likely more successful) way out of this is to not try to convince the childless to have children at all, but to try to convince those with children to have more. So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age) I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I already only have ~15 minutes at the end of the day for myself, another one would make me go negative (somehow). Part of this is our situation: my folks need some intensive memory care and my In-Laws aren't really interested in any childcare duties. We spend about an hour a day in the car shuttling about the ones we have, so more destinations isn't too bad, but would be tougher. Monetarily, we're more than fine compared to our neighbors, education should be well and paid for through college (very lucky here, we know). We can and do afford weekend activities. Our religious group is alright, they care, but there is just too many old people that need help and really suck all the charity-time out of the group as is (read: mostly useless for child-care/assistance). So, we're probably going to stick at what we have right now. I'm free to be questioned about my choices, so don't feel bad asking, though I'll try to keep some anonymity if that is alright.
- drewbug01 1y ago
  > I think a more humane (and likely more successful) way out of this is to not try to convince the childless to have children at all, but to try to convince those with children to have more. > So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age) > I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I think you've largely answered your own question, by reflecting on your own circumstances. I suspect there are plenty of people who would not mind having more kids per se, but simply cannot afford to (in terms of time, or in terms of money, etc). We are planning on a second kiddo, and I can barely fathom how we'll make it work with what little time we have left. At least in the US, we simply don't have a society that makes it easy or feasible to have kids - financially or otherwise.
  - 1y ago
gilbetron 1y ago
Two things I think are the main drivers, one is easy access to effective birth control (I consider this a great thing) and that is often mentioned. I think the other thing, though, is it is much easier to be entertained these days. People don't understand how boring it was 30+ years ago. I'll go back and play games with my son from when I was young and the games almost always are much more dull than I remember. There is a profound amount of entertainment and education at our fingertips, much of it available literally at all times. This includes adult entertainment, so it's easy to alleviate, uh, "needs". A lot of kids in the past came about from boredom. Also, because of the access to information, a lot of people realize that raising a kid is, for most people, kind of a sucky job. I love my son and would do it all over again, but the actual job of parenting has a lot of boring stuff that pushes me back into social spheres with people I gladly left years ago. There are some people that love the job through and through, but I just don't think most adults are like that. And we can easily understand that as an adult now. Plus the pressure to execute perfectly is intense. My parents had me, my mom carried me around until I was school age, and then basically my life was my own after that - they cared about me and were good parents, but they only vaguely were paying attention to me (I was a 3rd child and generally good kid, so it was easy). GenX experience through and through. These days? My son is in high school and the insane rat race for college is something my son and wife and I are just saying "no thanks" to. He'll go somewhere and figure something out, but kids are literally spending 60-80 hrs a week on school and "extracurriculars". Too much pressure! Really, there are just all kinds of factors now present that all push down the birthrate.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  The college prep rat race is insane today compared to when I was a kid. It’s become a 10+ year effort to check all the checkboxes. 1995: Have > 3.8 GPA, take the SAT, get a good enough score, write some decent sounding bullshit on an application essay, and bam: you have a shot at a top school. 2025: Start taking AP courses in middle school. Take and excel at advanced science and math classes for 4 years. Take 3 years of a foreign language and become fluent. Have a 5.0+ GPA. Have at least a 1580/1600 SAT. Have at least a 35/36 ACT. (Realistically you want perfect test scores). Be thoroughly involved in (preferably in a leadership role) multiple extracurriculars or sports teams. Have at least 3 letters of recommendation from prominent people in the community. Write an elaborate essay that checks multiple boxes, and a personal statement. After all this, you have maybe a 3% shot at a top school.
goalieca 1y ago
People don’t want to admit this is a cultural challenge.
binary132 1y ago
It’s interesting to think about the implied expectation that my children, who my wife and I have poured out our time, energy, and resources for, will do their part to support and willingly help the childless, who conserved their resources for themselves, in their old age. If I were looking down the barrel of that future, I wouldn’t feel so confident about that eventuality.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
I know several couples who had children in grad school. They had university jobs which did not pay very well, but had generous maternity and childcare benefits. They were in a grad program that pretty much guaranteed them a good job once they graduated. They were young and healthy. They stretched out their graduation, but nobody cares if you get your masters/phd in 3 years or 5. Compare that to what seems to now be the normal pattern of waiting until you're financially secure before having children. It seems to work out OK for the guys, but seems far from optimal for many women. Children later in life is really hard on their bodies, and so many of them seem to blow a giant hole in their career that they never recover from. There were down sides, of course. Most grad students are terribly poor. But they make it work. I really think that's something we should lean into and encourage as a society.
ofcourseyoudo 1y ago
Genuine question: why do I care if birth rates are falling? There are plenty of people.
- wuschel 1y ago
  There are many problems that come with a population decline, two of the major are: - Our economy (read: investment) is based on a constant growth, which is a function consumers - the elderly have to be taken care of … this is us one day
phkahler 1y ago
IMHO instead of trying to use UBI to help folks afford things, we should be trying to reduce the actual cost of living for everyone. This would also reduce peoples dependence on Social Security in the US which should go over well in congress.
Temporary_31337 1y ago
The future is not too expensive- people have just grown balooning expectations of what is minimal sustenance for children - people on <$200 month have 5 children families all over hte world and then you see people on 100k+ salaries saying they can't 'afford' to have chlidren. The truth is they can't afford to keep all the nice things - free time for hobbies/sports etc (childcare), holidays etc while still having children. Sacrifice some of that and suddenly most people can afford children but most people don't have enough moral value and a sense of duty to the society to sacrfice anything for a better future - in fact it's opposite - with credit cards and debt you sacrifice the future for sake of some frivolous consumption now.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Income inequality is the root cause. If it, housing, and healthcare were affordable, then we wouldn't even be talking about it. The problems are dwindling jobs and declining wages.
AndrewDucker 1y ago
The modern mortgage market is largely based around multiple people with jobs. Once you have a kid either one of those people is taking 5 years out of work or they're paying nursery fees for the next 5 years. Either of which is incredibly expensive (£15k per year in the UK for full-time childcare). So a lot of people decide "Well, I didn't fancy children that much."

74 points by hectorchu 1y ago

This post argues that collapsing birth rates aren’t just about housing or money — they’re a rational response to the sense that the future is unstable, meaningless, or even dangerous. It introduces the concept of “temporal inflation” — the idea that just like money loses value in hyperinflation, time loses value when people can’t trust the future. Would love to hear if this resonates with others.

robertlagrant 1y ago
I don't know. Did people do this in the midst of world war 2, for example?
- odyssey7 1y ago
  The war was likely to eventually end. The price of food will continue to increase exponentially, at some variable rate of inflation, forever. Skilled professions were likely to remain useful after the war. AI makes their future value seem uncertain.
- Jedd 1y ago
  Covered in TFA.
- tw04 1y ago
  Tough to say. It was difficult to have children in the middle of WW2 when all the men of appropriate age were fighting on the frontlines. The results would also likely be skewed by Germany quasi-forcing people to have children in support of the party.
  - baxtr 1y ago
    Look up birth rates in Syria for the past 10 years.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- cjfd 1y ago
  I am not sure. I was not alive during world war 2. I would think, though, that during world war 2 it was relatively easy to think that we just need to wait until the bad guys are defeated. Now the rise of dictatorships and populism makes me wonder whether humanity as a whole is not just too stupid to survive.
_dark_matter_ 1y ago
Is this AI generated?
- anilakar 1y ago
  Too many em dashes?
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    The iPhone—a fairly popular type of smartphone—produces em dashes automatically if you hit the hyphen button twice.
- raymondgh 1y ago
  Summary of original post written in ChatGPT style with no original substance… my guess is yes!
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Yes, and it still gets replies. Maybe from other bots. Welcome to our dumb future.
pjc50 1y ago
Would be nice to clarify that you're the OP? If I'm right about your username.
bell-cot 1y ago
It's a way to frame the problem that will work well for some people, and I don't see any real downsides to it. I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation. And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
baxtr 1y ago
Not getting kids is a cultural issue. My mom used to say exactly the same, but she still got 3 kids with very little money because her social groups expected her to have children.
- ggandv 1y ago
  “social groups expected” Catholic?
kaibee 1y ago
> Yes, kids are expensive. But countries like Korea and Singapore are pouring money into incentives and still seeing fertility drop to record lows. This is what you're missing. They are not. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink. In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on... Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value. And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
- chuankl 1y ago
  > Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value. I think this is the key insight, on this specific topic and many others.
  - joquarky 1y ago
    Bob was right. Don't let them take your slack.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Exactly. "Pouring money" is what, a one-time $2000 payment? How is that going to get anywhere near balancing what you've already described. Unfortunately most politicians seem very out of touch and are just there to keep the status quo.
freehorse 1y ago
I think treating it as a rational process and looking at the reasons behind makes sense, as opposed to "attitudes", in the sense that attitudes and culture are shaped through some processes. I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.

incomingpain 1y ago

In canada, aged 20-29, 46% were still living with their parents. If you live in a big city like toronto, the number is way higher. Kids living at home aren't saying "I still live in my parent's basement" "oh, lets have a baby!" this really is the depth of the issue. Confidence isn't going to have you change this answer.

markus_zhang 1y ago
Not surprised. Housing went up a lot in recent years and it is not affordable for most young people. And if you have to rent, why not rent your parent's?
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  Housing in the West was basically turned into another pillar of retiree funding. Old people extract tremendous financial gains from younger generations by either a) selling them decrepit real estate at extremely high prices or b) collecting very high rents on buildings that are even older than themselves (even in the US, which is the king of corporate landlording, they are a small minority; most landlords are natural persons, mostly retirees or near-retirees). It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible. (Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)
  - jplrssn 1y ago
    Young people may be checking out of that system but BlackRock and others are doing the opposite. Why wouldn’t they, when government policy has made it an asset class that can never fall in value?
  - 1y ago

FrankWilhoit 1y ago

He is right, if he also stops well short of saying what he might. But "the politicians", as always, are only doing what the people are telling them to. The human species has decided to shut down.

shadowgovt 1y ago
The human species has eight billion people. If the birthrate is still low when it's four billion, or two billion, I'll start to have concern for the species.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Would that it were a game of SimCity. If/when we get to 4B, 2B, it will be only after displacements of whole populations, mass-starvation, and likely brutal war.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    That is quite possible, but I was thinking more that several generations of people not reproducing above replacement rate isn't really a disaster by itself. If we don't have war, displacement, and mass starvation, and people still decide just to not have as many kids for a few generations, the species will survive (and from a resource consumption standpoint the planet will probably be better off).
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    It's amazing that we had oodles of "population growth will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries on the run up from 2B to 8B and now we've got "population decline will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries. And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      Good news, unfortunately, rarely radiates with the power or urgency of bad news. The mass-starvation concerns of the '70s-'80s were resolved by an army of agriculture and biological scientists developing revolutionary breakthroughs in staple food crops and farming techniques. These fundamentally staved off the "cold equations" starvation risk (most starvation in the modern era is logistical error; the food exists, it isn't where people are). Unfortunately, key pieces of the solutions involved practices we know aren't sustainable indefinitely (fertilizer production is fossil-fuel heavy), so there's more work to be done (and some non-zero benefit if we were to discover that the global human population was falling without some mass-tragedy causing it).

pestatije 1y ago

see correlation house affordability vs. birth rates...im sure which one is cause and which one is consequence

bee_rider 1y ago

We certainly aren’t going to do anything about climate change, so any kid born now is going to live to see some rough times.

nemomarx 1y ago

Makes me think of Future Shock a little? We've known that cultural and technological change has been accelerating for decades, though. I suppose the question is if there's been an inflection point even in that.

pjc50 1y ago

> Nobody knows Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision? South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul. This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance.

blagie 1y ago
No, the population has not "levelled out" in Korea. These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass. The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File:South_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m... Learn how to read these plots and what they mean. There are almost no young people. There are almost no kids in South Korea. Unless there is mass immigration, the population of South Korea will implode. Even if people began breeding like rabbits today, there is nothing that can be done; when the 0-20 year old population is of working age, there will be a massive number of old people, and almost no one of working age.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > There are almost no kids in South Korea. That page says 11% of the population is under 15. Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    And a population where, say, everyone uniformly lives to 75 should have 20% of its population under 15. So that page says that South Korea has just over half as many kids as it should have for a stable population.

Fricken 1y ago

French Aristocrats had difficulty affording children as well. My theory is that as a society becomes wealthier, the acceptable minimum standard for child rearing grows at an even faster rate, until it becomes unattainable for a growing number of people. Raising kids is cheap. People who live in mud huts who have never heard of money can afford to raise kids. Avoiding negative social stigma is what people can't afford.

pjc50 1y ago
> Avoiding negative social stigma is what people can't afford. This is a very important factor. The West has successfully more or less eliminated teenage pregnancy thanks to very heavy stigma plus enabling choice and information. People are simply deferring having children until conditions are perfect - as they were told to do.
- odyssey7 1y ago
  I would say they don’t need to be perfect, but mere stability seems to be a thing of the past. The millennial generation has seen repeated waves of economic crises and layoffs and the invention of a gig economy. Mere stability is lacking. At least the people in mud huts know they can afford their mud hut next year. Maybe people don’t want to be economically corralled into a large city a thousand miles from home and then to have their children in that city where they moved for career advancement, particularly as the social contract between employees and employers grows increasingly vacuous.
moduspol 1y ago
Indeed. Likewise, there has never been a time where wide swaths of potential parents feel like they can "afford" having children. Before birth control, it was less of a choice. This narrative that "people aren't having children because the future is bleak and they're expensive," is wildly overblown. Yes, it's what people say when you ask them. That's not the same as it being the actual reason.

steveBK123 1y ago

I think we very rapidly went from a world with high child mortality rates, no access to birth control and children being at least moderately useful on the farm or doing some other work quite young to a world where having children is both a choice and very very expensive. This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations. We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.

pjc50 1y ago
Also from a world where the ability of women to access decently paying jobs outside the home was heavily restricted to one approaching equality. Motherhood is one choice of many, with negative pay.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household. My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today. In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years. It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years. My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work. Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
  - sseagull 1y ago
    Spot on, but this in particular > people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course). Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away. Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare. Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.

drooopy 1y ago

Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m legally responsible for and could go to jail over if I can’t afford to feed them. Sounds like a solid plan.

kspacewalk2 1y ago
Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
- drooopy 1y ago
  You're right that many aspects of life have improved since the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean the current conditions for raising children are good or sustainable. In high-income countries, lower birth rates correlate with rising housing costs, lack of affordable childcare, stagnant wages, and job insecurity. People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.
- louthy 1y ago
  When people are considering having children, of course the first thing they think is “our lives are objectively better than the 1930s, let’s go for it!” As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now. I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.
  - kspacewalk2 1y ago

maxglute 1y ago

Not having kids is too inexpensive.

pearlsontheroad 1y ago
I disagree. Even though I'm childless, taxes I've paid my whole life help finance public schools which I'll never use.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Maybe you used the public schools when you were growing up? A generation often pays for the previous one, or up and coming one.
- gwd 1y ago
  > which I'll never use. Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund. Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.
  - pearlsontheroad 1y ago
    Agree 100%. Not saying I don't benefit indirectly from public education. In fact, I actually feel good about contributing to the education of my fellow citizens. My comment was related to the insinuation that childfree choice is "too inexpensive". What's next, let's tax childfree people more than parents?

Jedd 1y ago

Is this a new theory? I'm sure this has been a fairly commonly perceived trope amongst late-X and millenials for several years now. Presumably accelerated during 2016-2020, and once again ramping up quickly, for our stateside friends - but I haven't heard of any part of the planet being burdened by an over-abundance of optimism about the (affordability of the) future.

easywood 1y ago

"On a farm, a child is an investment. In a city, it's a liability". In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city. Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm. But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.

Zealotux 1y ago

Surprised to see such a poor and superficial article reach the front page, the collapsing birth rates are a multifactorial problem, there's nothing of substance in that article.

lnsru 1y ago

In shrinking economy like current Germany’s economy the future does not look bright. White collar jobs are moved to Malaysia, Poland and Serbia at extreme rate. And will never come back. I recently worked at the companies moving whole departments to the mentioned countries. I am sure, living from salary to salary in a rented apartment does not provide much optimism about future. Especially when one can barely afford rent of bigger apartment. Having a child in a city adds a pile of extra cost: bigger apartment plus few hundred for kindergarten. Children are simply for very rich families.

BLenkomo 1y ago

We are enough people on the planet. Why does this read like we have to have kids? I'm completly fine not having kids surprise \o/

JKCalhoun 1y ago
It's how society will break down without a younger generation in quantity that is paying for social security, earning taxes for society, etc.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  Oh well, just have to accept that there won't be retirement, only burning your savings and then euthanasia. Better have fun while you can afford it.
  - joquarky 1y ago
    That sounds like a rational strategy to me. Counting on a retirement takes faith.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    That might be preferable to rotting in an old age home with dementia.
  - BLenkomo 1y ago
    When i look at most people what they do when they retire, it doesn't feel like most people actually have a good strategy for it anyway. Less work, longer work, using more and leaving without a dime in the pocket sounds a lot better.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Tax AI and we let the bullshit jobs die.
- spiffyk 1y ago
  If the society is built upon the assumption of its own infinite growth in terms of population—an assumption which is very blatantly nonsensical—then maybe it deserves to break down.

throwaway984393 1y ago

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nisa 1y ago

I'm in my 40ies and in Germany and basically from my friends and surroundings I've realized the only people that have children are academics / people with established careers where both partners earn very well and have stable jobs or people on welfare where at least all necessities are covered. What's missing is people in-between, people with limited contracts, people without money in the family and people working a job that hardly pays more than what you would get with welfare. If you look at birth rates in eastern europe after the fall of the soviet union and the establishment of neoliberal economics everwhere and the development of eastern europe economies as workbenches for western corporations with low wages the birth rates fell and are only slowly recovering now. Before that - while circumstances where surely not better in a lot of ways - essentials like housing, childcare (kindergarden and so on) where provided and you could be assured to be fine no matter what is going on in your job. Now you are only fine if you either on welfare and have nothing to loose anyway or earn so much that you can afford everything and risk having children. If you are in between (like most of the population around 20-40 here) it's perceived as a risky gamble.

sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah, I do wonder if a survey question getting at "how concerned am I about the risk that I won't be able to find good work in 15 years" would be pretty well correlated with fertility rate decline. Most things I see look at current economic conditions, but I think you're right that it's the perception of future earning potential, a decade or two out, that is most stressful to parents of young children.

silvestrov 1y ago

I would add another item: Today you need to be "the perfect mother". Just "being a parent" isn't good enough anymore for the middleclass. Today's grandparents spend their time and money on themselves instead of helping out. So not only do you need to be perfect as a parent, there is also less support from the people who have done this once before. If does not help much to consult the internet as you will mostly get told the world is about to fall apart if your kid gets as much as a skin rash.

echo-lot 1y ago

Its pretty related to the other article that was posted here yesterday (?) about the american dream. I dont think its the perception of the future, because people in the cold war / WWII surely didnt believe the future is going to be bright. Just read about the youth protests in America during 1940-1945. Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents. Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc. Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.

aetherspawn 1y ago

If someone had asked me I would have probably struggled to find words to explain this exact thing, but the article explains it well. And in the words of my wife, “It seems like a bad idea to bring a kid into this world”

DoingIsLearning 1y ago
I hope not to sound like some sort of birth evangelist but could we not flip that statement? That portraits a child as someone that you need to protect from suffering at all costs. If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult, you would argue that it is perhaps condescending and removes somewhat your own agency. There is a _chance_ that any children that you bring into this world become not only an adult but an agent for (positive) change.
- card_zero 1y ago
  > If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult "Hey, it was unfair of us to bring you into this situation, so we were thinking maybe we should kill you." This does not follow. A person's resistance to having their shitty life terminated doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin it.

pearlsontheroad 1y ago

Funny, not a single mention of the collapse of communities as a possible contributing factor. Strong communities provided support to young parents and also pressured them to have kids.

bell-cot 1y ago
Yep. Especially if shrinking families and high mobility result in few young couples having extended family around for support.

spicyusername 1y ago

Everyone is going to want to reach for their favorite modern problem, but every point in history is fraught with sociopolitical and economic challenges. Today is not special, in that regard. My personal favorite reason is just that this is the outcome of birth control. At no other point in history could people decide how many kids they want, and when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.

gwd 1y ago
Birth control was available to the Baby Boomers's parents, and the result was... a baby boom. My two grandmothers had 7 and 5 children respectively in spite of the availability of birth control.
- spicyusername 1y ago
  The percentage of the population taking birth control has increased significantly since that time. Cultural shifts, in this case due to the availability of birth control, take time to materialize.
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    You've just moved the problem to explaining why "the percentage of the population taking birth control has increased significantly since that time". Your initial claim was that it was the availability of birth control. That is, that birth control was the cause. But this new claim is that it is the choice to use birth control. That is, choosing to use birth control is now an effect, which must have some other cause.
    - spicyusername 1y ago
      when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  Griswold was in 1965. We had laws banning birth control. The Pill was first used in 1960. Yes, condoms existed. But they were stigmatized, sometimes criminalized, and substantially less effective than hormonal birth control methods developed and popularized during the 60s and 70s.

kspacewalk2 1y ago

Like any single-cause explanations of the fertility collapse, it's fairly easy to poke holes in it. Usually, you just name countries as a counter-argument. For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility. What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war for an additional drop). Eritrea and Ethiopia are right next door to each other, they have high birth rates dropping completely in lock-step, despite Eritrea being essentially shut off from the outside world in terms of disruptive tech - no Internet for most, no social media or whatever other bogey man you can come up with and blame for "disrupting the culture". Countries that are essentially ignoring climate change have falling birth rates too, as do countries where people aren't into Western-style contemplative existential dread. I haven't come up with an alternative answer, mind you. So far, I've just been noting how easy it is to poke holes in all available single-cause explanations.

pjc50 1y ago
The usual one is "availability of contraception and related education for women". I don't think even the fundamentalist states have chosen to and managed to reverse that. Least feminist most collapsed country Afghanistan is still falling: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afghanistan/birth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afg... We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Plausible. But what about sub-Saharan Africa? Do they not have access to birth control? (Or are they falling too, just started later?)
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Much less so, it's extremely poor and more likely to be starvation or war limited. But even there it's going down.

isodev 1y ago

The post definitely highlights some of the reasons a person would (rightfully) choose not to start a family. I would add that addressing those reasons should absolutely not be "just to increase the birth rate". There are currently a little over 8 billion humans on Earth - the survival of the species is not even remotely at stake. It's possible we're nearing a moment when we have to re-evaluate what it means to be human. Do we live just to procreate? Just to work to support 'the system'? I don't know the answer, but I can't stop thinking about that line from Star Trek First Contact: "... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves..."

124123124 1y ago

The post is very unconvincing, I doubt that the outlook for today's situation is more severe than back in the middle of the coldwar for example.

rdm_blackhole 1y ago

I think that the various studies on this subject do not take into account a simple explanation. Choice. Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore. Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids. From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume. According to this study https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-in-5-stay-at-home-parents-in-the-us-are-dads/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-..., only 18% of stay at home parents are dads, which means that in 80% of the cases, it's the woman who has to sacrifice their career to raise the kids. If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood? As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.

Tade0 1y ago

I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it. Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking. Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment. I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear. Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident. We've become too cautious for our own good.

rdm_blackhole 1y ago
I disagree with you. It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids. Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years. This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
- Tade0 1y ago
  I'm not arguing that. But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born. Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce. I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.

theturtle 1y ago

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CommenterPerson 1y ago

Our World in Data has a great chart showing negative correlation between women's education level and fertility: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain... This was particularly experienced in India, where the birthrate went down when literacy went up. Maybe more educated people do worry about the future?

tsimionescu 1y ago

Isn't Korea, one of the countries that they use explicitly as a counter-example to prosperity or monetary incentives helping with fertility, also a country where people still tend to expect the same job for their entire life? If so, then much of this idea fails on the same arguments it uses against other possible explanations.

lossolo 1y ago

What happened in the 1960s in the USA?[1] This seems to correlate with women's emancipation and the rise of contraception. Are there any other theories? 1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-United-States-1920-2014_fig1_316893597 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-...

Balgair 1y ago

I think a more humane (and likely more successful) way out of this is to not try to convince the childless to have children at all, but to try to convince those with children to have more. So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age) I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I already only have ~15 minutes at the end of the day for myself, another one would make me go negative (somehow). Part of this is our situation: my folks need some intensive memory care and my In-Laws aren't really interested in any childcare duties. We spend about an hour a day in the car shuttling about the ones we have, so more destinations isn't too bad, but would be tougher. Monetarily, we're more than fine compared to our neighbors, education should be well and paid for through college (very lucky here, we know). We can and do afford weekend activities. Our religious group is alright, they care, but there is just too many old people that need help and really suck all the charity-time out of the group as is (read: mostly useless for child-care/assistance). So, we're probably going to stick at what we have right now. I'm free to be questioned about my choices, so don't feel bad asking, though I'll try to keep some anonymity if that is alright.

drewbug01 1y ago
> I think a more humane (and likely more successful) way out of this is to not try to convince the childless to have children at all, but to try to convince those with children to have more. > So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age) > I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I think you've largely answered your own question, by reflecting on your own circumstances. I suspect there are plenty of people who would not mind having more kids per se, but simply cannot afford to (in terms of time, or in terms of money, etc). We are planning on a second kiddo, and I can barely fathom how we'll make it work with what little time we have left. At least in the US, we simply don't have a society that makes it easy or feasible to have kids - financially or otherwise.
- 1y ago

gilbetron 1y ago

Two things I think are the main drivers, one is easy access to effective birth control (I consider this a great thing) and that is often mentioned. I think the other thing, though, is it is much easier to be entertained these days. People don't understand how boring it was 30+ years ago. I'll go back and play games with my son from when I was young and the games almost always are much more dull than I remember. There is a profound amount of entertainment and education at our fingertips, much of it available literally at all times. This includes adult entertainment, so it's easy to alleviate, uh, "needs". A lot of kids in the past came about from boredom. Also, because of the access to information, a lot of people realize that raising a kid is, for most people, kind of a sucky job. I love my son and would do it all over again, but the actual job of parenting has a lot of boring stuff that pushes me back into social spheres with people I gladly left years ago. There are some people that love the job through and through, but I just don't think most adults are like that. And we can easily understand that as an adult now. Plus the pressure to execute perfectly is intense. My parents had me, my mom carried me around until I was school age, and then basically my life was my own after that - they cared about me and were good parents, but they only vaguely were paying attention to me (I was a 3rd child and generally good kid, so it was easy). GenX experience through and through. These days? My son is in high school and the insane rat race for college is something my son and wife and I are just saying "no thanks" to. He'll go somewhere and figure something out, but kids are literally spending 60-80 hrs a week on school and "extracurriculars". Too much pressure! Really, there are just all kinds of factors now present that all push down the birthrate.

ryandrake 1y ago
The college prep rat race is insane today compared to when I was a kid. It’s become a 10+ year effort to check all the checkboxes. 1995: Have > 3.8 GPA, take the SAT, get a good enough score, write some decent sounding bullshit on an application essay, and bam: you have a shot at a top school. 2025: Start taking AP courses in middle school. Take and excel at advanced science and math classes for 4 years. Take 3 years of a foreign language and become fluent. Have a 5.0+ GPA. Have at least a 1580/1600 SAT. Have at least a 35/36 ACT. (Realistically you want perfect test scores). Be thoroughly involved in (preferably in a leadership role) multiple extracurriculars or sports teams. Have at least 3 letters of recommendation from prominent people in the community. Write an elaborate essay that checks multiple boxes, and a personal statement. After all this, you have maybe a 3% shot at a top school.

goalieca 1y ago

People don’t want to admit this is a cultural challenge.

binary132 1y ago

It’s interesting to think about the implied expectation that my children, who my wife and I have poured out our time, energy, and resources for, will do their part to support and willingly help the childless, who conserved their resources for themselves, in their old age. If I were looking down the barrel of that future, I wouldn’t feel so confident about that eventuality.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

I know several couples who had children in grad school. They had university jobs which did not pay very well, but had generous maternity and childcare benefits. They were in a grad program that pretty much guaranteed them a good job once they graduated. They were young and healthy. They stretched out their graduation, but nobody cares if you get your masters/phd in 3 years or 5. Compare that to what seems to now be the normal pattern of waiting until you're financially secure before having children. It seems to work out OK for the guys, but seems far from optimal for many women. Children later in life is really hard on their bodies, and so many of them seem to blow a giant hole in their career that they never recover from. There were down sides, of course. Most grad students are terribly poor. But they make it work. I really think that's something we should lean into and encourage as a society.

ofcourseyoudo 1y ago

Genuine question: why do I care if birth rates are falling? There are plenty of people.

wuschel 1y ago
There are many problems that come with a population decline, two of the major are: - Our economy (read: investment) is based on a constant growth, which is a function consumers - the elderly have to be taken care of … this is us one day

phkahler 1y ago

IMHO instead of trying to use UBI to help folks afford things, we should be trying to reduce the actual cost of living for everyone. This would also reduce peoples dependence on Social Security in the US which should go over well in congress.

Temporary_31337 1y ago

The future is not too expensive- people have just grown balooning expectations of what is minimal sustenance for children - people on <$200 month have 5 children families all over hte world and then you see people on 100k+ salaries saying they can't 'afford' to have chlidren. The truth is they can't afford to keep all the nice things - free time for hobbies/sports etc (childcare), holidays etc while still having children. Sacrifice some of that and suddenly most people can afford children but most people don't have enough moral value and a sense of duty to the society to sacrfice anything for a better future - in fact it's opposite - with credit cards and debt you sacrifice the future for sake of some frivolous consumption now.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Income inequality is the root cause. If it, housing, and healthcare were affordable, then we wouldn't even be talking about it. The problems are dwindling jobs and declining wages.

AndrewDucker 1y ago

The modern mortgage market is largely based around multiple people with jobs. Once you have a kid either one of those people is taking 5 years out of work or they're paying nursery fees for the next 5 years. Either of which is incredibly expensive (£15k per year in the UK for full-time childcare). So a lot of people decide "Well, I didn't fancy children that much."