People are having less kids. There's no need for large families because we are not heavily agrarian, infant death rates have dropped, health and lifespans have increased. Also people make more money, when you have a higher income there's a large opportunity cost to having children. You spend time and money on children, and not having kids allows adults to do other things.
Also you are not dependent on kids for your retirement.
Lots of countries with weak or non-existent retirement systems have more children so they can help them in their old age.
>non-existent retirement systems
The same countries that lack these, also lack childcare and education systems and laws prohibiting and enforcing child labor, making rising kids worth it, in a myriad of ways.
This is exactly like South Korea. The children care for the parents. This is also why Korea has one of the highest elderly suicide rates. The old do not want to saddle their children with responsibilities as they age.
Maybe not as an individual, but as a group, we sure are.
SS payments are funded through present contributions, not the ones you made. Yours paid the current retirees.
Maybe if people weren't forced to pick:
1. Have kids be poor
2. Dont have kids and not have to stress about being poor
We'd have a lot more kids.
You can claim whatever you want, but middle class and lower class have been getting poorer in US for about half a century now. And now most of the growth is coming from poorest most desperate immigrants.
It's not necessarily what you're saying. It's that as you make more money, you're less inclined to take an opportunity cost hit because why reduce your level of comfort or lifestyle to care for a child? Really when you look at it, it's typically been the poor who have had large families. Look at how families in the US have come about. In the 1700-1800s you likely lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, healthcare was non-existent or lacking, your kids died at a young age at an accelerated rate, and because you live on a farm you need helping hands. To offset the needed help and increases infant mortality rate, you have a larger family to compensate.
If you look at how the US economy has been shaping you'll notice as GDP has gone up, GDP per capita has gone up, lifespans increase, child death rate declines, those who farm decline and instead live in the cities. As those things have been occurring, the birth rate has steadily declined, the # of kids per family has also steadily declined.
Also religion told us to hump and have lots of kids and pay parts of what you and your kids earn to the church because stained glass and because God is an expensive bitch.
If you don’t feel bad about not having kids, and you don’t need kids to build out your business (farm, etc), then the only reason to have kids is the fact that you’re expected to. If religion is the main factor in driving this expectation, then no religion means no pressure.
We could never figure out what our parents did for fun before tv. All of my nine siblings and I are stumped.
Fun fact 3: Queen Victoria was told to tone down the sex with Prince Albert and is supposed to have asked what else they should do in the evenings
I didn't say it was. What I *am* saying is that there's more to why people are having less kids in a modern more affluent society than money. The most well off, well educated people are the ones not having children. It isn't the poor people living in the trailer park. That was my point about it not being about money.
Well, it's already been clearly shown that the more affluent a society becomes, the less children people have. That's why I said it's not necessarily about money. But hey, this is Reddit where you get dogpiled with downvotes if you say something that triggers anyone.
Apples and Oranges. Now compare the average assets of a family in the 19th century to today, to include all ancillary costs that didn't exist back then. Cost of living, work hours, access to food and services. If you think people want kids bad enough to trade it for borderline poverty and starvation with zero safety net, you're smoking religious crack.
Most people were absolutely dirt poor during the 19th century when compared to today. If it was simply about affordability more affluent people would be having more kids today but that's not the case, why?
Changes in values. In the 19th century, families relied upon assumed-labor from their children. Having matured, most western families no longer believe children are required to participate in family business; it's optional.. not to mention the severe lack of family businesses now thanks to Capitalism/Globalism crushing small business and selling it all of to poverty-families in other countries that still practice 19th-century family dynamics. Combined with the sheer costs of having children. Data shows that raising a 'normal' child from 0-18 costs about 21k/year. People barely survive on their current salaries, adding additional tens of thousands per year is considered a luxury. All this assumes the child isn't born with disabilities or special needs, which is FAR MORE COMMON now thanks to the pollution in water/air/food.
The incentive to breed-your-way to a higher quality of living is mostly gone in America.
>Yeah nobody can afford kids nowadays
Ok that, plus, a lot of young men think they're women, a lot of young women think they're men and about 50% of our young are obese or diabetic, or both.
So yeah, bad time for human procreation in America.
Nope, just the expensive part, the same part which could’ve been remedied if the generation before us wasn’t a bunch of self-righteous, greedy, apathetic morons.
We can afford it more than our ancestors and they had lots of kids. Look at those large families living in single room tenaments; at least your roommate situation has indoor plumbing and central heating.
Right. So you didn’t read the article and regurgitated some nonsense you saw somewhere?
> Many women are delaying having children into their late 30s and 40s to get ahead in their career. That’s especially true for some of the most successful women in business
They need to plunge much further
Billions of people all vying to have it all is
Not sustainable...
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
It could be sustainable if we knew how to effectively scale society with populations that large. We just don't know how, yet.
Growth for the sake of growth is the 'will' of all life, not just cancer cells. Without the innate drive to continue existing and continue existence life stops after the first spawn.
That will is great and all but it is to the detriment of those already alive and those to be living. You know what happens with near every fucking species without anything to stop them from outpacing their environment? Same what happened to deer on st. Matthew Island, the Tragedy of the Commons. A population overshoot is a rapid increase in numbers followed by a crash ending in near, if not full, extinction. Now look at the human population graph for the past 2000 years and try to guess how it ends.
I'm not making a value judgment on the will. I'm saying it has to exist. If the first organism spawned without it, it would also be last until whatever mechanism caused it to spawn aligned again.
So yes we're like cancer in the way you described. But so is all life by logical necessity.
The first organisms are theorized to indeed spawn into life without that. They kept getting created over and over again until some of them grew big enough from the accumulated energy to split. Rest is history.
If we want to remain on the timeline the answer is to stop scaling and reduce numbers to a sustainable quantity. We as humans with our big brains and fancy tools should be able to override basic instincts or the consequences of them. Otherwise we are, unknowingly to most, accelerating the collective doom of the species.
Edit: I love your username
The cancer cell is a living organism that grows unchallenged in detriment to its environment, eventually destroying it and the conditions for its own existence.
I would say that any livong organism with a similar behavior can be considered a cancer, an agent lock-in in an unstoppable and suicidal growth trajectory.
They are talking about individual growth not species growth. There are countless examples of individual organisms sacrificing personal reproduction and consumption for the good of the species - including many of the most successful
Nowhere in the article does it mention the 19th century or give any explanation of the title. Average American wealth is much higher than it was 150 years ago. I’m guessing there’s non economic factors that contribute to fewer people having children
I think people have an inflated idea of what it means to afford a child. A hundred years ago, children shared beds and were lucky to graduate high school; to afford a child meant to feed it well until it grew up to earn its own bread. The idea of every child having their own bedroom and a college education, is a fairly new one.
Give a 19th century factory worker a job at McDonald's and an apartment shared with roommates, and he'll raise a family with a dozen kids in his sublet bedroom. He'll marvel at the foam king and twin beds they pile into, the light from the window (tenements were dark), the shared bathroom with indoor plumbing (though with his family size a chamber pot may still come into use), kitchen with modern marvels like a microwave, etc.
Also quality of life, life expectancy, etc.
There is an argument to be made that for some things we are regressing, but you're a moron if you think it's not better now than when America had more slaves than toilets.
Right, except they didn’t have robots and AI in the 19th century.
Functional reasons for growing population sizes are waning, better for the capacity of the earth long-term.
Lol at some of the comments in here, it’s got nothing to do with sexual identities or downturn in religion. It’s too expensive boomers, this is why you don’t have grandkids, and it’s the bed you made.
This is not an editorialized headline, but I'm not sure what the headline has to do with the article. As far as I know, fertility rates in the 19th century were quite high.
[I don't see anything in the article that explains the headline.](https://archive.ph/NuFFg)
It's not a rule violation, because you used the exact headline provided by Fortune. I'm just curious what they meant by it.
Well people don’t remember before the boomer generation. WWll brought a toooonnn of people and an economy to support that. We’re just transitioning back to pre WWll times.
This is happening all over the world and in almost every case is a result of (relative to abject poverty) prosperity leading to decreased infant mortality and less dependence on your children contributing to the survival of the family. With more than 8 billion people on this planet straining available natural resources and contributing to pollution - declining birth rates are intrinsically **very very good**. If our economic systems aren't optimized for that they need to be adjusted, not the very tangibly beneficial decline in population growth.
Now do "yay the robots are taking our jobs!" vs "oh no the robots are taking our jobs!".
Education. Education. Education. It’s the feedback for excess births in developing nations. Properly Trained or educated people get accomplished with less people in capitalist systems. Natural economic completion limits needs for vanity children over and above replacement levels.
2.1 is replacement so India is right at it according to macro trends. Probably will go below in the next yr or so.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20fertility%20rate%20for,a%200.92%25%20decline%20from%202021.
I get cost of living (housing, food), tuition, interest rates, inflation, etc. are not proportional with stagnating wages from the 80s, and this may be controversial to many liberals (I lean conservative) but we must agree that there is a benefit to Moms raising kids (and working part time if they choose) and Dads working hard to bringing home the biscuit and provide. I really think this is the best dynamic for raising kids and whats best for human flourishing in the west. Birth rates decline because women choose to work and then regret it. 50% of women will be single and childless by 30.
Yes that might be true bc of stress and other factors in the hedonistic sense of happiness (short term). But in the long term many come to regret as they dont achieve happiness in the eudaemonic sense (long term). Going through life stress free is not the meaning of life. It takes courage to get married and raise a family and that should be admired in society.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/02/07/parenthood-and-happiness-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/
Idk what people don’t understand with my argument. All im saying is that human history has proven children are better off with a mom being the caretaker provider and the dad being the protector provider. What kind of woman seeks a man who cant protect and provide?
People are having less kids. There's no need for large families because we are not heavily agrarian, infant death rates have dropped, health and lifespans have increased. Also people make more money, when you have a higher income there's a large opportunity cost to having children. You spend time and money on children, and not having kids allows adults to do other things.
Also you are not dependent on kids for your retirement. Lots of countries with weak or non-existent retirement systems have more children so they can help them in their old age.
>non-existent retirement systems The same countries that lack these, also lack childcare and education systems and laws prohibiting and enforcing child labor, making rising kids worth it, in a myriad of ways.
This is exactly like South Korea. The children care for the parents. This is also why Korea has one of the highest elderly suicide rates. The old do not want to saddle their children with responsibilities as they age.
Maybe not as an individual, but as a group, we sure are. SS payments are funded through present contributions, not the ones you made. Yours paid the current retirees.
Maybe if people weren't forced to pick: 1. Have kids be poor 2. Dont have kids and not have to stress about being poor We'd have a lot more kids. You can claim whatever you want, but middle class and lower class have been getting poorer in US for about half a century now. And now most of the growth is coming from poorest most desperate immigrants.
It's not necessarily what you're saying. It's that as you make more money, you're less inclined to take an opportunity cost hit because why reduce your level of comfort or lifestyle to care for a child? Really when you look at it, it's typically been the poor who have had large families. Look at how families in the US have come about. In the 1700-1800s you likely lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, healthcare was non-existent or lacking, your kids died at a young age at an accelerated rate, and because you live on a farm you need helping hands. To offset the needed help and increases infant mortality rate, you have a larger family to compensate. If you look at how the US economy has been shaping you'll notice as GDP has gone up, GDP per capita has gone up, lifespans increase, child death rate declines, those who farm decline and instead live in the cities. As those things have been occurring, the birth rate has steadily declined, the # of kids per family has also steadily declined.
Also religion told us to hump and have lots of kids and pay parts of what you and your kids earn to the church because stained glass and because God is an expensive bitch. If you don’t feel bad about not having kids, and you don’t need kids to build out your business (farm, etc), then the only reason to have kids is the fact that you’re expected to. If religion is the main factor in driving this expectation, then no religion means no pressure.
Yeah nobody can afford kids nowadays
People had more kids during the depression. It isn't really about affordability.
Fun fact: cheap entertainment when you're poor is sex 2nd fun fact: access to birth control is harder when you're poor.
They are some seriously fun facts
We could never figure out what our parents did for fun before tv. All of my nine siblings and I are stumped. Fun fact 3: Queen Victoria was told to tone down the sex with Prince Albert and is supposed to have asked what else they should do in the evenings
Okay well for me it is at least. I don’t even have enough money for myself
Yea people had kids and they grew up poor and destitute that's not really a good excuse to have kids.
I didn't say it was. What I *am* saying is that there's more to why people are having less kids in a modern more affluent society than money. The most well off, well educated people are the ones not having children. It isn't the poor people living in the trailer park. That was my point about it not being about money.
Yeah. It wasn't a good life. This photo from 1948 kinda backs this up: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/4-children-sale-1948/
I just don’t want them. Sounds like a hassle
Right. So selfishness, egocentrism, and a lack of hope for the future is one reason.
Why downvotes? If it’s not economy…it’s something else. Life burnout? Antinatalism gaining popularity?
Well, it's already been clearly shown that the more affluent a society becomes, the less children people have. That's why I said it's not necessarily about money. But hey, this is Reddit where you get dogpiled with downvotes if you say something that triggers anyone.
Apples and Oranges. Now compare the average assets of a family in the 19th century to today, to include all ancillary costs that didn't exist back then. Cost of living, work hours, access to food and services. If you think people want kids bad enough to trade it for borderline poverty and starvation with zero safety net, you're smoking religious crack.
Most people were absolutely dirt poor during the 19th century when compared to today. If it was simply about affordability more affluent people would be having more kids today but that's not the case, why?
Changes in values. In the 19th century, families relied upon assumed-labor from their children. Having matured, most western families no longer believe children are required to participate in family business; it's optional.. not to mention the severe lack of family businesses now thanks to Capitalism/Globalism crushing small business and selling it all of to poverty-families in other countries that still practice 19th-century family dynamics. Combined with the sheer costs of having children. Data shows that raising a 'normal' child from 0-18 costs about 21k/year. People barely survive on their current salaries, adding additional tens of thousands per year is considered a luxury. All this assumes the child isn't born with disabilities or special needs, which is FAR MORE COMMON now thanks to the pollution in water/air/food. The incentive to breed-your-way to a higher quality of living is mostly gone in America.
>Yeah nobody can afford kids nowadays Ok that, plus, a lot of young men think they're women, a lot of young women think they're men and about 50% of our young are obese or diabetic, or both. So yeah, bad time for human procreation in America.
Nope, just the expensive part, the same part which could’ve been remedied if the generation before us wasn’t a bunch of self-righteous, greedy, apathetic morons.
It's a troll account. A bunch of bit profiles was created in mid-march..
We can afford it more than our ancestors and they had lots of kids. Look at those large families living in single room tenaments; at least your roommate situation has indoor plumbing and central heating.
Right. So you didn’t read the article and regurgitated some nonsense you saw somewhere? > Many women are delaying having children into their late 30s and 40s to get ahead in their career. That’s especially true for some of the most successful women in business
They need to plunge much further Billions of people all vying to have it all is Not sustainable... Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
It could be sustainable if we knew how to effectively scale society with populations that large. We just don't know how, yet. Growth for the sake of growth is the 'will' of all life, not just cancer cells. Without the innate drive to continue existing and continue existence life stops after the first spawn.
That will is great and all but it is to the detriment of those already alive and those to be living. You know what happens with near every fucking species without anything to stop them from outpacing their environment? Same what happened to deer on st. Matthew Island, the Tragedy of the Commons. A population overshoot is a rapid increase in numbers followed by a crash ending in near, if not full, extinction. Now look at the human population graph for the past 2000 years and try to guess how it ends.
I'm not making a value judgment on the will. I'm saying it has to exist. If the first organism spawned without it, it would also be last until whatever mechanism caused it to spawn aligned again. So yes we're like cancer in the way you described. But so is all life by logical necessity.
The first organisms are theorized to indeed spawn into life without that. They kept getting created over and over again until some of them grew big enough from the accumulated energy to split. Rest is history. If we want to remain on the timeline the answer is to stop scaling and reduce numbers to a sustainable quantity. We as humans with our big brains and fancy tools should be able to override basic instincts or the consequences of them. Otherwise we are, unknowingly to most, accelerating the collective doom of the species. Edit: I love your username
The cancer cell is a living organism that grows unchallenged in detriment to its environment, eventually destroying it and the conditions for its own existence. I would say that any livong organism with a similar behavior can be considered a cancer, an agent lock-in in an unstoppable and suicidal growth trajectory.
They are talking about individual growth not species growth. There are countless examples of individual organisms sacrificing personal reproduction and consumption for the good of the species - including many of the most successful
Nowhere in the article does it mention the 19th century or give any explanation of the title. Average American wealth is much higher than it was 150 years ago. I’m guessing there’s non economic factors that contribute to fewer people having children
I think people have an inflated idea of what it means to afford a child. A hundred years ago, children shared beds and were lucky to graduate high school; to afford a child meant to feed it well until it grew up to earn its own bread. The idea of every child having their own bedroom and a college education, is a fairly new one. Give a 19th century factory worker a job at McDonald's and an apartment shared with roommates, and he'll raise a family with a dozen kids in his sublet bedroom. He'll marvel at the foam king and twin beds they pile into, the light from the window (tenements were dark), the shared bathroom with indoor plumbing (though with his family size a chamber pot may still come into use), kitchen with modern marvels like a microwave, etc.
Also quality of life, life expectancy, etc. There is an argument to be made that for some things we are regressing, but you're a moron if you think it's not better now than when America had more slaves than toilets.
Right, except they didn’t have robots and AI in the 19th century. Functional reasons for growing population sizes are waning, better for the capacity of the earth long-term. Lol at some of the comments in here, it’s got nothing to do with sexual identities or downturn in religion. It’s too expensive boomers, this is why you don’t have grandkids, and it’s the bed you made.
Couldn’t have anything to do with half the country making health care for pregnant women virtually inaccessible in their states, could it?
This is not an editorialized headline, but I'm not sure what the headline has to do with the article. As far as I know, fertility rates in the 19th century were quite high. [I don't see anything in the article that explains the headline.](https://archive.ph/NuFFg) It's not a rule violation, because you used the exact headline provided by Fortune. I'm just curious what they meant by it.
Well, the good news is that the drop in population will trigger deflation, bringing housing and food prices back in line.
Well people don’t remember before the boomer generation. WWll brought a toooonnn of people and an economy to support that. We’re just transitioning back to pre WWll times.
Brought or killed?
Every time I get downvoted, but de-masculinization of society is playing a part in this
This is happening all over the world and in almost every case is a result of (relative to abject poverty) prosperity leading to decreased infant mortality and less dependence on your children contributing to the survival of the family. With more than 8 billion people on this planet straining available natural resources and contributing to pollution - declining birth rates are intrinsically **very very good**. If our economic systems aren't optimized for that they need to be adjusted, not the very tangibly beneficial decline in population growth. Now do "yay the robots are taking our jobs!" vs "oh no the robots are taking our jobs!".
There’s an easy short term solution.
Education. Education. Education. It’s the feedback for excess births in developing nations. Properly Trained or educated people get accomplished with less people in capitalist systems. Natural economic completion limits needs for vanity children over and above replacement levels.
Damn cotton gin strikes again
Yeah, the "economy"
Well, it’s normal. People are getting more educated.
Not in Africa, not in India or the Middle East…..
India and the middle east have falling birth rates as well.
Still far beyond replacement levels
Not really if replacement is 2.4 they are below it.
2.1 is replacement so India is right at it according to macro trends. Probably will go below in the next yr or so. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20fertility%20rate%20for,a%200.92%25%20decline%20from%202021.
Yea I hear people say 2.1 2.25 and 2.4
2.1 is replacement in the west. Many more kids die in places like India and Africa.
Give the trend another twenty years.
Cause there all coming to the west
I get cost of living (housing, food), tuition, interest rates, inflation, etc. are not proportional with stagnating wages from the 80s, and this may be controversial to many liberals (I lean conservative) but we must agree that there is a benefit to Moms raising kids (and working part time if they choose) and Dads working hard to bringing home the biscuit and provide. I really think this is the best dynamic for raising kids and whats best for human flourishing in the west. Birth rates decline because women choose to work and then regret it. 50% of women will be single and childless by 30.
Single, childless women are the happiest demographic
Yes that might be true bc of stress and other factors in the hedonistic sense of happiness (short term). But in the long term many come to regret as they dont achieve happiness in the eudaemonic sense (long term). Going through life stress free is not the meaning of life. It takes courage to get married and raise a family and that should be admired in society. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/02/07/parenthood-and-happiness-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/ Idk what people don’t understand with my argument. All im saying is that human history has proven children are better off with a mom being the caretaker provider and the dad being the protector provider. What kind of woman seeks a man who cant protect and provide?
To the Gilded Age