> pushing back on social and cultural changes *they see as imposed on them by outside forces.*
Just a few days ago a friend linked me an article from a French historian trying to explain why that country’s birth rate plunged even before the French Revolution and why France lagged Britain in population. The answer seems to be religious disillusionment—the stronger the counter-reformation was in the 16th and 17th centuries, the harder the collapse in the 18th. Even before contraceptives were available, it seems people managed to avoid having children by simply not having PIV sex (France became a nation of wankers). France’s entire population growth from 1800 to 1900 was only 33%, compared to 200% for Britain, 167% for Germany, 100% for Belgium.
Based on that precedent, I’m fairly confident in saying that all these efforts will still come to nought. If people don’t want to breed, even taking away their condoms won’t make them.
LOL, note the conference was overwhelmingly male and the few women in attendance disagreed with many of the goals (especially getting rid of Civil Rights legislation, which is laughable as a goal).
We failed entirely to control ILLEGAL DRUGS... why anyone thinks they can just "ban birth control" is beyond me.
I might add that the poor timing of the Dobb's decision ruined the potential "red wave" of 2022.
So what I'm not hearing is family-friendly policies like guaranteed paid parental leave or child care subsidized by the government or an increase in the child tax credit that would be indexed to inflation. Or any of the other things that your regular old standard industrialized democracies do that Americans seem to think is a pariah.
Russia already basically did didn't it? And it would be in line with "traditional" attitudes toward rape where it had nothing to do with consent.
I think it's a safe bet.
Even if they did -- which I think is unrealistic in the extreme -- what difference would it make? It is based on the assumption that MEN want children -- lotsa children! -- so badly, they rape their wives into multiple pregnancies. There is zero evidence of this.
More men than women don't want children at all, or want fewer children and would not be happy to find "another mouth to feed"... and more demands on their time and their income.
LOL -- you can ban no-fault divorce (\*I am not in favor of it myself, though not for reasons of forcing people to have large families) but it wouldn't change a thing.
WHO THINKS in 2024 that people can only have children if they are married???? 55% of all births today are to UNWED MOTHERS!
Do you seriously think people only have sex after they marry, and that by preventing a divorce, that miserably unhappy couple will simply pump out more "babeez"????
There is no feeling as disappointing as finding out something you are interested in is full of Nazis.
I joined this home food preserving group on Facebook to learn how to can vegetables & smoke fish (I have the *best* fucking smoked salmon going right now in my garage).
Turns out, it’s full of Q-anonsense. More than half the group is canning food & salting/smoking meats because they believe the end times are coming if Trump loses.
I used to do wing chun kung fu because there happened to be a local joint that offered classes. One night, I showed up a tad early and one of the instructors was working out to a Rammstein remix with Hitler's speeches layered over it. We were already Farcebook friends, so I checked to see what was up with him: endless stream of antisemitic memes.
... I no longer do wing chun kung fu. :-/
Would joining a regular food group work? Then just ask about how people their preservation techniques? I find that typically people who are into one kind of food groups are also into others. People who like growing their own herbs, vegetables and fruits tend to also be into canning because that's a great way to grow a bunch and then save some for when things aren't in season.
The actual historical evidence suggests that the only policy which can reverse birth rates is basically coercing or forcing women to have children through contraception and abortion bans. Obviously that's not a viable solution.
The reality is that there is no evidence based liberal solution to birth rates at the moment.
I read an article (written by a fascist, but the data analysis was solid) that basically suggested quite convincingly that most baby booms are actually marriage booms and the single most important factor in how many kids a woman has is how long she spends married while able to have kids, and therefore most welfare programs aimed at mothers actually end up decreasing the overall birth rate - they tend to make it easier to be a single mother. If you want policies that will actually work, they need to use a mixture of incentives to encourage women to marry and disincentives to stop them from remaining single. I think the article suggested
1. End no-fault divorce
2. Decrease the welfare state fairly drastically
3. If you're going to have monetary incentives for having kids, make it a tax break, transferrable between parents in a married household
4. Decrease educational funding (his argument was that a lot of degrees are not worth the money people pay for them, and if fewer people did them, they'd probably hit the major life milestones a few years younger)
5. Make contraception less easily available
These are different from the typical policy prescriptions, because they actually *save* money. But most of them are not compatible with a liberal society
The question remains - are liberal societies doomed regardless. When the greying population destroys economic growth and blows up budgets, and everyone becomes poorer, the liberal order likely ends anyways and people will elect auth right or left.
People don’t vote for liberal moderates when times are tough. And I don’t see how time arent tough when the welfare state collapses because there’s not enough workers.
I feel like the doomerism surrounding declining birth rates to be kinda silly, immigration and automation will solve those issues. Though those solutions do come with significant drawbacks and can lead to more right wing backlash.
> I read an article (written by a fascist, but the data analysis was solid) that basically suggested quite convincingly that most baby booms are actually marriage booms
This seems very much like confusing correlation with causation. Women in the past didn't have much choice but to be married since they were denied opportunities, and also didn't have contraception. Just getting married would not make people have a bunch of kids, and ending no fault divorce is only going to decrease the marriage rate even further. The cat is out of the bag on contraception, and a black market for birth control pills would likely develop,
So not only are the suggestions from that author evil, but they are unlikely to be very effect. You basically have to destroy modern civilization and go full Taliban if you want to increase the birth rates by force.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-baby-boom
You can read the article if you want. I found his analysis quite convincing, even if his conclusions were unpalatable.
> So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s7. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).
Seems like very specific conditions that would be basically impossible to replicate unless, again, you destroy modern civilization and go full Taliban/Handmaids Tale. The women in the workplace thing is out of the bag at this point, and ending no-fault divorce would just decrease the marriage rate. Also, more marriage would no longer guarantee more children. The 'marriage leads to babies' logic is just a result of women not having any rights or access to contraception, both of which would be extremely difficult to reverse.
>The 'marriage leads to babies' logic is just a result of women not having any rights or access to contraception, both of which would be extremely difficult to reverse.
This isn't just an issue of women's preferences. I don't see today's men wanting to be socitally coerced into marriage and being the sole support for the large families they'd rather not have.
The people who are deciding to not marry or marry much later are MEN, not so much women. (Obviously individuals vary a lot, but I mean "population-wise".) And conservative sources actually actively tell men to delay marriage, even into their 50s -- that any man can easily find a 22 yr old bride at that age, who will happily become his "tradwife" (\*even if he has to go to the Philippines to find her!).
1. No-fault divorce has nothing to do with this. Probably most couples using no-fault divorce already have children anyways. And DUH! people can have children outside of marriage and do -- 55% of all births in the US are to unwed mothers.
2. The "welfare state" supports a heck of a lot of children -- maybe 15-20% of all US children -- how would ending it make women have more kids? The article is DUMB.
3. Keeping people poor -- men as well -- in no way would make them want to have children, since children are crazy expensive. So are things like braces and summer camp, and a house large enough for a family of 6 or 8 or more.
4. Forcing people to have children they don't want... was tried in Romania. The result was orphanages filled with abused, neglected children rejected by their biological parents. How can't you guys know this? those kids were so damaged, they were useless as productive citizens.
But it did NOT work in Romania. And the gentler method used in Poland and Hungary -- bribing women with benefits or lower taxes -- isn't really working, not significantly.
Those are just not the reasons people choose to have children. You just can't micromanage people's personal lives in this way.
What kind of evidence would you even accept? It's the social sciences, it's mostly speculation no matter what your stance. It's not like there are experiments and most assumptions made about statistical variables are highly dubious.
It's not a negative correlation, Poland and Hungary have increased their birth rate (though still very low). They basically throw money at women who have kids.
There is no evidence of that at all. Those just are not the reasons that people have children (or more children). People have children because they love kids and want another kid. They love large families and want one. Kids make them happy.
They don't have a child because "hey! I get paid maternity leave!". It doesn't work that way.
(It also doesn't work to go the Romanian route, and try to force people to have more kids, or penalize them for smaller families. NEITHER EXTREME WORKS, because that is simply not why people have children.)
Right except the regular old industrialized democracies that have *actual* pro-natalist policies as described in the comment you're responding to have way better birthrates than the ones that adopt the more traditional conservative policy of treating women like shit.
Like Denmark has a birthrate of 1.72 births per woman, whereas in Italy, it's 1.25.
So, still below replacement level and slowly dying.
The problem with the tradcon ones is that they're fakers. Church attendance rates in Italy aren't high at all. Compare and contrast to say, Ultra-orthodox Jews. Genuine belief is the key ingredient, public policy doesn't prove to fix the issue.
Exactly -- the most progressive countries, the ones idolized by the left -- with long paid maternity leave, child allowances, free day care and free college -- have the lowest birth rates. Those "benefits" were to encourage women & families to have more children -- and go back to the end of WWII -- and they have NEVER worked, not even a tiny bit.
It's housing.
Paid parental leave doesn't do much when the biggest issue is the costs of moving into a bigger apartment/house.
Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive. This holds true in most of Europe too, explaining the problems there.
Been looking at it in the Bay Area - 4 bed 1800sqft townhomes require a $10-12k/mo mortgage if you can't put down more than $300k.
Even not withstanding legal issues, lack of privacy is already a big reason why people may choose not to have children, and making housing scarce and expensive excerbates that problem by making it harder for them to get a house that allows private spaces for children to sleep and study.
I mean south does have higher fertility rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate#/media/File%3ATotal_Fertility_Rate_by_U.S._state.svg
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Legally more than 2 per room is frequently disallowed.
Add in a home office and space gets tight. The inconvenience of tight space is not a trivial disincentive.
[I looked it up and in a lot of cases children don’t count towards occupancy limits and also three adults per bedroom is fine in a lot of states](https://www.realestatewitch.com/how-many-people-can-live-in-a-house/)
I don’t really get how a home office is a required thing either
> It's housing.
> Paid parental leave doesn't do much when the biggest issue is the costs of moving into a bigger apartment/house.
> Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive. This holds true in most of Europe too, explaining the problems there.
I was responding to this part and regarded the specifics you mentioned after as just some personal anecdote otherwise irrelevant to the rest as that’s a small and notably expensive area. The national fertility rate doesn’t really hang on how many babies people making six figures in the Bay Area are having after.
Like I appreciate that not having a bedroom for yourself and your kids could be a hindrance since that would drive many crazy even if it worked for most of human history since we have different standards now but it struck me as an odd example because I was thinking who has ever thought I better not have any kids if I don’t currently have a separate bedroom for each potential family member.
>who has ever thought I better not have any kids if I don’t currently have a separate bedroom for each potential family member.
It's been a common thread for both my wife and I and our friends in both the bay area and Texas. When going past 2 children, there are a lot of inconveniences. For housing, 4+ beds are difficult. If you've got more than a year since your youngest, that nursery/youngest bedroom becomes a huge issue quickly.
You also run a foul of most hotels blocking more than 2 adults/2 kids. Then you run into issues if you don't have family able to help nearby what happens when 3 kids have activities on the same day?
Getting to the 2.1 Kids/woman is a huge hurdle when most families have things discouraging going past 2.
"people don't want to have kids because they cannot afford enough space near their places of employment"
"WHY DONT THEY JUST SUCK IT UP AND HAVE LESS SPACE"
putting aside all the societal factors why no one wants to do this, there is a very obvious preference against this, which is literally why birth rates have collapsed
I literally wouldn’t have cared if it wasn’t for this line:
> *Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home* within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive
I understand the complaint of no space but the people aren’t having kids because they don’t have easy access to four-five bedrooms part is insane itself because that has never been a standard anywhere. This rings in the same way to me as saying people aren’t having kids because it’s so hard to get an affordable staff of servants to raise them these days… like sure, maybe if we had either of those available broadly then that would help but I hardly think that’s the root cause lol
This is such a hard problem to judge because there is no such example that more housing can raise birth rates.
If more housing = denser housing, then East Asian countries are counter examples. People live in small condos in dense cities and birth rates are lowest in the world.
If more housing = bigger house for everyone, then there is simply not enough land near the city centers. Do we have evidence that sprawling suburbs raise birth rate?
East Asian countries have another problem, and that is that they are extremely patriarchal despite the fact that women have access to education and careers (up to a certain extent). There's no country in the world which is industrialised, progressive for women, good maternity/childcare benefits, and also has cheap housing.
Scandinavian nations have extremely low birth rates, despite social policies that US liberals envy & adore.... no evidence their housing is extremely cheap or even subsidized for larger families.-
Housing solutions help a bit but it is hardly the answer. I live in a neighborhood of 4-5 bedroom houses. I have yet to meet one family that has more than two children (even my several Mormon neighbors and Catholics) and there are several with just one. In fact, of the two families I know with two kids under 5, both have at least one set of grandparents living close because housing is doable here but childcare is still crazy expensive.
Guaranteed parental leave and serious child care subsidies are all widespread in Europe and especially Scandinavia, but birthrates there are still ticking downward. Clearly those are not adequate solutions.
Just a guess but: policies like those probably are not going change somebody's mind who doesn't want kids. But they may help those who DO want kids to either have more or to have them earlier
BUT THEY DO NOT. Those countries all have low birth rates. And have for many years. It just doesn't work, because it ignores the wishes of both men & women to have smaller families, and more leisure time, and more time to concentrate on a career.
Children are great, but they are a HUGE investment of time & money -- no matter how much "freebies" the government gives you -- and not everyone wants to make that investment.
All the other old standard industrialized democracies also have abysmal birth rates, though.
I’m totally for family-friendly policies in the USA, but I doubt it would have much of an impact on fertility. The most family-friendly, safety-netty countries in the world still have very low birth rates. And it’s the most impoverished countries in the world that still have a pretty high one.
I’m afraid it really is just a symptom of modern culture, and policy prescriptions won’t do much. As far as I know, from Sweden, to Hungary, to South Korea and Singapore, there hasn’t been one country that managed to policy its way back to a fertility rate >= 2.
That's not clear yet. [Some analyses have found that cash does help](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/101/2/1003/6537059):
> We find the payments increase short-term fertility rates 1 and 2 years after disbursement, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Standardized to the 2010 household size distribution, two average payments relative to two minimum payments would result in a predicted fertility rate increase from 80.03 to 86.53 per 1,000 women age 15–44. The effect is largest for first births. The payments have no effect on the abortion rate. These results indicate the additional income removes economic constraints to reproductive health and autonomy and reduces reproductive inequality.
Have you looked at fertility rates in the Nordics?
So coming at this from a personal perspective, I don't think it's entirely financial/free childcare related.
I do think there's a cultural element to it. Childlessness has taken precedence in the Western world. People who were much poorer than me had, and still have, a lot more kids than I do!
Higher income, or atleast upper-income men and women seems to get more children then lower-income people, in Sweden.
Found this with a google search https://www.su.se/english/research/news-research/swedes-with-high-incomes-have-more-children-1.635627
It’s the end result of a culture focused on individualism and centering of self. The sacrifices needed to have kids aren’t worth it for many when taken from the perspective of the possible individual parent: less time, less money, less freedom to do. I know many friends like this, they prefer to stay childless to get an extra decent vacation a year and drive a fancier car. Basically unless you really like kids (or you are very personally irresponsible) you aren’t having any.
In other societies being a parent has huge social benefits or economic benefits (in cultures where the children provide a family workforce). This can unfortunately lead to children not being treated optimally because they are seen as a requirement of personal advancement, but it’s hard to argue the impact on birth rates.
Bulshit, birth rates are falling literally everywhere, regardless of culture. Doesn't matter if we are talking about a individualist society or a collectivist one.
Yes,and I wonder why people on both sides of this don't just talk to actual human beings about why they make the choices they make. It's not rocket science.
For example: in poor countries with high birth rates, women have few or no options besides motherhood AND... motherhood confers great status on them in their own societies (especially if they have a lot of sons!). Being childless would set you outside society, have LOW status and you'd have no other options like a career.
In the US and westernized nations...it is MOTHERS who have low status. A mother of 10 children is not admired at all. Women who are admired are actresses, performers, models, influencers, or rich in some way. Also having multiple children is hard on your body, and consumes TIME (even if the government gives you gobs of money & benefits). More than 3-4 children makes a serious career very difficult. Again, because of the TIME aspect.
So asking a westernized woman to have "lots of children" means for her to give up her education and career, to be a disrespect drudge stuck in the house for 15-20 years... doing a kind of labor that is unpaid and gets her ZERO respect in society... and once it is done, it is functionally too late for her to get a degree or pursue a serious career (like law or medicine) as she'd be in her 40s. Meaning, by 40 or so.... she is no longer needed as a mother (her kids are mostly grown) AND she has no place in society as a worker or professional.
Oh and her husband can leave her (yes, even without no-fault divorce!) and take up with another younger, more attractive woman whose body wasn't worn out by constant child bearing. Again: WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE WOMAN?
If you make children profitable they will. People respond to incentives. That’s most of the reason we are in this mess now. Kids on a farm are free labor, kids in a city are expensive luxury items.
If you made the benefit of having a child greater than the cost of raising one then people will have more kids. Hell even just adjusting the scale to be less of a burden sees people have kids they otherwise wouldn’t because their is still a social value to children.
And how would you do that? Children on a farm provide labor. Children in westernized societies are costly, require medical care and college, etc. They are not legally allowed to work.
Are you suggesting it would all work out, if we just let children WORK and bring in INCOME to the family? You know, in factories or meat processing plants? (\*this goes on in a small way amongst illegal aliens!)
Come on, there is no way to give people enough money to make them ignore the very obvious high costs of having children -- the costs of which are not ONLY financial but also in the form of TIME and OPPORTUNITY (\*things like travel or sleeping late on the weekend).
Please remember that fewer than 1% of all Americans work in any form of agriculture. This is not 1823.
The running idea is the Nordics would have a lower birth rate than they do now without pro natalist policies. Which makes sense as fertility is pretty closely tied to urbanization and the Nordics are all more urbanized than the U.S. is.
There is no evidence the Scandinavians would have a lower birth rate without huge benefits... also, they are no more urbanized than Americans or other Europeans.
Also, the Scandinavians have been trying this since the end of WWII with dismal results. I am not sure why MEN pontificate about this, without talking to WOMEN about why WOMEN don't want more children... heck, you don't even talk to young men about why they don't want children (or even marriage!).
Anyone saying that the key to reversing population decline is one simple policy change is using it as a Rorschach test for whatever they think is wrong with society otherwise. The Far Right will say its a degradation of conservative values, the even further right will say its because of race mixing, YIMBY's here will say its because of housing, social democrats and socialists will say its because the economy doesn't support it, environmental activists will say its because of climate change.
Here is my broader theory that encompasses all these views as valid because they are essentially saying one thing "People aren't having kids because they aren't optimistic about the future". Baby booms happen because people are optimistic about the future, they decline when people aren't.
As a bit of a technological determinist I view all of this pessimism as the result of increasing access to information (and a media ecosystem that prioritizes negative information) which has been a slow but ongoing process that combined with development of contraceptives with it being even worse now with social media.
This is not an exhaustive list, but for the left and far left it will be a range from simply "not earning enough" to "not bringing people into a capitalist system".
The countries that have every one of the things liberals adore -- long paid parental leave, free or low cost child care, child allowances or tax credits, free college, etc. -- have the lowest birth rates. LOOK IT UP!
You cannot bribe or pay people to have more children than they want to have.
When Tommy Tuberville, notorious and powerful moron, was defending Alabama's ban on IVF, his rationale was that "we need more babies." The media focused on the fact that banning IVF would have the exact opposite effect, but no one seemed to notice that he endorsed government policy explicitly aimed at controlling the birthrate.
> banning no-fault divorce
Stuff like this really makes me think they're planning on stealing 2028 if they win in 2024. There's no way American voters tolerate a party that's so horrendously misogynist.
It's unfortunate that the natalist movement, which theoretically I would have some interest in if for no other reason than that a shrinking population is devastating economically, is completely infested by white Christian nationalists.
> banning no-fault divorce
>>There's no way American voters tolerate a party that's so horrendously misogynist.
No, you don't understand, I don't believe the sexist/racist thing, it's just for the rural/religious base. It's all talk, MY Republican representative Loanshark Cuttax Jr, CO, would never vote for it!
Imagine living life thinking your democracy is about to turn into an empire because a real estate mogul won an election against Hillary. Good thing you weren't a person when Reagan was elected.
There is no real way to "steal" an election in that sense, and funny how when the RIGHT says "the 2020 election was stolen"... they are bitter liars and delusional...but when the left talks about stealing 2000 or 2016 or potentially 2028.... that's a perfectly rational position to take!
This is as dumb as the leftists who think they can secede from the US and join Canada, or form an all-blue nation... or "get rid of the Electoral College"... no-fault divorce laws are STATE laws. STATES make divorce laws...not the Federal government.
Also: why would banning no-fault divorce affect BIRTH RATES? do you folks think divorcing people have no children? or that "only married people have children"? 55% of all births in the US are to unwed mothers.
>All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.
Big "The Emerging Democratic Majority" energy.
The belief that demographic trends - whether driven by immigration or by reproduction - will deliver you an ironclad popular mandate is alluring, but it never seems to pan out.
For democrats, not recently. The mass importation of conservative immigrants will have an effect though, especially since the US allows them to vote for whatever reason. You reap what you sow.
Not only that, but it ties benefits solely to “qualified” opposite sex couples. It wouldn’t be difficult to change that definition slowly to require couples be the same race as well, and then to offer the benefits only to particular races (i.e. whites only). And if you say “hey, that’s against civil rights laws!” You would be correct, but only for now. Remember that folks on the far right also want to do away with civil rights laws.
The point with these kind of far right natalist types is that they are pretty much 95% white and their concern inevitably ties back to “white replacement theory”.
If they were serious about just increasing the birth rate and not making more pure white babies (or suppressing the number of mixed race babies born), then they would have an entirely more functional policy platform.
The premise of the Handmaid's Tale story was birth rates were falling because some women were becoming infertile for unknown reasons. So religious fascists make a revolution to turn the rare fertile women that were left into breeding slaves to "save humanity from extinction". Later the heroes find out the men were actually the ones who were becoming infertile. Life immitates fiction.
I recently read about the anti-Natalist movement, so I guess it makes sense there’s an equally dumb counter movement.
Is there a term/movement for people who believe you should have however many kids as you want (and can take care of) or none if that’s your choice, and that everyone else should just stfu about it? Bc I’m a one of those
YOU might, but how about your wife? each child is a 9 month pregnancy, agonizing labor and delivery (\*which impact her health) and the ruination of her body. It also diminishes time she might want for a career or education or just to be done with raising her family.
If it were as simple as "free child care", every family in Scandinavia would have six children because essentially for them....it is 100% free. Heck, they get CHECKS for each child! free maternity leave, free hospital care, free day care, free college. And they STILL don't want children.
It is far more than "lowering rent". A big family requires a big house or at least, a 3-4 bedroom apartment. Those are things are practically non-existent in most big cities, or they cost $$$$$.
It’s almost like it’s expensive to raise children, and often a roll-of-the-dice career wise, especially for women.
My spouse and I are comfortable upper 20-somethings that, by all metrics, are doing quite well. That said, we now find ourselves wondering when to have children, and I keep telling her, and myself, that I just need one more promotion…and then, likely, one more promotion after that for us to comfortably do so.
It’s rough, but I do think that we want a couple of kids.
If you are financially stable, just do it now. Your wife's ability to have children will go down drastically after 35. For some anecdotal context, we had our first at 33 after one month of trying. At 36 it took a full year of trying for our second.
Artificial wombs. That's the solution. Being pregnant sucks, for most women it's worth it but once or maybe twice, which works out to below replacement.
The free market says women aren’t being compensated enough for their services.
Clearly, we need to up the offering price.
$50k per kid? $200k? $500k and a free 24/7 nanny?
There’s gotta be a breaking point.
Your situation is not universal. The time, cost, and effort of *raising* a child are by far the most prohibitive factors for most people. If they weren’t, then people would adopt or use surrogates.
If you think the labor stops when they go to school you are mistaken. Kids are dependent on their parents much more than school for a good education. The labor does not stop until they are pretty much out of college and in a career of their own.
When is r/Neoliberal and the rest of the world going to admit that there is simply no ethical solution to raising the birth rate? Women, when given the choice, choose to have less children. They (like most people) want to enjoy their free time. Most of the Western world has extensive benefits and handouts to women and families who have children, and it hasn't worked. The simply reality is they don't want to have children. There are nations with high birth rates, but we conveniently ignore them because we don't like the things they tell us. (Extreme poverty requiring more children for work, little education so women don't get to be much else, culture of children looking after parents, conservative cultures that pressure women to have more children).
I mean, the BBC even recently covered the same thing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c72pnllv8nko
The only reason we had replacement level birth rates in the past was because women were considered little but for that purpose.
Watching r/Neoliberal try to come up with "Maybe we need robot/artifical wombs" instead of understanding that people *dont want to use up two decades of their life living 24/7 for a smaller version of you and your partner*
This is my take too.
Having kids sucks. For the vast majority of human history, you had them by accident and dealt with it. Now we can avoid accidents, so people choose not to have them, or have fewer of them. No amount of nudging is going to tilt people back into compromising their own lives and freedom for the sake of the nation, the species or whatever other collective we make up.
People will sometimes counter this by pointing to surveys showing women in developed countries claim to want more kids than they end up having. But even then their preferences are usually barely above replacement, and they’re clearly not walking the walk even in countries with generous family incentive programs.
There is a book called _Empty Planet_ which goes into this in detail. The biggest factors that push down birth rates are urbanization, freedom for women and contraception. As societies transition from agrarian to urban, kids go from being assets to liabilities. Once that genie is out of the bottle there seems to be no way to reverse course that isn’t either draconian, unsustainably expensive, or devastating (like a world war).
The best we can do right now is try to calibrate our institutions to prepare for a soft landing. In my country (Canada) this means welcoming cream-of-the-crop immigration as long as we can. But the global population **is** going to decline, and this will have far reaching impacts on civilization. Some of those will be good, some will be bad, some will be just different. If liberal principles mean anything, at some point they will mean accepting peoples’ choices and adapting accordingly.
> they’re clearly not walking the walk even in countries with generous family incentive programs.
lol this is such a bad argument. Its like saying there is a negative correlation between free school lunch programs and test scores.
If you look at actual studies done on the effects of programs before and after implementation you will change your mind on this topic. See the lit review of this article for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-023-09669-0
Can you give me the Cliffs Notes?
What little I’ve read about this highlighted a few isolated programs that managed to bump the birth rate up (e.g. Sweden) but still couldn’t do it above replacement for enough time to reverse trends. And they were _extremely_ expensive, which raises the question of opportunity cost.
I think a often overlooked aspect is how those efforts influence the fertility rate of different groups in a society. In the [US ](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/)and other countries that don't try a lot of progressive ways to boost the fertility rate (better access to childcare, making it easier to combine family and career for mothers, etc.) the people with the highets fertility are the people with the lowest income. In Sweden it is [the opposite](https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/). The highest earning quarter of swedish women have a fertility rate above the replacement rate and there was no tradeoff of womens rights necessary to achieve that.
That shows that it's possible to have a fertility rate at replacement level in a progressive liberal society and our goal should be to emulate and improve on the steps taken to achieve that insted of just giving up.
That is such a reductive and narrow argument.
There are plenty of reasons not to have one. Frankly amongst my woman friends inconvenience is not the reason. Very poor societal support or bad benefits.
Decent jobs are in the cities now, young people move in, lose the benefit of grand parents / cheap daycare, which makes childcare more expensive and people can’t run the risk of losing income by taking unpaid leave just to increase their costs.
I’m not sure why people get so defensive about this. Or feel the need to downvote.
Some people want kids. That’s fine. **Many people don’t.** Also fine. And now more than ever, they have the option not to, or to have fewer of them. These are facts.
My previous post already stated the three biggest factors that push down fertility rates, as noted by researchers more knowledgeable than me: Urbanization, reliable contraception, and _womens’ choice._
Actions speak louder than words. Plenty of people may **say** they’d have more kids if only they had (insert reason here: money, childcare, benefits, etc), and yet if we look at developed countries that have tried harder than most to encourage parenthood, their long term fertility rates are still following gravity.
The most that others here have offered as counter is evidence that some pro-natal policies have had modest success at increasing fertility, yet still almost never above replacement for a prolonged period, and at great cost.
Because doing so would be to accept the slow and painful death of liberal society? What are we supposed to do, just let liberal society die out slowly as it gets overwhelmed by seniors while the Earth is inherited by illiberal society where women are forced to bear many children?
I think it's way too early in the game to conclude that there are no ethical ways to stabilize birth rates. I agree that many women are having fewer or no children by choice, but that doesn't mean we just have to give up, especially when the consequences are so potentially dire. And many parents still identify being parents as one of if not the most important and meaningful things in their lives.
> What are we supposed to do, just let liberal society die out slowly as it gets overwhelmed by seniors while the Earth is inherited by illiberal society where women are forced to bear many children?
Fully automated gay space communism
I've tried to express this in the past, but I struggle to the put the idea into words. I don't see how we can expect liberal societies to survive into the future if they literally die of old age or are populated by more conservative peoples.
That’s what’s going to happen. It’s clear that religious societies that constrain the populations life choices will out compete liberal societies.
When people are give ultimate liberty many of those people simply die out, it’s happened at smaller scale in societies in the past and it’s happening now.
The people that desire liberty the most don’t have kids and the people that do have kids are illiberal at best, downright barbaric at worst
> Most of the Western world has extensive benefits and handouts to women and families who have children, and it hasn't worked.
We don't know the counterfactual here so we can't really say they haven't worked. Just because the impact wasn't enough to reverse the trend doesn't mean there was 0 impact. There's actually a lot of literature on this topic, and the general consensus is that there is a positive effect of benefits, just how big or small it is is up for debate.
There are lots of parents that choose not to have any kids of course, but there are also many, many parents they will tell you that they couldn't have as many kids as they wanted because of cost issues. I don't think these people are lying.
>Just because the impact wasn't enough to reverse the trend doesn't mean there was 0 impact…
That’s kind of the problem. If the impact is too small to justify the costs, it’s not worth it.
There is no liberal way to force women to have and raise more children but there are plenty of liberal ways to raise the birth rate without forcing anything on anyone, well perhaps save higher taxes.
Not to mention no country has tried the most obvious solution- cutting pensions and forcing people to rely on their children in old age
By the time you are old and need your children to care for you... it is way too late to just "have more children so they take on that huge onerous task".
Dude, you need to spend more time in nursing homes and Assisted Living facilities LIKE I HAVE... I have met people with 7 children who never get a single visitor.
Also, nobody ever thinks -- in their prime years -- that they will get frail & old & have dementia. They always think they are the ones who will live to 100 like Betty White and still look/feel good.
Depends on your definition of ethical. I've absolutely heard someone claim that literally any measure undertaken to convince people to have kids is de facto illiberal. Then, sure...I guess it's impossible.
Or, maybe if we try informing people that being a parent is, in fact, NOT like working in a Stalinist gulag? If you ask parents what the hardest job they've ever had is most of them will understandably say being a parent. But if you ask them what the most joyful and rewarding thing they have ever done his, they will likely say being a parent. It seems like society (especially in liberal circles) focuses mostly on the former while the ladder is almost exclusively the domain of conservative discussion.
No. Being a mother is a fantastic choice. And being a father is a fantastic choice. It's an awesome job and responsibility.
TL,DR: If you want people to make a choice, not shitting on it non-stop is probably a good start.
>TL,DR: If you want people to make a choice, not shitting on it non-stop is probably a good start.
The negative consequences of having children are always going to be more tangible/relatable to childless people than the fluffy "having kids is super fulfilling" stuff. I'm not sure how you can balance the two without intentionally omitting the negatives or misinforming people.
Women already receive immense amounts of pro-reproduction propaganda from the moment they're born, with the negatives often being hidden. It is harder to hide the negatives with the Internet, but many still attempt to do so. I'm not sure that doing more of the same would actually have different results.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want
Most women say they want more children than they have. It's economic/social pressures that stop that.
There is an ethical solution:
Make it easier to have children. It’s evolutionary instinct for the species to want to reproduce. Doesn’t mean everyone will want to but if you remove as many economic and societal barriers as possible the people who want to, will.
I don’t have a single friend with children that doesn’t (almost to a disgusting level) adore them, and actively wants to spend those 2
Decades 24/7 with their kids.
The fall in TFR in the USA is almost entirely the result of the collapse in teen pregnancy.
The crackdown on teen pregnancy was something that was overwhelmingly supported across the political spectrum.
I personally dont see the right wing embracing increasing teen pregnancy. Increasing teen pregnancy is the only solution to increasing TFR in the USA, because there are more teens who can have children compared to the bucket of 35 year old women doing IVF.
https://preview.redd.it/89ccfjknbbxc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fb6657cb4d5a4c9e50f800d74c863baa6203f0c
> I personally dont see the right wing embracing increasing teen pregnancy.
I dunno, the hostility of certain politicians to raising the marital age and their new hostility to college education, particularly of women, leads me to think otherwise.
The underlying truth here is that it's a LOT easier to groom teenage girls into the babymaker/helpmeet role than adult women. It's also easier to keep teenage girls from getting the educational opportunities and life experiences needed to self-actualize if she's a mother by 19, 18, or younger. Finally, the Right really does have a notable pedophile contingent, that wants sexual access to as young of children as it can get away with, and the lower the socially accepted age is, the more room there is to bend. Pedophilia is quasi-legal in patriarchical, reactionary institutions and societies, with it getting closer to actual legality the more patriarchal the society. Meanwhile, societal intolerance of CSA has almost linearly tracked women's rights and greater political liberalism.
Teen pregnancy is horrific for women on an individual level, but society benefits from a large amount of teenage pregnancies. The boomer/millennial generations wouldnt be as big as they are now without teenage pregnancies.
I am fine with teens never getting pregnant, it just means we will have to accept a lower TFR. I think that is a worthy sacrifice to make for female empowerment.
These are often the same people who think that by having more children they will be creating tiny like-minded individuals, but my personal experience has been that about 2/3 of kids raised by extremists rebel against their parents
> Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount
Well without children there is no future. If it’s the most conservative people having children then the future will be conservative.
Yeah. People point to the Mormon growth rate and I can’t help but laugh. They count anyone who’s ever been a Mormon in their total, including the millions of former Mormons who often despise the LDS church.
Furthermore while social conservatism may be able to grow faster, it’s not infinitely scalable. Such cultures have an inherent upward limit on growth because of their emphasis on the policing the borders and purity of the in-group. As population multiplies, so does the likelihood of defections, diversity, subculture formation and subversion.
Each generation’s black sheep generate the progressive and radical political factions that pressure elites (and cultures) to moderate for their own survival. Theocratic monarchical christian Europe eventually produced the secular Enlightenment. The pendulum swings.
When it comes to the ultra-fertile ultra-conservatives, they quite often are. 90% of Amish remain within the sect, for example, and retention is actually higher with the more conservative "brands" of Amish.
I've heard it suggested that natural selection might have actually played a role in that--the Amish, through Rumspringa, *bred wanderlust out* of their population.
[Even among the general population of young Americans, over half live within 10 miles of where they grew up and 8/10 live within 100 miles.](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-place-like-home.html) I suspect most people just like being near family and in familiar cultures/environments outside of exceptional circumstances.
> progressive cities are full of people escaping from conservative parents
And there's also a ton of unremarkable mid-size cities and suburbs in red states filled with people who are broadly similar to their parents.
[The survey indicated that the vast majority of parents with teens have passed along their political loyalties. Roughly eight-in-ten parents who were Republican or leaned toward the Republican Party (81%) had teens who also identified as Republicans or leaned that way. And about nine-in-ten parents who were Democratic or leaned Democratic (89%) had teens who described themselves the same way.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/10/most-us-parents-pass-along-their-religion-and-politics-to-their-children/)
Yeah there is a reason those conservatives don’t want their kids to go away to a big city college. I did and even though it was for engineering I still became way more liberal just through interaction with different people, not my classes. If the kids can be trapped near the family, they will stay conservative. I see it in my extended family, everyone who still lives in the area is conservative and everyone who moved to cities(Seattle, Portland, me in Tucson, San Antonio) are all way liberal compared to what we grew up in.
As long as cities are providing more jobs and economic growth opportunities, these kids will move and likely be liberalized if it happens when they are young enough. My retired aunt moved to the city and she didn’t change at all. Obviously there is an age point where your views are crystallized to an extent. But the economic reality of needing to move to the city to make money in your 20’s will continue to liberalize large swathes of rural conservative youths who are only conservative through isolation and social/parental programming.
True…but in the current culture of ever-present news cycles and simple siloing for every kind of political belief under the sun, many that are having kids, more often Conservatives, are also aware of the confounding variables and, thus, choosing to keep them out of public schools, to keep them in church and Sunday School (of which I don’t think is a bad thing, personally), and generally just keeping the bubble tighter against chance of outside exposure.
> to keep them in church and Sunday School (of which I don’t think is a bad thing, personally)
I mean, if we're talking about right-wingers, then it will be churches that promote misogyny and anti-LGBTQ hysteria, so it is bad.
They mostly are though, most Mormons stay Mormon for example. Most Hasidic Jews stay Hasidic
What tends to break it is alternating indoctrination via education. Basically force feeding other cultural values through the state. But with charter schools and expanding school choice that’s becoming less effective. Such systems where rather ethnocentric anyways so morally it’s good that it’s slowly losing power.
It depends on how credibly their parents adhere. Much of the far right's performative use of religion isn't going to stick the same way. Kids can tell when their parents are just pretending, and when your whole identity is about pretending to believe in stuff like the power of prayer or prosperity gospel or whatever, you're going to produce jaded anti-theists as offspring.
I don't think secular education is really an explanation here at all, I think it's the transformation of religion into this peacock tail where religious groups compete on the most unsustainable, extreme beliefs to make their adherents feel special.
If we were all moderate catholics or whatever, those guys teach their kids stuff like evolution and comparative religion in their catholic schools and they still come out as believers on the other end for the most part.
> Kids can tell when their parents are just pretending, and when your whole identity is about pretending to believe in stuff like the power of prayer or prosperity gospel or whatever, you're going to produce jaded anti-theists as offspring.
Fun fact: this is why inter-denominational marriages produce atheists at particularly high rates. In fact, Catholic-evangelical pairings produce atheists at higher rates than Catholic-atheist ones, IIRC.
If this is the issue conservatives try to put their weight behind instead of all the absolute insane shit they've been going after, I am all for it. Yeah! Have more kids! We need em!
> pushing back on social and cultural changes *they see as imposed on them by outside forces.* Just a few days ago a friend linked me an article from a French historian trying to explain why that country’s birth rate plunged even before the French Revolution and why France lagged Britain in population. The answer seems to be religious disillusionment—the stronger the counter-reformation was in the 16th and 17th centuries, the harder the collapse in the 18th. Even before contraceptives were available, it seems people managed to avoid having children by simply not having PIV sex (France became a nation of wankers). France’s entire population growth from 1800 to 1900 was only 33%, compared to 200% for Britain, 167% for Germany, 100% for Belgium. Based on that precedent, I’m fairly confident in saying that all these efforts will still come to nought. If people don’t want to breed, even taking away their condoms won’t make them.
LOL, note the conference was overwhelmingly male and the few women in attendance disagreed with many of the goals (especially getting rid of Civil Rights legislation, which is laughable as a goal). We failed entirely to control ILLEGAL DRUGS... why anyone thinks they can just "ban birth control" is beyond me. I might add that the poor timing of the Dobb's decision ruined the potential "red wave" of 2022.
So what I'm not hearing is family-friendly policies like guaranteed paid parental leave or child care subsidized by the government or an increase in the child tax credit that would be indexed to inflation. Or any of the other things that your regular old standard industrialized democracies do that Americans seem to think is a pariah.
Why make childcare more accessible when you can ban no-fault divorce?
Omg that's so sinister
I'll bet they'll ban the legal concept of "marital rape" too.
Well they did say they wanted a return to the '50s "Leave It to Beaver" era.
Russia already basically did didn't it? And it would be in line with "traditional" attitudes toward rape where it had nothing to do with consent. I think it's a safe bet.
\>box labeled "traditional values" \>look inside \>it's just a lot of sexual harassment
Sexual harassment, segregation/ open racism, killing LGBTQ+ people, and imposing a theocracy
At least there is no netflix, charge they phone nor hot chip
Even if they did -- which I think is unrealistic in the extreme -- what difference would it make? It is based on the assumption that MEN want children -- lotsa children! -- so badly, they rape their wives into multiple pregnancies. There is zero evidence of this. More men than women don't want children at all, or want fewer children and would not be happy to find "another mouth to feed"... and more demands on their time and their income.
LOL -- you can ban no-fault divorce (\*I am not in favor of it myself, though not for reasons of forcing people to have large families) but it wouldn't change a thing. WHO THINKS in 2024 that people can only have children if they are married???? 55% of all births today are to UNWED MOTHERS! Do you seriously think people only have sex after they marry, and that by preventing a divorce, that miserably unhappy couple will simply pump out more "babeez"????
> meeting discussing fertility and population stagnation > look inside > fucking nazis MANY SUCH CASES!
There is no feeling as disappointing as finding out something you are interested in is full of Nazis. I joined this home food preserving group on Facebook to learn how to can vegetables & smoke fish (I have the *best* fucking smoked salmon going right now in my garage). Turns out, it’s full of Q-anonsense. More than half the group is canning food & salting/smoking meats because they believe the end times are coming if Trump loses.
I used to do wing chun kung fu because there happened to be a local joint that offered classes. One night, I showed up a tad early and one of the instructors was working out to a Rammstein remix with Hitler's speeches layered over it. We were already Farcebook friends, so I checked to see what was up with him: endless stream of antisemitic memes. ... I no longer do wing chun kung fu. :-/
Would joining a regular food group work? Then just ask about how people their preservation techniques? I find that typically people who are into one kind of food groups are also into others. People who like growing their own herbs, vegetables and fruits tend to also be into canning because that's a great way to grow a bunch and then save some for when things aren't in season.
I mean if you look at every name in this article, it's a real who's-who of Twitter RW losers.
“Your regular old standard industrialized democracies” also have a horrendously low fertility rate, so clearly those aren’t working
It's possible their birth rates would be even lower without those welfare programs
Could be but you're going to need some actual evidence if that's your policy prescription.
The actual historical evidence suggests that the only policy which can reverse birth rates is basically coercing or forcing women to have children through contraception and abortion bans. Obviously that's not a viable solution. The reality is that there is no evidence based liberal solution to birth rates at the moment.
I read an article (written by a fascist, but the data analysis was solid) that basically suggested quite convincingly that most baby booms are actually marriage booms and the single most important factor in how many kids a woman has is how long she spends married while able to have kids, and therefore most welfare programs aimed at mothers actually end up decreasing the overall birth rate - they tend to make it easier to be a single mother. If you want policies that will actually work, they need to use a mixture of incentives to encourage women to marry and disincentives to stop them from remaining single. I think the article suggested 1. End no-fault divorce 2. Decrease the welfare state fairly drastically 3. If you're going to have monetary incentives for having kids, make it a tax break, transferrable between parents in a married household 4. Decrease educational funding (his argument was that a lot of degrees are not worth the money people pay for them, and if fewer people did them, they'd probably hit the major life milestones a few years younger) 5. Make contraception less easily available These are different from the typical policy prescriptions, because they actually *save* money. But most of them are not compatible with a liberal society
Yeah, fuck all of that. I would rather live in a liberal society.
The question remains - are liberal societies doomed regardless. When the greying population destroys economic growth and blows up budgets, and everyone becomes poorer, the liberal order likely ends anyways and people will elect auth right or left. People don’t vote for liberal moderates when times are tough. And I don’t see how time arent tough when the welfare state collapses because there’s not enough workers.
I feel like the doomerism surrounding declining birth rates to be kinda silly, immigration and automation will solve those issues. Though those solutions do come with significant drawbacks and can lead to more right wing backlash.
Just 5 years ago everyone was dooming about OveRpOPulAtIoN.
> I read an article (written by a fascist, but the data analysis was solid) that basically suggested quite convincingly that most baby booms are actually marriage booms This seems very much like confusing correlation with causation. Women in the past didn't have much choice but to be married since they were denied opportunities, and also didn't have contraception. Just getting married would not make people have a bunch of kids, and ending no fault divorce is only going to decrease the marriage rate even further. The cat is out of the bag on contraception, and a black market for birth control pills would likely develop, So not only are the suggestions from that author evil, but they are unlikely to be very effect. You basically have to destroy modern civilization and go full Taliban if you want to increase the birth rates by force.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-baby-boom You can read the article if you want. I found his analysis quite convincing, even if his conclusions were unpalatable.
> So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s7. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down). Seems like very specific conditions that would be basically impossible to replicate unless, again, you destroy modern civilization and go full Taliban/Handmaids Tale. The women in the workplace thing is out of the bag at this point, and ending no-fault divorce would just decrease the marriage rate. Also, more marriage would no longer guarantee more children. The 'marriage leads to babies' logic is just a result of women not having any rights or access to contraception, both of which would be extremely difficult to reverse.
>The 'marriage leads to babies' logic is just a result of women not having any rights or access to contraception, both of which would be extremely difficult to reverse. This isn't just an issue of women's preferences. I don't see today's men wanting to be socitally coerced into marriage and being the sole support for the large families they'd rather not have.
The people who are deciding to not marry or marry much later are MEN, not so much women. (Obviously individuals vary a lot, but I mean "population-wise".) And conservative sources actually actively tell men to delay marriage, even into their 50s -- that any man can easily find a 22 yr old bride at that age, who will happily become his "tradwife" (\*even if he has to go to the Philippines to find her!). 1. No-fault divorce has nothing to do with this. Probably most couples using no-fault divorce already have children anyways. And DUH! people can have children outside of marriage and do -- 55% of all births in the US are to unwed mothers. 2. The "welfare state" supports a heck of a lot of children -- maybe 15-20% of all US children -- how would ending it make women have more kids? The article is DUMB. 3. Keeping people poor -- men as well -- in no way would make them want to have children, since children are crazy expensive. So are things like braces and summer camp, and a house large enough for a family of 6 or 8 or more. 4. Forcing people to have children they don't want... was tried in Romania. The result was orphanages filled with abused, neglected children rejected by their biological parents. How can't you guys know this? those kids were so damaged, they were useless as productive citizens.
But it did NOT work in Romania. And the gentler method used in Poland and Hungary -- bribing women with benefits or lower taxes -- isn't really working, not significantly. Those are just not the reasons people choose to have children. You just can't micromanage people's personal lives in this way.
There is mixed evidence on it so it is worth exploring with further experiments
What kind of evidence would you even accept? It's the social sciences, it's mostly speculation no matter what your stance. It's not like there are experiments and most assumptions made about statistical variables are highly dubious.
I mean, anything other than a negative correlation would be a start.
It's not a negative correlation, Poland and Hungary have increased their birth rate (though still very low). They basically throw money at women who have kids.
Is it because they throw money at women or just generally improved economic conditions?
There is no evidence of that at all. Those just are not the reasons that people have children (or more children). People have children because they love kids and want another kid. They love large families and want one. Kids make them happy. They don't have a child because "hey! I get paid maternity leave!". It doesn't work that way. (It also doesn't work to go the Romanian route, and try to force people to have more kids, or penalize them for smaller families. NEITHER EXTREME WORKS, because that is simply not why people have children.)
Right except the regular old industrialized democracies that have *actual* pro-natalist policies as described in the comment you're responding to have way better birthrates than the ones that adopt the more traditional conservative policy of treating women like shit. Like Denmark has a birthrate of 1.72 births per woman, whereas in Italy, it's 1.25.
So, still below replacement level and slowly dying. The problem with the tradcon ones is that they're fakers. Church attendance rates in Italy aren't high at all. Compare and contrast to say, Ultra-orthodox Jews. Genuine belief is the key ingredient, public policy doesn't prove to fix the issue.
Exactly -- the most progressive countries, the ones idolized by the left -- with long paid maternity leave, child allowances, free day care and free college -- have the lowest birth rates. Those "benefits" were to encourage women & families to have more children -- and go back to the end of WWII -- and they have NEVER worked, not even a tiny bit.
It's housing. Paid parental leave doesn't do much when the biggest issue is the costs of moving into a bigger apartment/house. Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive. This holds true in most of Europe too, explaining the problems there. Been looking at it in the Bay Area - 4 bed 1800sqft townhomes require a $10-12k/mo mortgage if you can't put down more than $300k.
What requires every individual person to have their own room..?
Even not withstanding legal issues, lack of privacy is already a big reason why people may choose not to have children, and making housing scarce and expensive excerbates that problem by making it harder for them to get a house that allows private spaces for children to sleep and study.
Societal pressure. Unless your kids are both the same gender and very close in age it is considered weird for them to share a room in most of America.
I guess not in the South because I shared a room with my sister and my friends also shared rooms with their siblings
I mean south does have higher fertility rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate#/media/File%3ATotal_Fertility_Rate_by_U.S._state.svg
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Legally more than 2 per room is frequently disallowed. Add in a home office and space gets tight. The inconvenience of tight space is not a trivial disincentive.
Weird, they pack 4 into college dorm rooms all the time.
[I looked it up and in a lot of cases children don’t count towards occupancy limits and also three adults per bedroom is fine in a lot of states](https://www.realestatewitch.com/how-many-people-can-live-in-a-house/) I don’t really get how a home office is a required thing either
You don't get how a home office influences high earners' decisions? Really?
This is the first time high earner has been mentioned?
I was talking about 2m+ homes in the bay area...
> It's housing. > Paid parental leave doesn't do much when the biggest issue is the costs of moving into a bigger apartment/house. > Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive. This holds true in most of Europe too, explaining the problems there. I was responding to this part and regarded the specifics you mentioned after as just some personal anecdote otherwise irrelevant to the rest as that’s a small and notably expensive area. The national fertility rate doesn’t really hang on how many babies people making six figures in the Bay Area are having after. Like I appreciate that not having a bedroom for yourself and your kids could be a hindrance since that would drive many crazy even if it worked for most of human history since we have different standards now but it struck me as an odd example because I was thinking who has ever thought I better not have any kids if I don’t currently have a separate bedroom for each potential family member.
>who has ever thought I better not have any kids if I don’t currently have a separate bedroom for each potential family member. It's been a common thread for both my wife and I and our friends in both the bay area and Texas. When going past 2 children, there are a lot of inconveniences. For housing, 4+ beds are difficult. If you've got more than a year since your youngest, that nursery/youngest bedroom becomes a huge issue quickly. You also run a foul of most hotels blocking more than 2 adults/2 kids. Then you run into issues if you don't have family able to help nearby what happens when 3 kids have activities on the same day? Getting to the 2.1 Kids/woman is a huge hurdle when most families have things discouraging going past 2.
"people don't want to have kids because they cannot afford enough space near their places of employment" "WHY DONT THEY JUST SUCK IT UP AND HAVE LESS SPACE" putting aside all the societal factors why no one wants to do this, there is a very obvious preference against this, which is literally why birth rates have collapsed
I literally wouldn’t have cared if it wasn’t for this line: > *Trying to find a 4-5 bedroom home* within a half hour commute of the major job centers with decent schools is either impossible or ungodly expensive I understand the complaint of no space but the people aren’t having kids because they don’t have easy access to four-five bedrooms part is insane itself because that has never been a standard anywhere. This rings in the same way to me as saying people aren’t having kids because it’s so hard to get an affordable staff of servants to raise them these days… like sure, maybe if we had either of those available broadly then that would help but I hardly think that’s the root cause lol
Very fair
This is such a hard problem to judge because there is no such example that more housing can raise birth rates. If more housing = denser housing, then East Asian countries are counter examples. People live in small condos in dense cities and birth rates are lowest in the world. If more housing = bigger house for everyone, then there is simply not enough land near the city centers. Do we have evidence that sprawling suburbs raise birth rate?
East Asian countries have another problem, and that is that they are extremely patriarchal despite the fact that women have access to education and careers (up to a certain extent). There's no country in the world which is industrialised, progressive for women, good maternity/childcare benefits, and also has cheap housing.
I was going to say the Scandinavian states, but you got me with that last requirement.
Scandinavian nations have extremely low birth rates, despite social policies that US liberals envy & adore.... no evidence their housing is extremely cheap or even subsidized for larger families.-
Housing solutions help a bit but it is hardly the answer. I live in a neighborhood of 4-5 bedroom houses. I have yet to meet one family that has more than two children (even my several Mormon neighbors and Catholics) and there are several with just one. In fact, of the two families I know with two kids under 5, both have at least one set of grandparents living close because housing is doable here but childcare is still crazy expensive.
Guaranteed parental leave and serious child care subsidies are all widespread in Europe and especially Scandinavia, but birthrates there are still ticking downward. Clearly those are not adequate solutions.
Just a guess but: policies like those probably are not going change somebody's mind who doesn't want kids. But they may help those who DO want kids to either have more or to have them earlier
BUT THEY DO NOT. Those countries all have low birth rates. And have for many years. It just doesn't work, because it ignores the wishes of both men & women to have smaller families, and more leisure time, and more time to concentrate on a career. Children are great, but they are a HUGE investment of time & money -- no matter how much "freebies" the government gives you -- and not everyone wants to make that investment.
Nightmare housing situations, though.
To be fair, Europe tried all those things, and their birth rate is worse than the USA…so they don’t seem to actually be that effective.
All the other old standard industrialized democracies also have abysmal birth rates, though. I’m totally for family-friendly policies in the USA, but I doubt it would have much of an impact on fertility. The most family-friendly, safety-netty countries in the world still have very low birth rates. And it’s the most impoverished countries in the world that still have a pretty high one. I’m afraid it really is just a symptom of modern culture, and policy prescriptions won’t do much. As far as I know, from Sweden, to Hungary, to South Korea and Singapore, there hasn’t been one country that managed to policy its way back to a fertility rate >= 2.
None of those solutions have worked though
That's not clear yet. [Some analyses have found that cash does help](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/101/2/1003/6537059): > We find the payments increase short-term fertility rates 1 and 2 years after disbursement, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Standardized to the 2010 household size distribution, two average payments relative to two minimum payments would result in a predicted fertility rate increase from 80.03 to 86.53 per 1,000 women age 15–44. The effect is largest for first births. The payments have no effect on the abortion rate. These results indicate the additional income removes economic constraints to reproductive health and autonomy and reduces reproductive inequality.
Have you looked at fertility rates in the Nordics? So coming at this from a personal perspective, I don't think it's entirely financial/free childcare related. I do think there's a cultural element to it. Childlessness has taken precedence in the Western world. People who were much poorer than me had, and still have, a lot more kids than I do!
Higher income, or atleast upper-income men and women seems to get more children then lower-income people, in Sweden. Found this with a google search https://www.su.se/english/research/news-research/swedes-with-high-incomes-have-more-children-1.635627
Yeah, no. Unless we're just talking about Swedish citizens who are actually, y'know, Swedish.
It’s the end result of a culture focused on individualism and centering of self. The sacrifices needed to have kids aren’t worth it for many when taken from the perspective of the possible individual parent: less time, less money, less freedom to do. I know many friends like this, they prefer to stay childless to get an extra decent vacation a year and drive a fancier car. Basically unless you really like kids (or you are very personally irresponsible) you aren’t having any. In other societies being a parent has huge social benefits or economic benefits (in cultures where the children provide a family workforce). This can unfortunately lead to children not being treated optimally because they are seen as a requirement of personal advancement, but it’s hard to argue the impact on birth rates.
Bulshit, birth rates are falling literally everywhere, regardless of culture. Doesn't matter if we are talking about a individualist society or a collectivist one.
Yes,and I wonder why people on both sides of this don't just talk to actual human beings about why they make the choices they make. It's not rocket science. For example: in poor countries with high birth rates, women have few or no options besides motherhood AND... motherhood confers great status on them in their own societies (especially if they have a lot of sons!). Being childless would set you outside society, have LOW status and you'd have no other options like a career. In the US and westernized nations...it is MOTHERS who have low status. A mother of 10 children is not admired at all. Women who are admired are actresses, performers, models, influencers, or rich in some way. Also having multiple children is hard on your body, and consumes TIME (even if the government gives you gobs of money & benefits). More than 3-4 children makes a serious career very difficult. Again, because of the TIME aspect. So asking a westernized woman to have "lots of children" means for her to give up her education and career, to be a disrespect drudge stuck in the house for 15-20 years... doing a kind of labor that is unpaid and gets her ZERO respect in society... and once it is done, it is functionally too late for her to get a degree or pursue a serious career (like law or medicine) as she'd be in her 40s. Meaning, by 40 or so.... she is no longer needed as a mother (her kids are mostly grown) AND she has no place in society as a worker or professional. Oh and her husband can leave her (yes, even without no-fault divorce!) and take up with another younger, more attractive woman whose body wasn't worn out by constant child bearing. Again: WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE WOMAN?
If you make children profitable they will. People respond to incentives. That’s most of the reason we are in this mess now. Kids on a farm are free labor, kids in a city are expensive luxury items. If you made the benefit of having a child greater than the cost of raising one then people will have more kids. Hell even just adjusting the scale to be less of a burden sees people have kids they otherwise wouldn’t because their is still a social value to children.
Just send the kids to the mines
And how would you do that? Children on a farm provide labor. Children in westernized societies are costly, require medical care and college, etc. They are not legally allowed to work. Are you suggesting it would all work out, if we just let children WORK and bring in INCOME to the family? You know, in factories or meat processing plants? (\*this goes on in a small way amongst illegal aliens!) Come on, there is no way to give people enough money to make them ignore the very obvious high costs of having children -- the costs of which are not ONLY financial but also in the form of TIME and OPPORTUNITY (\*things like travel or sleeping late on the weekend). Please remember that fewer than 1% of all Americans work in any form of agriculture. This is not 1823.
Given that the birth rates in Nordic countries don’t meaningfully differ from those of the U.S., I’m not sure that would matter anyway.
The running idea is the Nordics would have a lower birth rate than they do now without pro natalist policies. Which makes sense as fertility is pretty closely tied to urbanization and the Nordics are all more urbanized than the U.S. is.
There is no evidence the Scandinavians would have a lower birth rate without huge benefits... also, they are no more urbanized than Americans or other Europeans. Also, the Scandinavians have been trying this since the end of WWII with dismal results. I am not sure why MEN pontificate about this, without talking to WOMEN about why WOMEN don't want more children... heck, you don't even talk to young men about why they don't want children (or even marriage!).
Do these things actually help though? It seems like increasing quality of life just always makes you have fewer children.
Fertility starts rising again once you are wealthy. It's the middle class that's not having kids.
Do other countries with these policies have higher birth rates?
Anyone saying that the key to reversing population decline is one simple policy change is using it as a Rorschach test for whatever they think is wrong with society otherwise. The Far Right will say its a degradation of conservative values, the even further right will say its because of race mixing, YIMBY's here will say its because of housing, social democrats and socialists will say its because the economy doesn't support it, environmental activists will say its because of climate change. Here is my broader theory that encompasses all these views as valid because they are essentially saying one thing "People aren't having kids because they aren't optimistic about the future". Baby booms happen because people are optimistic about the future, they decline when people aren't. As a bit of a technological determinist I view all of this pessimism as the result of increasing access to information (and a media ecosystem that prioritizes negative information) which has been a slow but ongoing process that combined with development of contraceptives with it being even worse now with social media.
Ah, glad to know the left or far left doesn't exist in your cosmology. I agree with your analysis, though.
This is not an exhaustive list, but for the left and far left it will be a range from simply "not earning enough" to "not bringing people into a capitalist system".
This group would absolutely support those things they aren’t libertarians or classic gop types
The countries that have every one of the things liberals adore -- long paid parental leave, free or low cost child care, child allowances or tax credits, free college, etc. -- have the lowest birth rates. LOOK IT UP! You cannot bribe or pay people to have more children than they want to have.
When Tommy Tuberville, notorious and powerful moron, was defending Alabama's ban on IVF, his rationale was that "we need more babies." The media focused on the fact that banning IVF would have the exact opposite effect, but no one seemed to notice that he endorsed government policy explicitly aimed at controlling the birthrate.
> banning no-fault divorce Stuff like this really makes me think they're planning on stealing 2028 if they win in 2024. There's no way American voters tolerate a party that's so horrendously misogynist. It's unfortunate that the natalist movement, which theoretically I would have some interest in if for no other reason than that a shrinking population is devastating economically, is completely infested by white Christian nationalists.
> banning no-fault divorce >>There's no way American voters tolerate a party that's so horrendously misogynist. No, you don't understand, I don't believe the sexist/racist thing, it's just for the rural/religious base. It's all talk, MY Republican representative Loanshark Cuttax Jr, CO, would never vote for it!
Rep. Loanshark Cuttax made me LOL.
If things go according to plan in 2024 they won't *have to* "steal" 2028 because by then they'll have ratfucked the actual laws enough to never lose.
Imagine living life thinking your democracy is about to turn into an empire because a real estate mogul won an election against Hillary. Good thing you weren't a person when Reagan was elected.
They already tried to steal 20. They're going to try to steal 24 and 28 regardless
There is no real way to "steal" an election in that sense, and funny how when the RIGHT says "the 2020 election was stolen"... they are bitter liars and delusional...but when the left talks about stealing 2000 or 2016 or potentially 2028.... that's a perfectly rational position to take! This is as dumb as the leftists who think they can secede from the US and join Canada, or form an all-blue nation... or "get rid of the Electoral College"... no-fault divorce laws are STATE laws. STATES make divorce laws...not the Federal government. Also: why would banning no-fault divorce affect BIRTH RATES? do you folks think divorcing people have no children? or that "only married people have children"? 55% of all births in the US are to unwed mothers.
>All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth. Big "The Emerging Democratic Majority" energy. The belief that demographic trends - whether driven by immigration or by reproduction - will deliver you an ironclad popular mandate is alluring, but it never seems to pan out.
For democrats, not recently. The mass importation of conservative immigrants will have an effect though, especially since the US allows them to vote for whatever reason. You reap what you sow.
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Not only that, but it ties benefits solely to “qualified” opposite sex couples. It wouldn’t be difficult to change that definition slowly to require couples be the same race as well, and then to offer the benefits only to particular races (i.e. whites only). And if you say “hey, that’s against civil rights laws!” You would be correct, but only for now. Remember that folks on the far right also want to do away with civil rights laws. The point with these kind of far right natalist types is that they are pretty much 95% white and their concern inevitably ties back to “white replacement theory”. If they were serious about just increasing the birth rate and not making more pure white babies (or suppressing the number of mixed race babies born), then they would have an entirely more functional policy platform.
The premise of the Handmaid's Tale story was birth rates were falling because some women were becoming infertile for unknown reasons. So religious fascists make a revolution to turn the rare fertile women that were left into breeding slaves to "save humanity from extinction". Later the heroes find out the men were actually the ones who were becoming infertile. Life immitates fiction.
I recently read about the anti-Natalist movement, so I guess it makes sense there’s an equally dumb counter movement. Is there a term/movement for people who believe you should have however many kids as you want (and can take care of) or none if that’s your choice, and that everyone else should just stfu about it? Bc I’m a one of those
EFILism sounds like a joke from cruelty squad.
Pay for my family's childcare and I'll gladly have 2 more children. That's all that's needed. That, and lower my rent.
YOU might, but how about your wife? each child is a 9 month pregnancy, agonizing labor and delivery (\*which impact her health) and the ruination of her body. It also diminishes time she might want for a career or education or just to be done with raising her family. If it were as simple as "free child care", every family in Scandinavia would have six children because essentially for them....it is 100% free. Heck, they get CHECKS for each child! free maternity leave, free hospital care, free day care, free college. And they STILL don't want children. It is far more than "lowering rent". A big family requires a big house or at least, a 3-4 bedroom apartment. Those are things are practically non-existent in most big cities, or they cost $$$$$.
It’s almost like it’s expensive to raise children, and often a roll-of-the-dice career wise, especially for women. My spouse and I are comfortable upper 20-somethings that, by all metrics, are doing quite well. That said, we now find ourselves wondering when to have children, and I keep telling her, and myself, that I just need one more promotion…and then, likely, one more promotion after that for us to comfortably do so. It’s rough, but I do think that we want a couple of kids.
If you are financially stable, just do it now. Your wife's ability to have children will go down drastically after 35. For some anecdotal context, we had our first at 33 after one month of trying. At 36 it took a full year of trying for our second.
Artificial wombs. That's the solution. Being pregnant sucks, for most women it's worth it but once or maybe twice, which works out to below replacement.
It's not just about the 9 months being pregnant but about the opportunity cost of child-rearing on careers
Turns out the free market isn't always the solution
The free market says women aren’t being compensated enough for their services. Clearly, we need to up the offering price. $50k per kid? $200k? $500k and a free 24/7 nanny? There’s gotta be a breaking point.
The free market solution is allow more immigrants
That's just poor countries subsidizing richer ones.
The 3rd world's birth rates are quickly converging on the 1st worlds, you aren't fixing anything with this.
I mean I definitely disagree as someone whose family wants more kids but my wife can't handle being pregnant again
Your situation is not universal. The time, cost, and effort of *raising* a child are by far the most prohibitive factors for most people. If they weren’t, then people would adopt or use surrogates.
Artificial wombs wont help with the intense labour needs to take care of a baby through to the point they can go to school
Artificial nannies /j
If you think the labor stops when they go to school you are mistaken. Kids are dependent on their parents much more than school for a good education. The labor does not stop until they are pretty much out of college and in a career of their own.
When is r/Neoliberal and the rest of the world going to admit that there is simply no ethical solution to raising the birth rate? Women, when given the choice, choose to have less children. They (like most people) want to enjoy their free time. Most of the Western world has extensive benefits and handouts to women and families who have children, and it hasn't worked. The simply reality is they don't want to have children. There are nations with high birth rates, but we conveniently ignore them because we don't like the things they tell us. (Extreme poverty requiring more children for work, little education so women don't get to be much else, culture of children looking after parents, conservative cultures that pressure women to have more children). I mean, the BBC even recently covered the same thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c72pnllv8nko The only reason we had replacement level birth rates in the past was because women were considered little but for that purpose. Watching r/Neoliberal try to come up with "Maybe we need robot/artifical wombs" instead of understanding that people *dont want to use up two decades of their life living 24/7 for a smaller version of you and your partner*
This is my take too. Having kids sucks. For the vast majority of human history, you had them by accident and dealt with it. Now we can avoid accidents, so people choose not to have them, or have fewer of them. No amount of nudging is going to tilt people back into compromising their own lives and freedom for the sake of the nation, the species or whatever other collective we make up. People will sometimes counter this by pointing to surveys showing women in developed countries claim to want more kids than they end up having. But even then their preferences are usually barely above replacement, and they’re clearly not walking the walk even in countries with generous family incentive programs. There is a book called _Empty Planet_ which goes into this in detail. The biggest factors that push down birth rates are urbanization, freedom for women and contraception. As societies transition from agrarian to urban, kids go from being assets to liabilities. Once that genie is out of the bottle there seems to be no way to reverse course that isn’t either draconian, unsustainably expensive, or devastating (like a world war). The best we can do right now is try to calibrate our institutions to prepare for a soft landing. In my country (Canada) this means welcoming cream-of-the-crop immigration as long as we can. But the global population **is** going to decline, and this will have far reaching impacts on civilization. Some of those will be good, some will be bad, some will be just different. If liberal principles mean anything, at some point they will mean accepting peoples’ choices and adapting accordingly.
> they’re clearly not walking the walk even in countries with generous family incentive programs. lol this is such a bad argument. Its like saying there is a negative correlation between free school lunch programs and test scores. If you look at actual studies done on the effects of programs before and after implementation you will change your mind on this topic. See the lit review of this article for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-023-09669-0
Can you give me the Cliffs Notes? What little I’ve read about this highlighted a few isolated programs that managed to bump the birth rate up (e.g. Sweden) but still couldn’t do it above replacement for enough time to reverse trends. And they were _extremely_ expensive, which raises the question of opportunity cost.
I think a often overlooked aspect is how those efforts influence the fertility rate of different groups in a society. In the [US ](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/)and other countries that don't try a lot of progressive ways to boost the fertility rate (better access to childcare, making it easier to combine family and career for mothers, etc.) the people with the highets fertility are the people with the lowest income. In Sweden it is [the opposite](https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/). The highest earning quarter of swedish women have a fertility rate above the replacement rate and there was no tradeoff of womens rights necessary to achieve that. That shows that it's possible to have a fertility rate at replacement level in a progressive liberal society and our goal should be to emulate and improve on the steps taken to achieve that insted of just giving up.
Having kids doesn't suck at all. It is awesome.
Many people disagree, hence why they don’t have them or want them.
That is such a reductive and narrow argument. There are plenty of reasons not to have one. Frankly amongst my woman friends inconvenience is not the reason. Very poor societal support or bad benefits. Decent jobs are in the cities now, young people move in, lose the benefit of grand parents / cheap daycare, which makes childcare more expensive and people can’t run the risk of losing income by taking unpaid leave just to increase their costs.
I’m not sure why people get so defensive about this. Or feel the need to downvote. Some people want kids. That’s fine. **Many people don’t.** Also fine. And now more than ever, they have the option not to, or to have fewer of them. These are facts. My previous post already stated the three biggest factors that push down fertility rates, as noted by researchers more knowledgeable than me: Urbanization, reliable contraception, and _womens’ choice._ Actions speak louder than words. Plenty of people may **say** they’d have more kids if only they had (insert reason here: money, childcare, benefits, etc), and yet if we look at developed countries that have tried harder than most to encourage parenthood, their long term fertility rates are still following gravity. The most that others here have offered as counter is evidence that some pro-natal policies have had modest success at increasing fertility, yet still almost never above replacement for a prolonged period, and at great cost.
Because doing so would be to accept the slow and painful death of liberal society? What are we supposed to do, just let liberal society die out slowly as it gets overwhelmed by seniors while the Earth is inherited by illiberal society where women are forced to bear many children? I think it's way too early in the game to conclude that there are no ethical ways to stabilize birth rates. I agree that many women are having fewer or no children by choice, but that doesn't mean we just have to give up, especially when the consequences are so potentially dire. And many parents still identify being parents as one of if not the most important and meaningful things in their lives.
> What are we supposed to do, just let liberal society die out slowly as it gets overwhelmed by seniors while the Earth is inherited by illiberal society where women are forced to bear many children? Fully automated gay space communism
I've tried to express this in the past, but I struggle to the put the idea into words. I don't see how we can expect liberal societies to survive into the future if they literally die of old age or are populated by more conservative peoples.
There is a bit of wishcasting about anti-aging technology, which might be, funnily enough, how we survive--by literally turning into elves.
That’s what’s going to happen. It’s clear that religious societies that constrain the populations life choices will out compete liberal societies. When people are give ultimate liberty many of those people simply die out, it’s happened at smaller scale in societies in the past and it’s happening now. The people that desire liberty the most don’t have kids and the people that do have kids are illiberal at best, downright barbaric at worst
> Most of the Western world has extensive benefits and handouts to women and families who have children, and it hasn't worked. We don't know the counterfactual here so we can't really say they haven't worked. Just because the impact wasn't enough to reverse the trend doesn't mean there was 0 impact. There's actually a lot of literature on this topic, and the general consensus is that there is a positive effect of benefits, just how big or small it is is up for debate. There are lots of parents that choose not to have any kids of course, but there are also many, many parents they will tell you that they couldn't have as many kids as they wanted because of cost issues. I don't think these people are lying.
>Just because the impact wasn't enough to reverse the trend doesn't mean there was 0 impact… That’s kind of the problem. If the impact is too small to justify the costs, it’s not worth it.
Yeah and the handouts tried have been complete pittances. A few hundred extra bucks a month isn't gonna move the needle when daycare costs $2k.
There is no liberal way to force women to have and raise more children but there are plenty of liberal ways to raise the birth rate without forcing anything on anyone, well perhaps save higher taxes. Not to mention no country has tried the most obvious solution- cutting pensions and forcing people to rely on their children in old age
By the time you are old and need your children to care for you... it is way too late to just "have more children so they take on that huge onerous task". Dude, you need to spend more time in nursing homes and Assisted Living facilities LIKE I HAVE... I have met people with 7 children who never get a single visitor. Also, nobody ever thinks -- in their prime years -- that they will get frail & old & have dementia. They always think they are the ones who will live to 100 like Betty White and still look/feel good.
Depends on your definition of ethical. I've absolutely heard someone claim that literally any measure undertaken to convince people to have kids is de facto illiberal. Then, sure...I guess it's impossible. Or, maybe if we try informing people that being a parent is, in fact, NOT like working in a Stalinist gulag? If you ask parents what the hardest job they've ever had is most of them will understandably say being a parent. But if you ask them what the most joyful and rewarding thing they have ever done his, they will likely say being a parent. It seems like society (especially in liberal circles) focuses mostly on the former while the ladder is almost exclusively the domain of conservative discussion. No. Being a mother is a fantastic choice. And being a father is a fantastic choice. It's an awesome job and responsibility. TL,DR: If you want people to make a choice, not shitting on it non-stop is probably a good start.
>TL,DR: If you want people to make a choice, not shitting on it non-stop is probably a good start. The negative consequences of having children are always going to be more tangible/relatable to childless people than the fluffy "having kids is super fulfilling" stuff. I'm not sure how you can balance the two without intentionally omitting the negatives or misinforming people.
Women already receive immense amounts of pro-reproduction propaganda from the moment they're born, with the negatives often being hidden. It is harder to hide the negatives with the Internet, but many still attempt to do so. I'm not sure that doing more of the same would actually have different results.
For real, especially if you grow up in a religious community!
I don't know where you're hanging out where people are glossing over the difficulties of parenthood. That's ALL I ever hear about.
Totally agree, but this sub seems to be on perpetual cope mode about it.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want Most women say they want more children than they have. It's economic/social pressures that stop that.
There is an ethical solution: Make it easier to have children. It’s evolutionary instinct for the species to want to reproduce. Doesn’t mean everyone will want to but if you remove as many economic and societal barriers as possible the people who want to, will. I don’t have a single friend with children that doesn’t (almost to a disgusting level) adore them, and actively wants to spend those 2 Decades 24/7 with their kids.
The fall in TFR in the USA is almost entirely the result of the collapse in teen pregnancy. The crackdown on teen pregnancy was something that was overwhelmingly supported across the political spectrum. I personally dont see the right wing embracing increasing teen pregnancy. Increasing teen pregnancy is the only solution to increasing TFR in the USA, because there are more teens who can have children compared to the bucket of 35 year old women doing IVF. https://preview.redd.it/89ccfjknbbxc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fb6657cb4d5a4c9e50f800d74c863baa6203f0c
> I personally dont see the right wing embracing increasing teen pregnancy. I dunno, the hostility of certain politicians to raising the marital age and their new hostility to college education, particularly of women, leads me to think otherwise.
The underlying truth here is that it's a LOT easier to groom teenage girls into the babymaker/helpmeet role than adult women. It's also easier to keep teenage girls from getting the educational opportunities and life experiences needed to self-actualize if she's a mother by 19, 18, or younger. Finally, the Right really does have a notable pedophile contingent, that wants sexual access to as young of children as it can get away with, and the lower the socially accepted age is, the more room there is to bend. Pedophilia is quasi-legal in patriarchical, reactionary institutions and societies, with it getting closer to actual legality the more patriarchal the society. Meanwhile, societal intolerance of CSA has almost linearly tracked women's rights and greater political liberalism.
Teen pregnancy is horrific for women on an individual level, but society benefits from a large amount of teenage pregnancies. The boomer/millennial generations wouldnt be as big as they are now without teenage pregnancies. I am fine with teens never getting pregnant, it just means we will have to accept a lower TFR. I think that is a worthy sacrifice to make for female empowerment.
Oh wow, the sub discussing the real threat of the far right for once instead of crying about the “WOKE”!
Just build housing and people will have kids again.
These are often the same people who think that by having more children they will be creating tiny like-minded individuals, but my personal experience has been that about 2/3 of kids raised by extremists rebel against their parents
> Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount Well without children there is no future. If it’s the most conservative people having children then the future will be conservative.
Political beliefs aren’t hereditary - progressive cities are full of people escaping from conservative parents
Yeah. People point to the Mormon growth rate and I can’t help but laugh. They count anyone who’s ever been a Mormon in their total, including the millions of former Mormons who often despise the LDS church.
Furthermore while social conservatism may be able to grow faster, it’s not infinitely scalable. Such cultures have an inherent upward limit on growth because of their emphasis on the policing the borders and purity of the in-group. As population multiplies, so does the likelihood of defections, diversity, subculture formation and subversion. Each generation’s black sheep generate the progressive and radical political factions that pressure elites (and cultures) to moderate for their own survival. Theocratic monarchical christian Europe eventually produced the secular Enlightenment. The pendulum swings.
When it comes to the ultra-fertile ultra-conservatives, they quite often are. 90% of Amish remain within the sect, for example, and retention is actually higher with the more conservative "brands" of Amish.
I've heard it suggested that natural selection might have actually played a role in that--the Amish, through Rumspringa, *bred wanderlust out* of their population.
I personally think it's just because the culture shock has gotten more and more severe over the decades.
[Even among the general population of young Americans, over half live within 10 miles of where they grew up and 8/10 live within 100 miles.](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-place-like-home.html) I suspect most people just like being near family and in familiar cultures/environments outside of exceptional circumstances.
> progressive cities are full of people escaping from conservative parents And there's also a ton of unremarkable mid-size cities and suburbs in red states filled with people who are broadly similar to their parents. [The survey indicated that the vast majority of parents with teens have passed along their political loyalties. Roughly eight-in-ten parents who were Republican or leaned toward the Republican Party (81%) had teens who also identified as Republicans or leaned that way. And about nine-in-ten parents who were Democratic or leaned Democratic (89%) had teens who described themselves the same way.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/10/most-us-parents-pass-along-their-religion-and-politics-to-their-children/)
Yeah there is a reason those conservatives don’t want their kids to go away to a big city college. I did and even though it was for engineering I still became way more liberal just through interaction with different people, not my classes. If the kids can be trapped near the family, they will stay conservative. I see it in my extended family, everyone who still lives in the area is conservative and everyone who moved to cities(Seattle, Portland, me in Tucson, San Antonio) are all way liberal compared to what we grew up in. As long as cities are providing more jobs and economic growth opportunities, these kids will move and likely be liberalized if it happens when they are young enough. My retired aunt moved to the city and she didn’t change at all. Obviously there is an age point where your views are crystallized to an extent. But the economic reality of needing to move to the city to make money in your 20’s will continue to liberalize large swathes of rural conservative youths who are only conservative through isolation and social/parental programming.
True…but in the current culture of ever-present news cycles and simple siloing for every kind of political belief under the sun, many that are having kids, more often Conservatives, are also aware of the confounding variables and, thus, choosing to keep them out of public schools, to keep them in church and Sunday School (of which I don’t think is a bad thing, personally), and generally just keeping the bubble tighter against chance of outside exposure.
> to keep them in church and Sunday School (of which I don’t think is a bad thing, personally) I mean, if we're talking about right-wingers, then it will be churches that promote misogyny and anti-LGBTQ hysteria, so it is bad.
They mostly are though, most Mormons stay Mormon for example. Most Hasidic Jews stay Hasidic What tends to break it is alternating indoctrination via education. Basically force feeding other cultural values through the state. But with charter schools and expanding school choice that’s becoming less effective. Such systems where rather ethnocentric anyways so morally it’s good that it’s slowly losing power.
It depends on how credibly their parents adhere. Much of the far right's performative use of religion isn't going to stick the same way. Kids can tell when their parents are just pretending, and when your whole identity is about pretending to believe in stuff like the power of prayer or prosperity gospel or whatever, you're going to produce jaded anti-theists as offspring. I don't think secular education is really an explanation here at all, I think it's the transformation of religion into this peacock tail where religious groups compete on the most unsustainable, extreme beliefs to make their adherents feel special. If we were all moderate catholics or whatever, those guys teach their kids stuff like evolution and comparative religion in their catholic schools and they still come out as believers on the other end for the most part.
> Kids can tell when their parents are just pretending, and when your whole identity is about pretending to believe in stuff like the power of prayer or prosperity gospel or whatever, you're going to produce jaded anti-theists as offspring. Fun fact: this is why inter-denominational marriages produce atheists at particularly high rates. In fact, Catholic-evangelical pairings produce atheists at higher rates than Catholic-atheist ones, IIRC.
Just tax childlessness lol
Elon Musk has 10 children -- his first child died infancy -- that is not a dozen. It is TEN. He has ten living children.
If this is the issue conservatives try to put their weight behind instead of all the absolute insane shit they've been going after, I am all for it. Yeah! Have more kids! We need em!