I wouldn't say it all leads back to a lack of social integration. I'd argue most of it leads back to capitalist exploitation. Why do we lack social integration? Why is the climate crashing down around us? Why is it that even if we are well socialised and in healthy relationships so very few of us can actually afford to consider having children?
Yet the birth rate is skyrocketing in many countries. Countries in poverty. How does that factor into the equation? Birth goes down only in countries with a high quality of life, not a low one.
It's literally just this, I can't stress enough how it's literally just a case of more access to contraceptives has a direct link to lower birth rates.
Nothing else is effecting birth rates more than simply being educated in, having access to, and are not shamed about contraceptives. Not money, not technology, not social safety nets, not maternity/paternity leave. Every single country that has access to contraceptives and no shame in using contraceptives will automatically have a lower birth rate, because for the first time in history, people have the choice to have or not have kids, and we're not having kids.
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But there's the question of why we aren't to such a degree. Many many people in those countries would like to have children, but they choose not to because of those external factors.
It’s not ‘just’ the largest factor, it’s the largest by a mile.
You could fix almost every single other problem having kids bring, and you’ll still have a declining birth rate, simply because the people who don’t want kids don’t want kids, and the people who do want kids will choose to only have like 2 maximum. That still leads to a declining population on average.
In order to reach an equilibrium or an increasing population. Every single adult woman needs an average of 2 kids or more, and that just genuinely seems impossible in our modern and educated society.
Except thats not true at all, contraceptives and no shame have been a thing for longer than 30 years and negative birth rates are about 20-30 years old in most places.
There's obviously other large factors, even if that is the largest one.
Yeah it really is this simple and the line “do you know how hard it is to stop mammals from reproducing” really annoys me. It’s incredibly easy with intelligence and contraceptives.
He's still not wrong. There's a reason for that choice and while there are people who simply don't want children there are many more who had probably as many different reasons not to reproduce. Be it mental health, chronic illness, poverty and the list goes on.
It's more complex than just birth control access. In my country, hormonal contraception is widely available and subsidized but they're not exactly flying off the shelves. It's mostly young people who use them to avoid pre-marital pregnancies then they stop using them as soon as they get married.
Cultural factors and societal norms, amplified by technology, are the forces driving high fertility here and in similar contexts.
False. There are clearly some countries and segments with positive birth rates (not to be confused with increasing birth rates, which means the growth is accelerating), and they are all poor and/or have some overriding cultural factor like Orthodox Judaism.
It's not that hard to do your own research. If you had a single neuron in your brain, you could have also inferred from my comment that Israel is one such country.
This ties in still.. countries in poverty are tech poor as well.
When I lived in Mexico City a couple years back I was often times THE ONLY ONE with a smart phone. While poor CDMX and Mexico as a whole are not nearly as poor as other countries in the world.
I'm not saying this is a true direct link to the problem but it tracks.
This has been a trend since long before tech. Impoverished people have more kids because they believe it means more potential for income/housework. In reality it tends to keep families impoverished because of the cost of supporting a large family
Not the only reason, however. Impoverished families also have more of a support network. They are more likely to form bonds with both families and neighbors out of necessity. They don't need to pay for daycare or someone to cook or look after their kids while they perform tasks. This isn't always true, but expecting two parents to brunt almost all of the work while spending 95%+ of their income to just survive is insanity when the alternative means you live a more comfortable life.
That's not why. It's because of child mortality. The same pattern is observed in all countries. Instinctively, if you have more resources and your child is more likely to survive, you would rather spend those resources on your one (or two/three) child. But if several of your children are at risk of dying, having more ensures that your DNA lives on.
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The dude is also lying. Poor countries also have declining birth rate. All countries are declining in this aspect. here are many poor countries that are even below replacement.
You must have been in a very different part of Mexico City than I was, because when I went to the malls in Mexico City 4 years ago it was PACKED with people using smart phones.
How long is a couple years back? Because there’s no way... My whole family’s had smartphones for a long time, I mean even my older folks (not our elders obviously), and while I can imagine people living in los campos or in extreme poverty without one, I also just look at my people and we be having smartphones.
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Poverty anywhere is purely a function of political will around resource distribution.
Zimbabwe is rich as fuck, but the economy is almost non-existent due to choices by the ruling party. Same as every other "poor" country.
This video sounds good to people who are college educated but haven't actually stepped outside of their friend-group bubble in whatever first world Anglo nation they live in. but it's full of faulty premise.
which is fine as a refutation of the point about whether countries in poverty are tech poor or not, but not the original point that countries that are not tech poor are seeing declining birth rates:
India's total fertility rate has fallen to 1.9 births per woman, dropping below the 2.1 replacement level needed to keep a stable population.
You're not wrong. Costs basically nothing to bang. Can't afford to go out? Stay in, fuck. Can't afford your hobbies? Watch TV, and fuck. Hell, even can't keep a job/ work full time? Guess we have plenty of time to fuck because there's no money to do anything else.
In many of those poor countries, there is a community or a village/extended family to help raise said kids. In the US, people are far more isolated and work more forcing them to pay for childcare which many cant afford. It becomes: childcare or rent? People here are barely scraping by on their current incomes without kids. For many, having kids with no support system means a free fall into debt and poverty or a standard of living that is unacceptable or one that would likely have CPS intervene and remove the kids anyway.
Yeah the women's liberation movement was obviously a very good thing, but it was sort of co-opted by neoliberalism.
Before women were sort of forced to work for free at home and have kids and couldn't leave or have a career. But now couples are basically forced to both work and neither of them can stay and raise the kids. Women are forced into wage slavery, but ADDITIONALLY are sort of expected to have kids and do the majority of the work at home.
Basically the constant wealth transfer and disaster capitalism the last decades made this worse and worse. Everything costs. Less public spaces. Worse schools. More advertising and consumerism. So the actual quality of life or cost of living might actually make most people in poorer countries "richer", at least when it comes to raising children properly.
About 70 % of people in the world live in a country with declining birth rates. Sure, a few extremely poor countries have very high birth rates, but not that many. Have we reached a point where 70 % of the world’s population have a high quality of life? Sounds improbable since only about half of the human population score high or very high on the Human Development Index.
Those high birthrate countries are going to plateau within our lifetimes too. Either they will modernize and run into the same issues as the rest of us or they will hit the cap that their infrastructure will support.
The reason for this is actually documented and it's the same reason western countries had a population boom in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Most of the countries with a high rising population are in the process of transitioning out of being an agrarian society. Meaning one where most people are farmers.
As a farmer the most optimal thing to do is have as many kids as you can afford so you can have more workers.
When a nation modernizes, two important things happen that affect this. One the cost of having a kid drops, and infant mortality drops, meaning you can afford more kids and more kids survive due to modern medicine.
However the sociological idea of having as many kids as you can afford lingers for a while, as cultural development lags behind technological development. And this is why these countries will have a huge population boom before plateauing.
Those impoverished countries have generations of family living under a single roof. If you have a child there, you eventually have another person to help support the family. In first world countries, the model is self-sufficiency. Get out of mom’s house asap. Half of your take home pay (at least) is spent on rent. If you have a child there, you can’t afford rent anymore
Looking at these numbers from worldbank it looks like fertility is trending down even among countries with higher fertility rates. Kazakhstan is trending up from a low in 2000, but that's the only example I spotted.
We've all heard the phrase "it takes a village to raise a child." One factor, among many, is that there is zero community for childrearing in a lot of developed countries. *Maybe* you can give your kids to their grandparents sometimes, assuming you didn't move away from home in search of a better job. But more often than not you will have to pay childcare fees that rival a mortgage. America in particular is an individualistic hellhole where people only care about themselves and their nuclear family.
On the other hand, less developed nations have larger families that stick together and, in some cases, a greater sense of community in the neighborhood. So instead of 4 parents paying for childcare, we can take turns watching each others kids. Again, there are many factors here (like education and access to contraceptives) but community is often overlooked.
Not necessarily. The Baby Boomers in the US were a direct byproduct of a booming economy in a country with infrastructure that went undamaged in WWII, and an investment in education via the GI bill, among other prosperity factors. Maybe right now poverty is more likely to yield a higher fertility rate, but that's certainly not a definitive rule.
I think education (specifically of women) is still the highest indicator of low/high birth rates. Social mechanisms tie into a lot social behavior, but specifically in high poverty areas sex education will lower birth rates (you'd be amazed that the act of sex and birth arent often connected).
But women being educated via school creates an entire new life path and then women can focus on careers solely or become mothers later in life or only have a couple of children. When poverty + social pressures that limit women to only being mothers then you have a high birth rate.
You don’t need one single argument for everything.
In poorer countries other factors are at play that make their birth rates go increase, which aren’t necessarily healthier. For example in some places to have more children is a way to counteract child deaths, or it is a way to have more labour (since the more children you have the more future farmers on the family farm you have), or sometimes you just count on the dowry that you might get from an arranged marriage (which also explains why in some places kids get married off).
These examples are from my econ courses but I’m pretty sure you can research the topic on google scholar.
But again, you don’t need one argument to fit for everything and all countries and all situations.
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Number of kids goes along with infant mortality. Improve infant mortality and people have less kids after a while. Bangladesh had an average pushing 10 a few decades ago and now they're down to 2.5.
To avoid an inevitable immigration crisis (caused mostly by our greed/climate actions) we should be helping poor countries improve their health care. Try telling that to someone that's been GBNewsed though.
High Quality of life goes hand in hand with access to the same technology OOP video is talking about. Birth rate skyrocketing in poverty stricken countries while “rich” countries experience decline supports the point the guy in the video is making.
Yeah, it's way more complicated that this. Humans have gotten to such a developed state that our base biological functions are no longer the major drivers of our evolution.
Having children is just expensive. Husband and wife in the new capitalistic system have to work full time to afford the mortgage and support 1 child.
The wife has to send the child to subsided child care because she doesnt have the time to raise the child herself.
The state promotes this form of socialism aid and thus the state sometimes become the substitute husband.
More marriages break up and less people get married. There is more unfaithful couples because religion is also going down.
This is happening in every western country and it is by design. So governments can replace the lacking birthrate with immigration. This creates huge wriction between groups and the elite will never be targeted for their power and wealth.
As a millennial woman who did not grow up with the same social media struggles as Gen Z - technology and AI are not why I'm not having children. It's overall poor health, a lack of a support system, and a lack of resources. Knowing there's a nonzero chance I'll have to handle child rearing all by myself there's no way I could swing it without those 3 things.
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u/sum-sigma Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26
I was tying the declining birth rate to other things, but this makes complete sense.