> 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?
Might be different, but in China at least valentine's day always came off as a materialistic thing, a way for upper middle class Chinese to show off their knowledge of Western culture and buy stuff for their partners.
There was an actual Chinese version of Valentines that fell in August IIRC.
China has a couple of Valentine's Days of its own.
There's 5/20, which exists because saying the date in Chinese kind of sounds like saying "I love you" in Chinese. This is more recent, and mostly only celebrated by younger folks.
And then there's the Qixi festival, which being tracked on a lunar calendar happens sometime in late summer. This is very old, commemorating a myth of the love between a cowherd and a weaver girl.
Western Valentine's Day is I think celebrated less than either of these.
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.
The problem is daycare form 8 am - 8 pm is going to be really really bad especially for young kids (<3 most impacted, at 3 it's still going to be pretty bad - especially since the studies we are referring to here were not from kids spending their whole day in daycare).
I think the best easy move you could make would just be to deregulate in-home daycares a lot more. 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).
Parents want the ability to drop off their child and not worry about being late from work / delayed in traffic. I imagine most would still pick up their kids around 5pm but they want slack to ensure they're _never_ stressed about the daycare's operating hours. Ditto for child sickness - ideally daycares should accept any child that's not literally dying (in which case an ER visit is more appropriate). You want a ~100% guarantee of being able to get up on Monday, drop your kid off, and work without _any_ interruptions. Anything less than that and people start having less kids on the margin.
This is also why rich people have a lot of kids. Elon Musk doesn't care if X Æ A-Xii has a bad cough tomorrow morning, he's got an army of nannies to deal with it. Hence he has 10 kids. Give the same guarantee to working class people and I'm sure we'll see a lot more families with 3+ kids.
but dropping kids off with contagious illnesses is bad for *everyone* else!
Kids in daycare get sick so much more, and especially for infants that can be life-threatening or at least really really inconvenient.
And workers don't really like getting sick all the time either!
I share Zvi's note that I think any focus on childcare is at best tangential to the actual issues which are likely more cultural (Lyman Stone also has some good stuff on this). The people who have the most kids are not focused on daycare. I think either providing people who have kids enough cash so that they can either:
A. Hire a nanny themselves or
B. make it economically worthwhile to stay at home
There's ways to deal with all of that. Separate rooms for sick kids, better ventilation, new vaccines, etc. In any case you want to offload the cognitive load away from parents and give them a "we'll take it care of it bro/sis, no worries".
As for "it's really bad for kids"... I mean, sure, but is it really worse than not existing at all? Conditions for kids weren't exactly fantastic 100 years ago and most people still grew up just fine.
I don't think the correlation between increased rates of daycare use and decreases in fertility rate is *purely* correlation, such that I sort of reject your premise. I see encouraging more daycare use as encouraging fewer kids.
Years ago I looked into making an app to connect people that need child care with people already caring for children. I stopped investigating pretty quickly owing to the regulations and all the personal risk that caretakers would assume in breaking those regulations.
Even just making your home an acceptable location would cost you thousands of dollars to add alarms, special dishwashers, refit windows so that they can't open big enough for a kid to scramble out of, install self closing gates/doors, etc.
On top of that you'd need to get yourself certified, which the state has since decided includes getting 20 credits of college education in early childhood education.
We gotta reform the au pair system. You could get responsible people from other countries to come to the US and work as au pairs at costs to the parents of a lot less than what you're talking about.
Au pairs already only require about a thousand per month in spending money, which is a steal compared to licensed daycares. You have to provide room and board as well, but you likely already have a spare room for them and the extra food cost is still dwarfed by the cost of licensed daycare.
And the au pair is a fixed cost even if you have more than one kid.
Hanging out in au pair forums, it seems to me like the actual cost is a lot more, because I'm addition to board, you also supply a car, car insurance, a phone, other Perks that are expected
Exactly! I’m one of those women. I love my son with all my heart, but I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. No disrespect to stay at home parents! It’s just not for me. Dealing with diapers and temper tantrums around the clock would drive me certifiably insane.
Germany: I rather like our Kindergarten, open from 7am to 6 pm. (we take them out at 4pm). More important: the kids like it. Mostly free as I am low-income, also very affordable for higher incomes. IF we had to pay a substantial sum (1k+ ?! omg!): We'd kept the kids at home. We have 3 little kids, obviously my wife is not working. I am at a loss why people have kids when they pay through their nose to have others take care of them. Sure, kindergartens are fine; nannies from abroad are fine (why limit au pairs???), all the mothers in the Gulf states do it - at a few hundred $ a month. If you make mom-stays-home affordable and acceptable: problem solved (maybe).
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.
Cousins are great! I have zero friends that I keep in touch with from high school or earlier. I have literally dozens of cousins and other family members that I keep in touch with, to various extents.
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...
The pull out method works just fine (if done correctly) and has been known since Biblical times. Activists tend to exaggerate how ineffective it is due to worries about people getting STDs but in reality its almost as good as using a condom.
Men instinctively don't want to pull out though, especially not consistently, so I would guess that this method is effectively negligible in real world effect, whereas contraception proliferation has a very real, very strong effect on fertility rates.
Well, most men don't want to use condoms either. I do agree that birth control and condoms reduced fertility on the margin but you can get <2.0 TFR with pull out / cycle timing alone.
I just imagine that if I were an average 18 year old in the 1800s or earlier (e.g. relatively poor and uneducated), and I had a nice young girlfriend, I'd wanna screw a lot and there's a pretty high chance a child would happen in a year or two, even if I didn't really want one quite yet. Then we'd probably end up married quite young and have a bunch more kids later.
However, in the modern day, it's relatively easy for 18 yo me to have lots of sex while avoiding a baby thanks to much more effective and less intrusive birth control, as well as better education. By the time I make a reasoned decision to get married and have a baby, I'm much older.
A disciplined guy in the 1800s could avoid a baby with pull out and cycles and so on, but I don't think the average person is very disciplined.
You're wrong. Premodern contraception methods (pulling out, crude condoms, cycle timing, infanticide, abortion) were generally unreliable on the individual level, but perfectly adequate on the population level. I think this misperception comes from overfitting on Western European history, where family planning *within marriage* was almost unheard of until ~1760 (France) or ~1870 (Britain, Nordics, Germany). But it was heavily used just about everywhere else, and once adopted in the West quickly drove fertility rates down (France was around replacement by 1815, and most Western countries were the same by 1930. This was reversed by the Baby Boom).
Even if there was "adequate" premodern contraception, wouldn't modern contraception be more effective and therefore bring down fertility rates even if all else was equal?
I also don't really understand your point on Western Europe, where is the "everywhere else" you refer to? China? India? Africa? Married couples in those places were "family planning", meaning they were actively deciding not to have children until later in life, and achieving low fertility rates that way?
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.)
Yea, there is big difference between a)"we should rearrange society so that people want more children", and b) "people who voluntarily do not have children are worse off because of it". Also Zvi imho fails to properly justify either a) or b), probably because target audience is assumed to be already convinced...
1. There are people who don't want kids and for whom this is indeed a great life decision.
2. There are those who don't want them today but who would've been happier in the aggregate if they've changed their mind.
3. There are those who have kids or want to have (more) kids, for whom this is a bad idea and they'd be better off childless or with less kids.
4. There are those who want (more) kids but can't have them due to various constraints, and for whom this is indeed a great idea.
I don't think this post denies the idea that groups #1 and #3 exist. Instead it argues about how we could change the mind of group #2 or help out group #4. It _is_ possible that 1+3 are so big that the combined TFR would still be <2.0 in an ideal world where everyone's preferences were perfectly satisfied, but I'm not sure if we have good data to rule one way or the other.
"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.
Yes, this would clearly be better on average. The problem is there would be more extremely negative outliers (or if there weren’t, the negative outliers would make the news more), and whichever politician pushed for relaxing the daycare rules would get annihilated.
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.
Canada is mainly inviting immigrants from China, Taiwan and India, highly selecting for the most educated/talented people so their TFR keeps on falling despite having one of the largest immigrant populations in the world.
The U.S. is primarily welcoming immigrants from Mexico, India and China. Mexicos TFR is already at 1.6 so this likewise won’t solve anything.
One problem is that immigrants fertility rates seem to rapidly drop to the average, so they seem like just a temporary fix, and countries want something that lasts.
Another issue is that overly open immigration is feared to lead to disloyal immigrants that will jump ship back to their "home" countries in times of war or crisis. Or even worse, it will lead to unrest and violent uprising. Assimilation can be done, but it's generally accepted that it works better when done gradually.
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
Mostly the expense of space relative to other areas is what I found most striking. Morebirths on Twitter has additional arguments on how dense cities might be bad for families for other reasons, and can make the arguments better than I can
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.😉🤦♀️🤐
Respectfully dude, I wrote the words, the voice in YOUR head, ascribed intonation and meaning. Not me.😉
Saying it ain't so, doesn't make it any less true.🤨
But since you object, ill, help you feel better about it all. I am nobody, a voice on the wind. If you want to take the time to look for yourself, every statement can be verified by published literature, multiple times over. I also have personal/work experience in almost all industries mentioned.😉
Believe it, don't believe it. It's happened without yours or my knowledge and approval for decades.
With THAT knowledge, you do what ever you need to do to sleep at night and keep on living😉🤗
That's your choice, as is Ziv's to respond or not😉
Lol, so you want me to do your homework for you? You want fries with that too?🤦♀️
Look, if you want to spend your time labelling $#!% because it makes you feel better in some way, you do you.
As for actual hard data- if you actually want to know, start by looking at your countries regulatory group for pesticides/controlled substances, etc. It could be EPA, AVMPA, whatever, depending on your country. Then look at dates of introduction for particular products (be warned, they usually make those databases very difficult to navigate, interact with, so strange😉), cross check with countries birth rates, then live birth rates, then adjust for reporting, etc, etc. Then look at fertility clinics/IVF data.
Your right, South Korea has multifactors affecting its FR, so has Congo, so has Scotland, so has Norway, look at them and find whats common...its there, and its really obviously there in the last 5 years😉It's called research or work, or due diligence, depending on your generation label😉
Or failing that business of doing your own work, then find a person in the field who has already done that work and see what they say, have a think about it, then find someone in the same field that says the opposite. Then think about it and make up your own mind. 2nd way is usually what most do but means you have to accept responsibility for listening to whoever and if their wrong, well sucks to be you. 1st way takes more time, but when you tell others, you'll know your right and be ok owning it😉 If you want an easy but solid data peep to start with, I suggest look for I, Numero's stack, or Joel Smalley. His data is solid, people don't like it, but it's accurate😉 happy trails.
I kind of wondered about the endocrine disruptors. I always had the conspiracy theory the huge rise in trans people (in addition to social contagion etc.) was at least in part due to ambient hormones (they've made animals display behavior of the other sex right?) and the corporations were ginning it up as a movement so they wouldn't be investigated for it.
As for the rest of it...I don't see a direct connection, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
> 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?
Might be different, but in China at least valentine's day always came off as a materialistic thing, a way for upper middle class Chinese to show off their knowledge of Western culture and buy stuff for their partners.
There was an actual Chinese version of Valentines that fell in August IIRC.
They have their own romantic literature over there, no? Dream of the Red Chamber and all that? Might not go on a specific day.
China has a couple of Valentine's Days of its own.
There's 5/20, which exists because saying the date in Chinese kind of sounds like saying "I love you" in Chinese. This is more recent, and mostly only celebrated by younger folks.
And then there's the Qixi festival, which being tracked on a lunar calendar happens sometime in late summer. This is very old, commemorating a myth of the love between a cowherd and a weaver girl.
Western Valentine's Day is I think celebrated less than either of these.
How does Wu Er Shi become I love you?
Wu Er Ling -> Wo Ai Ni
As a non-native speaker the last two syllables seems like a stretch to me, too, but everyone else seems to accept it.
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.
Do childless 60 year olds today report a deep sense of unsatisfaction compared to their peers with kids?
I think some childless 60 year olds regret not having had kids, and others don't. People are complicated.
Right, I guess my point was that we don't need to wait to know how old childless people feel. We've already got millions of them in the US alone.
> 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.
The problem is daycare form 8 am - 8 pm is going to be really really bad especially for young kids (<3 most impacted, at 3 it's still going to be pretty bad - especially since the studies we are referring to here were not from kids spending their whole day in daycare).
I think the best easy move you could make would just be to deregulate in-home daycares a lot more. 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).
Parents want the ability to drop off their child and not worry about being late from work / delayed in traffic. I imagine most would still pick up their kids around 5pm but they want slack to ensure they're _never_ stressed about the daycare's operating hours. Ditto for child sickness - ideally daycares should accept any child that's not literally dying (in which case an ER visit is more appropriate). You want a ~100% guarantee of being able to get up on Monday, drop your kid off, and work without _any_ interruptions. Anything less than that and people start having less kids on the margin.
This is also why rich people have a lot of kids. Elon Musk doesn't care if X Æ A-Xii has a bad cough tomorrow morning, he's got an army of nannies to deal with it. Hence he has 10 kids. Give the same guarantee to working class people and I'm sure we'll see a lot more families with 3+ kids.
but dropping kids off with contagious illnesses is bad for *everyone* else!
Kids in daycare get sick so much more, and especially for infants that can be life-threatening or at least really really inconvenient.
And workers don't really like getting sick all the time either!
I share Zvi's note that I think any focus on childcare is at best tangential to the actual issues which are likely more cultural (Lyman Stone also has some good stuff on this). The people who have the most kids are not focused on daycare. I think either providing people who have kids enough cash so that they can either:
A. Hire a nanny themselves or
B. make it economically worthwhile to stay at home
are the two approaches likely to actually matter.
There's ways to deal with all of that. Separate rooms for sick kids, better ventilation, new vaccines, etc. In any case you want to offload the cognitive load away from parents and give them a "we'll take it care of it bro/sis, no worries".
As for "it's really bad for kids"... I mean, sure, but is it really worse than not existing at all? Conditions for kids weren't exactly fantastic 100 years ago and most people still grew up just fine.
I don't think the correlation between increased rates of daycare use and decreases in fertility rate is *purely* correlation, such that I sort of reject your premise. I see encouraging more daycare use as encouraging fewer kids.
Yes, I think that daycares are in a bit of an 'uncanny valley' for Western parents:
1. Not good enough to fully offload the cognitive load (see my comments above)
2. But also they remove the joy of having kids by outsourcing the job to someone else
And I agree that more money is probably a better solution but you also want to nudge daycares into becoming a 100% solution instead of a 95% one.
Years ago I looked into making an app to connect people that need child care with people already caring for children. I stopped investigating pretty quickly owing to the regulations and all the personal risk that caretakers would assume in breaking those regulations.
Even just making your home an acceptable location would cost you thousands of dollars to add alarms, special dishwashers, refit windows so that they can't open big enough for a kid to scramble out of, install self closing gates/doors, etc.
On top of that you'd need to get yourself certified, which the state has since decided includes getting 20 credits of college education in early childhood education.
We gotta reform the au pair system. You could get responsible people from other countries to come to the US and work as au pairs at costs to the parents of a lot less than what you're talking about.
Au pairs already only require about a thousand per month in spending money, which is a steal compared to licensed daycares. You have to provide room and board as well, but you likely already have a spare room for them and the extra food cost is still dwarfed by the cost of licensed daycare.
And the au pair is a fixed cost even if you have more than one kid.
Hanging out in au pair forums, it seems to me like the actual cost is a lot more, because I'm addition to board, you also supply a car, car insurance, a phone, other Perks that are expected
Good info, thanks. I've only gone as far as looking at the advertised costs.
At that point why not just pay the mother?
You can but many women genuinely want a career. If you want those women to have kids, you'll have to find a way to make it work.
Exactly! I’m one of those women. I love my son with all my heart, but I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. No disrespect to stay at home parents! It’s just not for me. Dealing with diapers and temper tantrums around the clock would drive me certifiably insane.
Germany: I rather like our Kindergarten, open from 7am to 6 pm. (we take them out at 4pm). More important: the kids like it. Mostly free as I am low-income, also very affordable for higher incomes. IF we had to pay a substantial sum (1k+ ?! omg!): We'd kept the kids at home. We have 3 little kids, obviously my wife is not working. I am at a loss why people have kids when they pay through their nose to have others take care of them. Sure, kindergartens are fine; nannies from abroad are fine (why limit au pairs???), all the mothers in the Gulf states do it - at a few hundred $ a month. If you make mom-stays-home affordable and acceptable: problem solved (maybe).
Is that 2k / month for 50 hours?
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.
Cousins are great! I have zero friends that I keep in touch with from high school or earlier. I have literally dozens of cousins and other family members that I keep in touch with, to various extents.
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...
The pull out method works just fine (if done correctly) and has been known since Biblical times. Activists tend to exaggerate how ineffective it is due to worries about people getting STDs but in reality its almost as good as using a condom.
Men instinctively don't want to pull out though, especially not consistently, so I would guess that this method is effectively negligible in real world effect, whereas contraception proliferation has a very real, very strong effect on fertility rates.
Well, most men don't want to use condoms either. I do agree that birth control and condoms reduced fertility on the margin but you can get <2.0 TFR with pull out / cycle timing alone.
I just imagine that if I were an average 18 year old in the 1800s or earlier (e.g. relatively poor and uneducated), and I had a nice young girlfriend, I'd wanna screw a lot and there's a pretty high chance a child would happen in a year or two, even if I didn't really want one quite yet. Then we'd probably end up married quite young and have a bunch more kids later.
However, in the modern day, it's relatively easy for 18 yo me to have lots of sex while avoiding a baby thanks to much more effective and less intrusive birth control, as well as better education. By the time I make a reasoned decision to get married and have a baby, I'm much older.
A disciplined guy in the 1800s could avoid a baby with pull out and cycles and so on, but I don't think the average person is very disciplined.
You're wrong. Premodern contraception methods (pulling out, crude condoms, cycle timing, infanticide, abortion) were generally unreliable on the individual level, but perfectly adequate on the population level. I think this misperception comes from overfitting on Western European history, where family planning *within marriage* was almost unheard of until ~1760 (France) or ~1870 (Britain, Nordics, Germany). But it was heavily used just about everywhere else, and once adopted in the West quickly drove fertility rates down (France was around replacement by 1815, and most Western countries were the same by 1930. This was reversed by the Baby Boom).
Even if there was "adequate" premodern contraception, wouldn't modern contraception be more effective and therefore bring down fertility rates even if all else was equal?
I also don't really understand your point on Western Europe, where is the "everywhere else" you refer to? China? India? Africa? Married couples in those places were "family planning", meaning they were actively deciding not to have children until later in life, and achieving low fertility rates that way?
Has contraceptive use dramatically increased since 1980? Since 2015?
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.)
Yea, there is big difference between a)"we should rearrange society so that people want more children", and b) "people who voluntarily do not have children are worse off because of it". Also Zvi imho fails to properly justify either a) or b), probably because target audience is assumed to be already convinced...
Multiple things are true at the same time:
1. There are people who don't want kids and for whom this is indeed a great life decision.
2. There are those who don't want them today but who would've been happier in the aggregate if they've changed their mind.
3. There are those who have kids or want to have (more) kids, for whom this is a bad idea and they'd be better off childless or with less kids.
4. There are those who want (more) kids but can't have them due to various constraints, and for whom this is indeed a great idea.
I don't think this post denies the idea that groups #1 and #3 exist. Instead it argues about how we could change the mind of group #2 or help out group #4. It _is_ possible that 1+3 are so big that the combined TFR would still be <2.0 in an ideal world where everyone's preferences were perfectly satisfied, but I'm not sure if we have good data to rule one way or the other.
"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.
Yes, this would clearly be better on average. The problem is there would be more extremely negative outliers (or if there weren’t, the negative outliers would make the news more), and whichever politician pushed for relaxing the daycare rules would get annihilated.
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.
Canada is mainly inviting immigrants from China, Taiwan and India, highly selecting for the most educated/talented people so their TFR keeps on falling despite having one of the largest immigrant populations in the world.
The U.S. is primarily welcoming immigrants from Mexico, India and China. Mexicos TFR is already at 1.6 so this likewise won’t solve anything.
One problem is that immigrants fertility rates seem to rapidly drop to the average, so they seem like just a temporary fix, and countries want something that lasts.
Another issue is that overly open immigration is feared to lead to disloyal immigrants that will jump ship back to their "home" countries in times of war or crisis. Or even worse, it will lead to unrest and violent uprising. Assimilation can be done, but it's generally accepted that it works better when done gradually.
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
What are you concerned about specifically?
Mostly the expense of space relative to other areas is what I found most striking. Morebirths on Twitter has additional arguments on how dense cities might be bad for families for other reasons, and can make the arguments better than I can
Most of the bay area is not very dense. But it is very expensive.
Define "good job".
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.
The evidence on this is pretty clear; having kids is good for men’s careers and bad for women’s..
Makes sense. Probably further exacerbates the negative fertility effects then.
It's a good thing my wife never gave a crap about her career then!
😐🤔🤔🤔🤨🤦♀️
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
I agree that these issues should be covered, though by commenting in such an unhinged way you might make it less likely Zvi will do so.
But even if everything you say were true, how much it does it affect his arguments about financial inducements and education?
🤣😂🤣😂🤣
"...commenting in an unhinged way..."
Respectfully dude, I wrote the words, the voice in YOUR head, ascribed intonation and meaning. Not me.😉
Saying it ain't so, doesn't make it any less true.🤨
But since you object, ill, help you feel better about it all. I am nobody, a voice on the wind. If you want to take the time to look for yourself, every statement can be verified by published literature, multiple times over. I also have personal/work experience in almost all industries mentioned.😉
Believe it, don't believe it. It's happened without yours or my knowledge and approval for decades.
With THAT knowledge, you do what ever you need to do to sleep at night and keep on living😉🤗
That's your choice, as is Ziv's to respond or not😉
It’s the emojis that make it look like a boomer post on Facebook and add intonation.
Do you have data about which places are more toxic and whether TFR is dropping faster there. For instance, South Korea? There are multiple variables!
Lol, so you want me to do your homework for you? You want fries with that too?🤦♀️
Look, if you want to spend your time labelling $#!% because it makes you feel better in some way, you do you.
As for actual hard data- if you actually want to know, start by looking at your countries regulatory group for pesticides/controlled substances, etc. It could be EPA, AVMPA, whatever, depending on your country. Then look at dates of introduction for particular products (be warned, they usually make those databases very difficult to navigate, interact with, so strange😉), cross check with countries birth rates, then live birth rates, then adjust for reporting, etc, etc. Then look at fertility clinics/IVF data.
Your right, South Korea has multifactors affecting its FR, so has Congo, so has Scotland, so has Norway, look at them and find whats common...its there, and its really obviously there in the last 5 years😉It's called research or work, or due diligence, depending on your generation label😉
Or failing that business of doing your own work, then find a person in the field who has already done that work and see what they say, have a think about it, then find someone in the same field that says the opposite. Then think about it and make up your own mind. 2nd way is usually what most do but means you have to accept responsibility for listening to whoever and if their wrong, well sucks to be you. 1st way takes more time, but when you tell others, you'll know your right and be ok owning it😉 If you want an easy but solid data peep to start with, I suggest look for I, Numero's stack, or Joel Smalley. His data is solid, people don't like it, but it's accurate😉 happy trails.
Uh, yeah, I think I'll get fries with that, actually.
Ps, nice work on your stack btw.😊
I kind of wondered about the endocrine disruptors. I always had the conspiracy theory the huge rise in trans people (in addition to social contagion etc.) was at least in part due to ambient hormones (they've made animals display behavior of the other sex right?) and the corporations were ginning it up as a movement so they wouldn't be investigated for it.
As for the rest of it...I don't see a direct connection, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.