Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?
- Reference: 0178332036
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/07/11/0755248/why-is-fertility-so-low-in-high-income-countries
- Source link:
Total fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in nearly all OECD countries, with many sustaining rates below 1.5. Some East Asian countries including South Korea, Singapore, and China now have fertility rates at or below one child per woman. The researchers concluded that period-based explanations focused on short-term income or price changes cannot explain the widespread decline. Instead, evidence points to "shifting priorities" involving changing norms, evolving economic opportunities, and broader social and cultural forces that have diminished parenthood's role in adult lives.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33989/w33989.pdf
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What are consequences for the parent you can levy that don't end up punishing the children?
> why not have sex with lots of different women, have lots of kids? It costs him exactly nothing.
I mean, welcome to the advantage men have enjoyed since time began? Are we really treating deadbeat dads like it's a new trend? Like c'mon, the old "Dad went out for cigarettes 40 years ago" is an old joke for a reason.
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> Are we really treating deadbeat dads like it's a new trend?
No just you. The rest of us are able to remember that the paragraph started "Finally, on a non-PC note: the "wrong" people are still having plenty of kids.`" for longer than it takes to read the whole thing.
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So is a person wrong because they had multiple kids with multiple moms and supports them or had one kid and left it for dead with the mother?
I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...
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If economists actually knew anything at all, they would be billionaires, not academics and social media commentators, and certainly would not waste their time talking to politicians.
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Some humans do have a strong desire to become parents, which is unsurprising since species that don't reproduce tend not to last very long. There are exceptions, pandas being the obvious one.
The question is, how strong and how common is this desire to become a parent, and are people overcoming it due to their financial situation or some social pressure, or were we always like this and it's mostly due to contraception?
Houses (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus mcfucking Christ it's not rocket science.
We can't afford houses.
Re: Houses (Score:2)
Bingo! We have a bingo. Houses are too expensive. So two parents need to work to afford the house. And childcare costs are also too expensive. The financial cost of having children, for the majority who mostly pay their own way, is much higher than even 20 years ago.
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
> Houses are too expensive. So two parents need to work to afford the house.
Yes, but is that the cause or merely an effect of the cause? I'd argue that the real cause is social change enabled by the availability of birth control. As society has become more egalitarian women, thanks to birth control, are now free to choose a career over having kids. This has meant that families have two incomes and so can offer more to get the house they want causing house prices to rise.
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You may be completely right on the root cause of house price increases. And even if not, you are certainly right that the interactions between bank lending limits, number of earners, contraception and decreasing sexism will combine to cause price rises. I think the original “Bingo” can probably stand, but my own right to check bingo cards is revoked.
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It's not that simple, although I'm sure that plays a part; if it was then there would be a clear positive correlation between wealth/income and number of children in the population and there isn't.
Having children is a choice; that choice has become easier as contraception has become more accessible and effective, and as society puts less pressure on women to have children or be seen as a failure. We're also decades from the point where it was normal for an adult to be reliant on children to support them,
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> It's not that simple, although I'm sure that plays a part;
It IS that simple. The Democratic war on suburbs and insistence on cramming people into ever-smaller shoeboxes (called "urbanism") is going to kill the democracy. It has already given us Trump.
> if it was then there would be a clear positive correlation between wealth/income and number of children in the population and there isn't.
There is. It's called "reverse J-curve". It's even more apparent when you check not just fertility, but the number of families with two or more children. You can reasonably raise one child in a city, but once you have two children, all the anti-human design of modern cities (war on cars, bike lanes, road diets, lax la
Why? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the opportunity cost of raising children is just too high. Especially for the women.
Because they are busy earning income? (Score:2)
Then they can afford to retire when they get to that age. Don't need a bunch of kids to support them.
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If you think that AI is good enough to replace education; do I want to know what jobs that pay for family-size houses you expect people to be working?
Testable Hypothesis (Score:2)
Let's try returning housing and employment conditions to 1950's levels and see what happens. Whether or not people have more kids, it'll be a popular move.
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Conditions today are better than in the 1950s by almost every metric.
Home ownership rate in 1950s was below 60%, today it's 65%.
Unemployment rate was around 4.5% .. which is around what it is today.
Murder rate was about 4 per 100k, which was a historical low (it was well over 10 in the 1930s). Today's is about 5 per 100k and reducing.
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Now do wages versus inflation.
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No comparison about that - by every metric of wage, we're a lot poorer. Oh, there's some,mostly fungible and intangible, stuff that's cheaper but real items are much more.
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You say it is better by almost every metric then list 3 of which today is better in 1...
The home ownership figure is commonly used to simplistically. Home ownership in the 1950s was low for older people, home ownership now is high for older people. I'll bet a considerably lower proportion of people at the age to have children own houses now than in the 1950s.
In general I agree that today is a better time than the 50s; not least because the 50s properly sucked for minorities, but I do think there is an
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And yet a guy could get a factory job out of high school, get married in his twenties and afford a three bedroom house, a car and annual vacations at Disneyworld on one income. (The Flintstones, e.g., is an important documentary record of lost prosperity.)
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I bet if you added up the fractions of houses that "owners" own versus the large chunks of most houses owned by banks and other creditors, home ownership has actually fallen, and been time-shifted a decade or two later in most people's lives. Feelings about the future matter when prospective parents are deciding whether now is a good time to have a kid. If you've got a huge mortgage hanging over your head that might go underwater based on factors you can't control, perhaps you don't breed right now.
Also,
Doesn't take a crystal ball.. (Score:2)
Doesn't take a crystal ball or time machine for many to see just how f'd the planet is, and that future generations are completely screwed in dealing with this mess.
No way I'd bring a kid into what's about to befall us.
Re: Doesn't take a crystal ball.. (Score:2)
We also see what kind of spoiled and annoying brats everyone raises these days and decide itâ(TM)s impossible to not raise an annoying child of our oen if theyâ(TM)re going to be influenced by all the other brats at daycare and school.
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There are three certainties in life: Death, Taxes, and the older generations hating on the younger ones.
Hardly anyone is ready for children early enough (Score:5, Insightful)
I can name some of the top of my head:
1.Cost of housing - high pretty much universally across high income countries, which in turn leads to:
2. High standard of living is hard to maintain without both potential parents working,
3. High standard of living is hard to maintain without extended education which delays children,
4. Access to contraception which allows 2 & 3 to happen
5. Greater mobility means grandparents are more often not available to help with grandchildren
6. People having children later means grandparents are more often not available or no longer able to help with grandchildren
Want to have higher fertility? Make it so people in their mid to late twenties have a life stable enough that they can choose to have children without it being a major sacrifice.
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A slightly hopeful sign may be that the shift to remote work enables extended families to gather in one affordable place at some distance from downtown, while also allowing one or both parents to parent between Zoom calls.
It's not greater mobility anymore (Score:2)
It's not the people are moving because they want to they're moving because they have to. I was quite comfortable in my little old city but I got forced out of it because they're just wasn't any work and I needed more money.
You are forced to move where the work is.
Also increasingly grandparents don't want to take care of the grandchildren. They want to play with them and have fun with them but when they're done they want to dump them right back on their kids and get back to their RVs and their Matloc
Wrong question (Score:2)
The question should be: "why is fertility so high in low income countries?:
Toxic environment (Score:2)
Most high income countries work their people too hard, causing them to eat fast food, made with toxic ingredients, as they try to find pleasure in toxic amounts of sugar and other substances to offset the stress of their commute and daily grind. They live in cities, breath polluted air, drink polluted water, eat toxic food. What do you expect?
US fertility is not evenly distributed (Score:4, Interesting)
We hear so much these days about young urban hipsters deciding not to have children because the world as they see it appears to be coming to an end. But when I visited Iowa this month, I was impressed by by seeing babies everywhere. So if children represent optimism about the future, look at these differences among states:
[1]https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com]
Now consider the effects, long-term, of these differentials on our culture and politics.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/birth-rate-by-state
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Or people just don't feel comfortable raising a child in an era where unidentified masked men abduct people.
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People tend to be a lot happier in the middle of the country - purely my observation living there, of course, but friends who live on both coasts (and in islands of uban such as the Colorado Front Range, DFW, etc.) are far more miserable. too much population density? Too much noise? Pollution? Who knows?
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Generally not.
People are happier when they can AFFORD the place they live. If you live in NYC or LA, you're probably happier than Dallas or Miami. If you can't afford to live in the city, then you are probably going to be miserable living somewhere cheaper where there is literately nothing to do, no jobs, no healthcare. Basically everything is in the city, and less and less are in smaller cities.
If you want to be happy, and not have to be bound to a vehicle, move to Europe or Asia, because North America is
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Working "good jobs" has whittled away my mental health over the years. It's different than getting up to work some hard labor job where somehow you wake envious of yourself in some parallel dimensions where you died in your sleep and are still laying soundly in bed.
But little by little the deadlines, reorgs, MBA double-talk, layoffs, and so forth wear you down.
People in the middle of the country, I could talk about their problems, but shit does indeed happen at a more leisurely pace, people are less guard
Work/Life non-balance. (Score:3)
"High Income" countries tend to be profit-driven. As in, profit isn't just "a" motive, it becomes "the" motive for the entire society. Once that happens, pressure is applied from the top down to extract as much profit potential as possible from the populace. Turns out when you need everyone in the population working full time jobs just to keep the profit potential climbing, it's kinda difficult to imagine having time to properly raise a family. Who in their right mind wants to have a child when they know they'll have to hire out raising that child to either daycare, a nanny, or some other form of hired parental substitution? You can't focus an entire population on the importance of hard work for profit and/or survival and still expect child-rearing to be important to them.
We shouldn't need to study why this is happening. We should need to study how to balance the need for profit with the need to continue having a viable population. Not that we're on the verge of complete population collapse. It's not an overall bad thing for us or our environment to maybe let the population naturally slow a bit from our former frenetic population climb, but we probably should start figuring out how to turn that natural slow-down now when we hit a point where we feel we've rebalanced. Because one thing is for certain, we're not going to turn the ebb of population growth into a huge growth again in an instant, and it'd be nice to have some idea how to achieve it in a long-term balanced way when the day comes we actually need to be concerned for any reason other than the "growth is important to maintain ever growing profits" reason.
Video Games (Score:2)
I mean, would you rather have sex or run around blasting bad guys and color matching falling gems or have sex?
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Are you asking me or my wife?
This is a common phenomenon that is well studied (Score:3)
When people get rich, the need to have a lot of kids goes down. You're less likely to lose a child to disease and accident. You're more likely to spend time early in adulthood making money and/or growing skills. The cost of raising children is much higher. Women's role in public life grows.
It's well studied for decades.
Something not mentioned yet in the comments... (Score:2)
... is: Who wants to bring a kid into this f*cked-up world?
I have three adult kids. I am almost certain none of my kids will have kids and I can't say I blame them.
They are still clueless about birth rates (Score:2)
When else were the rich this clueless? oh right 1789 [1]https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
[1] https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/memes/Celebrate-the-global-birth-dearth-like_its-1789
Smartphones (Score:2)
That simple. Sez Alice anyway. [1]https://www.vox.com/today-expl... [vox.com] [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/0... [nytimes.com]
[1] https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/405376/pronatalism-fertility-couples-romance-alice-evans
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-children-fertility.html
What makes you think we are high income? (Score:2)
Years ago I remember an economist describing America as a fragile existence.
We own cars which are expensive because we have to. But already the majority of us can't buy houses which was the primary means of building wealth in America.
Back in the sixties we have 3 billion people on this rock. It's now at least 8 billion. Might be higher if there's some evidence that we've been under counting rural people but that's pretty inconclusive.
And even going outside America every country on the planet has
Healthcare (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
Because they can afford contraceptives.
Social Change (Score:3)
That has been true since the 1970s - at least in countries with national health care. So while this is has enabled the change, I'd argue that the cause is more social in origin. As we have made our society far more egalitarian there is no longer the social pressure for women to stay home and raise kids, they are now far more free to choose a career over kids than they were back in the 1970s.
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It's not just pressure on women too, not having kids was for a long time taken as a sign of lack of moral character and wasting ones life for both genders.
I think back to about 15 years ago and the last conversation I had with a great uncle before he died a year later. My dad had called him up to include him in a family holiday and we were passing the phone around to all say hi and include him in our holiday celebration. When the phone gets to me without even a moments hesitation he starts chewing me out be
That is rather limited point of view (Score:2)
Easy contraceptives availability is part of it but not the most important one. There are 3 main reasons:
1) Economics. Kids cannot be used as cheap labour from around age 8 as it was in the past. Instead they are costing a lot of money to around age 18-24. Parents have retirement - kids are not that important from the point of view of taking care for aging people.
2) Fun. There are a lot of sources of fun besides sex now. TV, games, sports, carrier building ...
3) And the most important one: women do not wa
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> 3.1 The availability of contraceptives and the effect of education, enabling women to better control their bodies.
Well, yes. But you cannot stop progress and information spreading. That is the reality we live now in. Maybe kids will be born from an an artificial womb and raised in public "kinder gardens" in the future. Or we will be gradually replaced by machines ... or die out as a civilization.
If women would want kids then availability of contraceptives would not stop them from having kids. I assume nobody is forcing people to take contraceptives against their will.
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> Easy contraceptives availability is part of it but not the most important one. There are 3 main reasons:
> 1) Economics. Kids cannot be used as cheap labour from around age 8 as it was in the past. Instead they are costing a lot of money to around age 18-24. Parents have retirement - kids are not that important from the point of view of taking care for aging people.
> 2) Fun. There are a lot of sources of fun besides sex now. TV, games, sports, carrier building ...
> 3) And the most important one: women do not want kids as much any more. The studies have shown that the best correlation is between how much women want kids and how many kids they end up to have. Women have many alternative sources of activities when compared to 9 months of carrying a "parasite" around in their belly PLUS additional around 18-24 years of resource drainage. Kids are great fun to have but they are costly as hell. They cost resources which can be spend on alternatives which are fun as well and which are not such a long time commitment.
So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
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If I'm not raising a kid to go straight into the upper middle class or higher I'm gonna do them a favor and never make them.
Nope (Score:2)
So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
"We" are no different than our great grandparents or their great grandparents. What has changed is the environment, and it would have effected them the same way.
What you call "weak", others people call "wealthy".
What you see "hedonism", others see agency and self-determination.
And the only people who ever spend time fretting about "our own civilization" are people who are unhappy with it and want it to
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> So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
Yes, we live in Nash equilibrium and not Pareto optimum. People prefer their own individual good because few "bad apples" typically exist which makes collective good impossible. And there is that pesky problem of what needs to be done for the best collective outcome. We do not know enough to predict the future so we cannot optimize our current behavior perfectly. I'm not claiming we should not try. Everybody needs to decide oneself how much "individual good" is scarified for the "collective good". The quest
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Two words. Forever chemicals, and microplastics. Look it up, there are papers. That's why it's a worldwide problem because the cause is worldwide, much like climate change. We are the modern day petri dish unwittingly being experimented on.
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> "Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
> Because they can afford contraceptives.
That doesn't explain everything . Fertility takes two to make babies. It doesn't explain why male fertility is also dropping. Testosterone and sperm counts have been steadily dropping in first world countries for decades now. And everyone notices. Men are getting more boyish-looking and less rugged. There's more guys firing blanks. Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be. That surely has something to do with the lower testosterone. So something else is going on. It's not just economi
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Low sperm only matters if you are trying to have a child. If you have no desire then who cares about sperm counts?
> Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be.
Where is this quantified, a lot of this is going to lean on why they are finding men less attractive. The expectation of of men today from women are quite different than they were 50 years ago.
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> Low sperm only matters if you are trying to have a child. If you have no desire then who cares about sperm counts?
For the women that DO want to have children it's certainly an increasing problem.
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It's a problem for *both* people, last I checked it takes 2 to have kids. If a women by herself wants a kid it's pretty easy still.
Also do we have data that there is a stronger trend of couples "trying and cant conceive" versus "couples aren't interested in having kids at all" we should see the former far more often. These are two very different problems with very different solutions.
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And have the presence of mind, and the giving-a-fuck (you have something to lose!), to actually bother using them.
AFAIK I've never slipped one past the goalie, but the times I risked it, is when I was poorer and life was generally worse and I was overall (not just sexually) less risk-averse. The more comfortable my life, the more I've maintained safe practices.
Re:Healthcare (Score:5, Interesting)
Education tends to be good as well. Education for women and access to contraceptives are the two big things. They introduced them to places like Bangladesh, and the fertility rate fell from over 9 to under under 2. It's not a particularly wealthy country, but contraception is cheap and education is free.
Japan's birth rate collapsed before birth control (Score:2)
And while they were forcing women into becoming housewives. Their birthright collapsed in the late eighties and birth control wasn't legal there until the mid-90s.
As a woman if you get married you basically exit the workforce. No one's going to hire you because you can't work somebody 60 to 70 hours a week when they have a kid.
I don't quite know what made Japan's birth rate collapse but I can tell you that here in America we forced women to work and work a lot. And we forced men to work a lot too. H
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Because they can not afford children.
You need a house or a large apartment, those are exceedingly not being built, or being built so poor quality that they become death traps after a few years. There's a pile of youtube shorts of a building inspector going through homes in arizona where he finds 100's of defects, some of them being absolutely ridiculous structural failures that all but ensures the home falls apart or needs extensive repairs in a decade.
Now assuming the housing was not the first obstacle, yo
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The real reason isn't too far off - high income countries can afford healthcare. This leads to the population in general being much healthier and living longer, and the biggest reason, lower infant mortality.
In poorer countries, you need to have multiple kids - this is a requirement because most of your kids will be dead before they reach adulthood. So you need to have multiple kids to have a chance that one of them will reach adulthood.
And moms, when they aren't having to constantly pop out kids for surviv