Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
When people are considering having children, of course the first thing they think is “our lives are objectively better than the 1930s, let’s go for it!”
As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now.
I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.
That's the precise argument I'm refuting with the 1930s analogy - not that people today look to the past, but that people in the past had a lot less reason to be optimistic about the future. Again, think 1930s in rural central Ukraine - you've had a relatively okay life, but now uncle Stalin has re-instituted serfdom, this time under the auspices of a totalitarian state (itself a terrifying bleeding-edge invention in the 1930s). Your friends, neighbours and relatives are dropping dead all around you, there's rampant cannibalism, for god's sake. What possible hope is there for the future? Birthrates didn't fall.
Just one example of many. This "vibes about future" argument ought to make no sense whatsoever to anyone who is a fan of history, particularly the daily-life-in-the-age-of kind, not the battles-and-dates kind.
You're right that many aspects of life have improved since the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean the current conditions for raising children are good or sustainable. In high-income countries, lower birth rates correlate with rising housing costs, lack of affordable childcare, stagnant wages, and job insecurity.
People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.
Directionality is the key. Do we see things as getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?
Right now, the future has very very few signs of promise. Humanity is behaving attrocious, being a menace and a monster is amazingly popular, science and free thinking are being cancelled and rounded up by government goons. The very rich prey ever more on everyone else.
But is it substantially different? The writing from the 30's is extremely pessimistic. In the 50's and 60's everybody assumed that we were all going to die in a nuclear war. And going back in time you can find numerous examples of where the future was worse than uncertain, where an awful future for your children was guaranteed. As an extreme example, many children were voluntarily born into slavery.
I would argue that pessimism about the future is the rule, and the American optimism about the future in the 20th century was the exception.
But humanity had so much finding out to do. Average material conditions haven't moved steadily forwards, no, but humanity has been overall rising. Science and technology developing, insights to the natural world happening & spreading, cultural elements forming & flourishing. The powers that be in the world were quite regionalized, had their fingers in only small pies: there was similarities across the world but it was characterized more as many individual experiments rising and falling, a variance among societies where many things were being tried in many ways. The difficulty in survivng (for much of this time) was overall characterized by the difficulty of finding food in the world, which was brutal work but work against nature.
Today, things are so different. We all see (or can see if we want) the whole world. Progress has tapered down. The bold efforts for progress like the New Deal and international order (UN) have been worn down or unrepaired (notably the security council sotuation). But more than all that, we have lost the civilizational diversity that fed change and growth. We don't try new things, our systems don't shift: we are locked on course, path dependence amid the vast global network of international trade. The efforts to try new things are small tweaks, of limited scope: Obamacare (much protested), 4 day work weeks, some small scale UBI. We have seen so few attempts to house and feed the populations of the world, so few attempts to broaden education. The millions of enterprises across the world keep being hoovered up into ever larger companies with ever more high up and far off seats of power, the 0.1%'s ascent over us all and control of the world's money supply and markets extends and extends.
The stagnancy and unflinching singular trajectory we are all locked into is pitiful. Humanity feels so a long for the ride of a couple absolutely insane pathological freaks. That loss of diversity, the consolidation of many things into fewer and fewer, is an evolutionary stagnancy which even if unconsciously experienced weighs enormously heavy on the human souls of today. It feels terrible, feeling like as the wheel turns, it's not the rise and fall of civilizations, but now the plight of us all, enmeshed, and knowing that we do so very little have so few levels to pull, so few positions of any real power to steer this.
Maybe you can argue that it's slower now than it was in the late 20th century. But it's still far faster than it was at any other point in history.
You may think we're locked on course, but we're far less locked on course than we were in medieval times or pretty much any other time in history. Changes in medieval times happened, but took centuries, and those advocating for change got burned at the stake.
Of course, it matters less what actually was than the way people thought. It's an almost universal constant throughout history that people thought the future was doomed.
On the one hand you are absolutely right. The last was slower about change, probably in many many ways.
But the past was decoupled. There were many pasts, moving at different paces, in different ways. We don't know what most of these pasts were even a thousand years ago, for the majority of life on earth! We have such a eurocentric view of history, have such incredibly poor knowledge of how most of humanity (by area at least) lived, what was really happening, what life was like, how people saw the world and saw history & time.
Theres still many things happening, sure. But the dominant themes of the world today trace to Thomas Pikerty Capital in the 21st Century overarching economics, something he shows happening over a 250 year arch. The many free hands of the world are reduced to many many less hands than before.
The locality of power is gone. The availability of new lands and new resources to tap into has peaked. We have gobsmacking amounts of people and we don't know what to do to harness this bios-power, we don't have true missions available for people to get up to, and almost no governments are able to generate good causes and good trouble to get themselves up to. We devolve into shitty posturing and jingoism as purpose and exploration/expansion (and alas yes imperialism) fade away, after a time of great prosperity & strong social character.
We're at the end of a lot of curves. It's so so so unclear how incremental GDP rising is supposed to tide us over spiritually. Especially when such a lions share of the GDP is captured by such monsters at the top, when no government or system seems willing to set the sparks of motivation to get the populations excited and moving on their own.
I suspect the big factor is that the opportunity costs have gotten a lot higher over that past 80-100 years. For the median woman in the 1930s, her expected lifetime earnings if she didn't have kids probably wouldn't be that much higher compared to if she took 10-20 years off to raise some kids. Equally the relative quality of life a single income family could expect wasn't too different from that of a dual income family. Today a dual income, no kids, household have opportunities and possibilities simply not available to such a household in the 30s.
> So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
C'mon you have the whole answer right here.
Its a prisoners dilemma. People aren't stupid. For any one individual, it makes sense to wait and defer having kids until they're more economically secure. They know that. So what happens when _everyone_ is under that same incentive structure? Well, some people eventually pull the trigger and just yolo it, if they _really_ wanted kids. They probably aren't as economically secure as they wanted to be, but make the personal sacrifices to do it anyway. But you probably also have a lot of people/couples who are depressed that they didn't reach the position they expected to and depressed people generally don't want to have kids.
I really don't think incentives changed so much in Eritrea or North Korea or Iran lately. If this was a Western-only or rich-countries-only phenomenon, I would provisionally buy this (and a bunch of other Western-centric) explanations. But it's a global phenomenon.
People don’t measure happiness in aggregate. Just because I can fly anywhere in the world in a few hours, doesn’t make up for something like loneliness.
There’s categories of “happiness with life”, and some of them are much, much worse than a century ago.
It could very well be that those carry a lot more weight than tech.
When comparing the 1930s and today, I'm not talking about tech or flying, of course. I'm talking about health and longevity, economic opportunities for the bottom 80%, political and personal freedom, social progress on most fronts, that sort of thing.
Perhaps you're right in saying that the vibes are off, and in any individual country that could be a very valid point - pressures imposed on young people in South Korea, for example. Killer argument - except the same thing is happening in Sweden where these pressures are almost absent by comparison. And in North Korea, would you believe it? Birthrates falling. I somewhat doubt their "happiness with life" has dropped in concert with that in the West, on account of them having a life and a culture that's almost orthogonal to ours in every way.
My dad grew up with hand-pump well water, an outhouse, a four-room house his dad built on cinderblocks that was too small for both the girls and the boys so the boys slept in the barn (and I think maybe they had a dirt-floor house at first, that one may have come after he was born), no electricity in his early years, no phone until he was a teen and I think it was a party line until after he moved out. Pretty sure they still had a one-room school house, too (small rural town).
This was the late '40s through '60s, not even the '30s. In the US.
