20 ms·

What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

• HPsquared 1y ago
  Mortality salience. Overcrowding, on the other hand, suppresses it.
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    What's mortality salience?
    • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      Being aware that death is not a far-off thing. I'm not sure that the idea is right, but I'm pretty sure that, after World War II, the parents of the Baby Boom generation definitely had that.
    • Modified3019 1y ago
      They likely meant mortgage salience
• blackhaj7 1y ago
  War, sadly. Seems like some politicians are doing their best to arrange that
  • jansan 1y ago
    Do you see rising birth rates in Ukraine and/or Russia?
    • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      Well, in the US at least, it was after the war was over, not during it.
    • behringer 1y ago
      it would happen after the war is over.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      Baby Boomers are the folks born from 1946 to 1964. The war is the cause, but it has to end to do it.
    • cwnyth 1y ago
      Is the war in Ukraine over yet? The baby boom happened after World War II, not during.
      • mensetmanusman 1y ago
        The article points out this common misconception, it started before World War II.
    • rjsw 1y ago
      Ukraine has conscription for over 25s so that they can have children before going to the war.
  • silisili 1y ago
    I know this is what spurred the first, but I can't believe it would spur another. Both sperm counts and testosterone are way, way down for who knows what reason. People are waiting longer and longer to get married, and the number of unmarried people is higher than ever. I think war just leads to mostly broken, single men, as there's nobody to come home to.
  • WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > War, sadly. The post Vietnam war economy implies this wasn't really true. Also our current post Afghanistan/Iraq war economy.
    • toast0 1y ago
      In the US at least, the end of the Vietnam war didn't have the same social attitude as the end of WWII. For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam. Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others. Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so. WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq. Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.
• haunter 1y ago
  >What Caused the 'Baby Boom'? WW2 >What Would It Take to Have Another? WW3
  • LiquidSky 1y ago
    It only happened after WW2 because the US came out of that war as the only untouched developed economy. A WW3 isn't going to leave anyone unscathed and would probably mean all-out nuclear war.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Wasn't just the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom
    • tormeh 1y ago
      Happened in many countries in western Europe as well.
    • racl101 1y ago
      Did other countries, especially the ones that were ravaged by war, did they have baby booms? I'm curious now.
      • Qem 1y ago
        US feared people from ravaged countries would embrace communism, and showered them with cheap cash for jobs and reconstruction. Unfortunately capitalism today faces no competition, and it's devolving into techno-feudalism. The super-rich have a hard time sharing wealth with the rest of us, in absence of credible threat of some revolution putting their heads to the guillotine or something like that.
    • jandrese 1y ago
      I think a bigger factor is how the war broke up a lot of the old power structures and for a couple of decades it was really possible to get ahead even if you started off poor. There was an abundance of need for labor rebuilding the world and servicing the sudden boom in consumer goods that arose from all of the technologies being developed. Those power structures have reformed and now we are back in the neofeudalism model that arises when power is allowed to ossify. There is no guarantee that a WW3 would even repeat this phenomenon.
• sparklingmango 1y ago
  Optimism. And unfortunately based on the doom and gloom that the news and social media constantly shoves in our faces, we have a short supply of that.
  • thrance 1y ago
    Doom and gloom that is somewhat substantiated by material reality. The world is getting warmer and nothing is done about it. Far right populism is getting more and more popular, with no end in sight. No way am I bringing kids in this environment.
    • gtech1 1y ago
      Doesn't seem to stop "some* religious people to pop 5-6 kids
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • Demoder 1y ago
      I have a feeling that far right populism was worse in 1930s
      • thrance 1y ago
        Still, I'm only expliciting my reasons. I don't care about what my forefathers would have done in my situation.
      • WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
        I've found a lot of parallels between now and 1910s-1930. Thru genealogy I see how families and extended families lived together to afford living expenses. MultiFamily housing was common and jobs were within walking distance. The automobile dispersed jobs and families, taking all the above away. The needs we have now are no longer possible to fill.
      • 1y ago
• phkahler 1y ago
  What will it take to have a stable society that doesn't depend on indefinite economic/population growth?
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Now you're asking the uncomfortable but important question.
    • spwa4 1y ago
      Really? Because one obvious thing it'll require is about a doubling of the birth rate ... it's not about growth, it's about stability. At least at first.
      • ceejayoz 1y ago
        Population stability and economic/societal stability don't have to be the same thing. If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers. It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
  • wistleblowanon 1y ago
    it will take you to "eat the rich"
  • seniorThrowaway 1y ago
    An entirely different economic paradigm.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    A stable population requires a fertility rate of about 2.1. It’s not about growth, it’s about stability of population at this point.
    • 1y ago
• kevingadd 1y ago
  This post gradually seems to tiptoe towards eugenics, which makes me a little nervous, closing with this bit: > If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them. This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too. I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.
• Supermancho 1y ago
  The assumption that a war would trigger another baby boom is incorrect. The conditions are very different than in the 50s and there's no going back. World devastation, reverting to the stone age or some agriculture society will not result in a population growth for decades, maybe a generation at best, as western society falls into the familiar throes of barbarism and resource starvation. The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon. If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.
• bdavbdav 1y ago
  (Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am. On top of a $3000/mo mortgage. NE USA. When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded." Either that or they have one parent who cannot be employed outside the home.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • nervousvarun 1y ago
      Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529. Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved. Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
      • red-iron-pine 1y ago
        same here. not near her parents but close enough to both hers and mine that we can effectively have them rotate through consistently (got a spare room and king sized bed for the g-parents). even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.
• darth_avocado 1y ago
  Cheaper housing and not having to work 2-3 jobs.
  • WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    This and parenting a few hours a week while kids roamed & learned how to grow up - instead of kids living in boxes under 24/7 adulting.
• plantwallshoe 1y ago
  Was it a side effect of the war ending or a side effect of having a generation of financially stable young men via the GI bill?
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    The GI bill is American; the baby boom is not. Other countries saw the same phenomoenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom
  • rangerelf 1y ago
    I think it was having a government having an active hand in guiding society: housing, education, childcare, stable government jobs, high enough taxes at the top end to finance all of that.
  • Gibbon1 1y ago
    If people think at all rather than just doing what everyone else does. People invest in their future. Peasants don't own land, can't own land, have zero access to financial wealth or education, so they try to breed because adult children are the only type of family wealth they can produce. Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity. Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.
  • standardUser 1y ago
    Every major economy was either running at max capacity due to the war effort or was in desperate need of repair and reconstruction. The US starts handing out loans like candy to a) help rapidly rebuild the economies of our allies and trade partners and b) fend off communism. So here we have... 1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce 2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees 3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer). 4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort. It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jpecar 1y ago
  Hedgehog's dilema. Interacting today with random average human being leads in 99% to such a painful disappointing conclusion that I got PTSD from it. Just being within a line of sight of another human being makes me nervous and looking for a place to hide.
• t1234s 1y ago
  You would need an economy where the average man can work and provide a life for his stay-at-home wife to raise the 3-4 kids at a decent living standard.
  • louwrentius 1y ago
    We really don’t need this kind of sexist attitude on HN in 2025.
    • alexey-salmin 1y ago
      Not the OP, but the statement above is a proposed answer to the question in the article title "What Would It Take to Have Another?" As such it can be true or false, but I don't really see how it can be sexist. If you think it's not true, it would be curious to hear why.
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      It’s kind of naïve to think it’s a sexist attitude. Some young women are waking up to the fact that even though their corporate overlords call them family a month before mass layoffs, it can be a lot more rewarding to work for your actual family instead of the family assembled by billionaires looking for a good return on investment and pension funds.
• ljf 1y ago
  Maybe it was the strange mix of capitalism and socialism that existed in America at that time? High taxes, high levels of investment and well paid public servants: https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/back-when-america-was-socialist/ https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/back-when-america...
• toomuchtodo 1y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/10/un-population-fund-unfpa-report-reasons-falling-global-fertility https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/10/u... https://www.unfpa.org/swp2025 https://www.unfpa.org/swp2025
• WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  These studies never seem to look at time spent parenting, between baby-boom years and now. My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers. My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood. My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation. Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    I don't think that's a significant factor because it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8. Nobody is thinking "I'll have to drive them to music lessons in 10 years instead of letting them play outside". I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
    • ElevenLathe 1y ago
      It also may be the wrong causality. Perhaps when children are rarer, they are more precious and we naturally want to protect them more. It's bizarre to me that the piece doesn't mention the contraceptive pill, which debuted in 1960, the exact same year as peak fertility.
      • thijson 1y ago
        I saw it mentioned once that there's less crime today due to birth control. Supposedly there's fewer unwanted children.
    • alexey-salmin 1y ago
      I think the level of obsessive care people feel obliged to deliver to their single child prior to age of 8 is a part of the same story. You can see how radically it changes even with the second child (not to mention the third) but half of the parents never get there nowadays and think it's the norm.
• aantix 1y ago
  There needs to be a mind shift. It will probably take a generation. Being online is not the same as being in the real world. You have to take risks, including speaking with people, face to face, and forming meaningful relationships. Swiping right is not the same as approaching someone attractive in person. Complaining on Reddit is not the same as talking directly with lawmakers. Interpersonal communication, persuasion, is hard work that should be re-embraced.
• tormeh 1y ago
  My bet is on banning the pill and reversing the sexual revolution. We probably don't want to do that. Frankly, I don't think we need to do anything about this problem. Evolution will work its magic and in a couple of hundred years we'll have overpopulation the way we used to have before artificial fertilizer.
• mcoliver 1y ago
  Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first place), or delay having children until you are financially secure. Couple this with the constant inundation of social media and the myriad experiences available with the click of a button and people are simply taking the short term gratification route. Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
  • msgodel 1y ago
    Older generations need to be more comfortable with their kids getting married and having children before moving out.
  • endtime 1y ago
    In terms of incentives, Hungary has attempted this with tax policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary Seems to be working!
    • hraedon 1y ago
      "Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016. No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
      • slaw 1y ago
        Neighbour countries are at 1.0x TFR, so that policy is quite effective.
      • 1y ago
• more_corn 1y ago
  Hope. Hope that the world was on track to be better and better. Faith that people would do the right thing. Confidence that good would triumph over evil. We have none of those things at present.
• zebomon 1y ago
  Good read. I've been reflecting recently on the idea of demand-side economic growth as something that happens across two variables: consumption and reproduction. Until very recently in history, only the reproduction variable ever moved the big number much at all. It could be that as each of our own energy needs continues to increase, especially as compute-hungry AI proliferates and personalized medicine extends lifespans, it becomes culturally more normal for populations to fall. Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.
• SamuelAdams 1y ago
  As a new parent, it’s money. Daycare costs $400 USD per week in my area, from 7am-6pm, 5 days a week. So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually. Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures. So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons. If you want actual actions congress can take: 1. Expand limits on the dependent HSA account to allow more than 5,000 annually. Daycare alone is much more than 5,000 USD, it seems making that completely tax free will help. 2. Subsidize the entire cost of daycare. This will never happen but by golly it will work.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • floren 1y ago
    How fast are you popping out those kids to have more than 2 children in daycare rather than free public school?
    • Tadpole9181 1y ago
      I mean, kids start school at around 6 in the US. So one every 2 years. That's not uncommon for people who want families? Most of the folk my age with 3 kids had them within 3 or 4 years?
      • SamuelAdams 1y ago
        And it assumes you do not have twins or triplets.
  • bethekidyouwant 1y ago
    We have a subsidized childcare in Quebec and the fertility rate is still shit
    • MangoToupe 1y ago
      My understanding is the cost of housing is increasing far faster than inflation in the entire anglosphere.
• recursivedoubts 1y ago
  What caused the baby boom was post-war catholics. What would cause another baby boom would be a recovery of catholic cultural confidence.
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Catholics certainly were having more kids than Protestants at the time, who had by then been normalizing contraception (following the Lambeth Conference of 1930). But eventually Catholics drank the Koolaid like everyone else, so it's less about "cultural confidence" and more about "cultural detox".
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Catholics are the only world religious group that rejected the pill. Currently, actual Catholics (who believe and practice the defining doctrine) are the only group above replacement rate. Cultural Catholics in the United States mostly aligned with Protestant secular world views.
      • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        > Catholics are the only world religious group that rejected the pill. Or rather, the Church has steadfastly refused to sacrifice moral principle to drift downstream along with everyone else. Sure. And it never will go along. But a good fraction of the Catholic laity has. > actual Catholics (who believe and practice the defining doctrine) are the only group above replacement With all those qualifiers, the point becomes comical. Obviously, Catholics who actually live in accord with sexual ethics will have above replacement fertility. But a good fraction of those still in the pews are not procreating at above replacement, at least in the developed world. Many use contraception.
  • emseetech 1y ago
    If that were the case, wouldn't the trendlines for Protestant vs Catholic as percentage of population move considerably closer to each other? https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2014/02/04/50-years-of-religious-change/ https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2014/02/04/50-... Re: Figure 1. Trends in American Religious Affiliation, 1957-1971
• hluska 1y ago
  My grandmother passed away almost ten years ago in her late nineties. She was born in the 1920s and was a teenager when ww2 broke out. One of her memories is interesting and very relevant. There were a lot of soldiers trained in Canada and the government put on dances to entertain them. Had my gram or of her sisters asked to go to a dance with a bunch of soldiers in 1936, they would have been locked in a barn while he burned something down. But by 1939, it was his patriotic duty and he’d buy his girls dresses and take them to the dances. When my Gram was in her nineties, she would talk about the soldiers, the music and the dances. Then she’d start to glow and her neck would turn red. Romance of the times is a comfortable euphemism. :)
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• goalieca 1y ago
  It’s a cultural problem. Poor people and poor countries are having more babies on average.
• vander_elst 1y ago
  I think the article makes sense for me. IMO, a 10x decrease in mental load at an affordable price would be the key. Examples: * You can bring and pick up the kids at the daycare/babysitter every day of the week, every time of the day. * Household chores take at most 10 minutes a week. * High quality school and education standards are available everywhere (Probably there's more) I think that if such problems would be cracked more people might consider having more kids. I think at the moment these problems are easily solvable with a lot of money, so it would seem that kids have become a luxury good. So affordable support for the masses might be an answer.
  • spwa4 1y ago
    How about: recreate the actual policy that created the baby boom in the first place? Make child allowance such that 3 kids means 20 years of 20% over supermarket wages. Either for women alone, or for a family. In other words: 3 kids? Have a "free" stay-at-home parent.
• metalrain 1y ago
  I think it's about social acceptance. People give up their money and time to have children. Please make them feel good for it. Make it desirable.
• deepfriedchokes 1y ago
  Single income family cost of living is the secret sauce.
  • downrightmike 1y ago
    Now we have a dual income trap that doesn't cover things. My poor CEO had to join a 3rd board of directors just to make ends meet
    • supportengineer 1y ago
      Snark aside, I actually believe that could happen, especially if they're putting kids through college.
• thefz 1y ago
  It is OK to thin our numbers!
  • throwaway313313 1y ago
    Haha, jokes on you: only the cultures of the world that think that or that have the values that cause that will eliminate themselves, to be survived by everybody else that didn't have which ever deadly thought viruses that cause their decline.
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  I dislike the premise here. It assumes we want another baby boom. There are 8.2 Billion humans on Earth. We do not need another "boom." A 7% increase in birthdate would be disasterous. Define Boomers and the boom: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers)
  • saalweachter 1y ago
    Another part of the premise is "but the current baby boom isn't French/Japanese/white Americans".
• Yizahi 1y ago
  War, duh. No, really, the only reason for that happening was a total war. War caused devastated countries to collectively sign Bretton-Woods which affirmed USD as a reference currency and allowed USA to externalize a lot of it's issue, both immediate and future. Allowing this externalization, plus major political influence in the first decades after the war, plus rapid innovation accelerated by the war allowed USA to become filthy rich, which allowed Homer Simpson to afford a mansion, car and 4 jobless dependents on a single government job. Unfortunately the rapid global development means that even new world war wouldn't replicate this period. Train has left, bye bye, and won't return in our lifetimes. We need to adapt.
  • downrightmike 1y ago
    Recent wars haven't been expensive enough: World War II was significantly more expensive for the U.S. than the Gulf War. The Gulf War cost roughly $60-$70 billion (in 1990s dollars). In contrast, World War II cost the U.S. over $4 trillion when adjusted for inflation to today's dollars.
    • tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
      It's not the cost itself. 40 PERCENT of GDP went toward war production in the 1940s. Almost half of everything we produced was to win the war. The other 60 percent largely went to feeding and clothing and housing the people working on the war effort, and keeping the lights on, etc. since they were no longer producing those things. Everyone in the whole society was literally working on the same thing toward the same goal at the same time. There's simply no comparison with that to anything we've experienced since then. That kind of thing can't be measured in dollars.
  • Havoc 1y ago
    That was my first thought too - USD world reserve - but other countries had similar prosperity and child booms so can’t be that. At least not primarily
  • twoodfin 1y ago
    TFA addresses this theory directly: The leap in fertility that became the baby boom started years before the war.
• slowmovintarget 1y ago
  Well, you see, when a man and a woman love each other very much, and they've been separated by war, they come back to each other afterward and reaffirm their exuberance for life and become mommies and daddies.
• skywhopper 1y ago
  Vaccines and antibiotics, freedom, and teenagers with cars, plus optimism after 16 years of depression and war, but no birth control pill yet.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• WalterBright 1y ago
  Baby booms are the natural consequence of mass deaths. The day WW1 ended, people were copulating in the streets of London.
  • supportengineer 1y ago
    Uh, do you mean that figuratively or literally?
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      Literally. Also, the day Paris was liberated in WW2, there wasn't a soldier in the city who could not get laid.
  • ako 1y ago
    Not of mass deaths, but the hope of a good future.
    • downrightmike 1y ago
      trauma
• ge96 1y ago
  Idk if it's ADD or just being poor for so long. I can't imagine taking care of someone (a child) for 18 years. My life is so unstable. So I probably won't have children. I think about it but yeah. It's crazy to remember how stable your life was to get through 12 years of school/maybe college.
• supportengineer 1y ago
  I have two teenagers and they are wonderful. But the world is NOT the same anymore. In the current moment, I would really think twice before bringing any more kids into this world. I feel sorry for everyone coming of age at this time. The world got very bad very quickly. There's no jobs, no one can afford a house, healthcare, or retirement, and the climate is toast.
  • bpbp-mango 1y ago
    What a ridiculous attitude. The world will always have problems you cannot control. People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.
    • triceratops 1y ago
      > People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history But they didn't know how screwed they were.
      • floren 1y ago
        I think literal chattel slaves knew they were pretty bad off but they still had kids. (If you implied sarcasm I apologize, it's extremely hard to tell when dealing with HN posters)
        • triceratops 1y ago
          I encourage you to do some research about this. I did and I wish I had not.
          • floren 1y ago
            edit: you know what, I'm not going into this here, I'll leave a link with some actual slave narratives about family and children. https://americainclass.org/family-life-of-the-enslaved/ https://americainclass.org/family-life-of-the-enslaved/
• jpm_sd 1y ago
  I think this idea that we need more people is completely bonkers. Look at the housing market in any developed country; overcrowding at tourist destinations around the world; environmental impact of resource extraction, plastics manufacturing, fossil fuel consumption. There are WAY TOO MANY people in the world already. We had thriving communities with <1B people on the planet, we certainly don't need to go rocketing past 10B.
• itake 1y ago
  My $0.02 is being a mom sucks. In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day. Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice. Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids. Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job. Being a mom just sucks.
  • qmr 1y ago
    > unpaid labor I have never expected to be paid for raising my children.
    • acdha 1y ago
      No, but if the load is uneven and you’re giving up career possibilities it becomes harder not to think about what you were giving up because instead of some hard to quantify 1950s-style bargain you’ll be thinking of lost promotions relative to your peers when you're doing laundry at 11pm.
  • PakistaniDenzel 1y ago
    No - being a mom and having to work full time sucks. Being a full time mom probably isn't that bad.
    • louwrentius 1y ago
      Some Women who are full time mothers report feeling isolated. Many chose to keep their job even if all the money goes to day care.
• Animats 1y ago
  Well, let's see how it works for Russia. Russia has a 1.41 fertility rate (2.1 is breakeven). Plus Russia has lost somewhere around a million soldiers so far in Ukraine. Deaths outnumber births by 1.6 to 1. They need fresh meat for the grinder.[1] Current steps being taken include: - Emphasizing family values via the Russian Orthodox Church - Restricting abortion, which was cheap and easy in the USSR days - Encourage teenage pregnancy (there's a "Pregnant at 15" TV show) - Encouraging immigration So far, it's not working much. [1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-might-be-losing-1000000-casualties-in-ukraine-war/ https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-might-be-losing-1...
  • trod1234 1y ago
    Most countries today are losing population (below replacement value). The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85. There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies. They are matching people up who won't ever have babies. What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.
  • NoOn3 1y ago
    It's not that scary. You don't have to go to church. And don't have to listen to church broadcasts or channels. And no one forces you to do anything. There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia. It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia. There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing. Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.
• yumlogic 1y ago
  Relative stability, focus on family, growth, men as head of household, minimal single parent families, women spending time with their kids. Raising kids is a full time job. I am doing both as a father and also as a founder. My wife does not work, does minimal contribution here and there. I dont know where she spends time but she is unavailable. I would rather do it myself than keep fighting. I think from population front we are not going to have baby boom anytime in next 30 years. Technology will create more isolation than ever. Laws never favor men. India, most populous country, recently dropped birth rates below replacement level. That is probably most fertile land (for food and reproduction) and yet they are falling behind. I think unless we see dramatic change in policies worldwide (not going to happen) that puts men and families as center of policy making, it will be all doom from here. Come back in 30-50 years when new generation is in charge and thinking patterns change.
  • louwrentius 1y ago
    > Relative stability, focus on family, growth, men as head of household, minimal single parent families, women spending time with their kids. This reads as deeply obnoxious sexism. Man as head of the household, sounds like religious fundamentalism.
    • yumlogic 1y ago
      Typical liberal talk rather than solving the problem. It worked for centuries. No one is stopping women from working or doing anything. But, making whole world gynocentric and policies around it is how you get mass inequality. For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood? Decades of mistakes and yet you come here with sexism talk. Words are cheap. Life is hard.
      • louwrentius 1y ago
        > For a societal change, things have to change at fundamental level. Are you aware that below $120k - $150k it is impossible to raise two kids, mortgage, healthcare, and live in a no-drug ridden neighborhood? Your solution is to enslave women again so they become baby incubators, exactly as right-wing theocrats want. The real solution is ofcourse 'socialism' and a rampant curtailment of capitalism, that is currently accelerating the migration of money from poor to rich.
• 486sx33 1y ago
  [dead]
• qmr 1y ago
  Homer Simpson is a bumbling incompetent who manages to have a stable job, and can afford a mortgage, insurance for his family of 5, and two good enough cars as the sole breadwinner for his household. It's going to take something like that.
  • cbdumas 1y ago
    How does this square with the fact that fertility declines as income rises, both within and across societies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
    • tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
      Because income rises with age, and fertility declines with age. Not that hard to figure out.
  • standardUser 1y ago
    That was modelled on the peak post-War nuclear family, a type of family entity that had not existed before and will likely never exist again. One person working to support 4 or 5 is not something we can strive for without a serious look at UBI along with a revolution in automation.
  • yen223 1y ago
    Homer Simpson is also a fictional cartoon character
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Worldview blown.
• crtified 1y ago
  My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing. Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother. Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures. In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time. I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
  • Qem 1y ago
    I'm sorry for your loss.
    • lisbbb 1y ago
      What loss? It was not her but her "girlfriend" which I don't even know how to correctly interpret these days. Is she saying it was her love interest or just a friend who is female? Heaven knows! Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
      • tayo42 1y ago
        Idk if that's anything new. There was a movie about this 20 years ago
        • ta8645 1y ago
          Mad Max?
• Glyptodon 1y ago
  I continue to think that despite the likelihood of birth rate being multiplicatively impacted by different factors, housing being stable and inexpensive has to be a leg on which all the other factors build. I know so many people who have put off having kids despite wanting them because they do not believe (having gone through the great recession, experiencing modern hiring and firing practices, the pandemic, and seeing global warming, and now AI, while being given a roadmap called "just go to college and everything will be easy" from boomers) that it's prudent when rent and mortgage payments hang over ever all other factors and when things never actually "feel" like they improve for them and don't seem likely to. Make housing so cheap that people feel there's nothing risky about working minimum age job with 3 kids and you have the first leg of higher birth rates being societally supported IMO. But that's not an easy place to arrive.
• yfw 1y ago
  Cheaper housing, taxes on billionaires
• ziknard 1y ago
  Worrying about declining birth rates on Earth in 2025 is exactly as psychotic as dinosaurs worrying about their investment portfolios the day after Chicxulub. Someone said "more meat for the grinder", which is exactly correct whether it is referring to a war machine or the late-stage capitalist shithole we've created. You're all absolutely crazy if you think more fscking people on this finite planet is going to solve any problem. Get sterilized.
  • anon291 1y ago
    Late stage capitalist shitholes are actually really fun.
  • ratmeadow 1y ago
    Times like these you realise HN is surprisingly conservative and narrow minded
  • cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  • azan_ 1y ago
    The world now is in better place than it ever was. We are less violent, live longer, live healthier, minimum wage workers can have luxuries unimaginable by kings back in time. It's time to end the nihilism epidemic.
• dividefuel 1y ago
  I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids: #1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry. #2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like. #3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own. The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.
  • xedrac 1y ago
    As someone with 5 kids, I can attest to #1. Kids are hard and expensive, but they are also the single most rewarding aspect of my life. I rushed into having kids in my early twenties, and those early years were very difficult. Now that my kids are a bit older, I am so grateful for them. My life is infinitely richer because of them, even though I may have less time and money for myself.
  • southernplaces7 1y ago
    >People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like. At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue) Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.
• neuroelectron 1y ago
  I'm surprised it was really considered mystery. My grandparents told me straight up, who had four children, that the reason that had such a large family is because they were supposed to. It was their patriotic duty. Did this zeitgeist get lost a time or is it now some sort of secret? Perhaps it's not politically correct the point out that actually, people, there is a class of people who determine what we're supposed to believe. Just like I grew up thinking computers were cool just when we needed a lot of software developers, right before my career was outsourced to H-1Bs. I suppose it makes sense. It's not like there's any single place that documented where we're all agreeing about what we're supposed to believe. After all, nobody has a date where we all decided that hackers were really cool and awesome.
  • thesuavefactor 1y ago
    It's religion. The church pastor would visit the family if a young couple didn't have children within a year to ask what's up. That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen. It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.
• standardUser 1y ago
  The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish. There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
  • Havoc 1y ago
    > was an anomaly Unfortunately suspect this is the right answer.
    • Lammy 1y ago
      Nope! Check out the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future's 1970 Congressional Report: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check) John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
      • standardUser 1y ago
        You're talking about the widely known concept called the "demographic transition" and it has slowed, not accelerated, the death of the single-income household in the West because it's more affordable to support smaller families and to start families later in life.
  • 1y ago
• khurs 1y ago
  Fix the money aspect 1. Fix Family Courts Western Family courts are based on biblical punishment (divorce is bad and a sin, nuclear family is good, must punish sin). And extreme Christian crazy Judges falsify outcomes routinely, hence why they are hiding behind closed doors. Leaving men broke and barely seeing their child means the next generations of men know not to marry. 2. Child Support No sensible safeguards of how it is spent and even if the woman is a high earner the man can be asked to pay 100% of the child costs. So men are very cautious about getting the wrong woman pregnant, as women are financialy incentivised to ensure a child lives as little as possible with the father as that means more money for them. You want a balance between deterrence to unplanned kids and motivation to have kids. Generations of men have seen what happens/been told this/social media and they are more wary. Many relationships and marriages fail. It needs to be normalised and the lunatic Christian extremists need to be put away.
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  > between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent that’s it so basically very few people - as in both partners - were consciously planning kids, they were just having sex, but the irresponsibility was curbed by nature, sanitation, as many of the resulting children died. of the people that were planning children, they also has to hedge with many dead children, but suddenly they were all living so now people had to plan for the consequences and post 1950s the planning resulted in real practical choices, where people realized they dont want children. people never wanted the consequences of having children or many children. the history corroborates this. when both parties are now choosing the incentives haven’t helped for that reason the incentives are all based on the assumption that family planning is difficult and out of reach. merely delaying something desired, when they just won’t accept that most of has just don’t want children and never did. we still have sex. the decline in that amongst always single people is new, just the last several years. couples do the things that make children all the time, and just don’t get pregnant or output children.
  • angmarsbane 1y ago
    Do we still have sex? I keep seeing headlines that younger generations aren't having sex. My last relationship ended because my mid-30s male partner wasn't interested in sex.
    • yieldcrv 1y ago
      many people have very active libidos, there is a burgeoning "consent culture" about being more upfront about talking about it so you find what you're looking for faster. removes the guess work and hoping the vibes turn out to be what you want.
    • epicureanideal 1y ago
      I think this would be worth a post and a bunch of discussion all by itself. I think there are a bunch of factors influencing this. If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons? For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?
• scubadude 1y ago
  Unaffordable housing, working 3 jobs, and ever-reducing social safety net are the ideal conditions for people to raise a family. I can't work it out.
• atleastoptimal 1y ago
  Having a kid is no longer high-status for women. The only women (in the US) having kids in excess of the replacement rate are the poorest and most wealthy, in other words those too destitute for child-rearing to bring them any lower, and too rich for the burdens of it to have any effect on them. For all those in the middle, pregnancy and raising a kid is catastrophic to free-time, career success, and a sense of freedom in one's life trajectory.
  • fwsgonzo 1y ago
    I've read so many comments, many of which I agree with and some which I don't. Either way, this comment is the only one that touches on the subject of womens careers. We are new parents and my wife is scared that she will lose her job despite protections. We are sick a lot (almost permanently so far) as childcare is a petri dish. We are also sleeping poorly almost every other day. She sometimes has meetings in the afternoon because people can't respect other peoples time off, and has to sometimes have a screaming child in the background. If she were to lose her job, we would have serious economic issues, despite both of us having good jobs. It's not great. It's becoming very clear to me that something is wrong both economically and politically when it comes to child rearing.
• snowwrestler 1y ago
  I find it funny when people talk about the baby boom and then also worry about maintaining 2.1 babies per couple. Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement. But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out. The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.
• golemiprague 1y ago
  [dead]
• socceroos 1y ago
  I find the repeated comments of how much parenting 'sucks' and how much childbearing 'sucks' to be distasteful. It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over). I feel like, primarily, the reason why our society isn't having children is because of a growing selfishness and entitlement; which happens to be the very thing that Rome was suffering from when their society was collapsing too. No, I'm not rich and I'm not old. But I was brought up in a family that cherished loved ones and family. Love was agape, not eros.
  • seatac76 1y ago
    Here in the US. I think for the young population there is a genuine affordability crisis, coupled with health insurance being so expensive it is a genuine blocker for a lot of people.
    • pishpash 1y ago
      It's Malthusian scarcity, expressed through market-clearing prices. It's like some alpha baboon hordes all the food so nobody else is going to reproduce.
    • broost3r 1y ago
      some of the younger people i work with also mention climate change and global instability, amongst other things. they don’t want to bring kids into this world as it exists today.
  • squigz 1y ago
    People are choosing not to have kids so they can live their own lives, or because they don't want to bring more children into this crazy world, or any number of various other perfectly legitimate reasons, such as economic worries. While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.
  • arp242 1y ago
• apparent 1y ago
  Highly recommend Family Unfriendly [1] to understand how societal expectations and structures discourage large families. For example, people tend to feel like they have to get their kids into Ivies or whatever, which means tons of extracurriculars (which cost time and money). Even if you have no interest in having more kids, it's an interesting look at how we can parent differently and have happier families. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Family-Unfriendly-Culture-Raising-Harder/dp/006323646X https://www.amazon.com/Family-Unfriendly-Culture-Raising-Har...
• antonvs 1y ago
  The idea that it might be important to have another baby boom is essentially a late stage capitalist delusion. There are over 8 billion people on Earth. Well in excess of its carrying capacity given current technological usage. A smaller population is, in all objective senses, a good thing. Desiring a larger population is a purely greed-based obsession.
• arp242 1y ago
  Even a stable population can't mean it can never shrink. A long-term stable population means that sometimes it grows a bit over a period of decades, and sometimes it shrinks a bit over a period of decades. Overall long-term it roughly stays the same, but short-term it doesn't necessarily. The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible. The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future. And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.
  • aaomidi 1y ago
    I mean we know how to solve it. Increase/Apply taxation on wealth.
    • arp242 1y ago
      It's not just a money issue. You need medical and other care staff. You need appropriate places to house people. Things like that. None of this is really a "we can just pay for it" thing. But yes, obviously something will have to be done about taxation on wealth. But simply "tax wealth" doesn't really solve anything here on its own.
      • aaomidi 1y ago
        I agree.
• jonator 1y ago
  There's a lot of economic explanations that seem perfectly legitimate. I'm wondering if a simple contributor is the fact that many people are moving away from their immediate family. Then you feel more on your own when considering having child, which is significantly more daunting. I think a network of friends helps, but is simply not the same as parents/siblings/cousins sharing the load and advice. Let alone the experiences. Also, it seems there's a negative feedback loop, where each person that chooses to postpone or not have kids influences their network to do the same.
• anothereng 1y ago
  cultures would have to change to encourage motherhood and fatherhood, keeping marriages intact, etc. Also campaigns against contraceptives/abortion would help
  • budududuroiu 1y ago
    Abortions will happen regardless, they will just cause more deaths, look at the era where Romania banned abortion. Doesn’t seem like the winning solution is to apply policies that directly reduce the amount of people that _can_ give birth
    • anothereng 1y ago
      abortion kills women who will give birth in the future. It's not just one killing is potential killing of many future people who don't get to exist.
      • budududuroiu 1y ago
        Correct, so the further up the tree of parenthood you go, the higher the impact, which is why it’s important to have safe access to abortion. Romania’s abortion policy killed north of 200,000 women that died to at home abortions going wrong
• nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
  I can't ignore the profound degradation in the American standard of living as a contributing factor, especially in the last ~5 years (the recent housing bubble and "transitory inflation" (remember that one?) being disproportionate contributors. This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty. I hear concerns like the following, across social groups: "I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft." "If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?" Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc. I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from. Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
• hnpolicestate 1y ago
  80 million people died during WW II. That's what caused the baby boom. I assume birth rates also rose after the black death. Babybooms and societal renaissance I think only happen after cataclysmic events.
  • WorkerBee28474 1y ago
    > I assume birth rates also rose after the black death It seems not. Wikipedia says it took 80-150 years (4-7 generations) to recover from a ~21% population drop [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
• epolanski 1y ago
  Few things that should be noted: women at 25+ have more or less the same children they had 60 years ago. It's teenage and very young women virtually not having kids anymore. Thus, the narrative that in order to stop population shrinking we have to go back to some past state is false. We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies, and we should support older women and men having child at later stage at higher rates than previously during humanity.
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • WorkerBee28474 1y ago
    > We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies Why not? The statement seems very much derived from 'current culture' morals. For most of human history I would guess that behavior was normal human behavior.
    • epolanski 1y ago
      Because as of 2025 we know that in modern times such young pregnancies are closely related to financial difficulties, lack of maturity and stability, and in the end those lead to unhappy families and more importantly children.
      • WorkerBee28474 1y ago
        I know some kids of teen parents. They seem at least as happy as average. Do you have any studies that say that group of people isn't?
• budududuroiu 1y ago
  Rationalist circles will go to “yes, we must enslave women in order to save humanity from the fertility crisis”, before even considering “wages for housework/child rearing”
• vjulian 1y ago
  What we need are 25/30+ year-olds who are completely at ease with sex, who have no hang-ups, and who know how to form strong relationships because they’ve been doing it and having sex freely since they were teenagers. Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am. On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves. What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions. Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging. Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
  • rubyfan 1y ago
    This, about so many other topics for young people.
  • swagasaurus-rex 1y ago
    This is an unusual take. People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
    • maxerickson 1y ago
      Also, pro wrestling is real.
• stevev 1y ago
  Increase dependent rate, suspend income tax and property tax.
• snarf_br 1y ago
  The world can't handle another baby boom.
• ks2048 1y ago
  Plot the US birth rate AND the US tax rate on the top 1% over 1940-2025. Interesting... (only half joking)
• codedokode 1y ago
  Why not pay women a competitive (not $10/hr) salary for raising a child, collected from taxes from people who don't have children under 18? To make building a family more profitable than working a job. It seems that politicians (calling for ban of abortions) want to have a cake and not pay for it.
  • codedokode 1y ago
    For example, a Russian millionaire, Pavel Durov has 5 children, although it seems that they are raised by his ex-girlfriends. Once there is enough money, problem is solved.
    • eviks 1y ago
      > has 5 children You forgot a couple of 0s https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77v4x8g7pro https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77v4x8g7pro
  • rdm_blackhole 1y ago
    So you basically want to add another tax on young single/unmarried people? What if you are infertile? Is the government/state going to pay for all the procedures related to adoption/ fertility treatments? What about gay people? Would they be forced to adopt kids or use surrogates to have children so that they stop paying this tax? At what age should men stop paying this tax? After all, a man in his 60s and even later can still in theory father a child with a younger woman, so there is really no cut off date for men in this case? Finally why not pay men as well if they are the ones doing most of the child raising? This would apply in cases where the mother died or left. Would that be acceptable? I am sorry to say but your proposal is not very well thought out and on top of that your forget that people in relationships without children are already paying more than there fair share of taxes.
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      A single child raised to adulthood in the United States is worth over $10 million to the economy. Consider that in the calculation of what a fair share of investment bringing that into the economy is.
• deleted 1y ago
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• phendrenad2 1y ago
  The baby boom started immediately after the Great Depression. I think that what happened is that the depression wiped out the rich, and the mega-corps of the time, and leveled the playing field by a lot. The Googles and Facebooks of the time were destroyed, and there was a vast green field on which people tried to build new empires. Nobody cared if you went to Yale or Oxford, or were related to the upper management somehow, they just hired based on ability. For a brief period the American Dream was real: work hard, work smart, and you'll get far. So people worked hard, and rather than having their job stolen by ofshoring or AI, they get compensated well. They spent that money on houses, and then... they didn't know what else to do. They had everything they needed. Money in the bank. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Might as well have a big family, too. So that explains what caused it. What would it take to have another? We're currently having one in another part of the world.
• pfdietz 1y ago
  The current US TFR would be more than enough to grow the population if the female to male ratio of births were sufficiently skewed. In the limit of a mostly female population, a TFR of just above 1 is enough to sustain the population. So perhaps the problem isn't increasing the number of births per woman, but rather increasing the fraction of the population that are women. Women already do better than men in college; perhaps if women are perceived as having better economic prospects, and if technical means of choosing the sex of children were available, parents would tend to choose female children.
• nodesocket 1y ago
  While I'm sure won't be a popular opinion, the data seems to backup that the rise of far-left liberalism and feminism by women and shift toward moderate and conservative men has been a huge contributing factor. Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]! Secondly, social media, including onlyfans. This ideology of feminist power I believe has been a cancer. [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fthe-gender-divide-among-young-south-koreans-is-absolutely-v0-zzvflzbbjx4f1.png%3Fwidth%3D1400%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D89ffdb390c8663d075774273175f716cdcdde5b8 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
  • Glyptodon 1y ago
    I don't disagree that misalignment between the sexes might have some influence, but crass men who seem to think women are basically fertility slaves is wildly toxic, wildly dangerous, and only reinforces feminism. In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes. But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
• odyssey7 1y ago
  What if we just made people financially comfortable and secure again? The axis is "feed and breed" vs "fight or flight." And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense. Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen. I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children. Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
  • supertrope 1y ago
    "Don't have kids you can't afford." Now we're shocked when people makes less babies.
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  • abenga 1y ago
    Don't wealthy people have fewer children?
    • odyssey7 1y ago
      The problem is millennials having fewer children, not wealthy people having fewer children. Millennials are historically notable for having both fewer children and less wealth than prior generations at the same age.
• MangoToupe 1y ago
  It's hard to imagine any technological or scientific change that could overcome the expenses of housing, childcare, and education.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Formula technology also contributed at this time because mothers more quickly regained average fertility by 1-2 years.
• binary132 1y ago
  It seems obvious to me that the baby boom was caused by plentiful access to secure, affordable homes in decent communities, lots of communal social activity outside of the home, common religiosity, and plentiful access to reasonably well-paying work, for most people of a modest level of education. We have none of these things today. A small amount of cash is not going to fix it.
• FettermanLaw 1y ago
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• thinkingemote 1y ago
  The main thing is a rejection of oneself and the prioritizing of others. For those in the past this was normal, this was life itself. The dwindling number of parents of today may be able to see this. Parents sacrifice their life for their children. That the baby boom happened during a time of great sacrifice (war) is very significant. For most of us today this is horrific to think about! Our life is ours! We don't want to give up our freedoms! We don't want to sacrifice our life. I include myself in this. We have made Human Rights about ourselves and our own choices. My body! Our responsibility is for ourselves not others. It's not money nor housing, it's how we think about what life is. To argue for people to sacrifice their lives is completely insane. But that is what it would take, a kind of insanity in a selfish world. An argument against freedom is insanity in our culture of the self.
  • TFYS 1y ago
    This is probably one part of it, but I'm not sure it's a very big part. Sacrificing yourself for the group is still a part of some east asian cultures but they aren't doing any better in this regard. I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
• KolibriFly 1y ago
  This is one of the few pieces that actually treats the baby boom as the historical anomaly it was, rather than some baseline we should be trying to claw back to with tax credits and daycare vouchers
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• EmptySocks 1y ago
  A strong family culture and the return of all the troops from ww2. More younger people getting married and having kids. It seems like cost of living has a lot to do with it as well. Most people who want to start a family are waiting for a house but it is impossible for most to afford one.
• sjw987 1y ago
  It's the economy, stupid. Most younger people can't afford homes. People's money doesn't go as far as it used to. Academic qualifications are worth less than they used to be. Many people currently working now won't see a pension. Many won't see a good paying job, even with good academic qualifications and work experience. General health and wellbeing is getting worse, with businesses abusing human psychology to shift product that knowingly causes worse health outcomes. Many people are concerned about the political direction of the countries they live in, and many are concerned about the changes in the community and culture around them. Many might see the first shockwaves of climate change (climate refugees, more extreme weather, water shortages). War is growing, and will grow further when states start fighting over dwindling resources. All generations, especially the young and impressionable are becoming addicted to information (not in a good way) and media consumption, the only upside of which is an inverse relationship to alcohol and substance consumption. And their kids will have it worse than them. The world is getting worse to live in, and we (or many of us) have just enough education this time around to not want to burden another generation with that. In the past, and in certain places today, a lack of education would mean people would procreate even as society collapsed around them. We've lived through a very small golden age of being alive (in select places) the last 70 years. It was unsustainable, and we are now seeing the undoing of those times. We might not see such a boom of prosperity again.
  • giingyui 1y ago
    No, it’s not the economy. All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents. Yet they are doing fine.
    • pjc50 1y ago
      > All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents. The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible. An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.
• hermannj314 1y ago
  People will have more kids when the population of the planet is closer to 1 billion people than 10 billion, it is a problem that mostly self-corrects without intervention from what I can tell. To answer the headline question: find a way to make other planets inhabitable and the human population will grow to fill the new spaceships, but for now this one is too crowded.
• alchemyzach 1y ago
  It's not that deep. Young couples need to have a primal sense of home and safety to want to raise kids, and no young people can afford a 3+ bedroom home anymore. And it's gone on so long now that "not wanting to have kids" has entered the culture and become a big part of many people's personalities today. But it all starts with the affordability of homes. As to why life is less affordable today and getting worse, I would start here: https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbea597263a88f27075bd6eb49_17385_suerf.pdf https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
• jdlyga 1y ago
  Back in the 90s, there was fear about a population bomb. 10 billion people by 2010, mass starvation, etc. We've successfully defused the population bomb since, and now the conversation has flipped. In most developed countries, there's declining birthrates and new concerns over who will support the future economy. The problem now is that these countries do very little to support new families and children. Housing is expensive, childcare costs are crushing, expectations on parents is higher than ever, and there's less community support than ever before. So it's really no wonder why people are choosing to have smaller families or no kids at all.
  • garciasn 1y ago
    No; we just have birth control that works. The rest of these are all parts of the puzzle that help people not desire having offspring, but previously there simply wasn't a 99% fool-proof method to do so aside from abstinence or hysterectomy. So; regardless of economic factors, people had kids and dealt with those outcomes.
  • aoeusnth1 1y ago
    Yet, richer people have fewer children. It isn't clear that reducing costs (making people richer) would actually increase birth rates
    • adam_arthur 1y ago
      Is this true for very wealthy people, or only for above average earners? There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential. Quick google shows some support for this idea: "There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women." https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-relationship-between-status-and-children-is-changing https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela... ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
• tmaly 1y ago
  My take is that only needing a high school diploma to get a good job, affordable housing, and being able to raise a family on a single income likely helped.
• paxcoder 1y ago
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• xyzelement 1y ago
  One thing is always missing from the analysis of collapsed fertility is the recognition that truly religious people seem immune to the problem. Religious Jews, mormons, muslims, etc are having as many kids as a hundred years ago, if not more thanks to modern medicine and things that made things easier (I know guys with 11 kids, imagine doing that before diapers.) From that perspective, much of the analysis about the systematic causes seems bunk - the same forces (eg the economy, costs, etc.) affect everyone. An ultra-orthodox woman averages 6.6 kids, while an atheist - about 1, despite the fact that they might live in the same Brooklyn zip code for instance. It's just that - somehow - religious people maintain the motivation and energy to do it while atheism somehow doesn't create the same inspiration and ability. To be clear, fertility rate of around 1 means that each generation of atheists will be half the size of the previous one. So in one sense, the fertility problem will "solve itself" as subsequent generations are dominated by children of those who haven't lost their faiths. I suspect part of the problem here is that secular society fails to turn an inward look on itself and recognize that their "secularity" is at the very least co-morbid with this problem. I don't really have a solution since it's not like someone's going to read this and go "oh shit better pray up if I want to be a dad" (though it seems like that's true) but just wanted to point out the obvious connection between religiosity and being immune from this infertility on average.
• scotty79 1y ago
  If you need an average woman to have 2.1 children you need to pay her half of the average salary for having each. No one wants babies (on average). If society wants them it must pay for them because women are no longer "sentenced" to having them by biology.
  • AStonesThrow 1y ago
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