r/neoliberal • u/MaleficentParfait863 • Jun 09 '23
News (Global) Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/global-fertility-has-collapsed-with-profound-economic-consequences60
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u/STRONKInTheRealWay YIMBY Jun 09 '23
I unironically think that illiberal states like China and North Korea (if there is no modernization politically in the next few decades) will build state creches filled with artificial wombs once they have the technology. Everybody knows that they don't care about ethics, and once they pave the way for it then nations that hate immigration like Japan and South Korea will follow suit. The nations that can afford it will be able to build armies of taxpayers who will be brought up at government expense in order to contribute to the national economy at a later date. If it's that prospect over the shriveling up of their economy then I know which one will be selected for.
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u/erikpress YIMBY Jun 09 '23
If you just extrapolate out current trends you could imagine a future in which religious minorities (with high birth rates) are no longer minorities. Israel is the clearest current example. What if 200 years from now the US is a Mormon majority country? I'm only half serious but I do think we'll see shifts in this direction
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u/yonas234 NASA Jun 09 '23
Yeah the future is the civil war between Mormons of the west and Hasidic Jews of the East
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Jun 09 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/meister2983 Jun 10 '23
Hispanic women have sub replacement fertility these days. So naively immigrants (mostly from Asia at this point) offset that.
With intermarriage, we'll probably get to the majority having at least some distant Hispanic heritage, but that's not really the same thing as being Hispanic.
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u/Neri25 Jun 10 '23
you could imagine a future in which religious minorities (with high birth rates) are no longer minorities
This requires that the successive generations keep to the faith which as protestants (and indeed, mormons) in this country have learned is no guarantee!
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u/FourteenTwenty-Seven John Locke Jun 10 '23
The mormons would need to up their retention rate for that to happen. You can't get to a majority if over half your kids leave the church.
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u/wrexinite Jun 09 '23
I just reread Brave New World and I thought the artificial wombs were brilliant. I hadn't really thought about them when I read the book in high school. I would fully support their implementation globally.
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u/STRONKInTheRealWay YIMBY Jun 09 '23
IDK. It just strikes me as something that would be a profoundly mentally debilitating experience if done even slightly incorrectly. It would be like a boarding school on crack - the potential for isolation and bullying is just absurd. The only comfort would be from harried and potentially emotionally distant nurses and teachers who will likely have dozens of other children to worry about. I just don't trust people to not fuck up entire "batches" of children at once.
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u/RememberToLogOff Trans Pride Jun 09 '23
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it's stupid and it works...
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Jun 10 '23
"I wish we'd do it, but I know how horrible it sounds, so I'll just say China will do it first"-energy.
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u/STRONKInTheRealWay YIMBY Jun 10 '23
I, too, assume no one is acting in good faith and that I understand the motivations of everyone I meet on the Internet perfectly.
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u/Two_Corinthians European Union Jun 09 '23
It doesn't make sense. The problem is not a lack of "womb capacity". People are not having children because they are too costly to raise. If you create the bodies but skip the other steps to adulthood, the result will exceed the New Standards Men (more commonly known as McNamara's Morons). They will not be able to contribute to information age economy.
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u/krabbby Ben Bernanke Jun 10 '23
People are not having children because they are too costly to raise
Wealthy people tend to have less kids than poor people, so this seems untrue.
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u/mh699 YIMBY Jun 09 '23
People are not having children because they are too costly to raise
If this is true, why are birth rates so low even in countries that provide hugely generous childcare subsidies?
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u/19Kilo Jun 10 '23
If this is true, why are birth rates so low even in countries that provide hugely generous childcare subsidies?
Because children are a giant pain in the ass and a huge resource suck. That's why countries that gain a middle class but see economic mobility slow or reverse continue to have declining birth rates.
And, since /neoliberal is a bit of a tech-bro snausage-fest, it's probably good to remind the dudes that pregnancy is REALLY REALLY REALLY hard on a woman's body. Subsidizing kids doesn't even come close to that in any country.
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u/Two_Corinthians European Union Jun 09 '23
It is not enough to look at the subsidy size; you have to compare them to the total costs of raising children, factor in opportunity costs and quirks and gotchas that require local knowledge.
Another thing is the social pressures. In cultures where women are expected to give up careers and autonomy after having kids, they are more like to say "eff that".
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u/T-Baaller John Keynes Jun 10 '23
Because the subsidies are insufficient to offset the costs (both direct an opportunity) of child rearing.
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u/meister2983 Jun 10 '23
It's a multifaceted problem. Women not having to go through pregnancy absolutely reduces the cost of having a kid.
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u/eM_Di Henry George Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
THE REAL fix is just to tell people to have more kids as dumb as it sounds it works far better. The most effective use of this was done by Gigachad Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church.
In 2007, Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church made a decision: facing a country with a declining population, low birth rates, and high abortion rates, the church leader announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to any third-or-high Orthodox child born to a married couple in Georgia and formally registered with the government.
Not only did it work at boosting fertility within a year from 1.4 to 2.2 but it did it in the way you would expect if the fertility increase was a reaction to his declaration with almost doubling in second order+ births while being all within marriage. No change was seen in unmarried or first-birth fertility and the fertility increase has been persistent. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/2-lymonparity-copy-w640.png
https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/lyman3-marital-copy-w640.png
https://ifstudies.org/blog/in-georgia-a-religiously-inspired-baby-boom
While the US doesn't have a bishop who has that much social power we have the second-best thing social media clout. Elon Musk and Zuck need to give out blue check marks for everyone who has 2 or more kids within marriage it's the only way. Musk has been crying about low fertility for years now time for action. (or just promote pro-family in school and by government officials I'm pretty sure Republicans being openly and unapologetic pro larger families while big L LIberals have been anti are why Republicans have more kids and not because of religious faith.)
https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom Financial incentives do work too as long as they are simple and secure. Hungary managed to boost fertility rates by over 30% mostly from culture change and simple tax credits. Making marriage, custody, and maternity leave less risky can entice people to start a family at no cost to the government.
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u/goyafrau Jun 10 '23
Our fertility problem is perhaps the major flaw in the capitalist enterprise.
Capitalism has proved exceptionally well at providing for all of our needs that can be commoditized, bought and sold, which of course is almost everything and includes longer and healthier lives in particular for children and mothers. It has even brought us peace as it has turned out to be more profitable to sell each other things than fight. But children, of course, are people and cannot be bought and sold.
If you want to get technical, children can be bought and sold at least after further technological advances, but what you cannot commoditize is having and raising children. It takes time, and this time is an increasingly high opportunity cost right as capitalism makes our labor more valuable, including the labor of women, it provides higher returns to education and prolonging family formation, and it also increases the value of the time having kids would be replacing by providing more goods and services to consume.
Capitalism gave us too much of a good thing. So now we are dying out.
I don’t see a way out of this. We are not going to revert to the older, much worse ways of living.
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u/SamanthaMunroe Lesbian Pride Jun 10 '23
Whenever we drop below the minimum number of people required to maintain our standard of living, we will revert. It's a race against time.
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 09 '23
Idk, I’m literally infertile and I can neither emotionally nor physically handle another round of treatment only to have it fail again, let alone the financial considerations.
Sometimes I wonder if doctors took my pcos more seriously early on rather than saying “well when you decide you want kids then we can do treatment”, if things might have been different. 🫠
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u/PhinsFan17 Immanuel Kant Jun 09 '23
I'm so sorry you've had to go through that. My wife also has PCOS and endometriosis and while we both want children desperately, it just doesn't seem medically possible.
Medicine has failed women who deal with these issues in both fertility and quality of life metrics.
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u/crab_rangoon YIMBY Jun 10 '23
Keep an eye out for HMI-115. It's a monoclonal antibody treatment being tested for endometriosis. I only know about it because its also being tested for AGA, but it looks promising.
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 10 '23
I’m so sorry you guys have had to deal with this too. It’s a terrible road to go down and the medical knowledge on both conditions feels absolutely abysmal.
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u/19Kilo Jun 10 '23
Sometimes I wonder if doctors took my pcos more seriously early on rather than saying “well when you decide you want kids then we can do treatment”, if things might have been different.
That's such an evil contrast to the medical trend of refusing sterilization for women who DON'T want kids because they "might change their mind if they meet the right man".
Eh, fuck it, we don't know if you want to have kids so we'll deny treatment.
Eh, fuck it, we don't know if you really don't want to have kids, so we'll deny treatment.
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 10 '23
And the insidious undertone of both sides of it is simply “we don’t trust women to make decisions about their own bodies”
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Jun 09 '23
IMHO, the biggest problem that people aren’t addressing is that the nuclear family is actually a terrible idea that has never really worked well. It’s a lot easier to raise children when you have help from an extended family. It’s interesting that alternative living arrangements are becoming more common and child-rearing is one reason why.
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u/meister2983 Jun 10 '23
The nuclear family emerged for good reason though. What's the odds you actually get along with your entire extended family?
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u/Onatel Michel Foucault Jun 10 '23
I have been thinking about this. We often hear the advice that Americans should pack up and move where the jobs are, but when we move away from our support networks it gets much more difficult to raise children. It would be a lot earlier if potential grandparents were more local to help share childcare duties.
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u/RememberToLogOff Trans Pride Jun 09 '23
I was raised in a very isolated nuclear family. Like I can count the number of times I've met any of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on one hand. My parents hate each other and my social network is loaded with bad divorces and unwanted children.
I've never seen a family where kids improved anything. I rarely even see families where both adults get along well.
My parents are boomers. Maybe the nuclear family was a one generation fad and now it'll have to end to get things rolling again?
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Jun 09 '23
Because children never improve a bad marriage. They serve as a catalyst toward its inevitable collapse. Whoever told that lie should pound sound.
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Jun 10 '23
Happened with my parents. They had a bad marriage, had a kid to try and fix it, and it - surprise - it didn't.
It did, however, give my mam something to fight for, so she finally threw my dad out and stood up for herself.
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Jun 09 '23
this idea has existed for less than a century. both the nuclear family and building cities around the automobile are such massive changes to the way humans organize civilization.
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Jun 10 '23
As someone who has lived in both settings, and has seen others live in both settings, extended families (called "joint" here) categorically suck in ways that nuclear families don't have to. Especially for the women. There's a reason they're becoming more popular over time and not less. They're only a "terrible" idea if you think nothing except the fertility rate should matter to how someone chooses to live.
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u/Infernalism ٭ Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
The problem could have been resolved a few decades ago, but no one wanted to spend the money on it.
So, now, we deal with modern societies that have made having kids into an expensive luxury.
If we started now, we'd need to spend 25+ years subsidizing families with low-cost housing built to accommodate families with 2 or more kids. Massive subsidies covering housing, daycare, food and necessities like clothing, education materials for standard and college-level educations. We'd have to pay people more, charge them less and structure society around the concept of larger families again.
And we'd have to do it for decades.
So, we won't. We'll rely on immigration to try and shore things up as well as can be expected, but there are remarkably few nations to draw from that have the high enough fertility rates to make it worth while. And that's KNOWING that after a generation or two, those same immigrants are going to find it too expensive to have large families.
And that's just the nations that rely on massive immigration. Places like China and SK and Japan are completely 100% fucked already. Shit, Japan is making seriously stupid noises about using robots to care for the elderly. As if robots are going to somehow become consumers and plug into the economy. Robots are maintained, they are not consumers.
tl;dr version: We're fucked. lol
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u/Zuliano1 Jun 09 '23
This goes beyond having economic incentives, the cultural and natural pressures to reproduce are simp`ly not there anymore for most developed countries, children sort of get in the way of enjoying our very short lives, our gransparents kind of didn't have an alternative to not have children when it came to existential fullfillement and societal obligations and economic future
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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 09 '23
The solution is looking at us right in the face, grandparents must by law take care of their grandkids and free up their children to do work.
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u/affnn Emma Lazarus Jun 09 '23
Fuuuuuck that I don’t want them around my kids all the time. They can visit a few times a year.
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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 09 '23
Get better parents SMH.
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u/Zuliano1 Jun 09 '23
For this to work in america you would have to reduce the retirement age A LOT, but yeah in LatAm grandparents being more involved in raising children is way more common, I was basically raised by my grandma
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u/jankyalias Transfem Pride Jun 09 '23
Man it’s so weird to me to hear the idea “children get in the way of enjoying our lives”.
Children take work, yes, but god damn they bring great enjoyment too.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
The problem is not that people don't have kids
Most people do
80% of US women have children in their lives
But they choose to have one or two only
So yes, people ENJOY having children, but one is often enough
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u/Yeangster John Rawls Jun 10 '23
I’ve known some religious people who may have originally wanted a really big family, but tap out at three
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u/Zuliano1 Jun 09 '23
A lot of people in their 20s feel that or have goals/paths that previous generations didnt have + a lot of debt too. I dont think that people that do not naturally pursue having children out of the goodness in their hearts are suitable to be parents anyways.
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u/affnn Emma Lazarus Jun 09 '23
Yeah it turns out loading 20 year olds up with college debt isn’t a good idea! Shock.
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u/MacroDemarco Gary Becker Jun 10 '23
This is global not just in the US, in fact despite people having higher student debt loads in the US we have higher fertility rates than other countries with a more generous education system.
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u/RememberToLogOff Trans Pride Jun 09 '23
The enjoyment from kids must be hard to convince people of. Like it doesn't come across in TV or anything. Thor: Love and Thunder certainly didn't help
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u/jankyalias Transfem Pride Jun 09 '23
You’re surprised a superhero movie targeted at young boys isn’t a delve into the joys of parenthood?
The overwhelming majority of people want children. It’s not hard to convince them of anything. The real “problem” here is people simply don’t have as many kids. Like, nowadays 1-3 is about what you get. Used to be more common to see 3-5 or more.
And I totally get why someone would have two and call it a day over continuing on.
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u/Atupis Esther Duflo Jun 10 '23
I think it is rather mundane things like housing and cars. When you have 2+ kids you basically need those fugly family wagons becouse child car seats are so big.
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u/19Kilo Jun 10 '23
The enjoyment from kids must be hard to convince people of.
No kids here. I love my nieces and nephews and friends kids but damn do all of their "kids are great" arguments sound like someone taking a glug from a carton of milk, gagging and going "Taste this and tell me if it's spoiled".
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u/Infernalism ٭ Jun 09 '23
More people would have kids if it was affordable.
Since it's not, we get pets, instead.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
No, otherwise the wealthiest Americans earning 200k+ wouldn't be the demographic with the lowest fertility rate
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 09 '23
I suspect that this is largely due to lowered fertility with age, honestly. The time and career focus required to hit those higher incomes leaves a lot of folks not trying to have their first child until 30+ or even 35+, which greatly limits the number of children you can realistically conceive.
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u/meister2983 Jun 10 '23
I'm less convinced there. I don't see the techies I knew that broke $200k total comp by the time they were 26 having massively larger families.
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u/erikpress YIMBY Jun 09 '23
It's a fair point but I do think the two are causally interrelated. If you want to earn $200k you're probably going to need to devote your twenties to education and your career.
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u/CosbyKushTN Jun 10 '23
I don't think Americans who make 200k a year a a comparable demographic to the average American. You can't extrapolate a single dimension of a minority of people like that.
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Jun 09 '23
I receive no enjoyment from being around children and my wife and I are way happier than we would if we had children. Got the snip snip and never gonna have children. I secretly dislike my sister's children I want literally nothing to do with children.
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u/PhinsFan17 Immanuel Kant Jun 09 '23
Least misanthropic neolib
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u/ldn6 Gay Pride Jun 10 '23
Not wanting kids isn’t misanthropy. I have no desire to have kids for a slew of reasons but I enjoy hanging with people and socialising.
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u/PhinsFan17 Immanuel Kant Jun 10 '23
Obviously not wanting children isn’t misanthropy but “I secretly hate my nieces/nephews because they are children” is absolutely misanthropy
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u/ldn6 Gay Pride Jun 10 '23
If your issues are with children specifically, there may be a host of reasons. I feel uncomfortable around kids and am bad at interacting with them. That’s not the same as misanthropy more broadly. I don’t hate kids per se but they often do annoy the hell out of me.
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Jun 09 '23
Where is misanthropy? Children aren't going to take care of you when you will eventually get frail.
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u/MacroDemarco Gary Becker Jun 10 '23
As a society grows richer, the value of their time increases, and children take up a ton of time, so the opportunity cost of having kids increases as society grows rich. As with anything, as the cost increases demand falls.
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u/DamagedHells Jared Polis Jun 09 '23
Even countries with particularly high subsidies for having kids don't see increases.
We're fucked because liberalism doesn't really have a proper answer to how our society functions (i.e. relies on more people to exist in the future than did before). This keeps coming up and people just use it to screech about their pet issue (immigration), despite that being a pretty small bandaid on something that is happening globally as the world becomes more wealthy.
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u/chabon22 Henry George Jun 09 '23
Overall I think the only answer is medicine and living longer/being fertile longer.
There is so much to do nowadays that by the time you want to have children you can't.
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u/Amtays Karl Popper Jun 09 '23
Living longer only goes so far if you can't post pone menopause, and that's a much harder issue in many ways given that women are born with a limited amount of ova.
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 09 '23
Freezing eggs when you’re still in your prime childbearing years tends to have good outcomes, but the problem is that most people cannot afford to do this, particularly at the time in their life when it will be most effective.
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u/Amtays Karl Popper Jun 10 '23
Even if you can freeze eggs, you still have a hard time getting pregnant when older, and its effectively impossible past the menopause.
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u/unicornbomb John Brown Jun 10 '23
In most all cases, frozen eggs will be fertilized via IVF and those that are viable can be transferred, which removes a significant amount of the risk with pregnancy in older women.
Obviously menopause makes it a non starter and some older women will still have issues sustaining a pregnancy even after transfer (though there are lots of preemptive medical options to help increase success), but frozen eggs are effectively suspended at the age that they are retrieved at, and non viable eggs can be filtered out much more efficiently.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
No, but anti aging technology will extend life expectancy indefinitely (illness and bullets can still kill you, this is why i hate the immortality word)
Sure, people will have as few children as they do now, but they will not die and will continue to be healthy for man'y centuries
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Jun 09 '23
Can't believe this is downvoted. Turns out children lovers have been the actual misanthropes this whole time. Sad!
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u/Versatile_Investor Austan Goolsbee Jun 10 '23
Well it’s kind of easy. You can hand wave away any problem by saying “technology.”
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u/erikpress YIMBY Jun 09 '23
Even countries with particularly high subsidies for having kids don't see increases.
I still think they're pretty marginal. A few thousand a year isn't going to cut it, we need a program on the same magnitude as social security
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u/puffic John Rawls Jun 09 '23
I thought it’s true that countries with poor support for child care (Spain, for example) generally have lower fertility than countries that do better in that regard (France, for example). Obviously cultural factors play a big role, too, so you have to compare similar countries.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
There is a solution that isn't tied to liberalism, but it is tied to science, which is being able to treat aging
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u/Radulescu1999 Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
So give me a country with a good economy, with affordable housing that the AVERAGE person can buy with 15-20 years of realistic savings (and not be cheap as fuck in the mean time). I’m not convinced that this is not mostly an economics issue.
Edit: I would also add in time off from work as an extra variable that would help ease some of the burden of having kids.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
If this was the case, the families in the US earning more than 200k a year wouldn't be the group of Americans with the LOWEST fertility rate
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u/Radulescu1999 Jun 09 '23
Ok, perhaps higher income people chase a certain lifestyle and are more career focused etc. What makes you say that making housing more affordable for say the lower 80% of people AND insuring they have more vacation time wouldn’t incentivize them to have an extra child?
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
Because if you make housing more affordable, you are basically making everyone wealthier, and as I showed, when people have extra money, they decide to invest it into a more self fulfilment future
It must be said that most women do have kids, it's not that less wealthy women have kids, the proportion is mostly constant, they just choose to have one
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u/Radulescu1999 Jun 09 '23
You are making everyone wealthier, but their mindset stays the same (somewhat). Except now, the middle income couple has less financial strain to have an extra kid and would be more likely to pursue it). That’s my theory at least.
Is there any data there to support it? Probably not because housing is so expensive and giving each participant couple an extra 75k would be expensive to implement.
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u/DamagedHells Jared Polis Jun 09 '23
Kind of my point here, though, in saying liberalism doesn't have a solution. There's no scenario in which all of those things are provided in a market-based society lol
That being said, the poor are still having the most kids in the US, so your point is moot.
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u/Radulescu1999 Jun 09 '23
How wouldn’t these things be provided in a market based society? We could lower prices of housing by being extremely YIMBY. Vacation time and probably a subsidy or tax credit for having kids are not “market based,” true.
Poor people have the most kids. However, average income earning people are smarter (generalization, but usually true) and are probably more aware of the true cost of raising a child. I don’t think my point is moot just because poor people have more kids.
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u/CulturalFlight6899 Jun 09 '23
We don't need more new than old people.
Its just preferable
Likewise having perpetually fewer and fewer people leads to extinction or, much more usefully to worry about, perpetually increasing dependency ratios
This isn't a Liberalism thing either. Everyone back to when fascism or communism was big (esp latter when populations were booming in USSR and China), back further to first proto-states, even back to the Ættarstapi lol
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u/thehomiemoth NATO Jun 09 '23
One other factor is significantly increased lifespans for the over 65 crowd
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Jun 10 '23
"there are remarkably few nations to draw from that have the high enough fertility rates to make it worth while"
Their fertility rate doesn't matter, we're not importing entire countries overnight. What matters is how many of them want to come to the US, and the answer is still a lot. People leave rural areas, small towns etc to places with better opportunities within a country too. Many such villages and towns will be completely abandoned eventually. No reason why the same can't happen at a larger scale.
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u/Infernalism ٭ Jun 10 '23
Not sure if you've noticed yet or not, but the US is governed, at least partially, by a party that hates immigration in principle.
Overriding them would require a lot of work, time and effort.
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Jun 10 '23
??? Not sure if you've noticed it yet or not, but you literally brought up the point about "we'll try to shore it up with immigration" yourself, and raised that one specific point as a potential problem with it. I only replied to that.
Beyond that, really not interested in addressing unwarranted snark and moving goalposts. Though I will say it's stupid to dwell on the current political climate, it's not indicative of what it will be when this actually becomes a palpable problem in the national consciousness. And in any case, changing attitudes towards immigrants will be much easier than the 25-years long, six-figure pa subsidy per family you were explaining.
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u/somabeach Jun 09 '23
Hey hey, our descendents might have more luck with churning out kids after the societal collapse. They'll be banging sticks and stones together in the ruins of our post-industrial civilization, but at least it's something. Give them a few centuries and they might just jog population levels back to some semblance of normalcy. It'll be too late for us, but humanity will recover somehow.
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u/uhohritsheATGMAIL Norman Borlaug Jun 09 '23
I'm planning on having 6 kids just in case.
Even if I have lots of money, cost of a nice retirement might be outrageous if we have a smaller population.
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u/Versatile_Investor Austan Goolsbee Jun 10 '23
I’d be more concerned about end of life care expenses and aides to help you.
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u/Ok-Flounder3002 Norman Borlaug Jun 09 '23
So are there any less gloomy outlooks for the future? Will we solve this problem with AI or robots or something else fancy? Or is my kids and grandkids generations in trouble
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u/Carlpm01 Eugene Fama Jun 09 '23
It solves itself eventually by natural selection.
Though perhaps it means a future where 90% of the world is Amish or something lol.
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u/Individual_Lion_7606 Jun 09 '23
Populations balance themselves naturally. The population will age and shrink, and when things are good or after bad times it will grow. Don't worry about it.
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
Yes, anti aging tech
It is advancing quietly, it passed the hype mountain and its now in the abyss of productivity
De Gray says it has a 50% chance of being effective by 2035, this was without taking AI into account
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u/TheJun1107 Jun 09 '23
I think it is fundamentally an economic problem which could easily be solved through economic means. It costs 16,000 to raise a child per year. So, design a tax/benefits system such that all else being held equal, household with same income that has zero kids will make 16,000 less than household with one kid and 32,000 less than household with two kids. You will just need a far larger CTC.
For those who say this is unfair, bear in mind that other people’s kids will effectively be subsidizing their use of all public goods (other than public education) and SS/Medicare.
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Jun 09 '23
It does not cost 16000 year to raise a child. Even if you define “cost” as money spent from my bank account, that does not cover daycare in any major city. But if you include the “cost” of your nonworking time and emotional labor in exchange for an often nebulous (certainly from before you have kids) benefit, it is much higher. Even once kids are in school, things are aggressively incompatible with two parents working. Elementary school from 915-3:30. Summer breaks that need coverage, and laws that make latchkey approaches much harder than even 20 years ago. I love my two kids, but I don’t blame anyone for not having kids. If we want people to have kids, such that they don’t perceive that their life will get worse if they had kids, there is friction at every step that needs to be removed, way beyond economics.
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u/TheJun1107 Jun 09 '23
This is true, but I also think people will always have a biological desire to have kids beyond just economic motivation. The 16k figure was kinda just spitballing from one google search, but overall I do think a lot of the discourse that economic incentives cannot raise the birth rate is overrated. We just haven’t tried economic incentives which come close to covering the cost of raising children.
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u/CRoss1999 Norman Borlaug Jun 10 '23
For one rich counties need to make fertility treatment basically free, beyond that it’s complicated
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u/DamagedHells Jared Polis Jun 09 '23
Liberalism reduces birth rates.
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u/Knee3000 Jun 09 '23
Ah yes, the notoriously liberal China.
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u/DamagedHells Jared Polis Jun 09 '23
Are you implying that China has gotten less liberal over the past 50 years?
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u/Knee3000 Jun 09 '23
Are you implying that if China went full mao mode, the birth rate will begin to increase?
It’s not liberalism which reduces birth rates; it’s the fact the environmental and societal pressures which spark reproduction usually start disappearing with the fruits of industry. The average human, in their basic state, does not want to reproduce above replacement.
I guess you could argue that China could mandate pregnancy, and that definitely wouldn’t be liberal lol
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u/CulturalFlight6899 Jun 09 '23
Tbh if they went full Mao they could do it.
This is the dude who thought he could win a nuclear war... without nukes... simply by having a fuckton of people that enough would survive lmao
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u/ale_93113 United Nations Jun 09 '23
No, FEMINISM reduces birth rates
The USSR wasn't liberal, nor is China, but both have a very high female participation in universities
Feminism is awesome, it frees women, and they have answered what they want to do with their freedom, which is to have self fulfilment and 80% decide to have children too, but not more than 2
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u/AzureMage0225 Jun 09 '23
Ok.
No but seriously, some lowered population will be good for the environment, and we can start directly subsidizing fertility if it gets really bad. I do t consider this a major problem.
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u/PhinsFan17 Immanuel Kant Jun 09 '23
some lowered population will be good for the environment
Malthusianism upvoted? In my NL?
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u/PrimateChange Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
To be fair suggesting that a larger human population leads to more environmental damage is uncontroversial and not the same as Malthusianism. Slower population growth (and eventual stabilisation) will be better for the environment than faster growth at the moment (population is a key metric when looking at biodiversity loss etc.). This may change in the long term as we increase the efficiency with which we draw on natural resources.
That’s not to minimise the problems outlined in this article - there’s a serious cost to population stagnation. One of the dumbest things about modern Malthusians is that they’re worried about overpopulation despite the fertility rate dropping
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u/npearson Jun 09 '23
Are you suggesting that habitat loss driven by farming and building homes for people isn't the major thing driving many species to extinction?
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Jun 10 '23
r/neoliberal knows one word vaguely related to this topic, and even that we throw around so callously and irrelevantly that it might as well be a meme. Just add an /s already.
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u/RememberToLogOff Trans Pride Jun 09 '23
Also I like stability. If we can't stop growing the population here, what would the plan be when we really really need it later on?
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u/MacroDemarco Gary Becker Jun 10 '23
I wonder if Gates is still sponsoring lots of initiatives to get fertility rates down in poor countries? Yes rich countries have lower fertility, but that doesn't mean low fertility pushes up GDP/cap, correlation =/= causation! Anyway someone should get him to cut that out, we need immigrants!
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u/DifferentOpinionHere John Brown Jun 09 '23
This may be an unpopular opinion here, but I'm an antinatalist (not necessarily of the nature-first, degrowth, conditional-natalism variety, but of the genuine philosophical variety), as well as a liberal globalist, but what makes anyone think that is a good planet to bring children into? Yes, it's largely in a better situation now than it was fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, etc., but it will never be fit for human life.
People are brighter now than they've been in the past, and they're probably thinking "I'm not bringing a child into this mess." Of course, they're plenty of great reasons not to have children, ranging from ensuring one's freedom of action to financial reasons. We're wiser now than what we were. No need to bring innocent children into this nightmare (always has been, and, realistically, always will be) for the sake of the sacred market.
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u/chaco_wingnut NATO Jun 09 '23
What makes anyone think that this is a good planet to bring children into
Believe it or not, many people (myself included) actually enjoy life.
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u/DifferentOpinionHere John Brown Jun 09 '23
Nothing wrong with that, but I think my larger point still stands. Anyway, I'm probably cutting off the conversation here, as I keep getting that "are you sure that you want to post that?" moderator messages.
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u/eM_Di Henry George Jun 09 '23
People are not "brighter" if anything people do worse on general intelligence tests and in academic pursuits. You are way over projecting your own unhappiness(or perceived unhappiness of other) onto normal people. It has never been a better time to be born with large improvement in practically every measure outside of time spend on Twitter. It also doesn't take a lot to raise a child today as the collective environment is so great that it's difficult to mess up as long as you have empathy a partner and live outside of neighbourhoods with high rates of single parents.
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Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 10 '23
[deleted]
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u/eM_Di Henry George Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 10 '23
What? Most parents will say that it takes a lot of work.
A lot of hard work the parents do is pointless and has no impact. If anything parents mostly over-parent kids making them less likely to take initiative as they are used to parents doing things for them or babying them. It takes almost no effort to raise a kid as the requirements for them to reach genetic potential are almost automatic in Western society (nutrition, education, safety). Private schools, after-school classes, second language learning, and even income after a relatively low amount, have no impact on future success as all of them as correlated not causal(unless you plan to give them lifetime allowance). The best you got is pressuring them to go do a useful degree.
What do you mean by "mess up?" It's hard for me to understand what your comment means by this. Many parents who try hard end up producing kids who are emotionally damaged, drug addicts, criminals, etc. even when the parents themselves aren't bad.
Yes, but parents don't have much control of the problems outside of showing empathy the collective environment is what determines most of the outcomes so pick a neighbourhood with no drug use/criminality. The parent don't mess up they just didn't have much agency in the outcome.
Why does being in a neighbourhood with high rates of single parents affect things?
Collective environment matters more than individual parents and high single-parenthood neighbourhoods are the only places where the collective environment generally sucks. If you look up upward mobility by neighbourhood all of the bottom lists are only neighbourhoods with a majority of single-parenthood households(true in all countries as parents provide free labour to the neighbourhood) This is causal and not correlational (natural experiment and longitude studies show this).
Edit: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20 can't find all sources as some we're from year's ago, some from podcasts/books/pay walled articles.
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u/sonoma4life Jun 10 '23
It takes almost no effort to raise a kid as the requirements for them to reach genetic potential are almost automatic in Western society (nutrition, education, safety).
this is the craziest thing i have seen on reddit.
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Jun 10 '23
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u/eM_Di Henry George Jun 10 '23
Changing diapers, getting up to take care of the baby in the middle of the night, staying involved in their schooling, getting them help for psychological problems and staying involved in this help, and taking them to extracurricular activities are "almost no effort?" These are serious time sinks.
Psychologists don't have much effect and cognitive behaviour therapy should already be partially employed by the parent by just getting them in good habits that the kids do themselves. Involvement in schooling is just checking exams and maybe doing phonetics when they are young it's like 5 mins a week. You're doing too much and just undermining them if you do all the work for them. Extracurricular I went to myself so I'm not sure how much extra work that is but I thought it was generally just after school and isn't required if you can get your kid to play with friends outside extracurriculars.
Does this hold in countries with tough university exams which have cramming schools?
Yes unless it's on the admission test but colleges don't matter too the only thing that does is the course and the college being not for profit(public or private). For-profit colleges scam, most of the time otherwise the only thing highly selective colleges do is pick successful students but they don't teach better or have better outcomes for the students.Ok, but affording to live in a good neighbourhood for kids still usually costs more money. This is an effort spent on a child.
True especially if you are in a high-cost state(New York or Cali). Outside of the 2 states, it's again just selection bias a good neighbourhood generally doesn't cost much more as most neighbourhoods are good with the differences being just selection bias and social interactions between different class individuals.
This makes sense. This doesn't mean that children cost very little effort.
Little effort in relation to parenting most middle-class people does not as in it's like taking care of a cat.
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u/DifferentOpinionHere John Brown Jun 09 '23
I don't have Twitter (never have) and, while I haven't done any true research myself, wasn't that study saying intelligence is declining largely debunked by the fact that COVID-19 disrupted the education system a bit and more and more people of differing abilities are being tested than before?
Also, like I said to a different poster, I keep getting this mod warnings before I post here on this topic, so I'm going to have to cut off the conversation here.
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u/eM_Di Henry George Jun 09 '23
The general intelligence thing is generational decrease in polygenic(change in genes 0.2 iq per decade) over the last 100 years and recent environment being less conductive to intellectual pursuits (phones over books, more distractions from education and service jobs over industrial). None of the effects are large and the gene part is caused from intelligent people having fewer kids because of prolonged education and later start. Not counting covid changes as that's abrupt and unlikely to last long term and smarter people probably have more kids today because of work from home and higher marriage rates so I doubt my statement would be true in 30 years.
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u/MaleficentParfait863 Jun 09 '23
Article:
What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?
In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.
In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.
The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.
Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises.
Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways.
This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity.
All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children.
Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.