Birth Rate in England and Wales Plunges To Lowest Level Since 1938 (bbc.com) 230
England and Wales have recorded their lowest birth rate since records began in 1938, with women having an average of 1.44 children in 2023, official data showed on Monday. The figure falls well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population without migration in developed nations, the Office for National Statistics reported.
The rate has declined steadily since 2010. The steepest drops occurred among women under 30, with new mothers in 2023 averaging almost a year older than in 2013. Experts link the decline to multiple factors, including widespread contraception use, women's increased participation in education and employment, and rising childcare and housing costs. The trend mirrors similar patterns across developed economies, with EU nations like Italy and Spain reporting rates as low as 1.2 children per woman in 2023.
The rate has declined steadily since 2010. The steepest drops occurred among women under 30, with new mothers in 2023 averaging almost a year older than in 2013. Experts link the decline to multiple factors, including widespread contraception use, women's increased participation in education and employment, and rising childcare and housing costs. The trend mirrors similar patterns across developed economies, with EU nations like Italy and Spain reporting rates as low as 1.2 children per woman in 2023.
Housing cost is the easy one to solve (Score:5, Informative)
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Anyway:
with women having an average of 1.44 children in 2023
UK must have a world fertility record then even if they are at their lowest! 1.44 children by woman in 2023 would be an average of 14 children by woman in 10 years and 29 children in 20 years. What are they going to do with all that population?
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Quantification error. They do not mean "1.44 children IN 2023", they mean when they took the stats in 2023, women generally had 1.44 children in their lifetime.
Re:Housing cost is the easy one to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Housing cost is the easy one to solve.
The long term solution is to lower the population. We have too many people and too few resources. Reduce the population, and the resource problem becomes much more tenable until it eventually disappears. As an added bonus, employment conditions start to favor the employed.
We are vastly overpopulated, so any long term reduction in population is a net gain for everyone.
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The long term solution is to lower the population. We have too many people and too few resources.
I've heard this many times. Remind me again, what's the right population?
We are vastly overpopulated
So that's what, 1/10th the population, 1/100th is the right amount to you?
I believe survival of the next extinction level event is going to depend on people, both brain power and labor. If you don't care about such things then yeah, lets clear cut the world population and build bunkers.
Beyond that, I also believe more people means more interesting things in life. As long as people are housed, fed and educated, I think we're doing ju
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The neckbeards and cat miladies take care of that themselves.
The "narrative" (Score:2, Insightful)
These articles are always about
- cost of living
- expensive housing
- lack of time for child raising
- lack of interest
The never come out and say the actual reasons
- The legal system disincentivizes men from getting married; and especially those that have seen 2 generations of fathers, uncles treated poorly by divorce and post divorce legal system.
- Women want to delay marriage and childbirth when compared to decades ago
- The media message, school message to women is get educated, get a career, the right princ
Childless women (Score:3)
Forgot to add: The birth rate decline is mainly due to an increasing number of women being childless. Mothers are having the same number of children as ~1970.
Re:Childless women stats (Score:3)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep... [ons.gov.uk]
From: Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2021 and 2022
> Women in England and Wales who were born in 1977 have an average completed family size of 1.94 children (before the age of 46 years); this is the highest average since those born in 1962, but a lower average compared with 2.07 children for their mothers' generation (assumed to be those born in 1950).
> Of women born in 1977, 16% had not had a child before the age of 46 years; this is
Considering (Score:3)
- Refer to the economic research topic "Marriage Sorting Market". Women want to marry up, to a better educated, taller, higher earning person than themselves thus limiting the pool of possible partners
- The legal system disincentivizes men from getting married and fathering children in or outside of marriage
- Women waiting until later in life still want to marry up and combine it with women earning more as they approach 30 reduces the pool of possible partners due to wanting to marry up
Nowhere did the orig
Re: The "narrative" (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh my god, men are the victims?
If you think women need to be captive in the home and men need protection from divorce to fix this "problem", I can tell you why you're not getting laid.
You're disgusting.
Re:The "narrative" (Score:5, Insightful)
The never come out and say the actual reasons
Every time I hear someone talk about "the real reason" I expect to see some heavily biased or short sighted answer that results. You didn't disappoint. Let's dissect it:
You said it's nothing to do with cost, time or interest. ... time. The thing you discounted. ... incoherent rubbish followed by men in their 30s and some incoherent rubbish that doesn't even form a grammatically correct sentence" - Honestly I don't know what to make of this, it sounds very much like an argument for why the birth rate should be going up. That is a wildly incoherent thought you had there. The bits I can make out seem to be based on some insanely strong underlying bias. You think men in their 30s right now expect their wives to stay at home and run on a treadmill? Did you just wake from a 50 year coma? I suggest not telling your wife to get back into the kitchen - times have changed since you last looked at western culture.
"The legal system disincentivizes men from getting married" - you don't need to be married to have kids. And the marriage rate has changed only by a smidge over 1% so clearly that's got little to no effect on something that is down 20% over the same decade.
"Women want to delay marriage and childbirth when compared to decades ago" - that isn't represented in the statistics. Delaying doesn't cause an overall population birth rate to drop over such a long term. But while we're at it, you gave an observation, not an underlying reason. The "why" is missing, and it's likely the things you discounted: cost and time.
"The media message, school message to women is get educated, get a career, the right prince charming will come along" - So
"As women age into their late 20s and 30s, they are more selective" - Not reflected in the underlying marriage statistics.
"Women enter their 30s and
As for your cherry picked news articles, how would you like me to frame society? I can do the same from pretending we are all kind hearted woke people, to saying we're all crazy pieces of shit. Your "examples" are not a reflection of a society. They are reflections of two people, and most relevantly in highlighting those examples of your society you failed to mention the first example was effectively laughed away in parliament, while the second isn't remotely anything to do with marriage, couples, or childbirth, and while you frame it as the "law" against men, it ultimately had little to do with the law itself and Williams is in jail.
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We're not vastly overpopulated at all.
Says who? Just because the population is lower than another spot you cherry picked? Who cares? If people cannot get critical needs met like living somewhere that doesn't bankrupt them, you've likely got a problem with overpopulation. That is to say, the area simply cannot support the population you have given the resources they have access to. The reasons are just reasons. Identifying some of them won't change the fundamental problem of not being able to build.
we just manage our land more poorly.
Bad management or not, what happens elsewhere i
Re: Housing cost is the easy one to solve (Score:2)
Thereâ(TM)s also the dislike of building upwards, or rather the general attitude towards living this way. Probably council high rises from the 60s and poor quality developments general have put people off, but if you look at other cities around the world, even just five story buildings are much more common. Where I live, the major of London has overruled locally planning rules and we have some very out-of-character high rises planned, although without commensurate infrastructure plans to improve publ
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Expensive housing is the only way to ensure a segment of the population stays working. Food is widely available and cheap in the west. Healthcare too (at least nowadays). If you're broke in a city, you can't survive because you'll lose housing. In 1940 a home cost about 1x annual median salary. As in, most homes cost the amount a typical person would earn in one year. So if you made $2000 a year, a decent house was available to you for $2000. Which meant your mortgage was no big deal. Today, a typical perso
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Ahh yes, I recall how no one worked 30 years ago when houses were affordable. /s
Sorry but that conspiracy is just dumb.
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1940 wasn't 30 years ago and the post you replied to didn't offer any conspiracy theories.
That aside, buying a house costing 1x the median income in 1940 still required making the median income which meant working..
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Housing cost is the easy one to solve. Most of the UK, but England especially, have made it incredibly difficult to build new housing. So there's massive demand and very little supply, so cost goes up. While there are construction issues, the main aspects are extremely involved planning processes, regulatory barriers, and letting even the smallest community interest block housing (sometimes literally one disgruntled neighbor). See https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/2024/9/new_research_identifies_barriers_to_housing_supply_in_england_and_wales/ [warwick.ac.uk].
The fascinating thing is the narrative that one must be pretty wealthy to even think about having children.
When it fact, it is in direct opposition to the fact that for so many years, people have married young and started families at a time when they were making a whole lot less money than when they were older.
The problem with the "you must have a lot of money, or else you can't have children outlook is that there really are not that many people who are 6 figure income people (or even millionaires) du
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some 45 percent of women in their 30's will be single, unattached, and childless.
And fucking everything that walks, just like the men, and happy as a clam.
I suspect that number will only increase.
You bet your ass it will.
Many women are experiencing loneliness
lol. Na.
Women are behaving sociosexually more like men.
The thing people like you keep missing with your "disinterested men" claims, is that the women don't want your fucking interest.
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Many women are experiencing loneliness
lol. Na. Women are behaving sociosexually more like men.
Many men are lonely. So your comment should be:
Yah. Women are behaving sociosexually more like men.
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Re:Housing cost is the easy one to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
One person used to be able to afford a decent size house, two kids, stay at home partner etc on one average income.
Now both people have to work and still can't afford more than renting a small flat.
Re:Housing cost is the easy one to solve (Score:5, Interesting)
As a divorced 40 year old man with exceptional credit, good career prospects and no criminal records or drug habits. I've had exceedingly poor luck in the dating market. I'm not overweight but I'm nerdy and maybe a bit boring (I like to read, hike, play video games, watch sports and go to concerts a few times a year). I don't make 6 figures but at least I'm 6'1" tall.
None of that has managed to land me a date. I've got friends. I'm popular at work. I've found the young ones have super high expectations, the ones my age already have kids and husbands and the divorced ones with kids don't have any time to date.
I'm just going to keep trying but it's super discouraging. I'll keep working on myself, building my nest egg and enjoying life. Who knows, maybe having cats (I love my cats), driving a Honda and being an atheist is part of the issue. I've no clue and honestly if I wasn't lonely wouldn't even be trying anymore.
Maybe I need to hire someone to do a make-over on me, clothing, etc. Seems superficial but a lot of people seem to think that shit matters. Clearly something is wrong. Shrugs.
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It's the men who want to rope a woman into having their kids, and it's the women who are fucking tired of it.
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Housing cost is the easy one to solve. Most of the UK, but England especially, have made it incredibly difficult to build new housing.
Here's the thing. Housing units per capita ratio is _growing_. There's now more housing than ever, and it's better than ever.
The issue is the _concentration_ of housing. Pro-urbanist policies create economic forces that push people to live near ever-densifying cities. While the countryside and smaller cities just die out. The fix for this is to stop these forces, not try to "build more housing".
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Someone has been reading their Sam Bowman! I tend to agree
There are solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
1) stop stigmatizing motherhood like it's easy. It's easy to become a mother (given the right functional reproductive bits), but not easy to be a good mother. (Or a good father, but less is required of us between conception and the first few months of life outside the womb).
2) subsidize the hell out of childcare. If kids are such an important resource for society, we should socialize the expense of raising them. Not just education, but sports and camp and whatever. Parents should be able to parent evenings, nights, and weekends while knowing they have no-hassle options for having the kids cared for while they work.
3) subsidize the hell out of surrogacy. If some healthy woman wants to make a living for a decade by popping out other people's kids, let them.
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4) Allow more immigrants and tell the bigots to STFU. They are not going to ruin your wonderful way of life (cough) and they rarely eat pets, despite what tinted trolls claim.
And the non-bigots? (Score:5, Insightful)
4) Allow more immigrants and tell the bigots to STFU.
And what do you tell the non-bigots?
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the resistance isn't about immigration, it's about *illegal* immigration.
Being against law breaking isn't part of the definition of bigotry.
Re:And the non-bigots? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what they say, until you start discussing increasing legal immigration. Then the story changes.
Since this is about the UK (this is also true in the US) we can look for example at what happened with the Windrush Generation [jcwi.org.uk] who were and are people of color, members of the Commonwealth and in fact under British rule, who were imported by Britain as part of an effort to bolster its labor force after the Second World War. These legal immigrants, in fact eagerly sought by the British government, have been (when Tories are in power at least) subject to systematic discrimination and persecution including illegal deportation.
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Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the resistance isn't about immigration, it's about *illegal* immigration.
Na, I don't believe you.
Sure- some idealists really do believe that.
The majority? Na. They're the same ones that fight each and every path to legal immigration.
I hope you're not one of those cowards dressing your dislike of those dirty brown people in a veneer of idealism.
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> Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the resistance isn't about immigration, it's about *illegal* immigration.
I doubt that. Most the things Don and other bigots accuse "illegals" of are not differentiators between legal and illegal.
Pet eating? Why would illegals eat more pets than legals? (BS, by the way).
Emptying insane asylums? A country is more likely to "get rid of" those if they come legally because the illegals can illegally just wander back into the original country. (It's BS by the way.)
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Yes folks, pointing out that putting significantly different groups of people together risks friction is 'trolling'.
Some people should not be allowed to have mod points.
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My understanding for Canada is that we do this... But the cities are where immigrants can find resources to help them get established. Incentives to settle elsewhere tend not to be as attractive as having a nearby community of people from the same country, or large concentrations of immigration lawyers, consulates, etc.
That's second hand and decades old understanding though, the system might be quite different now.
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I guess I was lucky but around here the husband worked and it was enough to raise a family. Homemaker is a fully legitimate title, but either no one wants to be one or more likely the family simply can't afford to have a parent stay home.
How much more can you subsidize child care really? We all pay into the school system, along with a bulk of taxes t
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But something happened along the way:
Yep. Women flooded the labor pool and drove down wages for everyone. That lead to the situation where two workers made the same amount that a sole worker used to make.
I don't know what world you live in (Score:2)
What we don't do though is provide literally any significant or useful long-term support for mothers who aren't extremely wealthy.
This is because 100 years ago women and children were property. That was a trick to make men think they owned something when they didn't. But it did also mean that the family unit was basically stuck taking care of and raising their kids more or less on their own because af
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I am not nearly convinced (3) is a good idea. Even leaving all the issues of faith aside, its like assisted suicide in a way, there is just so much potential for abuse.
I don't want to live in a society where some women feel they have birth other peoples children, because it is that or homelessness..
We absolutely need to do 1, and 2, though and curb immigration at the same time. If we don't western society is really doomed. Oh and spare me the Christian-nationalist bull crap. Even in the USA we are already
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Nobody so far as I know has made having children something you can ignore as part of your personal budget. 'Subsidize' isn't quite the same as 'subsidize the hell out of'.
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Nobody so far as I know has made having children something you can ignore as part of your personal budget. 'Subsidize' isn't quite the same as 'subsidize the hell out of'.
Nor should it be something you ignore as part of your personal budget. Creating and raising children is an undertaking, the single most important thing most people are going to do with their lives. Having children isn't some exceptional situation that people need to be compensated for, it is an expectation society places on married couples to create the citizens of the future, otherwise what is the point, even? Selfish indulgence of our own personal happiness with no intention of furthering the future is a
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Nobody so far as I know has made having children something you can ignore as part of your personal budget. 'Subsidize' isn't quite the same as 'subsidize the hell out of'.
Nor should it be something you ignore as part of your personal budget. Creating and raising children is an undertaking, the single most important thing most people are going to do with their lives. Having children isn't some exceptional situation that people need to be compensated for, it is an expectation society places on married couples to create the citizens of the future, otherwise what is the point, even? Selfish indulgence of our own personal happiness with no intention of furthering the future is a waste of the investment the society we live in (no matter where you live) makes in us.
If society expects it, society can compensate for it. Fuck serving a society that no longer serves the citizens. Fuck it with a rusty, broken-down, slow sputtering chainsaw. Coddling "society" in favor of self no longer works. You can pour your entire soul into society and all you'll have to show for it is the backside of a shovel as you get buried.
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Nobody so far as I know has made having children something you can ignore as part of your personal budget. 'Subsidize' isn't quite the same as 'subsidize the hell out of'.
Nor should it be something you ignore as part of your personal budget. Creating and raising children is an undertaking, the single most important thing most people are going to do with their lives. Having children isn't some exceptional situation that people need to be compensated for, it is an expectation society places on married couples to create the citizens of the future, otherwise what is the point, even? Selfish indulgence of our own personal happiness with no intention of furthering the future is a waste of the investment the society we live in (no matter where you live) makes in us.
If society expects it, society can compensate for it. Fuck serving a society that no longer serves the citizens. Fuck it with a rusty, broken-down, slow sputtering chainsaw. Coddling "society" in favor of self no longer works. You can pour your entire soul into society and all you'll have to show for it is the backside of a shovel as you get buried.
Society is made up of people, if it isn't serving them they can change it, but there is always an implied social contract no matter where you live or in what culture. Highly individualistic cultures are going to end up going the way of the dodo unless they start engendering civic responsibilities in their children, and in encouraging building families and social institutions. No matter where you live, you are enjoying the benefits of tens of thousands who are "pouring their soul" into society to build and m
Re:There are solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't have and raise children as a service to society. I did it because building a family is inherently rewarding for everyone in the family. And yes, it's hard and some days it's a struggle, but it's still worth it. I've done boot camp but raising kids is harder and also more rewarding. Also it's the trials and tribulations that make you grow into a fully mature person, and I'm sorry but even though you kinda feel like an adult at 25 before you have kids, you realize you're way more mature after raising some.
That said, the only way you can get through being a parent is to lose the petty selfish-ness. So that whole attitude of "f*ck serving a society that no longer serves the citizens" will be gone once you raise kids. Because then you will actually understand what service is. You'll actually understand what love is. It'll be the first time in your life that you actually cared about something else more than yourself. You become a better person. Parenting is as much about building parents as it is about building kids.
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I didn't have and raise children as a service to society. I did it because building a family is inherently rewarding for everyone in the family. And yes, it's hard and some days it's a struggle, but it's still worth it. I've done boot camp but raising kids is harder and also more rewarding. Also it's the trials and tribulations that make you grow into a fully mature person, and I'm sorry but even though you kinda feel like an adult at 25 before you have kids, you realize you're way more mature after raising some.
That said, the only way you can get through being a parent is to lose the petty selfish-ness. So that whole attitude of "f*ck serving a society that no longer serves the citizens" will be gone once you raise kids. Because then you will actually understand what service is. You'll actually understand what love is. It'll be the first time in your life that you actually cared about something else more than yourself. You become a better person. Parenting is as much about building parents as it is about building kids.
I meant to include more of this in my post, but yes absolutely, building your family is its own reward. I am at the end of the high-school years for my son, at the start for my daughter, and if I look at myself at 25 I am not sure I would even recognize the man in the mirror, even though my wife and I were already married then. Getting married was the first big "growing up" moment, where someone else had a dependency on me and I on her that never existed before. It was scary at first and then a source of st
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It's funny, I feel a lot more mature then I was at 25 and I didn't need kids to do it. Pretty sure it's just part of the aging process for most folks.
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Sure you can. It'll work out [yahoo.com]. Just breed like rabbits. What's the worst that can happen?
it is an expectation society places on married couples to create the citizens of the future, otherwise what is the point, even?
If that is the expectation, then why not subsidize parenting? If you're expecting a couple to reproduce, why shouldn't you assist in that expectation?
Selfish indulgence of our own personal happiness wit
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Bullshit. It's called personal freedom. One is free to waste their life as they see fit and if that means not having kids and using the money they saved by not having kids to see the world, good on them. It's their life. They'll do what they want with it. Screw what society thinks they should do.
I hope in the future you are never in need of a caretaker or someone to assist you in everyday tasks and decision-making, but unless one dies young that is highly unlikely.
An individual can waste their life all they want, yes, but the decision that is fun for the individual is corrosive in the extreme if too many people take that path, and will result in the loss of freedom altogether.
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Again, if society needs kids and people aren't making them fast enough...
You can get upset about whether it's fair or not and what people should do, or you can accept they're not doing that and try to create incentives to get more people working towards the desired result. The former won't change anything.
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Those that need the incentives already breed like rabbits.
It's those who don't need the incentives that aren't breeding, which is why the current incentives don't make a fucking difference.
My wife and I are one of those couples.
We have more money than we know what to do with. What would make us breed?
Nothing. We enjoy not having kids.
Breeding is for the very poor, who are too stupid/uneducated to stop doing it, and the very rich, who believe humanity needs their genes t
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Re: There are solutions (Score:2)
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Huzzah! (Score:4, Funny)
Glad to hear that, in the UK at least, overpopulation is being dealt with.
'How to Shrink' not written yet (Score:2)
Shrinking populations usually result in stagnating local economies. Maybe there's a "proper way to shrink" but nobody has discovered it yet (including my E.D. doctor).
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it's just fertility rate going down, total population is increasing. luckily, capitalism isn't picky about race or origin as long as it gets the ever increasing meat it needs to function. brits ... do seem to be a bit picky lately, afaik. tough call.
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The fertility rate is going down everywhere not just rich countries, its just poor countries aren't below replacement rate yet, but the world is very close.
from here https://ourworldindata.org/fer... [ourworldindata.org] pick for example Sudan (or Ethiopia) the fertility rate was 7 per woman in 1970 now it is 4.3. The world fertility rate is now 2.3 and 2.1 is replacement rate. The world population growth will lag fertility rates because in the past the population was growing so fewer old people are dying than babies being born
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I think it's humbling how little we understand about living systems and life itself, that the question of calculating the planet's correct carrying capacity, has been around for 60 or 70 years, if not more, and depending on who you read and what data and reasoning they use, the estimate of the correct caring capacity is anything from 500 million to 100 billion, and nobody seems to know how to reduce that degree of uncertainty.
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It's based on enough variables for a technological society that it may as well be chaotic.
This is a Good Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Our planet is massively overpopulated as is, and we're on the brink of making it uninhabitable for all future generations. Less humans being born is a *good* thing!
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Long term yes, but short term we have economic systems that are insane; they require eternal growth to support our standard of living.
We should be looking at gradually reducing the growth rate and then letting it go slightly negative... But it's crashing. It turns out that when you give people a choice of kids or more stuff... If they don't need those kids for support in retirement they're going to choose the stuff. That's on top of dropping fertility due to pollution.
TL;DR: the domestic birthrate is too
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Population does not grow because we are having more kids. Population grows because we are living longer than before.
This should give you a good impression of the situation in Europe (and North America) in comparison to for example Africa. In Europe there are more old people than young, while in Africa there are a lot more kids than old people.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
And this graph will show how 25-64 year olds have have increased from 1 billion to 4 billion, while the amount of younger has stayed p
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The fact is, the birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa are through the roof, i.e. 4 to 6.6 births per woman, on average. Those Africans gotta be the charmingest, sexiest people on the planet. Maybe we should be getting them to come over to teach us their seductive ways?!
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Our planet is not massively overpopulated and is in fact mostly empty except for certain regions.
Those "mostly empty" regions are known as "deserts and tundra."
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Our planet is not massively overpopulated and is in fact mostly empty except for certain regions.
Those "mostly empty" regions are known as "deserts and tundra."
https://luminocity3d.org/World... [luminocity3d.org]
It isn't all deserts and tundra. Some of the open spaces are certainly less desirable but not all, and even the densest population centers are very concentrated and fall off rapidly. There are large cities packed against bodies of water with the majority of the land otherwise unoccupied or very lightly populated. The Earth is hardly a 40K hive world.
1.2 x 1.2 = 1.44 (Score:3)
Birth rate in Italy x Birth rate in Spain = Birth rate in England and Wales! Is that a coincidence or is there a hidden meaning?
"THE WORLD IS DYING FROM OVERPOPULATION!" (Score:2, Flamebait)
Combine the hysteria with the fact that it takes far more money to live than what is being supplied to the lower echelons of most western societies, and then we have to wonder why people aren't having kids? Not to mention most of us are still reeling from our own shit childhoods. Why would we want to bring more into this hellhole world filled with bile, hatred, shitty attitudes and worse intelligence? Fuck that. We're being told constantly that we're all going to be replaced by machines. You want to bring k
Re:"THE WORLD IS DYING FROM OVERPOPULATION!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Life was not very great a century ago too. There were lots of uncertainties: constant wars, famines, plagues, unemployment, low life expectancy... Yet the birth rate was high. People willingly wanted to have many children, in spite of all the uncertainties.
Is it because avg. education levels were very low, so parents didn't have to worry much about the cost of education? And health care was as good as absent, whether rich or poor. People squeezed into tiny houses, as they didn't own many things. And more kids meant more household income and a hedge against unemployment and starvation.
Now things have changed. We have to send our kids to college and beyond. We now have health care, and we have to worry about the cost of future health care for ourselves and our kids as well. Houses have progressively become larger, and we cannot think of living in tiny homes anymore. Each kid needs his/her private room. Having many kids is not any kind of hedge now. If anything, it's a liability. Quite naturally, people are avoiding accumulating liabilities.
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Life was not very great a century ago too. There were lots of uncertainties: constant wars, famines, plagues, unemployment, low life expectancy... Yet the birth rate was high. People willingly wanted to have many children, in spite of all the uncertainties.
Is it because avg. education levels were very low, so parents didn't have to worry much about the cost of education? And health care was as good as absent, whether rich or poor. People squeezed into tiny houses, as they didn't own many things. And more kids meant more household income and a hedge against unemployment and starvation.
Now things have changed. We have to send our kids to college and beyond. We now have health care, and we have to worry about the cost of future health care for ourselves and our kids as well. Houses have progressively become larger, and we cannot think of living in tiny homes anymore. Each kid needs his/her private room. Having many kids is not any kind of hedge now. If anything, it's a liability. Quite naturally, people are avoiding accumulating liabilities.
A century and more ago there were more and stronger social ties, both within families and between them. You knew your neighbors and helped them out when you could, knowing that they would help you in turn. You probably had multiple levels of family member living with you in the same house, which is still the practice in many places around the world. The level of education was lower, life was harder, yet they were far happier than modern people are and weren't all being drugged into a stupor for depression a
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"People willingly wanted to have many children, in spite of all the uncertainties."
People willingly wanted to have many children, because of all the uncertainties. If you had a few kids then hopefully at least one of them would look after you when you can no longer do it yourself.
Good and this is why (Score:3)
Population growth mostly benefits rich developers. It promptly ruins formerly desirable areas.
The population will eventually decrease (Score:5, Insightful)
England is kinda the canary in the coal mine for the west at large, but we really need to start thinking about solutions to our Ponzi scheme economy that don't rely on immigration or some other form of population growth.
We either do it before fossil fuels run out, or after, but waiting until after is going to mean a lot more death.
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Japan's situation is far more serious. Their birth rate is decreasing a lot faster than most other nations and people there have a long life expectancy.
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Japan's situation is far more serious. Their birth rate is decreasing a lot faster than most other nations and people there have a long life expectancy.
Another one to look at is South Korea. In another century there may not be enough people for there to be a South Korea, at least not as it is now.
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If we outgrow our ability to convert fossil fuels to food there most certainly will be a lot of death. I think people underestimate the magnitude of death that can result from famine.
Happening everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
This is happening everywhere, not just in developed economies. Go to Our World in Data [ourworldindata.org] and check. Fertility rates are falling virtually everywhere. Just to pick a few random examples: Botswana went from 6.4 in 1950 to 2.7 in 2023. Haiti went from 6.3 to 2.7. Kenya from 7.4 to 3.3. The world average went from 4.9 to 2.3.
In the long run, stopping population growth is a good thing. In the short to medium term, it's going to cause a lot of economic turmoil.
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I know I have been looking at the same stats, but I think we need a lot of economic turmoil without it we will not change. I am coming to the conclusion that without a solid slap to the face to snap us out of the ruling classes economic delusions nothing will change.
We now have such amazing technology now that we should be so much more efficient, but because of our economies endless need consume more, the diversion of resources into screwing each other over (e.g. crypto, licensing everything, dynamic pricin
Not news (Score:2)
Birth rates in pretty much every country in the world are decreasing.
Are we going to get a slashdot article for each of the 195 countries in the world having a declining birth rate?
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The global population is projected to go up another 2 billion over the next half century https://ourworldindata.org/un-... [ourworldindata.org] so not so much on the "pretty much every country".
Re:Not news (Score:4, Insightful)
Decreasing, not negative. Important distinction.
Same Old Story (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a ton of reasons for why I believe birth rates are lowering but the biggest reason is the one I've realized most recently: society has gotten to a point where parenthood is almost an afterthought. Instead of fostering ambitions of parenthood in children, we focus almost exclusively on preparing them for their careers. People are spending more years of their life in higher education and establishing a career before having children. And for a growing number of people, this means focusing less on serious relationships, let alone preparing for raising a family, while they become accustomed to living alone or in casual relationships. And when that happens, you can become set in your ways and being in a serious relationship will become even more challenging. A quick look at the numbers will show that the number of people even interested in being in a relationship is plummeting, so it's no surprise that fewer people are having kids. This is mostly a social issue, not an economic one!
As others have pointed out, a decrease in the population may not be the worst thing to happen to humanity, but that's only the case if it's gradual. We need enough young people to feed our aging population applesauce and change our diapers. And for many of them, they'll have had no prior experience doing that since they haven't had kids.
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Another one of these stories, another group of comments blaming economics. Right off the bat, let's get this out of the way: many nations have offered economic incentives, some fairly significant, and none of them have managed to increase birth rates by any appreciable amount. And birth rates were already plummeting back when the economy was much stronger, so that line of reasoning isn't consistent with the data.
I have a ton of reasons for why I believe birth rates are lowering but the biggest reason is the one I've realized most recently: society has gotten to a point where parenthood is almost an afterthought. Instead of fostering ambitions of parenthood in children, we focus almost exclusively on preparing them for their careers. People are spending more years of their life in higher education and establishing a career before having children. And for a growing number of people, this means focusing less on serious relationships, let alone preparing for raising a family, while they become accustomed to living alone or in casual relationships. And when that happens, you can become set in your ways and being in a serious relationship will become even more challenging. A quick look at the numbers will show that the number of people even interested in being in a relationship is plummeting, so it's no surprise that fewer people are having kids. This is mostly a social issue, not an economic one!
As others have pointed out, a decrease in the population may not be the worst thing to happen to humanity, but that's only the case if it's gradual. We need enough young people to feed our aging population applesauce and change our diapers. And for many of them, they'll have had no prior experience doing that since they haven't had kids.
Am glad to hear others making these arguments, I am continually surprised at the proportion of people who think this is some kind of economic issue rather than a failing of our societies and cultures to inculcate the values and traditions that are necessary for them to continue. The comfort and constant entertainment available to people in the modern world is an extremely nice thing, but it also causes people to become who are not vigilant of human tendencies to become soft and settled down into a pillowy p
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It's a combination, but the specific economic issues are a failing in our societies.
What's the benefit?
Oh, you want a family? Okay, but then they're financially responsible for everything including your partner and if they leave you they take your finances and family with them and you're just left with the obligation. Government funding will aide your family, you just get the bill. Want to get married and have kids? Hm...no.
There's one of the factors right there.
So.... (Score:2)
Youth aren't choosing not to have children (Score:2)
Our youth have miserable lives compared to us. Housing is a huge expense because we older people limited the housing supply so that our houses would become more valuable. Then when we saw that there were not enough babies being born did we look at how little consumption our youth had? We might have tried to alleviate our guilt by subsidizing some daycare spots for the poorest of mothers but what we really did was massively increase immigration. That made housing worse,
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People want to keep pretending it's not the economy while they're profiting from it, but it really, really really is.
If I had a house in a nice place with a backyard, 3-6 bedrooms, kids sounds like fun and fulfilling. Teachers salary in the 70s could get that.
Now you can be an educated professional and foreign investments basically assure you that you're going to be paying someones loan on a house at a crippling rate prevent you from getting one or living in a tiny apartment
Why would you want to bring in mo
Plunge? (Score:2)
The fix is simple in theory (Score:3)
Fix the cost of living problems adults are facing today and they'll be having kiddos in no time.
People who are barely keeping up with the cost of living are not going to add to their financial
misery by mixing children into the equation. It's also selfish and downright stupid to start having
kiddos if you can barely afford rent and groceries as it is.
( Someone should send Elon the memo since he can't seem to figure out why folks aren't having kids )
I can personally attest to how miserable childhood is going to be if your family is struggling
finance wise.
Poor kids usually get left behind. They rarely get a decent education and, as a result, enter into
adulthood at a disadvantage in comparison to those kids whose parents can afford to give their
own offspring every advantage money can buy.
Poor kids -CAN- break out of that cycle, but it's definitely an exception and not the norm.
Easy Fix (Score:2)
Modern children are expensive pets. (Score:3)
Not long ago children were cheap labor. After 120 years of urbanization the reality has flipped. Today's first world children are often still adolescent in their mid 20ies all while being ( very) expensive in their first 20 years, an age where people back 70 years usually already had 2 or 3 children, if not more. Urbanization and technological development are also the main causes of the rise of women s rights movement and feminism.
By any large all this is a civilisatory decadence effect and one that various highly developed civilisations have experienced throughout human history.... And all of those died out once that happened. Which isn't good news.
Hungary seems to have gotten a good turnaround on this issue recently. 25% income tax rebate for every child. 4 children equalls 0 taxes. Looks like a viable solution IMHO. Everyone should try it.
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Different groups of people.
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Strongly typed system, I guess.
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Did you forget your meds today? You might want to double-check.
May you be touched by his noodley appendage.
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May you be touched by his noodley appendage.
You take all the fun out of it when you ask me to do it.
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Japanese?
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Countries that have low birth rates are worried about low birth rates.
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Well I assume that all those cultures in the countries the English immigrated to and took over are just being racist right?
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There is only one race of people that are worried worried about low birth rates. Three guesses which one.
The Japanese?
-- https://economictimes.indiatim... [indiatimes.com]