7 ms·
Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
- pkulak 4mo agoOh great, Idiocracy as a scientific paper.
- Leonard_of_Q 4mo ago[flagged]
- novia 4mo agoCaptain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet. https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
- pfannkuchen 4mo agoOkay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!
- Ysx 4mo agoThe environment is doomed either way without action. Is the issue that some demographics will become more dominant?
- pfannkuchen 4mo agoIs it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).
- Gualdrapo 4mo agoWe can't also assume that your offspring will have the same values as you.
- coldtea 4mo agoYou shouldn't be OK with them having any random values, either. If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life, and what's good and what's bad, and you want to see it to continue. That some of them will inevitable change over time is not the same as you preactively having no preference and guidance for your offspring whatsoever, and thinking "no problem, anything goes".
- vkou 4mo ago> If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life, Do you? Your 'civilization' doesn't run on some kind of command economy five-year-cultural plan. Its values and views of what's good and bad are just some (often dystopian) local maximum it's stuck in. Not to mention the obvious - what if you strongly disagree with your civilization's values?
- pfannkuchen 4mo agoSure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here. I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background. Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another. So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.
- coliveira 4mo agoA group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.
- dribbiy8 4mo ago[dead]
- M95D 4mo agoTo hell with the group. I won't feel sorry for my children and the state of the world they'll need to live in.
- coldtea 4mo agoThat's why people shouldn't take life advice from cartoons and celebrities
- novia 4mo agoI mean, I probably saw this when I was 4 or so, and I don't have any children now. I can't really blame my four year old self for being impressionable. I'd say this is probably more of an example of why people should be cautious of the kind of content they put in front of their kids.
- xethos 4mo agoSure, that's why Smokey the Bear is such a bad idea. Ignore the fact that pushing propaganda starts young, (the population in general, but especially) children are impressionable, and (echoing sibling) that we should probably consider the impacts of media on children. Lots of cartoons are wholesome, and it can be a powerful tool for setting social norms. More to the point, it's going to happen anyways - so let's do what we can to make sure it's a message we agree with
- Henchman21 4mo ago…and knowing is half the battle. GI Joe theme plays in the background
- jambalaya8 4mo agoWell, at least they aren't re-re-making that... yet.
- xyzelement 4mo agoLikewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle. There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.
- vkou 4mo agoThere's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties. Doubly so when it blames children's television for its ills, instead of the obvious suspects of nuclear families (who have no free adult time for child care), dying rural areas (which push young adults to move away from their parents), a fucked up and unaffordable healthcare system, an ever-growing chasm between haves and have-nots, and the expectation that children should not be left unsupervised for even a moment (by either their parents, who presumably have to work for a living, or by a paid babysitter, who the have-not parents are somehow supposed to afford) until their teens. Oh, and in more recent years, the redder regions of it have also been waging and winning a war against women's reproductive health. Not to mention the war against the 'wrong'[1] kind of immigrant. No, it's clearly television that's at fault. --- [1] The definition of 'wrong' changes every fucking week, suddenly and without warning. You'd have to be insane to have a child when you or your partner can lose your/their status, and be arrested and deported at the whim of the tweeter-in-chief. The amount of work the 'family values' party has been putting into tearing families apart is really something.
- skeledrew 4mo ago> There's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties. From a biological perspective, the ideal age range for reproduction is late teens to early 30s[0]. Beyond that there's greatly decreased chances, and a sharp increase in potential complications. When it comes to the human condition, biology comes first, and then the rest follows. Otherwise you have population problems. [0] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/age-and-fertility https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
- draw_down 4mo ago[dead]
- bm3719 4mo ago[flagged]
- inglor_cz 4mo agoIt remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups. That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
- bm3719 4mo agoI think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards. Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jrflowers 4mo ago>Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject I don’t think this means what you think it means
- postflopclarity 4mo agoseems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
- cryzinger 4mo agoAgreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
- WarOnPrivacy 4mo ago> it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics). Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure. It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it. ¹ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-cha... ² https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pope-leo-xiv-1793938 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pop... ³ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths-pastor-views/ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths...
- seff 4mo agoI feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.) I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.
- _aavaa_ 4mo agoOne thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here. And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
- giardini 4mo agoPshaw! There are plenty of non-heterosexual people who end up with children! A (drunken) poke here, a (drugged) poke, a wild moment, etc there really adds up. Many gay people I know have children.
- homeonthemtn 4mo agoEverything about this thread is weird and woefully online. As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4. It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
- xyzelement 4mo agoWhere are you and what percentage of your neighbors go to church and similar.
- homeonthemtn 4mo agoHa none. We are not "conservative" in the least bit, or even politically performative.
- xyzelement 4mo agoWhere are you?
- bad_haircut72 4mo agoAfter putting it off for many years, many millenials are finally settling down and starting the families that perhaps more traditionally we began 15 years earlier - but outside ones with fertility issues, we are getting on with it. Im in the same boat as you, left leaning with left leaning friends, mostly late 30s and we're all getting on with having or raising young kids at this point - so n=2 from real life observations
- s1artibartfast 4mo agoYou might be interested in the link I provided in a sibling post. A larger percentage of births are to older women, but total number of births are still dropping accross all ages.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- julianlam 4mo agoEvery time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"? You want to raise the fertility rate, yes? You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure). Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too. To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
- nielsbot 4mo agodon’t non-US countries already do this?
- mrweasel 4mo agoYes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women. We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.
- nielsbot 4mo ago…or stop educating women! I’m joking. But some religious types say it unironically.
- mrweasel 4mo agoThat is sadly also true, hence my "or devolve as a society". Educating girls, and young women, results in fewer children, but it also yield richer and honestly better societies. You'd struggle to find a rich, first world country, where women don't receive proper education, but it's almost universally true for poor and dysfunctional countries.
- skeledrew 4mo agoThe economics is a sizeable part of the issue. Fix - or preferably replace - the economy so that it's super affordable+rewarding to have and raise children. And make it more acceptable socially to start a family from late teen years (when fertility is just about already at peak).
- comrade1234 4mo agoJust like there's a natural selection to those with religious beliefs (and active killing of those without) there's probably active selection to those with conservative beliefs like raiding a family, a desire to teach their values to their children, producing as many children as possible - values that correlate with conservatives.
- xyzelement 4mo agoI think the atheist experiment of the last century or so is starting to yield clear evidence of what is and isn't "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Exactly as you are saying.
- tavavex 4mo agoAtheists have existed for basically forever. I think you're referring to the 'not murdering, ostracizing and repressing them' experiment. If, like some in this thread, you think that violence, ignorance and removal of freedoms are acceptable means to getting an outcome some find preferable (or "fit", or "natural"), please state so directly.
- xyzelement 4mo agoI think atheism works great as a minority view. It seems to not work well as the dominant philosophy-as per the article.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoI’ve also noticed fertility is high among certain immigrant demographic groups. Near me, it’s refugee groups (asylum applicants) where families very typically have 4 or more kids. In a couple decades I can see the demographics being very different in America, but especially Europe. It’ll probably look more brown, more Islamic relative to today. What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
- cosmic_cheese 4mo agoMy take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation. If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is. The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children. I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
- throw-the-towel 4mo agoI'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.
- cosmic_cheese 4mo agoIt's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.
- throw-the-towel 4mo agoWhat other aspects do you have in mind, then?
- mike_hearn 4mo ago
- _8L34K 4mo agoIt seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.
- balfirevic 4mo agoYes, but that is the common terminology.
- _8L34K 4mo agoThat's fair, it just really hinders the conversation amongst laymen.
- int_19h 4mo agoIsn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children. Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
- mike_hearn 4mo agoThis effect is present when controlling for income.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago[flagged]
- happytoexplain 4mo agoObviously it has nothing to do with some kind of mass non-awareness that fertility falls with age. (Caused by being "not sensible"? Not sure what that means here.)
- OutOfHere 4mo ago[flagged]
- rowanseymour 4mo agoI know plenty of women who have delayed starting a family and they were well aware of the increased risks.. as they struggled to meet the right person, establish themselves professionally etc. They were certainly not brainwashed.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago[flagged]
- watwut 4mo agoHaving kid with the wrong person is even shittier experience then marrying them. You can divorce and never see the guy again, ut you cant get rid of baby daddy. > meeting a partner in one's teen years, and getting it done by age 20 is best because one is the least picky then among all of one's fertile years Considering staggering rates of violence, domestic abuse and even rape in such circles, this not the best individual decision. The kids themselves get abused and neglected way more often in those circles too.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago> Considering staggering rates of violence, domestic abuse and even rape in such circles That's a nonsense argument since it's completely orthogonal to what I noted. Whatever you mean by "such circles" and "those circles" has no relation to what I noted. If women seek out partners with bad character, they will have to live with the consequences. At any age that's 18 or above, it is the woman's responsibility to ensure the partner is a respectable person from a respectable family before having a child with them. It doesn't take more than a few months of being together to determine it. If the person was initially good but becomes "wrong" later, this can in principle happen at any age. A higher age won't guard against it. In reality, the common reasons for the delay are banal, like not matching a wildly-high near-seven-figure income, six-foot height, eye color, etc.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- abeppu 4mo agoI didn't read the full paper only the abstract, but bc the political spectrum is correlated with education level or urban vs rural or multiple other factors that deeply impact what it is like to have kids. Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Or does the opportunity cost on careers plus the high cost of childcare plus the cost of living space impact conservatives and progressives alike? And among rural people without a college degree, do progressives still have fewer kids than their conservative neighbors? When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
- skissane 4mo ago> Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a constitutional law professor then federal appeals court judge, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.
- mike_hearn 4mo agoYes they do. Just grep the paper for the word "control" and you can quickly find the answers to these questions. This isn't a new finding and they've controlled for all the obvious factors.
- abeppu 4mo agoI did grep through the paper, and ... no not really. "Urban" and "rural" never appear. Among uses of "control", for their own work they have controlled for sex and race. Their Table 2 and Figure 2 are the same data displayed different ways and from the same analysis. In their mentions of other work they note related work on Europe that controlled for religiosity, education and income, and socioeconomic and attitudinal factors. Their table 1 actually shows that the p-value for religious attendance, education, two race variables , and birth year, were all tied with the politics variable, and showed that education, and both race variables had larger-magnitude estimates and z-values. After reading some of the paper, while I still think there's a relationship between political beliefs and number of kids, I don't see that their methods are convincing that this is more important than other such correlations.
- Balgair 4mo agoI hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter. It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally. No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions. Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is. Again, it's a weird little sub domain.
- skissane 4mo ago> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do. Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation
- HedonicEscal8r 4mo agoBy the 23rd century, sexual reproduction will be vastly transformed by technology. The discussions we're having now will be unrecognizable.
- skissane 4mo agoI think it will make less of a difference than you think. Do you think people who have 0-2 kids would be signing up to have 10+ if only we could grow babies in vats? I doubt it. By contrast, >10 kids is actually quite common in communities like Kiryas Joel. Most of the expense of children isn't the physical burden of pregnancy, it is the time and effort and expense in raising them. Making pregnancy easier won't make a huge difference to the birth rate, because for most women the burden of raising the child weighs much more heavily on her mind than the pregnancy itself does. Babies in vats would be an enticing option for wannabe single dads, gay male couples, women with medical issues – but the actual increase in "births" from those groups taking up that option is likely to be relatively modest. And natural biological reproduction is extremely cost efficient, due to millions of years of evolution optimising it – even after growing babies in vats becomes technically feasible, it is going to take a lot longer before it can compete on price with doing it the natural way. Of course, you could outsource the raising of your kids to AI robot nannies – but, that raises serious concerns about how well-adjusted they'd be, about the ethics – and apart from that, who would want to? Most people want to have kids because they actually want the emotional relationship of being their parent – absent religious conviction pushing them to do otherwise, they'd rather have a few they can invest in as individuals, than a large number with most of the actual work of parenting outsourced to AI.
- mike_hearn 4mo agoHere's an organically written summary of the paper. This is a plain vanilla regression analysis on the US GSS, which is a large poll of Americans done every year since the 1970s. Being a study of demographics it defines fertility to mean the number of children a couple has or doesn't have for any reason, a number which is driven primarily by people's decisions and not biological ability. It shows only two things: • The correlation between politics and fertility changes over time. It becomes really pronounced in the 1980s-1990s but during the baby boom years there is no link. • It only applies to white Americans. Black Americans show no such correlation. However the study cites a paper claiming that black Americans don't understand the terms liberal and conservative well, and suggests that may be the cause of the divergence (a data quality issue not a real difference in fertility). N.B. the title of the paper is deceptive. It claims a causal link but the paper itself admits the study is correlational and cannot establish causality. Misleading titles or abstracts are normal in academic social studies, unfortunately. They cite other papers showing the same correlation holds in Europe. Rest of the world isn't considered. It's surprising this paper got any attention and I'm not sure it'll get published in the end (it's early access). Regressions on US GSS are easy to do and many of them have been done before, there is nothing really new here.
- skeledrew 4mo agoMakes sense. Family creation and maintenance is a core philosophy of the right (see the various concerns surrounding family planning, education, queers, etc). There is a sort of Darwinian thing happening as a side effect of the held philosophies.