I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it.
Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.
I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.
Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.
> Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
We (the West, generally) have successfully put the fear of god (including metaphorically, for atheists) into people that they MUST NOT HAVE CHILDREN THEY CANNOT SUPPORT. We have provided them with means for not having children. Now everyone is surprised?
Yeah it is absolutely baffling to me that the discussion of teen pregnancy never seems to come up in these "oh no birth rates are down" discussions. Like, you told us that a substantial portion of these births were bad for society (and I generally agree) and now you are freaking out that the number of births went down?
Most people aren’t aware - especially in educated UMC circles like this one - how much the birth rate relied on teenage moms.
The birthrate for educated folks has been below replacement for a long time. Teenage moms probably aren’t in their mind cause they were raised among other UMC folks and it just doesn’t happen there. The US has been below replacement overall for even longer. We’ve relied on immigration for 50+ years.
Most of these discussions talk about cost of living and so forth - which are good metrics but the biggest influence of whether people have kids is if they’re getting into relationships. As any country has more women getting online, the birth rate plummets. It’s another factor we don’t talk about in these discussions. Social media has a huge effect on getting into relationships - and therefore having children.
~40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively). When women can prevent unintended pregnancy, of course total fertility rate will decline to a neutral rate below replacement rate. The population exploded because women were not empowered, and now they are. Economic systems built around this anomaly in human history are structurally flawed, and will need to adapt.
Kids incur exceptional opportunity and real costs, and are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.
> Kids (…) are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.
Unnecessary in a material existential sense, perhaps, when one exludes a systemic need to take care of the elderly. One could argue, however, that the responsibility when taking care of kids are one of the few means to live and grow as a human being.
This ignores the level of issues that most kids in foster care are suffering. People want a healthy child to start with. Most children in foster care are deeply afflicted and have deep traumas that will never be resolved by any new parental figure.
Teen marriage rates (15-17) are alread exceptionally low. One would expect as laws are enacted at the state level to raise the minimum marriage age to 18, these declines should continue.
I don't dispute that the teen birth rate is much lower now. I'm trying to estimate out the counterfactual "what would the US birth rate be if teen pregnancy was (say) the same as 2 decades ago" ? Currently it's 1.66.
But the back-of-napkin math is hard for me to figure out from the given "births per 1,000" women per different age group.
It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids.
Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years.
This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.
Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce.
I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.
> Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident. We've become too cautious for our own good.
But you are arguing that.
> But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.
I was not talking about homeownership, I was talking about making a rational decision to have a child or more as in weighing the pros an cons.
People these days want what is best for their kids. So they take their time, they think about it and eventually delay or abandon the idea altogether if they are not sure that this is the right one. It's that simple.
It's well and good to YOLO people into this world if you have an amazing job and low chance of being made redundant but if your situation looks even a tiny bit precarious then you are going to think a lot about it because that is the rational way of doing things.
Depends on what you expect for the future. A lot of those children have a hard time thinking of what kind of job they'll be able to do. Most of them seem to land on "influencer" or something.
I know it is contentious, but there is a very real chance that a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value in the somewhat near future. You may not believe that, but if it is true then adding to that number of people is not a good thing.
> a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value
Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.
Why would people even exist if they weren't going to contribute to shareholder value?
I completely agree that more people is not good, but for completely different reasons: there are WAY too many already.
Our primate species has so overpopulated the planet that every single "environmental service" (to put this in the money = purpose in life perspective) is massively over burdened.
My personal opinion is that there is no such thing as "purpose in life", we just grew from the mud here. But I think there is a general awareness among people with some exposure to the state of the planet that we're trashing the place, and that's mostly due to there being way too many humans.
Even if a person can't put their finger on it, there is a general feeling that the future holds a dubious opportunity to flourish.
Therefore less kids.
I also believe that raising a child takes a lot of time and effort, and modern first world youth just aren't interested in spending that much time away from their phones.
> Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.
I didn't say that. But the reality is that people who add no economic value are a problem for our societies as they are structured today.
But yes, overpopulation is also an issue with regard to pressure on the environment.
Something to think about instead of more or fewer humans is: what would be the ideal number of humans (at various points in the future)? It strays into eugenics pretty quickly, but it does force you to think about the fundamental elements such as ethics when dealing with these matters.
Thanks for replying. Sorry, I ended up typing a small chapter 8-/
> people who add no economic value are a problem for our societies as they are structured today.
There's no denying that, I think it's a pretty balanced statement, but a lot of people would point the finger at "as they are structured today".
The fact is, tech advances have been disrupting established social patterns of providing "economic value" from the beginning. And while the Luddites might be pointed to as an example that the world marches on, they actually do serve as a very good example of how the world marches on, with ownership reaping a bigger piece of the economic pie, and labor reaping less.
Working people have been increasingly disadvantaged by tech advances in pretty much every single case, from the beginning of tech advances.
Inequality is on a scale with all time record highs at this point, and tech is being applied to fields never approached before.
So, it's also reality that fewer and fewer people are needed to operate society.
There are already too many people, and fewer and fewer are able to provide "economic value" (the statement of which is silent on who receives that economic value, because it's assumed that it's not value until it's received by ownership. This is just by definition).
One natural consequence we're seeing of this, is that fewer people want to have kids.
Everyone should be happy about this. It means the economic value can be spread more densely while leaving fewer people lacking, and we obtain a greater ability to continue generating economic value into the future. Because the "trashing the planet" consequences are not a joke, even though the owners of the world's largest wealth are treating them that way.
We don't need eugenics, all we have to do is facilitate the already existing population declines, which again, is the opposite of what ownership is trying to do. It's all a panic because the ponzi scheme is going to implode.
1 billion people on the planet would be plenty... Why is that so hard to believe? Why is that so impossible to accomplish?
For all the brilliant advances and innovation that the world's wealth holders are supposed to be "creating", to me they seem pretty cluelessly unable to grasp even the basic facts in front of them and chart a path forward...
Could it be perhaps that they need to be established first and feel like talking less risks because the future feels uncertain like the essay suggests? “People don’t want to take risks” seems like half an answer and isn’t finding root cause. When things feel crazy, people control what they can, establish routines, and perhaps take less risks.
Just the other day my wife and I were marveling that people in our neighborhood groups are requiring pet sitters to be insured and bonded.
The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.
Just saying people need to chill out there has always been risk isn't really going to cause that to happen as there's no information there really. It's still useful to look at the reasons for the perception of increased risk if that's the right thing to focus on at all.
All these wild theories are complicating a simple issue. People arent having kids because they dont want kids. For some people maybe they need to see a psychotherapist like your comment almost implies, but for many others they just think kids would make their own lives worse in a way that past generations did not.
Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.
I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.
Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.
We've become too cautious for our own good.