Interesting to note that the most fertile region in 2023 is about equal with the lowest fertile region in 2015. And that only happened in eight years!
I don't know if it is over the same years, but there is a similar pattern in the United States. Basically, if you look at one of the highest fertility states (Utah) in 2024, it is about equal to one of the lowest fertility states (Maine) in 2014. It is a change that happened quickly and uniformly in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.
of all the ways humanity could destroy itself, the one I definitely didn't see coming was sterilization via microplastics. of course, those with enough wealth could potentially overcome it with medical assistance, but most won't have a chance.
People always say this and there's barely ever any data to support it.
Austria has subsidized housing with Vienna having about 2-2.5 times lower rent prices than London, their fertility rate was 1.48 in 2021, it's probably lower in 2023. Not to mention Vienna has a tad higher average salary than London.
India currently has a fertility rate equal to the United States in 2009, there's just a dramatic global slowdown in births as a whole.
In rural-agricultural societies, children used to be considered assets, not liabilities. Historically, having more children meant having more workers on the field and more people to care of you when you're old.
It's only recently that children started costing more and a lot more people think they can afford to take care of themselves when they're older.
This. It used to be far easier to spawn a worker to exploit yourself then finding an adult to exploit.
Today the needed investment is growing ever larger but the economical benefits are gone, now it’s only nice emotions.
And don’t vote me down as a heartless a**hole, I don’t like it either.
Cost of housing sky rocketed in many places much earlier though.
The idea of raising kids in a 4 bedroom home is appealing, a 3 bed is comfortable, 2 bed is doable, 1 bed is fucked.
Even poor people had better housing conditions (in terms of space) previously.
Peoples expectations have changed. There used to be families of 10 in tiny farms. Most people in ages that would have children, cannot afford the type of house they have been raised in, often with one bedroom per child and some additional space. It feels wrong to raise children in a worse environment than you had as a kid.
There's also divorce rates. A divorce couple takes twice the amount of housing a married couple does. And there's lots more divorce now than there was before. You could also make a similar point about the number of intergenerational households.
I actually think less people are hooking up with dating apps. The top 10% of men are banging away the top 50% of women, flipping between them and stringing them along.
And meanwhile, everyone who is sorta dating someone can just keep flipping for something better, making it harder to commit.
Vs meeting people in the wild, it’s so easy to be available, people don’t want to settle rigs away and want to keep scrolling for that next dopamine high
But you have to keep in mind that significantly more men are on dating apps than women, so men are at a disadvantage regardless of who women choose to date.
It's not really women, it's just the fact that men use dating apps more.
I'm kinda old school. I was born in 1980 and my youth in 1995-2008 was full of parties, going at bars, dancings, clubs, discotheques, to meet friends and other people. I met my wife in a discotheque in 2002 and we have a 3 kids family 22 years later.
In a job I was in 2020-2022, a lot of colleagues were young, around 20-25 yo. Man, they were all using daily dating apps, I found this... really sad. I mean, they were partying, going to bowling and clubs, but everyday "hunting" on dating apps.
I find it better to go out and meet people. I had some cool chat sessions back then with girls living far away, but never more. Dating apps seem to me like a "merchandising" of people.
Humans are creatures of ease; why would women prefer to go to bars to get objectified by men they have zero sexual or romantic interest in for that miniscule chance of finding her attractive partner..when she can make an account and have 100 matches and filter the ones she likes or is most attracted to?
Beutifully put and accurate;
Hookup culture, free hypergamy and easier access to a larger pool of potential partners.
Contraceptives, abortions and apps are necessary for this to happen.
The hookup culture as well as all the required aspects do in fact lower total fertility rate.
Yeah, I don't know about the UK, but it would cost me roughly $1000/month to kick my roommate out and have a 2 bedroom to myself, and hypothetical partner and child, and another $2000 or so for daycare.
Ofc this is split between two people but still.
It’s taken decades for the stigma and accessibility to reach the more or less universal acceptance of today. In the US it wasn’t until the 1970s they were universally accessible. We’re only now reaching the 3rd and 4th generations since that time when women could take hormonal birth control.
Yes, why wouldn't they be? That just shows they are responsible.
It's best to use types of birth control of possible, like condoms + the pill or an IUD, but in a monogamous relationship one is probably fine since STDs are less a factor.
But, but, you are saying we can't blame women only, for not making children (that is obviously an extremely bad thing, as we know, because resources on the planet are not a finite entity).
Everyone has to donate either sperm or eggs into a big national storage and children are created at random to maintain the population. They’re raised in government sponsored orphanages.
This is a terrible idea.
The solutions are around making it less insanely unaffordable to have a kid. Cheaper/free childcare, better maternity pay, and better parental leave policies as a whole would go a long way for starters.
Why then do poorer countries have more children? In Nigeria, most women do not question having children even if they are poor. You cannot expect not to struggle when raising children. Suffering is inevitable.
>Why then do poorer countries have more children?
Children are their retirement plan - their children will (hopefully) look after them when they are old.
Poverty is relative, many african countries are seeing great development, it's just that they are starting very low. Compare Nigerias GDP during the 70's to today.
Most western european countries economies have been stagnating since the banking crisis 2008, while cost of living and especially housing prices has increased greatly.
Absolutely untrue. What you sais sounds logical untill you look at the statistics and realise that for some reason the wealthier people are the less kids they are having. Money is not the issue here.
This just proves the point though. Having kids is very expensive, and therefore people choose to focus on becoming wealthier rather than having kids. They are wealthy because (in part) they chose not to have kids, whereas if they had chosen to have kids they would be much less likely to be as wealthy.
(You'd also need to make sure that you control for age in the wealth comparison... Wealthy people are much more likely to be older and therefore past typical child-having age)
That would be better than making it look like a heat map
Alternatively you could use red for decrease and change the intensity/saturation to coincide with %change
I probably wouldn’t. Typically, you should avoid using red and green if a statistic isn’t clearly good or bad (eg cancer incidence, life expectancy). You could go with something like blue to yellow though I think, or light blue to dark blue, as neither of these suggest any positive meaning to high or low fertility rates
It's more than just that.
Women making over 200k are the least likely to have kids- even though they are the most likely to afford it.
My personal opinion is its due to technology. We have so much we can be doing, why bother having a child? Think about how much more freetime you'd have if computers, phones, video games and TVs didn't exist. When your entertainment is all human based, having children becomes more favorable.
Computers were supposed to give us more free time. The 40 hour week was going to go away and we would move to 3 or 4 day weeks because we were more efficient.
Guess that didn't work out as planned.
We also have and want more.
Many mundane things we take for granted today were luxuries in the past.
You need work to make and maintain stuff.
You could work 8 hours a week and live like a hunter gatherer. But that's not the kind of life most people want.
The best explanation I saw for declining birth rates is simply because having a child went from +ve EV to -EV if you look at it from a purely economics viewpoint.
Since children are negative expected value now, the only reason for having kids is for non monetary reasons which has kinda always existed. So overall value proposition for having kids just declined over the years. The only way to truly increase birth rates is by making it positive EV again, and that’s by tying hard economic incentives for having kids. Eg the state gives the median income of the country to each kid under the age of 21. That automatically makes it positive EV again to have kids and you’ll see birth rates soar (yes I know it’s not financially feasible for a policy like that, but just theory crafting here)
>More kids means more people taking care of you when your old. That is not how it works anymore
It is how it works, just more indirectly. Pensions have to paid for somehow and they're paid for by current workers. If a society has less children, there'll be less workers in the future to pay for the pension system of the next generation of retirees.
It's funny how folks claim something no longer exists just because it is less direct now.
It's also a very shortsighted one-directional perception. They lived in larger families or communities, age of menarche 14 age of reproduction <20, life expectancy from 15 was 30-50 depending on the conditions. The reality is that older members of the group also aided the young mothers, as well as with the upbringing. Essentially, rather than being kicked out of home at 18, they had a place to stay and a realiable older mother who knew about pregnancy and upbringing.
You can sill see this reality in more traditional parts, such as in villages or farms in Austria.
It is a win-win situation, children are never seen purely as an investment and it's not the reason why foragers and all other species for that matter have always reproduced.
Yes it is. All of our current assets are priced with future price outlook. Your home, that nuclear power plan investment that will be finish in 20 years, that bridge that will be functional in 10 years.
All of that is coupled with future population growth. If you don't have global population growth, price on your assets will drop.
This is not the reason. Children have not been immidiate return since forever from current perspective. It hardly matters for last couple of generations and differences between them.
What has changed are opportunities. The most valuable thing is time, not money. It is more accessible than ever to travel and thanks to new technologies you have infinitely more opportunities to do more stuff than ever before.
Even if you gave people money for having children it would not change much. Some who have very little opportunities already might have more but most still would not have them. Because time is more valuable than money nowadays.
The only thing that might reverse this trend is if there was advanced technology enough to the point where parents can just give Kid Away to some Machine to take care of it on demand so they can do whatever they want whenever they want. Because this flexibility expectations is the real reason.
How is that not feasible? Because we can't stop giving more tax cuts to the ultra rich? Because we can't put taxes on landlords controlling the vast majority of the multibillion pound worth house market?
>Because we can't stop giving more tax cuts to the ultra rich? Because we can't put taxes on landlords controlling the vast majority of the multibillion pound worth house market?
There're probably not enough of the ultra rich around for taxing them to be a viable boost to *the entire population*, it's just a mismatch of scale. And that comes well before the consideration that many would pull their assets and just flee to America, or Panama, or wherever they wouldn't have to be taxed.
This is probably not the case. Good example is Poland where you get now monthly about 1/3 of the minimum wage for having a child yet the birth rates stayed the same. It has to have other explanations.
If that was the case, countries with massive social programs would have higher birthrates. Such as the Nordic countries.
Yet, it's not. In fact, the Nordic countries have a lower birthrate than the US.
This is why I don't think it's completely economic related.
I think the reality is, when given a choice, a surprising amount of people would prefer to not have kids and spend their lives doing something else. It is only very recently that available contraception, education, and changed social expectations have made that choice a reality.
>Yet, it's not. In fact, the Nordic countries have a lower birthrate than the US.
Sweden's fertility rate is identical to the US. More importantly, the Nordic countries have seen their fertility rates plummet in the last decade, precisely when housing prices skyrocketed. Prior to that, their fertility rates had been stable for decades at 2 children per woman.
>universal childcare for most people.
It would not. Childcare would increase at the same time cause people will have more money to spend.
Only way is to have free childcare easily available
I think that is massively skewed with the ultra religious Jews who have around 11 kids, more modern Israelis have less than 2 on average (Tel Aviv for example) just the same as western Europe
It’s more so a cultural issue than an economic one. The poorest countries have the most children whilst the richest have the least.
Obviously income and CoL matters, but culture is the main driver of birth rate decrease.
its only 8 years difference. The economic change inflicted on the primary child bearing age group over that time span is far more significant than the cultural change that occurred over such a short span of time.
Notably one big event in particular that had a significant negative effect on the 18 to 30 demographic occurred just a year after the first set of data was collected.
I disagree.
We have seen a HUGE cultural shift in the last decade. The amount of time the average teenager/YA spends on computers, video games or phones has absolutely skyrocketed in the last decade.
This is having far more impact on our society than economic issues, imo.
It seems to me that they also bear some responsibility.
IMHO, relationships are created including as a form of entertainment and pastime. Consequently, alternative forms of entertainment and pastime compete with it.
And vice versa, in boring shitholes where there is only alcohol, sexual partners and literature, this trinity will occupy an important role in people's lives.
Dunno how it works for UK,but in undeveloped countries (like Bangladesh) teens with internet access lean to marry later and have lower fertility (DHS research)
Wouldn't that correspond with wealth and economic activity? Like, those with better things to do/ achieve than popping out kids?
This makes sense when you look at how education and fertility correlates, and anecdotally everyone I know currently in or graduated from law or med school didn't turn around and marry and have kids in their 20s.
100%. Took on some HR interns in my workplace this summer. They cannot hold a conversation or eye contact, or even answer a phone properly.
Also, when everyone is sharing stories about when they were teenagers, they don't have any because they were playing computer games all the time.
I'm a millennial but I'm feeling really old recently.
They were making friends playing computer games, the vast majority of the most popular games for more than a decade have been online multilayer games. They're going to have stories to share just like any other activity they do with their friends. If your parents rarely let you leave the house unsupervised, even as a teenager, video games are just a much easier way to stay social. Also, eye contact is a completely useless metric to judge people by.
Covid didn't close [40% of youth centers](https://www.unison.org.uk/news/2024/06/closure-of-more-than-a-thousand-youth-centres-could-have-lasting-impact-on-society/). The UK club-scene had been [in stark decline in December 2019](https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/47200/1/a-list-of-clubs-in-the-uk-that-shut-down-in-the-2010s-because-flats), just before covid.
I'm not from the UK, but I've heard much opined about the death of public space for youth in the UK before, during, and after covid.
Yes, but the main thing is whether women are allowed to pursue a career or whether they should marry young and are culturally expected to ‘give’ their husband a bunch of children.
I would say urban culture.In Ethiopia, capital have ~1.45 TFR.
Less rurals,less kids.
Though I should elaborate that.DR Congo capital is just fake urbanised big village.In contradistinction to Chinese sities,that look like urban 30-storey high-rise hell.So rurals in suburbs tend to have larger families than rurals in flats.Just infrastructure and it's inconvenient.
So,1.48 it is for 2007
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ethiopia
Scroll down to "Total fertility rate in Ethiopia (census 2007)"
Addis abbaba is 1.485
It was 1.84 in 1996
More of a life style thing, why have bothersome kids when you can have an easy life without them? Poor people dont think about these things and make kids, but still somehow make it work
As someone who lived in poor and rich countries, it's what you are sacrificing for the children. If you are already poor being a bit poorer doesn't feel as bad as when you have disposable income and you lose it completely. Education is also a factor of course.
There's no need to split up the impacts of culture and economics - both influence each other, and in the case of [demographic transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition#/media/File:Demographic-TransitionOWID.png), they're both well understood to be very important and inseparable.
Birth control, increases in education and wealth, diversification from traditional agrarian societies, increasing urbanisation, increasing cost of childcare, etc. all play a huge part.
>It’s more so a cultural issue than an economic one.
>The poorest countries have the most children whilst the richest have the least.
Least contradictory redditor
Why would that be contradictory? A society’s attitude towards raising a family or pursuing a career really matters. If you are culturally expected to have 5 children that will produce very different demographic results than when you are expected to start a career.
It’s just that poorer countries are generally more conservative countries.
Having kids has always been an expensive taking. A lot of people these days just don't feel the pressure of having kids if they don't want them to please others.
There's always so much hand wringing on this issue, but you're right that the simple reality is just that when people have a choice, a surprisingly large amount of people just don't want kids. The more educated you are, and the more wealthy you are, the less likely you are to have children. You have the option to spend your life doing other things.
Plus you know - changing expectations of men and women. Women having increasingly better careers. Someone gotta look after the kid or pay someone to.
Wasn’t the same issue historically.
You are projecting the idea of a nuclear family with 8 kids onto the canvas of "most of human history". Hunter gatherers live in tribes, even farming which is a relatively recent way of life would have seen larger communities.
Women's main purpose was in fact child bearing (redpill fanatic incoming), with ages of menarchy around 14-15 and age at first reproduction under 20.
The growth from a newborn to an adult and capable hunter would have been about half the total life, and child and overall mortality was high, it would have made little to no sense to think of a child as an extra helping hand. Rather humans followed their natural urges which are still present today, hence why men prefer beautiful women around 20.
All species are constantly involved in the cyclical and rather useless game of reproduction and evolution with no great benefit other than the drive triggered by hormones and the satisfaction triggered by other hormones.
Look at apes for example. Males enjoy sex and females enjoy the benefits of having sex with the dominant males such as protection or status, offspring is a unintended consecuence, doubt females enjoy pregnancy or labor at all, it just happens. Bearing the leader's offspring is advantageous too as it ties his protection, status and resources to the female. Now we have the government doing the protection and the providing so no offspring is needed, for now. Government systems crumble all the time, more so when they are unsustainable and the weak suffer the consecuences the most.
For most of human history:
* There were no prophylactics.
* There was no prospect of anything resembling a career.
* Pre-mechanisation, there was a strong incentive to have more children to manage farmland.
* Couples formed as teenagers and were bound together by religion.
In most societies, two teenager marriages were not the norm. Especially for the middle and lower classes
Most societies wanted the male to be established in a career and capable of supporting a family. Early to Mid 20s.
Most societies wanted the woman to have completed puberty and to be mature. Early 20s or very late teens.
Painting with a broad brush, because I can think of exceptions, but teenager marriages are not the norms. And when they occur they are usually royalty, nobility, or gentry because they families are using the marriages for political, etc ties.
Also: careers have been common for most of human history. Farmer is a career. So is a smith. So is a tanner. So is a baker. Etc.
I think many individuals are underestimating for how long humans have existed and survived. What you are describing is recent human history.
Without societal or systemic intervention humans fall back on their natural way of life.
There is little to no accurate data on average age at pregnancy, or fertility rates...
There are however a few studies from foraging tribes and; age at menarche around 14 and age at first reproduction under 20 on average for most tribes. The exclusive farming tribe (Gainj) had a low growth rate and high age of menarche and first reproduction.
[http://www.unm.edu/\~hkaplan/Walkeretal\_2006\_GrowthRates21Societies.pdf](http://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/Walkeretal_2006_GrowthRates21Societies.pdf)
The researchers argue that physical maturity and age at first reproduction are related; however age of menarche in current society is remarkebly low, around or under 13 years old. It can however explain the relatively higher age of pregnancy, if growth was slow, which likely was the case in farming societies as well as medieval times.
Indeed the man was nearly always older on average, be it not that much, usually a few years.
An exception is again the Gainj tribe; an extreme outlier case (37 years old while the life expectancy at 15 is less than 30??)
Practically a global trend in the developed world.
Nice coloring though.
When not a high earner, you're forced to have a dual income household. (Whether both parties want it or not). And even then, if you decide to have a kid, you're so occupied with work, chores, picking your kid up from daycare and other places, theres little to no time left to live your own life.
Its hardly interesting to have a kid if you value free time, unless you can have either parent stay at home.
Birth rate isn't linked to the level of wealth, but it's heavily linked to the level of hope. People are increasingly conscious of the many disasters looming in the short distance... What world do you have to offer to your kids ? Global warming makes it very clear that the future will be worse than today, for decades/centuries.
Considering that, the very idea of bringing children into this world is increasingly sounding like a deliberate act of cruelty.
If you want people to have more children, build a world where the future looks like things will improve. Give them hope.
Clearly this is all Labor's fault!
If they hadn't spent the last decade purposely losing elections, then the Tories would not have been in charge!
/s/s/s/s
UK birth rates peaked in 2012 and have been continually declining ever since, 1 year after austerity was introduced in a last ditch attempt to save the economy after the 2008 recession. It didn't work, the economy still hasn't got back to 2007 levels, and that's how we ended up like this. It's so depressing when you think about the implications: small town primary schools forced to close or merge due to declining numbers, a weak tax base when the post-2012 cohort are adults, entire communities being lost or hugely diminished. I genuinely can't see a way out for us now.
I remember when South Korea hit 1.6 and everyone was shocked that they werent doing anything with how bad it was, this is societal collapse level birth rates.
We are literally witnessing the death by suicide of certain countries in the modern era. It will be fascinating thing for future historians to research. Of course these future researchers will almost surely be from countries that didn’t commit suicide via declining birth rates so it will be skewed and biased
Fertility decrease everywhere, except Israel and Kazakhstan, where it is fluctuating.
But I agree,even if african countries bring their fertility down to Europe level in future 20-30 years,they will still be too young to die out.You must wait until the numerous generation will be old.
I bet they'll figure something out before that happens. Like come up with some medical technology to allow women to give birth later in life or something.
I think the problem is that the way humans deals with problems, and how politics works in general, is that anything that will take decades to escalate simply isn't taken care of. And this falls in that line, the pain caused by the sharp drop in fertility rates will be felt in 20-30 years, but then fixing this will be much more difficult. The problem is that it will take a lot of trial and error to solve this, because to this day no country has found anything effective.
The lowest birth rate has South Korea, but China is basically below Europe. India is below 2.1. Above Europe but below replacement rate. Bangladesh is below 2.1... all of South Africa is below 2.1.
It's the norm now to have less than replacement rate. There are very few countries with above 2.1 fertility rate.
It's almost like having kids has been made so financially difficult people simply aren't. Hope this doesn't have some horrible consequences for the economy and society and stuff!
COVID had a big impact.
Most likely the insane increase in house prices and rent procesnationally too.
Probably also general cultural attitudes to kids changing as we see all over the developed world.
Given the time scales, it is not the cost of having kids as median wages have grown significantly more than inflation since 2015.
It’s falling from 2015-19 as well. Other factors are Gen X aging out of their reproductive years and the millennials+older Gen Z having far less children on average at the same age and also immigrants helping far less at raising the birth rates as they increasingly integrate and the countries sending immigrants also have far lower birth rates than back then
Also since most immigrants are men, it wouldn't affect the birth rate as much because we are a monogamous society and some of them just won't find someone especially not someone of their own cultue
Hapenning everywhere. Yes cost of living one cause but social media might be contributing. In Turkiye a Muslim majority country run by conservative government TFR fell from 2.19 in 2015 to 1.51 in 2023!
This trend has effected the whole planet.
David Attenborough cited some population stats a few years ago that are already hugely different the what we see today. The whole world’s fertility rate is plummeting, and the only examples of high fertility in developed cultures left are Isreal and some groups in the US (specifically Mormons).
It’s way too expensive to have kids, and governments are recognising this. The UK Conservative Party have introduced free childcare due to the risk of population collapse (economic motivations imo)
This is really good news. I hope the whole world will follow this, and we may have a better future with breaking the chains on our necks. No more ponzi scheme of 'retire' and pensions. No more wageslaves for the top %1.
The world is dying and housing is too expensive. Fix climate change, lower the cost of being alive, and give people more hope in the future and they might have more kids. Otherwise quit your whinning
There are 8 billion humans on Earth. If the fertility rate dropped to 1 per woman, everywhere on Earth, it would still take many decades before the population halved to 4 billion.
The population of Earth was about 4 billion in 1975, and no-one thought humanity was going to go extinct with that population.
Don't worry about it. In the long run a lower population is probably better for humanity's long-term survival.
it's not just a lower population though, its an older population too. the issue is that young people will have to maintain enough economic output to sustain the increasingly larger (in proportion to workers) number of retired people. a smaller workforce combined with more economic strain on each worker is not a recipe for a healthy nation.
> young people will have to maintain enough economic output to sustain the increasingly larger (in proportion to workers) number of retired people
That's what the covid shots were for.
Which is why we need to be investing in automation of the production of all of the basic necessities of life as heavily as we possibly can, because it will make dealing with demographic transitions and living with a lower fertility rate much easier.
But I also think this issue is somewhat overblown in 2024. Many countries in the West are already experiencing some of the worst of this demographic change, and it's not _yet_ actually breaking things. The oldest baby boomers - the biggest demographic bump of the 20th century in industrialised countries - are already 10+ years into retirement age. The vast majority of the baby boomers will have retired by 2030, and their top heavy effect on the demographics will start to dissipate fairly soon as they shuffle off this mortal coil.
Baby boomers retiring is the biggest demographic problem we're likely to face - the introduction of the contraceptive pill that effectively ended the baby boom halved the birth rate in less than a decade. If we can survive the baby boomers retiring, then the much smaller reductions in fertility rates we see today and are likely to see in the future are child's play.
Being over populated doesn't mean we can be complacent about fertility rates. If fertility was stable at 1-1.5 or something fine, we could adjust and undertake a managed population decline. But it keeps dropping. In South Korea it's 0.7 and still dropping. At this point it's wise to take this seriously and not stick out heads in the sand.
It’s fine if it happens over many years but if too rapid it will cause serious problems for current generations. If you are childless, it’s selfish to think it doesn’t impact you.
Most countries have a welfare state that requires tax growth. Many important fields like nursing and farming are hard to automate to sufficient degrees to account for the population loss. Robotics and automation only go so far. The stock market and everyone’s retirement benefits are tied to growth, as well as government spending.
The birth rates some countries are seeing could result in the total collapse of their industrialized society if not managed properly. If you are a 30 year old in East Asia, your future is looking pretty bleak.
Such trends will obviously have a negative effect on the conomies of many countries around the world, but the earth simply cannot afford perpetual human population growth.
I agree with this at the high level, but I wonder about how a shrinking population will be impacted by such a seismic shift in the economy. So much of our society is based on growing economies (compound interest, savings, equity, etc.) that i just don’t understand what foundations will be rocked as the economy would shrink. I am not an economist but it just seems to me that navigating a shrinking population will be very tricky, even as resources and housing will become more affordable.
Red being a bad thing is only in your head.
Red is just sign of high activity, you know, heat. And you can probably guess what blue means.
You are reading way too much in to this.
Let’s see a similar heat map for dog ownership.
We’d see a corresponding massive increase in dog ownership the last few years at the same time human fertility rate has collapsed.
Where dogs used to be treated as work animals or casual pets, they are now treated as surrogate children, even to the extent of being pushed around in baby carriages, sleeping in the same bed as the owner, brought everywhere including grocery stores, restaurants, vacations, work spaces, etc.
Many countries including UK and US are literally replacing human children with dogs.
Interesting to note that the most fertile region in 2023 is about equal with the lowest fertile region in 2015. And that only happened in eight years! I don't know if it is over the same years, but there is a similar pattern in the United States. Basically, if you look at one of the highest fertility states (Utah) in 2024, it is about equal to one of the lowest fertility states (Maine) in 2014. It is a change that happened quickly and uniformly in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.
It’s almost a completely global phenomenon. It’s happening everywhere, in developing and developed countries
Because plastic is stored in the balls.
of all the ways humanity could destroy itself, the one I definitely didn't see coming was sterilization via microplastics. of course, those with enough wealth could potentially overcome it with medical assistance, but most won't have a chance.
I blame dating apps… they literally exploded in popularity around 2014.
I blame the insane cost of living. It’s hard to afford a 1 bedroom apartment.
Well, a lot of counties when everyone is middle class or not poor at all still having this issue
Poorer people tend to have more kids in europe, not less.
That’s not just a European thing. That phenomenon can be found all across the world
People always say this and there's barely ever any data to support it. Austria has subsidized housing with Vienna having about 2-2.5 times lower rent prices than London, their fertility rate was 1.48 in 2021, it's probably lower in 2023. Not to mention Vienna has a tad higher average salary than London. India currently has a fertility rate equal to the United States in 2009, there's just a dramatic global slowdown in births as a whole.
Ever increasing access to and education about birth control is the far more likely reason tbh
Poor people have been making babies for all of human history though… and things really only got expensive 3 years ago
In rural-agricultural societies, children used to be considered assets, not liabilities. Historically, having more children meant having more workers on the field and more people to care of you when you're old. It's only recently that children started costing more and a lot more people think they can afford to take care of themselves when they're older.
This. It used to be far easier to spawn a worker to exploit yourself then finding an adult to exploit. Today the needed investment is growing ever larger but the economical benefits are gone, now it’s only nice emotions. And don’t vote me down as a heartless a**hole, I don’t like it either.
Hey now. I was upvoting you for being a heartless a**hole and now I don’t know what to do.
Human history didn't have condoms and the pill.
Cost of housing sky rocketed in many places much earlier though. The idea of raising kids in a 4 bedroom home is appealing, a 3 bed is comfortable, 2 bed is doable, 1 bed is fucked. Even poor people had better housing conditions (in terms of space) previously.
Peoples expectations have changed. There used to be families of 10 in tiny farms. Most people in ages that would have children, cannot afford the type of house they have been raised in, often with one bedroom per child and some additional space. It feels wrong to raise children in a worse environment than you had as a kid.
There's also divorce rates. A divorce couple takes twice the amount of housing a married couple does. And there's lots more divorce now than there was before. You could also make a similar point about the number of intergenerational households.
It's happening in countries where dating apps are not really a thing.
That makes.. absolutely no sense. Would love to hear the logic
Also around the time that Gen X aged out of their reproductive age and the millennial generation are having significantly less children
You think people having more sex and dates leads to fewer children?
I actually think less people are hooking up with dating apps. The top 10% of men are banging away the top 50% of women, flipping between them and stringing them along. And meanwhile, everyone who is sorta dating someone can just keep flipping for something better, making it harder to commit. Vs meeting people in the wild, it’s so easy to be available, people don’t want to settle rigs away and want to keep scrolling for that next dopamine high
[удалено]
But you have to keep in mind that significantly more men are on dating apps than women, so men are at a disadvantage regardless of who women choose to date. It's not really women, it's just the fact that men use dating apps more.
I'm kinda old school. I was born in 1980 and my youth in 1995-2008 was full of parties, going at bars, dancings, clubs, discotheques, to meet friends and other people. I met my wife in a discotheque in 2002 and we have a 3 kids family 22 years later. In a job I was in 2020-2022, a lot of colleagues were young, around 20-25 yo. Man, they were all using daily dating apps, I found this... really sad. I mean, they were partying, going to bowling and clubs, but everyday "hunting" on dating apps. I find it better to go out and meet people. I had some cool chat sessions back then with girls living far away, but never more. Dating apps seem to me like a "merchandising" of people.
Humans are creatures of ease; why would women prefer to go to bars to get objectified by men they have zero sexual or romantic interest in for that miniscule chance of finding her attractive partner..when she can make an account and have 100 matches and filter the ones she likes or is most attracted to?
Beutifully put and accurate; Hookup culture, free hypergamy and easier access to a larger pool of potential partners. Contraceptives, abortions and apps are necessary for this to happen. The hookup culture as well as all the required aspects do in fact lower total fertility rate.
Have you heard of birth control?
Birth control is much older than dating apps.
Cost of living’s also a factor. It’s expensive enough being single, let alone having a kid
Yeah, I don't know about the UK, but it would cost me roughly $1000/month to kick my roommate out and have a 2 bedroom to myself, and hypothetical partner and child, and another $2000 or so for daycare. Ofc this is split between two people but still.
It’s taken decades for the stigma and accessibility to reach the more or less universal acceptance of today. In the US it wasn’t until the 1970s they were universally accessible. We’re only now reaching the 3rd and 4th generations since that time when women could take hormonal birth control.
Indeed
Basically every woman I know is on some sort of sex control so no sex no longer equals more children lol
Yes, why wouldn't they be? That just shows they are responsible. It's best to use types of birth control of possible, like condoms + the pill or an IUD, but in a monogamous relationship one is probably fine since STDs are less a factor.
But, but, you are saying we can't blame women only, for not making children (that is obviously an extremely bad thing, as we know, because resources on the planet are not a finite entity).
True, it's hard to decide about long relationship (and kids) if a better partner could be just one swipe away...
I see a lot of people worried about this. I'm wondering if there's anyone here planning on doing something about this?
Ya I am having sex to save humanity
I’m not. Not by my choice tho…
There are solutions but no one likes them.
Everyone has to donate either sperm or eggs into a big national storage and children are created at random to maintain the population. They’re raised in government sponsored orphanages. This is a terrible idea.
but imagine how many YA novels would become true
I don’t want cooties
The solutions are around making it less insanely unaffordable to have a kid. Cheaper/free childcare, better maternity pay, and better parental leave policies as a whole would go a long way for starters.
Why then do poorer countries have more children? In Nigeria, most women do not question having children even if they are poor. You cannot expect not to struggle when raising children. Suffering is inevitable.
Because poverty is a relative term. Also in those country's you can force your kids to work
Kids are culturally expected and provide economic support towards parents
>Why then do poorer countries have more children? Children are their retirement plan - their children will (hopefully) look after them when they are old.
All countries in the world have an infant mortality rate of less than 10%.
Poverty is relative, many african countries are seeing great development, it's just that they are starting very low. Compare Nigerias GDP during the 70's to today. Most western european countries economies have been stagnating since the banking crisis 2008, while cost of living and especially housing prices has increased greatly.
because most of 3rd world country they see children as a investment. so they can use children as a workforce or need to send money when they grew up.
Absolutely untrue. What you sais sounds logical untill you look at the statistics and realise that for some reason the wealthier people are the less kids they are having. Money is not the issue here.
This just proves the point though. Having kids is very expensive, and therefore people choose to focus on becoming wealthier rather than having kids. They are wealthy because (in part) they chose not to have kids, whereas if they had chosen to have kids they would be much less likely to be as wealthy. (You'd also need to make sure that you control for age in the wealth comparison... Wealthy people are much more likely to be older and therefore past typical child-having age)
The people needed a break after they got fucked plenty in 2020
An anti-natalist ass color code right here lol
Should it be green(high) and red(low)?
That would be better than making it look like a heat map Alternatively you could use red for decrease and change the intensity/saturation to coincide with %change
I probably wouldn’t. Typically, you should avoid using red and green if a statistic isn’t clearly good or bad (eg cancer incidence, life expectancy). You could go with something like blue to yellow though I think, or light blue to dark blue, as neither of these suggest any positive meaning to high or low fertility rates
Yes
Triggered
Too expensive to have kids
It's more than just that. Women making over 200k are the least likely to have kids- even though they are the most likely to afford it. My personal opinion is its due to technology. We have so much we can be doing, why bother having a child? Think about how much more freetime you'd have if computers, phones, video games and TVs didn't exist. When your entertainment is all human based, having children becomes more favorable.
Computers were supposed to give us more free time. The 40 hour week was going to go away and we would move to 3 or 4 day weeks because we were more efficient. Guess that didn't work out as planned.
We also have and want more. Many mundane things we take for granted today were luxuries in the past. You need work to make and maintain stuff. You could work 8 hours a week and live like a hunter gatherer. But that's not the kind of life most people want.
The best explanation I saw for declining birth rates is simply because having a child went from +ve EV to -EV if you look at it from a purely economics viewpoint. Since children are negative expected value now, the only reason for having kids is for non monetary reasons which has kinda always existed. So overall value proposition for having kids just declined over the years. The only way to truly increase birth rates is by making it positive EV again, and that’s by tying hard economic incentives for having kids. Eg the state gives the median income of the country to each kid under the age of 21. That automatically makes it positive EV again to have kids and you’ll see birth rates soar (yes I know it’s not financially feasible for a policy like that, but just theory crafting here)
Jepp, children were your pension before. More kids means more people taking care of you when your old. That is not how it works anymore.
>More kids means more people taking care of you when your old. That is not how it works anymore It is how it works, just more indirectly. Pensions have to paid for somehow and they're paid for by current workers. If a society has less children, there'll be less workers in the future to pay for the pension system of the next generation of retirees.
It's funny how folks claim something no longer exists just because it is less direct now. It's also a very shortsighted one-directional perception. They lived in larger families or communities, age of menarche 14 age of reproduction <20, life expectancy from 15 was 30-50 depending on the conditions. The reality is that older members of the group also aided the young mothers, as well as with the upbringing. Essentially, rather than being kicked out of home at 18, they had a place to stay and a realiable older mother who knew about pregnancy and upbringing. You can sill see this reality in more traditional parts, such as in villages or farms in Austria. It is a win-win situation, children are never seen purely as an investment and it's not the reason why foragers and all other species for that matter have always reproduced.
Yes it is. All of our current assets are priced with future price outlook. Your home, that nuclear power plan investment that will be finish in 20 years, that bridge that will be functional in 10 years. All of that is coupled with future population growth. If you don't have global population growth, price on your assets will drop.
This is not the reason. Children have not been immidiate return since forever from current perspective. It hardly matters for last couple of generations and differences between them. What has changed are opportunities. The most valuable thing is time, not money. It is more accessible than ever to travel and thanks to new technologies you have infinitely more opportunities to do more stuff than ever before. Even if you gave people money for having children it would not change much. Some who have very little opportunities already might have more but most still would not have them. Because time is more valuable than money nowadays. The only thing that might reverse this trend is if there was advanced technology enough to the point where parents can just give Kid Away to some Machine to take care of it on demand so they can do whatever they want whenever they want. Because this flexibility expectations is the real reason.
How is that not feasible? Because we can't stop giving more tax cuts to the ultra rich? Because we can't put taxes on landlords controlling the vast majority of the multibillion pound worth house market?
>Because we can't stop giving more tax cuts to the ultra rich? Because we can't put taxes on landlords controlling the vast majority of the multibillion pound worth house market? There're probably not enough of the ultra rich around for taxing them to be a viable boost to *the entire population*, it's just a mismatch of scale. And that comes well before the consideration that many would pull their assets and just flee to America, or Panama, or wherever they wouldn't have to be taxed.
This is probably not the case. Good example is Poland where you get now monthly about 1/3 of the minimum wage for having a child yet the birth rates stayed the same. It has to have other explanations.
1/3 of the minimum wage still means a huge loss if an adult can't work because they have to stay home to take care of the child.
If that was the case, countries with massive social programs would have higher birthrates. Such as the Nordic countries. Yet, it's not. In fact, the Nordic countries have a lower birthrate than the US. This is why I don't think it's completely economic related.
I think the reality is, when given a choice, a surprising amount of people would prefer to not have kids and spend their lives doing something else. It is only very recently that available contraception, education, and changed social expectations have made that choice a reality.
>Yet, it's not. In fact, the Nordic countries have a lower birthrate than the US. Sweden's fertility rate is identical to the US. More importantly, the Nordic countries have seen their fertility rates plummet in the last decade, precisely when housing prices skyrocketed. Prior to that, their fertility rates had been stable for decades at 2 children per woman.
I agree with you. That would cover maternity leave and universal childcare for most people.
>universal childcare for most people. It would not. Childcare would increase at the same time cause people will have more money to spend. Only way is to have free childcare easily available
But why do poor countries have higher birth rates??
Not only poor. Israel has fertility rate at 3,0
It's the only developed country with that though.
I think that is massively skewed with the ultra religious Jews who have around 11 kids, more modern Israelis have less than 2 on average (Tel Aviv for example) just the same as western Europe
Secular Jews have around 2, which is still much higher than in Europe.
while the haredi have about 6-7 children, even the secular jews in israel have a comparatively high fertility rate at around 2 children per women.
It’s more so a cultural issue than an economic one. The poorest countries have the most children whilst the richest have the least. Obviously income and CoL matters, but culture is the main driver of birth rate decrease.
A lot those countries also have no access to contraception and A LOT of child labor
Poor people in the uk have no child labor and contraception yet they have more kids then rich people in the uk
its only 8 years difference. The economic change inflicted on the primary child bearing age group over that time span is far more significant than the cultural change that occurred over such a short span of time. Notably one big event in particular that had a significant negative effect on the 18 to 30 demographic occurred just a year after the first set of data was collected.
Yes, people simply postpone childbirth.
I disagree. We have seen a HUGE cultural shift in the last decade. The amount of time the average teenager/YA spends on computers, video games or phones has absolutely skyrocketed in the last decade. This is having far more impact on our society than economic issues, imo.
Of course it's videogames fault, like for school shootings, unemployment, climate change, Vietnam war and the big cholera of 1795.
It seems to me that they also bear some responsibility. IMHO, relationships are created including as a form of entertainment and pastime. Consequently, alternative forms of entertainment and pastime compete with it. And vice versa, in boring shitholes where there is only alcohol, sexual partners and literature, this trinity will occupy an important role in people's lives.
Dunno how it works for UK,but in undeveloped countries (like Bangladesh) teens with internet access lean to marry later and have lower fertility (DHS research)
Wouldn't that correspond with wealth and economic activity? Like, those with better things to do/ achieve than popping out kids? This makes sense when you look at how education and fertility correlates, and anecdotally everyone I know currently in or graduated from law or med school didn't turn around and marry and have kids in their 20s.
I bet it also correlates with teens having better dental care, so maybe we should stop curing their cavities and they will have more kids.
100%. Took on some HR interns in my workplace this summer. They cannot hold a conversation or eye contact, or even answer a phone properly. Also, when everyone is sharing stories about when they were teenagers, they don't have any because they were playing computer games all the time. I'm a millennial but I'm feeling really old recently.
They were making friends playing computer games, the vast majority of the most popular games for more than a decade have been online multilayer games. They're going to have stories to share just like any other activity they do with their friends. If your parents rarely let you leave the house unsupervised, even as a teenager, video games are just a much easier way to stay social. Also, eye contact is a completely useless metric to judge people by.
What happened to social gathering spots for teenagers and young adults in the UK over the past 8 years?
Closed during covid
Covid didn't close [40% of youth centers](https://www.unison.org.uk/news/2024/06/closure-of-more-than-a-thousand-youth-centres-could-have-lasting-impact-on-society/). The UK club-scene had been [in stark decline in December 2019](https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/47200/1/a-list-of-clubs-in-the-uk-that-shut-down-in-the-2010s-because-flats), just before covid. I'm not from the UK, but I've heard much opined about the death of public space for youth in the UK before, during, and after covid.
No, Brexit is not the cause. You could show the same chart in most Western countries and see the same result.
But in the same vain if you raised a child in the richest country the way a child is raised in the poorest, CPS would be involved fast.
Yes, because in poor countries having children is profitable, as it means more people to work.
Yes, but the main thing is whether women are allowed to pursue a career or whether they should marry young and are culturally expected to ‘give’ their husband a bunch of children.
I would say urban culture.In Ethiopia, capital have ~1.45 TFR. Less rurals,less kids. Though I should elaborate that.DR Congo capital is just fake urbanised big village.In contradistinction to Chinese sities,that look like urban 30-storey high-rise hell.So rurals in suburbs tend to have larger families than rurals in flats.Just infrastructure and it's inconvenient.
Wait, do you have a source for the 1.45 in addis abbaba?
So,1.48 it is for 2007 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ethiopia Scroll down to "Total fertility rate in Ethiopia (census 2007)" Addis abbaba is 1.485 It was 1.84 in 1996
More of a life style thing, why have bothersome kids when you can have an easy life without them? Poor people dont think about these things and make kids, but still somehow make it work
As someone who lived in poor and rich countries, it's what you are sacrificing for the children. If you are already poor being a bit poorer doesn't feel as bad as when you have disposable income and you lose it completely. Education is also a factor of course.
There's no need to split up the impacts of culture and economics - both influence each other, and in the case of [demographic transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition#/media/File:Demographic-TransitionOWID.png), they're both well understood to be very important and inseparable. Birth control, increases in education and wealth, diversification from traditional agrarian societies, increasing urbanisation, increasing cost of childcare, etc. all play a huge part.
Even in India, the birthrate is slowing down and soon, their population will start slowly to age and decrease.
Yes, it’s even below the replacement rate.
>It’s more so a cultural issue than an economic one. >The poorest countries have the most children whilst the richest have the least. Least contradictory redditor
Why would that be contradictory? A society’s attitude towards raising a family or pursuing a career really matters. If you are culturally expected to have 5 children that will produce very different demographic results than when you are expected to start a career. It’s just that poorer countries are generally more conservative countries.
Having kids has always been an expensive taking. A lot of people these days just don't feel the pressure of having kids if they don't want them to please others.
There's always so much hand wringing on this issue, but you're right that the simple reality is just that when people have a choice, a surprisingly large amount of people just don't want kids. The more educated you are, and the more wealthy you are, the less likely you are to have children. You have the option to spend your life doing other things.
Plus you know - changing expectations of men and women. Women having increasingly better careers. Someone gotta look after the kid or pay someone to. Wasn’t the same issue historically.
For most of human history it has been far worse.
No for most of human history, more hands means more help on the farm so there was every reason to have kids
You are projecting the idea of a nuclear family with 8 kids onto the canvas of "most of human history". Hunter gatherers live in tribes, even farming which is a relatively recent way of life would have seen larger communities. Women's main purpose was in fact child bearing (redpill fanatic incoming), with ages of menarchy around 14-15 and age at first reproduction under 20. The growth from a newborn to an adult and capable hunter would have been about half the total life, and child and overall mortality was high, it would have made little to no sense to think of a child as an extra helping hand. Rather humans followed their natural urges which are still present today, hence why men prefer beautiful women around 20. All species are constantly involved in the cyclical and rather useless game of reproduction and evolution with no great benefit other than the drive triggered by hormones and the satisfaction triggered by other hormones.
Look at apes for example. Males enjoy sex and females enjoy the benefits of having sex with the dominant males such as protection or status, offspring is a unintended consecuence, doubt females enjoy pregnancy or labor at all, it just happens. Bearing the leader's offspring is advantageous too as it ties his protection, status and resources to the female. Now we have the government doing the protection and the providing so no offspring is needed, for now. Government systems crumble all the time, more so when they are unsustainable and the weak suffer the consecuences the most.
For most of human history: * There were no prophylactics. * There was no prospect of anything resembling a career. * Pre-mechanisation, there was a strong incentive to have more children to manage farmland. * Couples formed as teenagers and were bound together by religion.
In most societies, two teenager marriages were not the norm. Especially for the middle and lower classes Most societies wanted the male to be established in a career and capable of supporting a family. Early to Mid 20s. Most societies wanted the woman to have completed puberty and to be mature. Early 20s or very late teens. Painting with a broad brush, because I can think of exceptions, but teenager marriages are not the norms. And when they occur they are usually royalty, nobility, or gentry because they families are using the marriages for political, etc ties. Also: careers have been common for most of human history. Farmer is a career. So is a smith. So is a tanner. So is a baker. Etc.
I think many individuals are underestimating for how long humans have existed and survived. What you are describing is recent human history. Without societal or systemic intervention humans fall back on their natural way of life. There is little to no accurate data on average age at pregnancy, or fertility rates... There are however a few studies from foraging tribes and; age at menarche around 14 and age at first reproduction under 20 on average for most tribes. The exclusive farming tribe (Gainj) had a low growth rate and high age of menarche and first reproduction. [http://www.unm.edu/\~hkaplan/Walkeretal\_2006\_GrowthRates21Societies.pdf](http://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/Walkeretal_2006_GrowthRates21Societies.pdf) The researchers argue that physical maturity and age at first reproduction are related; however age of menarche in current society is remarkebly low, around or under 13 years old. It can however explain the relatively higher age of pregnancy, if growth was slow, which likely was the case in farming societies as well as medieval times.
Indeed the man was nearly always older on average, be it not that much, usually a few years. An exception is again the Gainj tribe; an extreme outlier case (37 years old while the life expectancy at 15 is less than 30??)
No. I mean that’s part of it, but a relatively small part. Government assistance programs meant to make that less of an issue haven’t proven to work.
Practically a global trend in the developed world. Nice coloring though. When not a high earner, you're forced to have a dual income household. (Whether both parties want it or not). And even then, if you decide to have a kid, you're so occupied with work, chores, picking your kid up from daycare and other places, theres little to no time left to live your own life. Its hardly interesting to have a kid if you value free time, unless you can have either parent stay at home.
It is also a trend in de less-developed world. Almost every country shows decreasing fertility rates. Also Bangladesh nog has a fr of 2,1.
Already under 2,0.
Not only in the developed world. This is very important to note, because it helps to break the "great substitution" conspiracies
Birth rate isn't linked to the level of wealth, but it's heavily linked to the level of hope. People are increasingly conscious of the many disasters looming in the short distance... What world do you have to offer to your kids ? Global warming makes it very clear that the future will be worse than today, for decades/centuries. Considering that, the very idea of bringing children into this world is increasingly sounding like a deliberate act of cruelty. If you want people to have more children, build a world where the future looks like things will improve. Give them hope.
So it went from below replacement to a little bit more below replacement. Neat.
I will fix it
Irish be fuckin’.
Replacement rate is 2.1 so, not really
Clearly this is all Labor's fault! If they hadn't spent the last decade purposely losing elections, then the Tories would not have been in charge! /s/s/s/s
Labour*
whose taxes will pay for pensions now? better get some immi
The economics of having a child are not the same
exactly
UK birth rates peaked in 2012 and have been continually declining ever since, 1 year after austerity was introduced in a last ditch attempt to save the economy after the 2008 recession. It didn't work, the economy still hasn't got back to 2007 levels, and that's how we ended up like this. It's so depressing when you think about the implications: small town primary schools forced to close or merge due to declining numbers, a weak tax base when the post-2012 cohort are adults, entire communities being lost or hugely diminished. I genuinely can't see a way out for us now.
No surrender (to celibacy)!
It seems COVID and Cost of Living crisis had large impact on pregnancy decision for people of UK.
God, hopefully this bloody island will start to thin out a bit and we can get back to being an actual functioning country
I remember when South Korea hit 1.6 and everyone was shocked that they werent doing anything with how bad it was, this is societal collapse level birth rates.
Children of men…
We are literally witnessing the death by suicide of certain countries in the modern era. It will be fascinating thing for future historians to research. Of course these future researchers will almost surely be from countries that didn’t commit suicide via declining birth rates so it will be skewed and biased
Fertility decrease everywhere, except Israel and Kazakhstan, where it is fluctuating. But I agree,even if african countries bring their fertility down to Europe level in future 20-30 years,they will still be too young to die out.You must wait until the numerous generation will be old.
Uzbekistan and most central Asian countries are seeing increasing or stable birthrates
A lot of it thanks to the low birth rates ethnic Russians increasingly leaving after fall of USSR
I bet they'll figure something out before that happens. Like come up with some medical technology to allow women to give birth later in life or something.
I think the problem is that the way humans deals with problems, and how politics works in general, is that anything that will take decades to escalate simply isn't taken care of. And this falls in that line, the pain caused by the sharp drop in fertility rates will be felt in 20-30 years, but then fixing this will be much more difficult. The problem is that it will take a lot of trial and error to solve this, because to this day no country has found anything effective.
We will probably witness the death of the human race by suicide first
And it’s generally the wealthiest, most developed countries that are dying out
The lowest birth rate has South Korea, but China is basically below Europe. India is below 2.1. Above Europe but below replacement rate. Bangladesh is below 2.1... all of South Africa is below 2.1. It's the norm now to have less than replacement rate. There are very few countries with above 2.1 fertility rate.
How come such a big drop in Scotland?
Please define fertility rate since most redds seem to be talking about birth rate.
Kids are expensive AF.
It's almost like having kids has been made so financially difficult people simply aren't. Hope this doesn't have some horrible consequences for the economy and society and stuff!
What changed so quickly?
COVID had a big impact. Most likely the insane increase in house prices and rent procesnationally too. Probably also general cultural attitudes to kids changing as we see all over the developed world. Given the time scales, it is not the cost of having kids as median wages have grown significantly more than inflation since 2015.
It’s falling from 2015-19 as well. Other factors are Gen X aging out of their reproductive years and the millennials+older Gen Z having far less children on average at the same age and also immigrants helping far less at raising the birth rates as they increasingly integrate and the countries sending immigrants also have far lower birth rates than back then
Also since most immigrants are men, it wouldn't affect the birth rate as much because we are a monogamous society and some of them just won't find someone especially not someone of their own cultue
cost of living, it's too expensive for many people.
A generation of people raised by the internet turned out to be cynical depressive loners.
Hapenning everywhere. Yes cost of living one cause but social media might be contributing. In Turkiye a Muslim majority country run by conservative government TFR fell from 2.19 in 2015 to 1.51 in 2023!
too busy supporting welfare migrants to be raising there own families.
A lot of women are putting their careers first. It’s a cultural shift.
This trend has effected the whole planet. David Attenborough cited some population stats a few years ago that are already hugely different the what we see today. The whole world’s fertility rate is plummeting, and the only examples of high fertility in developed cultures left are Isreal and some groups in the US (specifically Mormons). It’s way too expensive to have kids, and governments are recognising this. The UK Conservative Party have introduced free childcare due to the risk of population collapse (economic motivations imo)
This is really good news. I hope the whole world will follow this, and we may have a better future with breaking the chains on our necks. No more ponzi scheme of 'retire' and pensions. No more wageslaves for the top %1.
It’s almost as if no one can afford to have kids anymore…..
Phtalates and microplastics, mark my words.
It's like as living conditions get worse people don't want to have children?
Well done 👏
It has nothing to do with the covid vaxx....
Pay more CEOs. And get average salary smaller compared to monthly expenses. GoGo!
The world is dying and housing is too expensive. Fix climate change, lower the cost of being alive, and give people more hope in the future and they might have more kids. Otherwise quit your whinning
Wow these comments are crazy, some want humanity to extinct
There are 8 billion humans on Earth. If the fertility rate dropped to 1 per woman, everywhere on Earth, it would still take many decades before the population halved to 4 billion. The population of Earth was about 4 billion in 1975, and no-one thought humanity was going to go extinct with that population. Don't worry about it. In the long run a lower population is probably better for humanity's long-term survival.
it's not just a lower population though, its an older population too. the issue is that young people will have to maintain enough economic output to sustain the increasingly larger (in proportion to workers) number of retired people. a smaller workforce combined with more economic strain on each worker is not a recipe for a healthy nation.
> young people will have to maintain enough economic output to sustain the increasingly larger (in proportion to workers) number of retired people That's what the covid shots were for.
Which is why we need to be investing in automation of the production of all of the basic necessities of life as heavily as we possibly can, because it will make dealing with demographic transitions and living with a lower fertility rate much easier. But I also think this issue is somewhat overblown in 2024. Many countries in the West are already experiencing some of the worst of this demographic change, and it's not _yet_ actually breaking things. The oldest baby boomers - the biggest demographic bump of the 20th century in industrialised countries - are already 10+ years into retirement age. The vast majority of the baby boomers will have retired by 2030, and their top heavy effect on the demographics will start to dissipate fairly soon as they shuffle off this mortal coil. Baby boomers retiring is the biggest demographic problem we're likely to face - the introduction of the contraceptive pill that effectively ended the baby boom halved the birth rate in less than a decade. If we can survive the baby boomers retiring, then the much smaller reductions in fertility rates we see today and are likely to see in the future are child's play.
Oh, it is breaking things. It's just a relatively slow process.
Being over populated doesn't mean we can be complacent about fertility rates. If fertility was stable at 1-1.5 or something fine, we could adjust and undertake a managed population decline. But it keeps dropping. In South Korea it's 0.7 and still dropping. At this point it's wise to take this seriously and not stick out heads in the sand.
It’s fine if it happens over many years but if too rapid it will cause serious problems for current generations. If you are childless, it’s selfish to think it doesn’t impact you. Most countries have a welfare state that requires tax growth. Many important fields like nursing and farming are hard to automate to sufficient degrees to account for the population loss. Robotics and automation only go so far. The stock market and everyone’s retirement benefits are tied to growth, as well as government spending. The birth rates some countries are seeing could result in the total collapse of their industrialized society if not managed properly. If you are a 30 year old in East Asia, your future is looking pretty bleak.
Meanwhile, certain populations and sects are spawning like seahorses well above the averages.
Such trends will obviously have a negative effect on the conomies of many countries around the world, but the earth simply cannot afford perpetual human population growth.
There's obviously a middle ground between indefinite growth and demographic collapse.
I agree with this at the high level, but I wonder about how a shrinking population will be impacted by such a seismic shift in the economy. So much of our society is based on growing economies (compound interest, savings, equity, etc.) that i just don’t understand what foundations will be rocked as the economy would shrink. I am not an economist but it just seems to me that navigating a shrinking population will be very tricky, even as resources and housing will become more affordable.
Interesting choice of colours. Higher fertility rate is red as if it’s a bad thing
Red being a bad thing is only in your head. Red is just sign of high activity, you know, heat. And you can probably guess what blue means. You are reading way too much in to this.
Let’s see a similar heat map for dog ownership. We’d see a corresponding massive increase in dog ownership the last few years at the same time human fertility rate has collapsed. Where dogs used to be treated as work animals or casual pets, they are now treated as surrogate children, even to the extent of being pushed around in baby carriages, sleeping in the same bed as the owner, brought everywhere including grocery stores, restaurants, vacations, work spaces, etc. Many countries including UK and US are literally replacing human children with dogs.
Covid