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Birth Rates in Rich Countries Halve To Hit Record Low (ft.com) 361

Birth rates in the world's rich economies have more than halved since 1960 to hit a record low, according to a study that urged countries to prepare for a "lower fertility future." From a report: The average number of children per woman across the 38 most industrialised countries has fallen from 3.3 in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022, according to a study by the OECD published on Thursday. The fertility rate is now well below the "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman -- at which a country's population is considered to be stable without immigration -- in all the group's member countries except for Israel. "This decline will change the face of societies, communities and families and potentially have large effects on economic growth and prosperity," warned the Paris-based organisation.

Faltering population growth acts as a drag on economic expansion. Across the EU, the rise in overall labour force participation will soon not be enough to compensate for its falling working-age population, exacerbating labour shortages, according to the IMF and European Commission's 2024 ageing report. Coupled with rising life expectancy, low births also put pressure on public finances as they leave fewer people contributing the tax revenues needed to pay for the rising costs of an ageing population. A lack of pupils is also driving an increase in school closures across Europe, Japan and South Korea.

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Birth Rates in Rich Countries Halve To Hit Record Low

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  • Feminism! (Score:3, Informative)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @11:56AM (#64576921)

    A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. --Irina Dunn, 1970.

    • Re:Feminism! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @12:37PM (#64577091) Homepage Journal

      Historically, egalitarian societies have not had any problem having kids.

      What has changed is the cost-benefit analysis for having kids: kids are no longer the retirement plan; having kids is incredibly expensive; kids are no longer free labor on your farm. If a government fully paid for the cost of raising a child [duckduckgo.com] they'd be flooded with more kids than the economy can support.

      • STEM degree (bachelor's), makes $30/hr. That's equivalent to about $16/hr when I started working and I had no trouble making that w/o a college degree. It's nuts. They want to go to grad school, but they need some pre-school prep (a few advanced classes their degree didn't cover). I'd like to kick them a chunk of change but my own job is a bit iffy right now (hooray for companies indulging in layoffs!).

        I'm not mad at the kid. They did everything right. Worked their asses off in college and got a degree
      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        If "the government" paid for the cost of raising a child, that would translate to "the tax paying public" paying for it.

        Which is the same as it is now, only less efficient.

        Your solution literally makes having children less attractive, because of the massively increased tax burden.

      • Historically, egalitarian societies have not had any problem having kids.

        Do you have data to back that up?

        From the data I've seen, if "egalitarian societies" means progressive western culture, the more egalitarian a society is, the fewer children they have they have.

        • I don't know about progressive western societies I just looked up birth rates per woman in Russia https://data.worldbank.org/ind... [worldbank.org], which 1.4 less than the US 1.7. Russia is not particularly wealthy either I don't know much about its culture though. I am discounting China because of its 1 child policy. Even India is heading down at 2.1 from 6 in 1964.

      • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        Rhetorically speaking, why should only wealthy people be able to afford to have children? That seems to be a form of eugenics.

        And why should a child's educational opportunities depend on the parent's wealth? Shouldn't a child born into a poor family and a child born into a wealthy family have equal odds of success in life?

        Any government that is worried about how to afford all the children could offer free birth control (including sterilization), free prenatal care, and free abortions during the first part o

    • Re:Feminism! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @02:43PM (#64577589)

      There are three reasons, and they cascade into one another:
      - Housing is too expensive
      - You need two full time incomes to be housed
      - Therefor a two income couple has no time for children

      There. Solved. If you want your country to return to replacement levels, you need to start making sure everyone can have home on a single income.

  • Not sustainable (Score:5, Informative)

    by ugen ( 93902 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @11:58AM (#64576931)

    Unbounded population growth is, obviously, not sustainable. I mean, we can disagree about the maximum number of humans on the planet, but clearly once there is 1 human per sq. ft. of dry land - that should be about the limit, although I guess we could build up from thence.

    So is any economic paradigm based on perpetual "expansion". It's not going to be easy, because "more == better" is, likely, currently a built in genetic trait in humans (and pretty much any other live organism). But we will have to adapt or die, as usual.

    • Uh, the problem right now is the opposite. Many countries have fallen below replacement. Without immigration, that means population contraction. Fewer workers to take care of more older people.
      Fewer workers means less tax revenue to pay for more older people. There may be a sort of revolution in 20-30 years.
      The idea of being able to retire might die again.

      • But those now older people mortgaged their child's good future to have the life they enjoyed. The bill is coming due.
    • We have more people than can be supported by subsistence farming. At this population level we're firmly locked into industrial scale farming practices. So by some metrics we've already exceeded the maximum number of humans. (I don't agree, but wanted to play Devil's advocate. because the Devil has better clothes and better music)

      So is any economic paradigm based on perpetual "expansion".

      That's bad news for stock market investors. You mean a P/E ratio of over 50 isn't a good investment? All this assumes that reality is important. But perception of growth has a huge

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      Carrying capacity grows as technology rises. Declining birthrates however are an economic cost. While higher populations advance technology faster (some argue for higher population growth specifically on this grounds, as tech advance generally correlates to quality of life).

      That said, declining birth rates are not some sort of untenable economic cost. Like, you may take a 30% hit to per-capita GPD in 2100 vs. a population steady-state, which may sound bad, but that's a hit to the *2100* GDP per-capita, wh

      • We CAN support more people on this planet... but we do not NEED more people on this planet.

        A contraction in population is a benefit for the future of the species. Much like technological advancements, it may be hard on those of us alive now to deal with the fact that we are not necessary, but it will present a better quality of life for those in future generations.

      • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        Carrying capacity grows as technology rises. Declining birthrates however are an economic cost. While higher populations advance technology faster (some argue for higher population growth specifically on this grounds, as tech advance generally correlates to quality of life).

        Some people argue that, but there is no evidence for it.

        Some of the greatest innovation in history has come from very small populations. The entire Renaissance, from daVinci and Michelangelo through Galileo, sprang out of a population of about a million people, about 0.01% of the current world population.

  • by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @12:09PM (#64576977)

    Endless growth is impossible
    We need steady-state sustainability

    • by RobinH ( 124750 )
      I agree. We don't even need exactly 2.1 children per woman (the "replacement rate"). We could probably handle anywhere from 1.9 to 2.3 and it would be fine. But dropping it to 1.5 is going to create some very difficult times for both the older generations that are retiring, and the younger generations who will have to support them.
  • It's almost like rich people saying, "actually doing something about climate change is too expensive so let's lie about it and pretend everything is fine" has resulted in ordinary people thinking, "what kind of fool would have children now?" Who could have foreseen such a result?! -_-

    You reap what you sow.

    • by RobinH ( 124750 )
      There's about a 99.9% chance that some humans will be alive on Earth over a thousand years from now. Yes, there are going to be crises, but life in general and people in particular are pretty great at adapting to change. If you don't think the future of humanity should include your descendants, that's your prerogative. But along with the challenges there's going to be a ton of amazing things that are going to happen. It's not the meek that inherit the Earth; it's the most persistent.
  • On the one hand we have these stories about a shortage of people of working age. On the other we have the supposed problem of AI meaning that most of the population won't have jobs to do.

    Specifically in China at the moment they are seeing a serious growth of unemployment - at a time when the government is panicking about demographics.

    Note that if handled properly, the effect of AI will be to make most things very cheap to buy - because there will be little human labour in their creation. Therefore the unive

  • You're saying that one of the most expensive things you can do in life that has life-long implications and ever-decreasing government support is less popular now than when wages were higher and schools had more funding? Gosh, I wonder why educated people concerned for the future of the planet with shrinking paycheques and fewer housing options are deciding that this isn't for them.

    Truly a mystery of our time.

  • Cultural problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @12:40PM (#64577097) Homepage

    Once people move to the city then their standard of living improves, but kids become less of a "help around the farm" benefit and instead become a very significant expense. We all want to give our kids the best start, so we delay starting a family until we have all the pieces in place. In my own life (late 40s and have had 3 kids) I can tell you that if you eventually want to have kids you should resist this urge to wait until everything is perfect. It doesn't really matter if the mom takes a couple years off now, or five years from now, it's the same amount of time out of her career.

    I'm sure there are people who regrets having kids, but it's very rare in my experience. I can't think of anyone, actually. Also, there are surveys which indicate that single people with no kids are happier than married people with kids, but generally only while the kids are little, and even then the parents will report higher life satisfaction than people with no kids.

    If you go on tiktok or Youtube you're going to find a never-ending stream of people telling young women not to have kids, but something like 90 percent of women aged 18 to 30 report wanting to have kids eventually. But if you don't start until you're in your 30's you may run out of time (over 35 is considered a geriatric pregnancy). Yet as someone who's gone through being a parent (and someone who likes to be prepared) I can honestly say this is one of those things you can spend too much time preparing for. People have been "figuring it out" for literally hundreds of thousands of years, and most of them were far less prepared than you already are.

    If you don't want kids, I have no problem with that, but if you do, don't let our culture scare you away from it. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's not as hard, but it's probably more effort than climbing Mount Everest, and putting your effort into raising a conscientious kid is way more beneficial for society than throwing some more litter on a mountain.

    • Three kids? Did they consent?

      You completely overlook the moral issue: what gives you the right to force yourself upon non-consenting children? Just to give YOUR life meaning and purpose? And then you reserve the right to kick the children out when they turn 18!

      Negative option contracts are illegal because it is immoral. Entering contracts with children is illegal because it is immoral.

      I say that the declining birth rates is caused by people realising the moral issues with forcing themselves upon children.

      Be

  • Pay for kids - a stay-at-home parent should get minimum wage for 7h/day, 5d/week, 50w/year until the jud hits kindergarten.

    Add a small bonus for overlapping children.

    After the 5th year, free daycare / after school care for parents who rejoin the main economy, until the kids are old enough to stay home alone.

    Do that, you'll see a spike. Lots of people put off having kids until it's too late because of the costs.

    Will we pay? No. So more immigration and complaints about being replaced by racists.

    • It is simple, the father should earn enough for one family. The idea that every single body - man and woman - should work for a living to make ends meet is disaster in the making.

      * or mother works while the father stays home, but either way a single wage should be plenty but currently even two is barely enough.
      • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @01:16PM (#64577229)

        Counter-intuitively, work is freedom. The standard of 'everybody works' means everybody can leave a partner who needs leaving.

        Currently, a stay-at-home parent is at the economic mercy of the breadwinner.

        • by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @01:45PM (#64577355) Homepage Journal

          Counter-intuitively, work is freedom. The standard of 'everybody works' means everybody can leave a partner who needs leaving.

          Currently, a stay-at-home parent is at the economic mercy of the breadwinner.

          And yet...it worked out perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of couples in the US (and the western world) up until about 25-30 years ago....

          2 parent, stay at home wife was the norm for ages and it worked well....in fact, most of the societal problems we see today can largely be attributed to the destruction of the "nuclear family".

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

            Nah. That's red-pill bullshit.

            Even if it isn't, your implied solution of keeping women at home to be baby factories is not acceptable.

            • by The Cat ( 19816 )

              The agenda is to stop you from having a happy productive family. To do so, they encourage women to compete with men. The outcome, of course, is that both are destroyed.

              If both husband and wife were united and working together, they would make forward progress and strengthen their neighborhood and country. If they are disunited and working at cross purposes, they destroy each other, their neighborhood and country.

              It's really not that complicated.

          • Counter-intuitively, work is freedom. The standard of 'everybody works' means everybody can leave a partner who needs leaving.

            Currently, a stay-at-home parent is at the economic mercy of the breadwinner.

            And yet...it worked out perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of couples in the US (and the western world) up until about 25-30 years ago....

            2 parent, stay at home wife was the norm for ages and it worked well....in fact, most of the societal problems we see today can largely be attributed to the destruction of the "nuclear family".

            The "nuclear family" is a sad degeneration of the multi generation family that was common for much of the 20th century. The nuclear family was a lot less happy than the myths say. Way back was also a time that people in the neighborhood would look out for each other, and each others' kids. That is not today's culture.

            Its good for kids to naturally hang out in unplanned groups of varying ages where the slightly older kids teach the younger ones. Adults would be drinking beer outside, more or less in view of

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            And yet...it worked out perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of couples in the US (and the western world) up until about 25-30 years ago....

            Did it? Or did those people stay in unhappy, even abusive relationships, that today they could walk away from?

  • The paper in question [nih.gov]

    There are several factors such as lifestyle factors, an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, rise in obesity and environmental factors involved in urbanisation and urban lifestyle that are affecting fertility and have led to rise in male and female subfertility. In addition there are socio-economic factors that have led to women and couples delaying having children. Lack of affordable housing, flexible and part-time career posts for women and affordable and publicly funded (free) child care have contributed to the current low fertility/birth rates. Couples/women are delaying starting a family which has led to a true decline in their fertility levels due to ovarian ageing and related reasons leading to reduced chance of conception.

    I think a lot of people keep ignoring how there are antibiotic resistant STDs floating around that can render you sterile and the number people infected with them is year after year on the rise. [who.int]

    The obesity epidemic isn't over, people just stopped paying attention. [who.int] Over 2.5 Billion people [who.int] on this planet are at weights that are dangerous to one's health.

    Urbanization has introduced new problems with isolation, diet, and stress (not even getting into the economic issues here as that's a

  • Short version: here is non-paywall linke to the article [archive.is].

    Long version, including rant ...

    I get it, Slashdot editors, you probably have a deal to drive traffic to certain sites. Running the site costs money, and you have to get revenue from somewhere.

    But, these deals are to sites who are not of interest to the target audience of this site. Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, ...etc. Slashdotters will NOT subscribe to these sites just because you link to them.

    There is no such deal you say? More re

  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @12:45PM (#64577119)
    Not having kids is awesome and having kids sucks. However, it's always been that way. Some major relatively recent changes have made things a lot worse.

    1. We're hyper competitive about education. A lot of our best and brightest don't enter the workforce until their late 20s. This is killing us as a species. You're biologically supposed to have kids in your 20s. If you have your first kid at 35, your risk of birth defects and development disorders increases drastically. Advanced maternal age causes A LOT of issues and advanced paternal age is strongly linked to autism. If you leave college 8 years later than your parents to get a post doc, by the time you can afford a place big enough to have a kid and not hate your life, you're in your mid-30s. And you've seen your peers have fertility issues, and children with health or development issues...so...most don't have many kids and quite a few just figure...my life is better with disposable income and freedom.

    We really need to stop practices like post-docs and encouraging PhDs in fields where they're not needed. These schools aren't teaching much, just exploiting grad students for cheap labor.

    2. Recent tax breaks are KILLING us, demographically. Since Reagan especially after George W Bush, Republicans have been very aggressive about tax cuts, which have increased our number of millionaires and billionaires....and for the majority of the wealthy, real estate is their favorite investment vehicle. The USA, Canada, and Australia have HUGE issues with the wealthy hoarding real estate, making it expensive to live. So in my area, housing prices are through the roof. Why? Because I live in a great location and therefore investors snap up building all the time. Since it is just a vehicle for the wealthy to avoid taxes and earn money, no price is too high. We've seen housing prices well over triple in my area....and because they're wealthy, they can buy as many as they can get loans for...so lots of luxury houses in my neighborhood are vacant...either a rarely used second home or just an investment vehicle....with no occupant from what I can tell. The reduced supply means everyone is either commuting for an hour and living far away or living in a much smaller house than their parents raised them in.

    Also, when you spend all your money on a mortgage or rent, it leaves little else for raising a kid....but you also have many wealthy in the area who can afford to pay top dollar for child care, so daycare costs are through the roof. And even if you live in a cheap area, the standards for child care have risen in ways that are always more expensive. Everyone has a 'back when we were kids..." story of something that was normal that is considered bad today...for example letting your kids independently leave the house at young age or eat garbage food...not to mention technology is mandatory today. Your kids need some sort of device to complete their homework and be generally normal. Nothing about having children has gotten cheaper in my lifetime.

    So yeah, we've spent decades making bad decision after bad decision...and making life suck for all those but those wealthy enough to be top Republican Donors...and huh...who woulda thunk?...people don't want to live in poverty to have children...and those that do stop at 1 or 2.

    Want people to have children?...make life suck less. We can do it. France and Sweden and Israel do it and they have much better birthrates than we do.
    • Both genders are butthurt. Media-savvy women are mad "because patriarchy". Media-addicted men are mad "because feminism". They've both been fed a constant diet of grievance.

      Then of course, there is the societal problems afflicting young families. You can't own a home, you cannot have a decent job (so you both get to work your ass off), your healthcare sucks so having a kid will cost a fortune (and thanks to price-inflation it'll continue to cost a mint), you cannot get laid even if you do get married bec
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Lowering birthrates is a *good* thing. The world population doubled between about 1800 and 1925. It doubled again by about 1975, and again by today. It can't double many more times before we run out of space to grow food or drown in our own waste. (Some would argue that we're already past that point.) Given that lifespan is increasing due to better medicine, we either need to slow down birthrate or implement some sort of lifespan limits a la Logan's Run.

    • It completely depends on the tech level we use. If we’re hunter-gatherers, the max sustainable population is probably a hundred million max. If everyone chose to live in cities with the density of NYC, the entire world’s population could fit easily in Texas, and the rest of the planet are would be WAY more than required to sustain people.

      Add in a few more tech advances lilely to happen in the next century, and you reach the conclusion that we’re nowhere near the capacity limit.
    • I agree that overall, controlling the total human population and maybe even shrinking it a bit (until we can expand beyond the Earth) is a good thing - there's no need for us to flirt with the disaster of overpopulation. However, we have the opposite problem that a lot of our key social structures and infrastructure were setup around the assumption of a growing, or at minimum a stable working population - things like social safety nets, medical and education, etc. As the population disproportionately become
  • by TomGreenhaw ( 929233 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @01:13PM (#64577223)
    People say rich countries aren't doing enough to lessen their impact on the environment. While it may not be soon enough, population decline coupled with technology will lower the impact on the environment and its limited resources.
  • Because of this:
    https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]

  • Quit freaking about about people immigrating in and that population drain will sort itself out in due time.
  • by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @02:51PM (#64577639)

    A species that finds a habitat with an excess of food and a lack of predators (humans created excess food through agriculture and have no meaningful predators besides other humans) will continue to multiply until disease, a new predator, a lack of resources, or low fertility stops their growth. Population growth must stop eventually. Far better for everyone if that growth is stopped by voluntary falling fertility as opposed to disease, running out of resources, or human predators (i.e. something like a nuclear war).

    As to why fertility is falling: I think it's the simple fact that when given a choice most people don't want to have large families. Most people do want to have some children, but most often one or two. Rasing kids is hard. It's expensive. One child can take care of you in old age almost as well as five (usually there's one child that ends up the primary caregiver in that situation anyways).

    In any society, there will be some portion of the population that can't have children, don't want children, or are otherwise prevented from having them by circumstance. That leads to a birthrate in the ~1.5ish range once people have a choice. Fertility is generally only dramatically higher than that when birth control is not widely available, meaning people don't have much of a choice (yes, there are ways not to have children without birth control but the practical result of not having it tends to be people having children who didn't really intend to).

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