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"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." Then please explain why birth rates throug
by JPKab 8mo ago
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction
3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoYou really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough. In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival. In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
- drowsspa 8mo agoYeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoIt's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall. Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
- csallen 8mo ago> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
- qweiopqweiop 8mo agoGreat point. I'd argue though, is it a utopia if we're not as happy?
- JPKab 8mo agoWe are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
- clavicular999 8mo ago[dead]
- throaway1998 8mo agoNo, its because its obviously a utopia meant for all which is only one for some (those who are hoarding resources)
- JPKab 8mo agoYeah, you have a hard life as you type on a device powered by magic with a full belly and a roof over your head in a building that magically heats and cools itself. Compared to our ancestors, who alternated between fighting to not die of hypothermia or starvation or have their infants eaten by predators, you really have it hard dude. That bald guy on the TV has a really big yacht and you don't, and that means your life is a tragedy. I'm really sorry for the suffering you're enduring because you don't get to party all day, every day. Participating in your own survival is truly an imposition that nobody should ever have to bear.
- drowsspa 8mo agoFunny how you don't realize you fit perfectly into the description of one of the groups that know exactly what is going on.
- JPKab 8mo agoWhat do you mean?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pawelduda 8mo ago> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoThat’s looking at history through a modern lens. The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex. They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
- pawelduda 8mo agoThis is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
- kixiQu 8mo agoIt's more complicated than that. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
- Balgair 8mo agoTLDR: Peasants could expect between 8-12 pregnancies, with 2 (!) surviving to adulthood. Christ, that is a lot of dead children for every woman. Your heart just breaks over and over.
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoYep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases. To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian. So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
- JPKab 8mo agoI totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple. Has any society successfully done this yet? Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoAnything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is. The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success). You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point. “A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
- SoftTalker 8mo agoGermany in the 1930s. Not that we'd want to emulate their methods.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago> rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures Same in EU
- bilegeek 8mo ago>without being authoritarian. Too late. We already have the eyes/muscle and nascent legal justifications; leadership will eventually force the issue.
- BugsJustFindMe 8mo ago> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? > The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts. You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading. Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
- JPKab 8mo agoI think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home). I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc. My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
- BugsJustFindMe 8mo ago
- esseph 8mo ago> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? Easy. In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor. Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.
- fullshark 8mo agoAnalysis from a time before the birth control pill is pointless. It's an alien society.
- watt 8mo agoIf, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
- tfehring 8mo agoThe timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US. Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit... Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996. Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.
- coryrc 8mo agoYou're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer. Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
- tfehring 8mo agoI don't follow. The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic. So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
- coryrc 8mo agoThe magnitude is what I wish to quibble about. There may be a trend, but it's much smaller than the other effects.
- Balgair 8mo ago> And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
- ziml77 8mo ago> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
- jvandreae 8mo agoThe past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit". I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
- maybelsyrup 8mo ago> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived. I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.