Previous Fertility Roundups: #1, #2. The pace seems to be doing this about twice a year. The actual situation changes slowly, so presumably the pace of interesting new things should slow down over time from here. Demographics This time around, a visualization.
> Alice Evans: Only 1% of Taiwanese emphasized romance. This tracks. I went to one mall and one supermarket today, there are no valentines. But there are thousands of celebrations of money.
Am I being dumb, or is it kind of insane/America-brained to use this as a data point? Valentines Day stems (broadly) from a Christian holiday, and the connection with romantic love only goes back to around late 1790s England. Why should we expect a country that was only colonised by Western powers for about 40 years 400 years ago, and was an isolated semi-dictatorship for much of the 20th Century to have any connection to VD?
I fear for many in the current generation. I think that those without kids will in their later years greatly regret not having other family members to talk with, worry about, experience joy with, to visit, go to concerts with, participate with during holidays, etc. It's also the joy of continuity of their family. We all die, but I know that some part of me will continue. Through my three kids, I know that my memory will continue into the next generation and, with their kids, even further. Of course there were problems. And it cost a bundle to raise three kids. But at my age at almost three quarters of a century, the value of kids is priceless.
> I would indeed vastly prefer to deregulate childcare
Whats the absolute cheapest you could make childcare in, say, NYC? If we're talking about 1-year-olds, you probably need at least 1 person per 4 kids realistically. At $20/hour (realistic wage in NYC for someone capable of being responsible for many hours in a row) and 50 hours/week (daycare needs to be 10 hours/day to account for parent commute times) that's $1,100/month/parent in salary alone. Add benefits, rent, overhead, etc, and you'll realistically be at $1,500/month. As far as I can tell the lowest market rate in NYC today is $2,000/month, so regulation adds maybe 30% of cost?
The biggest actual gripe I've heard from well off parents is that the daycare hours are too short (they'd prefer something like 8am->8pm for full flexibility, which is common in places like Russia with cheap labor) and that daycares won't take sick kids. Could the US afford providing this kind of standard of daycare to all parents? Because IMO that's what it would take to budge the birth rate.
It seems like East Asian countries got the Western capitalism without Western tradition and values, and it's making them sad.
Also, I'm 17 and part of one of these insular high-fertility subcultures. Lots of my friends have tons of cousins and frequently share anecdotes about spending time with them.
I don't have any cousins, and think my life would be like 10% better with some.
Somewhere in this post you mentioned someone saying that future technological developments are underrated or underpriced in this whole conversation. I think that's true, and I think that because this is such an emotionally charged topic for so many people, many people either ignore the promise of technological developments or else don't want to consider that they will ameliorate much of the problem.
“Birth rates have dropped below levels in the early 1960s, when China was devastated by famine.” Translation: when Mao murdered tens of millions of Chinese with his Great Leap Forward collectivization of agriculture.
I suspect that the spread of contraception, particularly condoms, is responsible for most of the drop in fertility, over economic or social factors. My hypothesis is that people historically have mostly not consciously decided to have children, but instead they just had unprotected sex and had lots of children as a result. But in the modern era, everyone is using condoms, so the fertility rate is much lower. The effect of economic factors and so on is relatively minor in comparison. I wonder if there's good data to show this?
Of course, even if we think this, it may not be reasonable to ban contraception. Romania tried in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770# and this did have a large effect on birth rates, but was bad in many other ways and did not last.
However, I wonder if perhaps reducing the promotion of contraception, or maybe actively discouraging it, could be considered. It's not good for personal liberty, but if the survival of a country is at stake...
I think this roundup is very good… also in illustrating precisely why we disagree. People state, loudly and clearly, that they (in aggregate, not each individually) prefer not having kids or having one kid. People state, loudly and clearly, that personal fulfillment is more important to them. We _know_ this to have applied in the only pre-modern developed society we have good data on, the Roman Empire, where fertility of Romans proper similarly dropped. So it all comes to your "I believe [these people] are just wrong". As much as I am usually eager to point out that people are (in aggregate and also each individually, including me and you) stupid and don't know why they like what they like, maybe we should just believe people who say "having multiple kids would be a thankless job I don't want" and/or "being in a non-atomized community would hurt me more than help me"? Like, there's a reason the most effective measure to increase fertility was Romania's banning contraception. Using contraception is voluntary. (I'd think the relevant kind of sex act, quite a narrowly defined one at that, also is, but _apparently_ people just can't use their brains to do alternative acts when they don't want children, or at least it is way more difficult than using the pill/condoms/both.)
"As discussed under South Korea, gender equality is tricky here. If you get rid of other traditional values and norms around children and families, then more gender equality probably becomes actively good for fertility. The logic is simple: Once you give women the choice on how many children they have, otherwise treating them badly and giving them less opportunity is going to cause them to choose to have less children rather than more children."
'South Korea' (as in the government) does not treat women badly. The government is one of the most institutionally feminist governments in the world, and has been since 1998, when the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (which, like similarly-named institutions elsewhere, is primarily concerned with increasing women's status in society, not gender equality per se) was formed. Women have a huge state-enforced career advantage over men because they are not subject to the draft, which means women get a several-year head start (this is one of the biggest grievances of young South Korean men). What is true is that South Korean men generally dislike women, with a mix of borderline pre-modern attitudes from older generations and hostility towards a privileged group that organizes to discriminate against them from younger generations. But this is not the same thing.
"The way that older gender inequality promoted fertility was that it took that choice away from women. I hope we can all agree that giving them that choice was a good change."
This is absolutely not true, at least in the West. Northwestern European women have had the option not to marry for 700 years. If you think American women in 1960 (American TFR - 3.5) were forced to have children, your model of world history is badly wrong (if your grandmother is alive, you can ask her - this is still within living memory). What is true is that becoming a wife and mother used to be the expected, default, high status option for women, as well as the only way to get access to men's resources, whereas now it is not (welfare state is a big part of this). But "this is incentivized" and "this is forced" are not the same thing; something will always be normal and incentivized by society.
"Jamie: My grandmother who was born in 1930 wants you all to know that there is no Return to Tradition. They constantly had kids out of wedlock, they just hid them. She said I should tweet that."
This is also not true. We have pretty good records from England on out-of-wedlock births going back hundreds of years, and before 1960 the rate never exceeded 7% (and that only for a very brief moment). Rates approaching or exceeding 50%, as became common across the West post-1970, are totally unprecedented in Western history (some primitive people without much paternal investment or certainty get close to this). What is true is that many marriages (something like 20-30%) were hurried or formed because of unintended premarital pregnancies, but the children were born within wedlock. Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173396
I think in the past you had written something about extremely punishing regulations for in-home daycares which I think is one area there could be some change on.
Someone who is already staying at home with a few pre-k kids can very easily watch 1-3 more, often resulting in less labor overall (kids just play with each other instead of needing parents to initiate entertainment), while increasing income as well at a cost that is often a substantial discount off of a center daycare.
There's just no way to make the economics of center daycares work such that you get high quality daycare at an affordable price with well compensated employees for young kids (for older kids we call it school, and quality and price can still vary quite dramatically by locale).
For someone already staying at home, an extra $1000-1500 a month for 2 kids is some nice bonus money as opposed to a center worker, where a netting $2.5k - $3k for watching 4-6 kids is a pretty bad wage. The parents putting their kids in an in-home daycare get likely higher quality care, with more unstructured play time, less illness, and less expense.
The elephant in the room here is immigration. Most developed countries address low fertility by bringing in a bunch of young immigrants who tend to have more kids for various reasons. This should be enough to address the issue in most places, and even insular countries like Japan and South Korea will find it easier to change their immigration policy than their fertility rate. China is a unique case as few people want to immigrate there and their high population makes that strategy less effective.
Funny, I'm about to move to the bay area and this seems like an absolutely terrible place to have kids. rough that most of the good jobs are in places which are bad for families
I’m a bit of a culture skeptic. As I see it you’ve got two separate issues:
1. I don’t want to have my first child because doing so will cost too much time/money/status.
2. I don’t want to have more children because I need to invest all my resources trying to boost my firstborn’s position in zero-sum competitions. More kids will just force me to divide my resources.
Both are solvable by reducing net costs. Give parents big checks or in-kind transfers and then do your best to stop them from spending all the windfall trying to boost their child’s position in zero-sum competitions.
So, in my ideal world: Elite college admissions are just pure sortition if you hit a threshold score on some maximally prep-resistant test, plus some spots reserved for legacies and rich foreigners who help bankroll the operation and maintain the networking aspect. Public elementary and high schools have longer hours and liberal pickup/dropoff policies, and they almost never close but also parents can schedule vacations for their kids whenever they want. Embrace the free-range kids agenda for older kids and push employers to offer free on-site daycare for younger kids. Get teens back into part-time jobs and get more 18-year-olds starting careers rather than going to college.
The inter-sibling resource contention issue is also helped by making larger families economically beneficial for each individual member. A housing downpayment assistance program that scales super-linearly with larger families, and even gives you retroactive payments when you have additional kids within a year or two after you move into the house. Some deal where families with enough kids can opt out of sending the kids to public school, and instead the state pays for a private tutor to come to the house. Do legacy admissions for colleges, officer school, trade apprenticeships, whatever, but based on older siblings, not just parents. Give each kid automatically a few thousand dollars in grants for university tuition, and if they choose not to attend they can transfer their grant, but only to a sibling. Implement programs that provide minor opaque cross-subsidies to not just veterans, but also siblings of veterans, and then do the same with cops, teachers, anything else you can get away with.
The ideal endpoint: “I’m the youngest of 7 siblings.” “Oh wow, lucky you!”
You run this policy program for a generation or two and see what happens with cultural attitudes.
> And rather than everyone realizing shaming is bad and not to do it at all, we have substituted other forms of shaming and other social pressures.
Personally I'd say one of the main issues there is this huge public/private shame divide. Public shaming has become very taboo except for a narrow range of approved issues, but as someone who is irl friends with some of these don't-yuck-anyone's-yum-ever-for-any-reason twitter types -- once you hang out with them offline they are backchannel shaming left, right and center in private.
Also along the same lines -- publicly (i.e. online) there is a lot less respect for parents and parenting than there used to be. But privately, in real life social situations, being a parent has been an incredible social superpower for me. You have an instant empathetic connection to any other parent and can relate to >50% of their day-to-day life immediately. And because of the costs of having kids, the other parents you're relating to tend to be the kind of well-off, high status individuals you'd want to relate to if you were trying to get ahead in your career. I'm not necessarily saying having kids is a good way to get ahead in your career, and it definitely damages your ability to work productively in many ways, but I think it also signals high status in ways that were surprising to me as a new parent. Not that I'm totally career driven, but I wonder if having kids might be better for people who are than they would think, at least given the current status of parenting.
In all your considerations and pondering on the problem of reproductive crisis and significantly lowered fertility and birth rates, and in all that.....not once did you consider the chronic "cradle to grave" exposure to toxic food, endocrine disrupting molecules, of heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, bacteriocides, antibiotics, micro and nanoparticulates (plastics, metals, etc), in the air, water and soil cycles....COMBINED with the circaidian disrupting effects of blue light tech, shift work, LED lighting and general indoor living and toxic sunscreens, all stopping the very critical rhythms/hormones required for actual fertility AND socialization, AND mental health....🤨🤔😐???!!
Really?! The problem is not complicated. The political, industry capture and corporatism of the problem is.
Don't let vested interests gas light you into thinking the problem is you. 🤨
It's not. It's them. They're "swifting" you😉. Blunt fact is, You make them more more money being sick, infertile, and confused.😉🤦♀️🤐
> Alice Evans: Only 1% of Taiwanese emphasized romance. This tracks. I went to one mall and one supermarket today, there are no valentines. But there are thousands of celebrations of money.
Am I being dumb, or is it kind of insane/America-brained to use this as a data point? Valentines Day stems (broadly) from a Christian holiday, and the connection with romantic love only goes back to around late 1790s England. Why should we expect a country that was only colonised by Western powers for about 40 years 400 years ago, and was an isolated semi-dictatorship for much of the 20th Century to have any connection to VD?
I fear for many in the current generation. I think that those without kids will in their later years greatly regret not having other family members to talk with, worry about, experience joy with, to visit, go to concerts with, participate with during holidays, etc. It's also the joy of continuity of their family. We all die, but I know that some part of me will continue. Through my three kids, I know that my memory will continue into the next generation and, with their kids, even further. Of course there were problems. And it cost a bundle to raise three kids. But at my age at almost three quarters of a century, the value of kids is priceless.
> I would indeed vastly prefer to deregulate childcare
Whats the absolute cheapest you could make childcare in, say, NYC? If we're talking about 1-year-olds, you probably need at least 1 person per 4 kids realistically. At $20/hour (realistic wage in NYC for someone capable of being responsible for many hours in a row) and 50 hours/week (daycare needs to be 10 hours/day to account for parent commute times) that's $1,100/month/parent in salary alone. Add benefits, rent, overhead, etc, and you'll realistically be at $1,500/month. As far as I can tell the lowest market rate in NYC today is $2,000/month, so regulation adds maybe 30% of cost?
The biggest actual gripe I've heard from well off parents is that the daycare hours are too short (they'd prefer something like 8am->8pm for full flexibility, which is common in places like Russia with cheap labor) and that daycares won't take sick kids. Could the US afford providing this kind of standard of daycare to all parents? Because IMO that's what it would take to budge the birth rate.
It seems like East Asian countries got the Western capitalism without Western tradition and values, and it's making them sad.
Also, I'm 17 and part of one of these insular high-fertility subcultures. Lots of my friends have tons of cousins and frequently share anecdotes about spending time with them.
I don't have any cousins, and think my life would be like 10% better with some.
Somewhere in this post you mentioned someone saying that future technological developments are underrated or underpriced in this whole conversation. I think that's true, and I think that because this is such an emotionally charged topic for so many people, many people either ignore the promise of technological developments or else don't want to consider that they will ameliorate much of the problem.
“Birth rates have dropped below levels in the early 1960s, when China was devastated by famine.” Translation: when Mao murdered tens of millions of Chinese with his Great Leap Forward collectivization of agriculture.
Is the title "Fertility Roundup" meant to evoke the fact that Roundup (glyphosate) apparently has a (negative) effect on fertility?
I suspect that the spread of contraception, particularly condoms, is responsible for most of the drop in fertility, over economic or social factors. My hypothesis is that people historically have mostly not consciously decided to have children, but instead they just had unprotected sex and had lots of children as a result. But in the modern era, everyone is using condoms, so the fertility rate is much lower. The effect of economic factors and so on is relatively minor in comparison. I wonder if there's good data to show this?
Of course, even if we think this, it may not be reasonable to ban contraception. Romania tried in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770# and this did have a large effect on birth rates, but was bad in many other ways and did not last.
However, I wonder if perhaps reducing the promotion of contraception, or maybe actively discouraging it, could be considered. It's not good for personal liberty, but if the survival of a country is at stake...
I think this roundup is very good… also in illustrating precisely why we disagree. People state, loudly and clearly, that they (in aggregate, not each individually) prefer not having kids or having one kid. People state, loudly and clearly, that personal fulfillment is more important to them. We _know_ this to have applied in the only pre-modern developed society we have good data on, the Roman Empire, where fertility of Romans proper similarly dropped. So it all comes to your "I believe [these people] are just wrong". As much as I am usually eager to point out that people are (in aggregate and also each individually, including me and you) stupid and don't know why they like what they like, maybe we should just believe people who say "having multiple kids would be a thankless job I don't want" and/or "being in a non-atomized community would hurt me more than help me"? Like, there's a reason the most effective measure to increase fertility was Romania's banning contraception. Using contraception is voluntary. (I'd think the relevant kind of sex act, quite a narrowly defined one at that, also is, but _apparently_ people just can't use their brains to do alternative acts when they don't want children, or at least it is way more difficult than using the pill/condoms/both.)
"As discussed under South Korea, gender equality is tricky here. If you get rid of other traditional values and norms around children and families, then more gender equality probably becomes actively good for fertility. The logic is simple: Once you give women the choice on how many children they have, otherwise treating them badly and giving them less opportunity is going to cause them to choose to have less children rather than more children."
'South Korea' (as in the government) does not treat women badly. The government is one of the most institutionally feminist governments in the world, and has been since 1998, when the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (which, like similarly-named institutions elsewhere, is primarily concerned with increasing women's status in society, not gender equality per se) was formed. Women have a huge state-enforced career advantage over men because they are not subject to the draft, which means women get a several-year head start (this is one of the biggest grievances of young South Korean men). What is true is that South Korean men generally dislike women, with a mix of borderline pre-modern attitudes from older generations and hostility towards a privileged group that organizes to discriminate against them from younger generations. But this is not the same thing.
"The way that older gender inequality promoted fertility was that it took that choice away from women. I hope we can all agree that giving them that choice was a good change."
This is absolutely not true, at least in the West. Northwestern European women have had the option not to marry for 700 years. If you think American women in 1960 (American TFR - 3.5) were forced to have children, your model of world history is badly wrong (if your grandmother is alive, you can ask her - this is still within living memory). What is true is that becoming a wife and mother used to be the expected, default, high status option for women, as well as the only way to get access to men's resources, whereas now it is not (welfare state is a big part of this). But "this is incentivized" and "this is forced" are not the same thing; something will always be normal and incentivized by society.
"Jamie: My grandmother who was born in 1930 wants you all to know that there is no Return to Tradition. They constantly had kids out of wedlock, they just hid them. She said I should tweet that."
This is also not true. We have pretty good records from England on out-of-wedlock births going back hundreds of years, and before 1960 the rate never exceeded 7% (and that only for a very brief moment). Rates approaching or exceeding 50%, as became common across the West post-1970, are totally unprecedented in Western history (some primitive people without much paternal investment or certainty get close to this). What is true is that many marriages (something like 20-30%) were hurried or formed because of unintended premarital pregnancies, but the children were born within wedlock. Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173396
I think in the past you had written something about extremely punishing regulations for in-home daycares which I think is one area there could be some change on.
Someone who is already staying at home with a few pre-k kids can very easily watch 1-3 more, often resulting in less labor overall (kids just play with each other instead of needing parents to initiate entertainment), while increasing income as well at a cost that is often a substantial discount off of a center daycare.
There's just no way to make the economics of center daycares work such that you get high quality daycare at an affordable price with well compensated employees for young kids (for older kids we call it school, and quality and price can still vary quite dramatically by locale).
For someone already staying at home, an extra $1000-1500 a month for 2 kids is some nice bonus money as opposed to a center worker, where a netting $2.5k - $3k for watching 4-6 kids is a pretty bad wage. The parents putting their kids in an in-home daycare get likely higher quality care, with more unstructured play time, less illness, and less expense.
The elephant in the room here is immigration. Most developed countries address low fertility by bringing in a bunch of young immigrants who tend to have more kids for various reasons. This should be enough to address the issue in most places, and even insular countries like Japan and South Korea will find it easier to change their immigration policy than their fertility rate. China is a unique case as few people want to immigrate there and their high population makes that strategy less effective.
Funny, I'm about to move to the bay area and this seems like an absolutely terrible place to have kids. rough that most of the good jobs are in places which are bad for families
I’m a bit of a culture skeptic. As I see it you’ve got two separate issues:
1. I don’t want to have my first child because doing so will cost too much time/money/status.
2. I don’t want to have more children because I need to invest all my resources trying to boost my firstborn’s position in zero-sum competitions. More kids will just force me to divide my resources.
Both are solvable by reducing net costs. Give parents big checks or in-kind transfers and then do your best to stop them from spending all the windfall trying to boost their child’s position in zero-sum competitions.
So, in my ideal world: Elite college admissions are just pure sortition if you hit a threshold score on some maximally prep-resistant test, plus some spots reserved for legacies and rich foreigners who help bankroll the operation and maintain the networking aspect. Public elementary and high schools have longer hours and liberal pickup/dropoff policies, and they almost never close but also parents can schedule vacations for their kids whenever they want. Embrace the free-range kids agenda for older kids and push employers to offer free on-site daycare for younger kids. Get teens back into part-time jobs and get more 18-year-olds starting careers rather than going to college.
The inter-sibling resource contention issue is also helped by making larger families economically beneficial for each individual member. A housing downpayment assistance program that scales super-linearly with larger families, and even gives you retroactive payments when you have additional kids within a year or two after you move into the house. Some deal where families with enough kids can opt out of sending the kids to public school, and instead the state pays for a private tutor to come to the house. Do legacy admissions for colleges, officer school, trade apprenticeships, whatever, but based on older siblings, not just parents. Give each kid automatically a few thousand dollars in grants for university tuition, and if they choose not to attend they can transfer their grant, but only to a sibling. Implement programs that provide minor opaque cross-subsidies to not just veterans, but also siblings of veterans, and then do the same with cops, teachers, anything else you can get away with.
The ideal endpoint: “I’m the youngest of 7 siblings.” “Oh wow, lucky you!”
You run this policy program for a generation or two and see what happens with cultural attitudes.
> And rather than everyone realizing shaming is bad and not to do it at all, we have substituted other forms of shaming and other social pressures.
Personally I'd say one of the main issues there is this huge public/private shame divide. Public shaming has become very taboo except for a narrow range of approved issues, but as someone who is irl friends with some of these don't-yuck-anyone's-yum-ever-for-any-reason twitter types -- once you hang out with them offline they are backchannel shaming left, right and center in private.
Also along the same lines -- publicly (i.e. online) there is a lot less respect for parents and parenting than there used to be. But privately, in real life social situations, being a parent has been an incredible social superpower for me. You have an instant empathetic connection to any other parent and can relate to >50% of their day-to-day life immediately. And because of the costs of having kids, the other parents you're relating to tend to be the kind of well-off, high status individuals you'd want to relate to if you were trying to get ahead in your career. I'm not necessarily saying having kids is a good way to get ahead in your career, and it definitely damages your ability to work productively in many ways, but I think it also signals high status in ways that were surprising to me as a new parent. Not that I'm totally career driven, but I wonder if having kids might be better for people who are than they would think, at least given the current status of parenting.
😐🤔🤔🤔🤨🤦♀️
In all your considerations and pondering on the problem of reproductive crisis and significantly lowered fertility and birth rates, and in all that.....not once did you consider the chronic "cradle to grave" exposure to toxic food, endocrine disrupting molecules, of heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, bacteriocides, antibiotics, micro and nanoparticulates (plastics, metals, etc), in the air, water and soil cycles....COMBINED with the circaidian disrupting effects of blue light tech, shift work, LED lighting and general indoor living and toxic sunscreens, all stopping the very critical rhythms/hormones required for actual fertility AND socialization, AND mental health....🤨🤔😐???!!
Really?! The problem is not complicated. The political, industry capture and corporatism of the problem is.
Don't let vested interests gas light you into thinking the problem is you. 🤨
It's not. It's them. They're "swifting" you😉. Blunt fact is, You make them more more money being sick, infertile, and confused.😉🤦♀️🤐
#dontletthemhide #theirgarbage #dontgetgaslit #itsnotyou #itsthem #wearemany #wearememory #wewillnotforgive #mistakeswereNOTmade #getlocalised