r/MensLib • u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK • 1d ago
To raise fertility rates, it’s not women who need to step up — it’s men: "New research found that countries where men do more housework and child care have higher fertility rates."
https://19thnews.org/2025/08/fertility-rates-traditionalism-research/162
u/ratttertintattertins 1d ago edited 1d ago
The first (including Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the United States) has somewhat low fertility rates that started taking a dip in the past several decades.
The second group (including Greece, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Portugal and Spain
I wonder if this takes into account that that first group of countries are all countries that have taken a great deal more immigration from areas of the world with higher fertility rates and the second group of countries tend not to.
For example, the U.K. is quoted as a country that has a higher birthrate but the white British population specifically has a very low birth rate, probably no better than Portugal. The big difference is that Portugal doesn’t have a large immigrant population improving those numbers.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 "" 1d ago
Immigrants normally only improve fertility rate in the first generation. After that, it drops as well.
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u/Requiredmetrics 1d ago
The first group, especially the U.S. utilized consistent levels of immigration to keep its population and fertility rates from dipping. This is fairly well documented. Everyone else I’m not sure.
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u/rbwildcard 1d ago
Being more accepting of others is probably correlated with men who don't subscribe to traditional gender roles and contribute their fair share to the household.
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u/wrenwood2018 1d ago
Except immigration is largely driven by economics ...
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 18h ago
There is a huge cultural component to acceptance. Just look at the US vs Japan
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u/wrenwood2018 16h ago
I mean sure, but the major forces are economic.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 16h ago
5 years ago, as an economist, I would have been the first to agree with you. These days I am far less certain....
There is no real economic logic in being able to convince millions of people you are only going after illegal criminals when in reality you are deporting as many as you can, including those who help keep local costs low for things like produce & cleaning.
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u/RigilNebula 1d ago
I think I get what they're saying, and fairly distributing housework is important for a number of reasons, but still this seems like quite the oversimplification. Millenial and Gen z husbands have been stepping up more than past generations, and yet fertility rates are still declining.
Norway and the Netherlands are other countries with reportedly more equality between genders, and lower "unpaid work gaps" between men and women, and yet they have lower fertility rates than the US.
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u/thieflikeme 1d ago
The article does what a lot of opinion pieces do, which is take data to try intellectualizing their own personal opinion. There's plenty of data that indicates that younger generations (millennial and younger) feel they either don't have the time, interest, or financial ability or to do things like start a family or own a home even in a dual income household. Most people rent, 60% of families in the US live from paycheck to paycheck and as such, are one lengthy and expensive illness away from being bankrupted.
There are many factors contributing to lower fertility rates, 'maybe if you did the dishes every once in a while' is a bit laughable as a noteworthy explanation.
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u/HouseSublime 1d ago
The quote I've been repeating is "animals in captivity don't tend to thrive or reproduce".
Globalization has brought us a level of advancement that humans from 100 years ago would think is magic.
But we've also removed a lot of humanity from human life. People feel overworked, unfulfilled and just being alive is expensive. More and more people are lonely, a lot of life in places like America is:
- commute to work through hellish traffic
- work 8hrs
- commute home through hellish traffic
- be so tired you don't do anything
- live so far in suburbia that you don't go anywhere
- sit and scroll on your phone until bedtime
- wake up and repeat
Throw in the fact that so many countries have essentially a gerontocracy that acts like it's final goal is the ensure the world is destroyed after they (finally) die off and the US swan diving into fascism and it's not a shock that people aren't having kids.
My wife and I have one kid and I've already had a vasectomy so we're not realy helping the birthrate (2 of us eventually die and are replaced with 1 kid). We've done it and have zero interest in starting over.
Men do need to step up but I don't think it will matter in the grand scheme of things. If anything being an involved parent has made me AND my wife not want additional kids.
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u/wizean 1d ago
And many places put parents in serious legal jeopardy.
For example, parent arrested for letting child walk 1 block to neighborhood park. Parent arrested for letting 12 year old walk 1/2 mile home. Parent arrested for letting kids walk 2 blocks to a mall to get icecream.
All these activities were not legal quagmires in the previous generation. Yes, some kids get hurt when they are unsupervised, but 100% supervision is a silly requirement.
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u/Teknekratos 1d ago edited 20h ago
Even without the legal risks... Taking care of a little human being is A LOT more complicated/involved nowadays than just letting them loose to play outside all day, then putting them to work as soon as they are able.
Parents are namely expected to know where their kids are at all times, put them through classes and extracurriculars, and so on. And the older children are generally being allowed to live their life instead of being parentified... There also aren't usually grandparents and maiden aunts and whatnot pitching in the childrearing on the daily.
1-3 kids will run a working couple pretty ragged. Not saying the housewives of generations past weren't also with their often double-digits families, but I can understand that as social and legal welfare standards have gotten higher and stricter (plus having some control over fertility), it's not viable anymore outside like Mormon enclaves to have a dozen semi-feral children basically taking care of their younger siblings while the stay-at-home-mom is busy 24/7 just trying to keep the lot fed and clothed.
As the proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child, but when that is replaced by a nuclear family and a bunch of paid professionals for 18+ years... it's a big ask!
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u/DocumentExternal6240 "" 1d ago
Yeah, we need to raise the children to becone perfect citizens but hace to work full time and are then blamed when out children are not perfect.
It is difficult to raise children without help from family and friends…
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u/7evenCircles 1d ago
The quote I've been repeating is "animals in captivity don't tend to thrive or reproduce".
Thank you.
It's like running an aquarium, and you have a dolphin exhibit, except they keep dying faster than they replace themselves. Because you know jack shit about caring for dolphins, you have built them an exhibit that's half terrestrial and choked with algae. Your solution to the problem of the dying dolphins is to go down to the dolphin store and buy more dolphins to chuck into the dolphin killing exhibit. It doesn't actually solve anything, but it does mean you can continue to exploit them for profit without having to do anything for the dolphins' living conditions.
Capitalist stakeholders shouldn't be insulated from the mortal pressures of what they've wrought upon their nations, which is why I oppose immigration as a solution to this issue. Stop giving them outs. Accept the gambit.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 18h ago
People talk about paternity leave and I feel like that's just giving the dolphins a single day in the right tank. A half measure at best
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u/moreKEYTAR 1d ago
You hit the nail on the head. The economic state has added pressure and work; the adults of reproductive age have a lack of prosperity that makes child-rearing insanely difficult, made more dangerous by domestic extremism. There is a gender factor in this equation worth noting, which is that in “equal” hetero partnerships where both adults work full-time, the woman does far more housework and child duties. This definitely disincentivizes women, at least those who can still exercise any agency in family planning.
Honestly though, we should be rejoicing in a declining birth rate, which reflects well for women’s rights and is exactly what needs to be happening on our overpopulated globe. But alas, it is framed as a problem because a high birth rate means a greater labor force which benefits the capitalistic oligarchy (lower wages, higher competition for employment, less bargaining power, more civil unrest, more social striation).
Lower birthrates is a good thing.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 "" 1d ago
So true - I love my kids but am not sure I would do it again. Men stepping up is certainly important, but the state of the world just doesn‘t warrant more kids. I do understand a lot better now why people don’t have kids and don’t blame them.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 18h ago
Can't believe I had to scroll down even this far to get to the right answer. We have designed society for isolation and a few months of paternal leave or $10k here and there in subsidies is not the fundamental rethink we need to return to a culture that actually values community
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u/amk 19h ago
I recently read "After The Spike" by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, which is about the coming population decline, and they note that pretty much every explanation for the fertility drop is contradicted by some set of example countries. e.g. the article suggests it's housework, but the Scandavian countries are the most egalitarian and their fertility is below replacement rate too.
There's an impressive graph in chapter 10 of the book that shows the fertility rates in China, Romania, Thailand, Hong Kong, and a few other countries from 1975 to 2020. The lines on the graph aren't labelled, and they all follow similar trajectories, even though China had the One Child Policy from 1980 to 2015 and Romania had criminalized abortion to encourage population growth. Ending the One Child Policy didn't cause a rebound, either.
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u/bananophilia 11h ago
Millenial and Gen z husbands have been stepping up more than past generations,
But perhaps not at the rate necessary to make up for the additional work that women are doing outside the home.
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1d ago
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u/Pure-Introduction493 1d ago
I’d say that is a very ungenerous take on this article.
If you have read it, it’s more a response to the anti-feminist narrative that women need to “suck it up, leave jobs to their men and take up a trad wife role in the home and have lots of kids to raise the birth rate.”
It’s trying to address what might actually be root causes, because developed societies with extremely strict gender roles are actually losing even more in terms of birth rate.
It doesn’t ever take a tone of hating men. Acknowledging data about gender inequality isn’t “hating men.”
We should be better at rationally looking at the data, trying to understand where gender roles and equality are lacking and addressing it, rather than taking offense.
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u/amanhasnoname4now 1d ago
I could agree except the Nordic countries which are more egalitarian have lower birth rates than other developed nations
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u/Pure-Introduction493 1d ago
And attacking the data and conclusions is fair. I think it is flawed in some ways, and the conclusions mask or ignore potentially confounding issues. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. I personally think there are some gaps in the conclusions made.
But we shouldn’t jump to charged claims about “man hating” when there is no evidence of such.
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u/amanhasnoname4now 1d ago
I don't think it's antiman I think it's reductive and simply taking a stance the data doesn't support to be in the opposite side of the anti-woman take.
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u/Pure-Introduction493 1d ago
And I strongly agree with that criticism. I don’t think the data supports the given conclusions. It’s shoe-horned as a flawed response to the equally flawed declaration that re-subjugating women to 1950’s gender roles will increase the birth rate.
I’m just responding to the knee-jerk reaction that anything pointing toward gender inequality is “anti-men” in some way.
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u/wizean 1d ago
The reason nordic countries have lower birth rate is NOT because they are egalitarian. That's a baseless conclusion and leads to glorifying slavery.
There is a lot of difference between Europe the continent vs America or Asia. People cherry pick whatever they want to push, and claim that's the reason.
Lately I have seen people attack gender equality claiming that's the reason nordic countries have lower birthrate. That argument is disingenuous bigotry.
Studying such differences requires a lot of nuance. The best comparisons are between countries with very little differences between them except for a policy or two.
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u/amanhasnoname4now 1d ago
Yes agreed there is no one answer. But over a large sample more liberal populations with a more even split have lower birth rates it is most likely correlation not causation but it is present broadly in society.
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u/Lisa8472 1d ago
Also, immigrants tend to have more children than non-immigrants, and the nordic countries are low-immigration. If controlled for that, I bet it would be more meaningful.
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u/ScissorNightRam 1d ago
This sounds like “countries where people generally have more free time have sex more”
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u/FullPruneNight 1d ago edited 1d ago
In addition to all the factors other people have pointed out, such as the first group of countries being more willing to accept immigrants, and other factors being more important such as concern about climate change and economics, this assertion blatantly goes against both the worldwide fertility data, in which more traditional societies have higher fertility rates, and also against recent data from the US and the developed world as a whole, which shows that more conservative, right-leaning households (which I’m going to take as a proxy for a more traditional division of labor here) actually have significantly higher fertility rates than more progressive, left-leaning households, and that that gap is only widening.
I’m all for equal division of labor being the norm. But this seems blatantly like an ideology in search of a cause for low fertility rather than anything else, including at the expense of not being intersectional.
EDIT TO ADD: so this paper is not peer reviewed, nor does it seem to even be written in a format suitable for publication to a journal. This is a conference paper for the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. It also clearly states that these two groups of countries were not found empirically, but decided upon based on something similar to a comparison of current and former fertility rates, and were limited for “convenience.” Yeah, calling this science at all is a misnomer.
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u/NotAnotherScientist 1d ago
The countries they studied seemed to be hand picked to make a point. There was no reasoning given for studying these countries and not including others.
I don't like saying it, but it's studies like this that make people think the scientific community is pushing a liberal agenda.
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u/FullPruneNight 1d ago
I looked into it, this is a conference paper for the federal reserve of all places, and the countries weren’t found by data, they were picked for “convenience.” Calling this science at all, let alone a liberal bias to it, feels like a misnomer.
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u/St_gracchus_babeuf 18h ago
quick Q from a concerned party:
if right wingers significantly outbreed leftists
and most people inherit their political beliefs from their family
what does that logically imply about the future?
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u/Soulful_Sadist 1d ago
With respect, I call bs. There is no science ANYWHERE that will uniformly agree with this. Fertility is not ONLY about the Men OR only about the women. It's both and it's the same old same old things dealing with overall health, fitness, stress levels, hydration, rest, etc. etc. Doing housework has NOTHING to do with any of it. If anything, obsessing about that only makes it worse.
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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 1d ago
for the purposes of this article, I'm just accepting that "raise fertility rates" is a net positive, because it seems like everyone and their mother is trying to do so.
most people, out there in reality, want to get married and have children. The difference between one, two, and three (or more!) children is a HUGE amount of work and a BIG choice for any potential parent to make. And if you're the one on the hook for most of the childcare, the nighttime soothing, and the bottle washing? You very well might be the mother who stops at one. That is a straightforward, rational choice.
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u/Tharkun140 1d ago
You very well might be the mother who stops at one. That is a straightforward, rational choice.
It might be rational, but that's not what people did throughout most of space and time. Poland had a higher fertility rate in the middle of WW2 then it does today, and first-world countries have almost universally lower rates than developing nations. Increased comfort does not lead to increased fertility rates, and seems to lead in the opposite direction.
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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 1d ago
I think you'll find a strong correlation between women being legally and socially entitled to say "no" with fertility rates. plus there's moderrn fertility management for women.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 "" 1d ago
I think since the advancement of birth control, women have a much bigger say if they want to have children.
That’s why some people want to take this choice away. But these forget that Pandora‘s box has been opened and the knowledge that you can have a choice is there.
And as long as there are over 8 billion people in the world, low fertility isn’t a bad thing, either (at least if you aren‘t racist…)
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u/OuterPaths 1d ago
And as long as there are over 8 billion people in the world, low fertility isn’t a bad thing, either (at least if you aren‘t racist…)
People don't live in a global civilization, though, they live in demarcated nation states with specific human geographies. That there are 2 billion people in India doesn't make what will happen to South Korea any rosier.
It is an odd, almost pathological thing to say that dying countries ought to feel good about their deaths because Africa and Asia keep pumping out kids and their demise will help compensate for that.
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u/HybridVigor 1d ago
Also pharmacologically. There was no birth control pill in "the middle of WW2" but it is widely available now.
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u/gelatinskootz 1d ago
> I think you'll find a strong correlation between women being legally and socially entitled to say "no" with fertility rates
Are you saying that women in South Korea are twice as "legally and socially entitled to say 'no'" as women in Mexico? That women in Russia have more autonomy than women in the United States? That women's social positioning in Chile is much closer to Thailand than Argentina? That women in the UAE have that freedom more than almost every other country in the world?
To be clear, I think that trying to objectively measure and compare women's ability to say "no" by country is an impossible and pointless idea. I'm just highlighting some examples to clarify that absurdity
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u/Balmung60 1d ago
One thing that's distinct is that broadly speaking, in developed economies, children are generally a financial burden on a household. They take money to raise and contribute little to the household's bottom line. The child will likely eventually have a relatively high income, but by then may not be part of the household due to the nuclear family + 18 years and you're out model and it will only be after a significant amount of time.
Meanwhile, in developing societies, which also often have higher levels of subsistence lifestyles or outright child labor, that child may well be a net financial asset for the household because from a young age, they're going out and doing some activity that brings in pay either directly or indirectly, which helps support the other children. Their lifetime income will likely be much lower than the above, but it starts much earlier and especially in the absence of the nuclear family model, may continue to be part of the same household longer.
Thus, while one household has to ask "how many children can we support", the other is asking "how many children will it take to support us".
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u/turkshead 1d ago
why on earth does everyone keep talking about raising fertility rates? we've gotten astoundingly lucky that women's rights and general affluence seem to counteract the massive population growth curve of the last couple of centuries before the ghost of thomas malthus reaches out from beyond the grave and eats us all alive.
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u/anubiz96 1d ago
Because modern economies are built on the idea that we will have enough young workers contributing yo the economy to support old retired people and our system requires more workers.
And the powers that be at the top are loath to change that because barring walking the old out into the wilderness any other fixes will probably require them to fix wealth inequality and wealth calcification.
A complete change in system.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 18h ago
Yeah look at how fucked up the powers that be got when we bent the system a bit for COVID. And they have pretty much dragged us back to where everything was in 2019.
No one is going to do the hard work of getting ready for different economic fundamentals.
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u/DrMobius0 1d ago
No, there's a lot of problems that come with having an aging population. It puts a lot of burden on your young people, and not just "because capitalism". Regardless of your economic system, things still have to be done, and if larger and larger percent of your population are old enough that they don't want to work, you have a problem.
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u/eliminating_coasts 10h ago
The rationale for talking about fertility is that even if you think a lower world population would be better, you would still like to be confident that you haven't accidentally set things in your society up so that there is a permanent decline, and ideally, you want the rate of decline in any given year to be relatively slow.
In other words, if you could wave a wand to tune population growth, the ideal would probably be a fertility rate below replacement in the industrialised world but slowly trending up towards it, while the rest of the world with a lower environmental footprint per person trends rapidly down towards the rate in the industrialised world as their population's prosperity increases, so that world population gently declines and stabilises at some value as the decline decelerates, with no part of the world seeing an excessive pattern of aging.
Of course, probably more important is that no-one has a child they don't want, and everyone who wants to have a child can, which is not a situation that most people are in at the moment, with parents around the world having children who they were not prepared for and people who are ready to be parents of more than one child finding that it's not really affordable, or there are medical obstacles etc.
But the fact that fertility rates keep falling in many countries, or stabalise in others at a level below replacement, is worth keeping an eye on. It might not be urgent, especially not compared to things like climate change, and actually lowering the footprint per person via improving energy supplies etc. all sorts of other things come first, but it's worth using it as a signal to remind us that we should be making sure it's possible for people to start families if they want to, and continue to expand them, even in richer parts of the world.
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u/theonewhogroks 1d ago
Yes, because Malthus really nailed his predictions. Have you looked into recent scientific population projections? It's a rhetorical question. You wouldn't have written that comment if you had.
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u/turkshead 1d ago
malthus was wrong because norman borlaug more or less single handedly saved the human race. it doesn't mean there's not a top, it just changes where the top is.
if you have something to say about "scientific population projections" then say it, your snide little insinuation just makes it seem like you're afraid to stake a position because you aren't really sure you know what you're talking about.
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u/theonewhogroks 1d ago edited 1d ago
"The world’s overall fertility rates are dropping, with women having one child fewer on average than they did around 1990.
In more than half of all countries and areas, the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 - the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.
Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of all countries and areas, including China, Italy, the Republic of Korea and Spain, now have “ultra-low fertility”, with fewer than 1.4 live births per woman over a lifetime."
"The global population reached nearly 8.2 billion by mid-2024 and is expected to grow by another two billion over the next 60 years, peaking at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s.
It will then fall to around 10.2 billion, which is 700 million lower than expected a decade ago."
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u/turkshead 1d ago
yes?
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u/theonewhogroks 1d ago
The trend is towards birth rates below the replacement rate. And we currently have an ageing population. That's a problem
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u/turkshead 1d ago
no, it isn't. it's a fucking miracle.
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u/theonewhogroks 1d ago
It's wonderful that people have a choice - that's how it should be. Doesn't mean there aren't negative consequences.
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u/turkshead 1d ago
there is a maximum number of people that the earth can support, and if we go above that number the consequences are starvation, war and environmental destruction.
so far, we've managed to stave that fate off via an incredible series of technological advances, but that will not continue forever, there has to be a maximum carrying capacity. So at some point we have to figure out how to get the population to stop growing.
It was assumed for a long time that in order to not hit that malthusian cap we'd have to implement some sort of chinese-style strict population controls, but it turns out people will have less children if you give them the chance.
there's a thing called a doubling rate that drives home the danger of exponential growth. it goes like this: if a population is growing at a rate of 1% per year, how fast will it double? the answer is 77 years. You can easily extrapolate: 2% growth has a doubling rate of 38.5 years, 10% growth has a doubling rate of 7.7 years.
there are a range of estimates as to the planet's carrying capacity, but the thing is we probably won't know for sure until we pass it, at which point we're cooked, because having a society that can make decisions like "we should grow less" requires a high degree of social coordination, but that is exactly the kind of thing that goes away when society collapses because of resource exhaustion, as people start panicking and being less willjng to act for the greater good.
the population's been growing at about 1% per year since the year 1800 or so, which means that the doubling rate is about one human lifetime -- so there are twice as many people when you die as when you are born. this means that if we were still growing at 1%, we'd have 16 billion people by 2100, which is way past most estimates of the earth's carrying capacity.
so it has looked for a while like we were going to have to choose between draconian population controls and mass starvation. the fact that people have less babies when they're rich is a miraculous save.
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u/Certain_Giraffe3105 21h ago
there is a maximum number of people that the earth can support, and if we go above that number the consequences are starvation, war and environmental destruction
What is this number? What is it based off?
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u/theonewhogroks 1d ago
That's all true, but many people today are choosing not to have children because they can't afford it. That's a sad state of affairs. Ideally we want to stay around at the replacement rate
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u/Certain_Giraffe3105 21h ago
incredible series of technological advances, but that will not continue forever, there has to be a maximum carrying capacity
Why? What's your source for this? There are still tons of plausible technological advancements that would allow for the more efficient use of resources on this planet ( increased electrification, geothermal, proliferation of nuclear energy (to include practical nuclear fusion), green cement, dense housing, proliferation of mass transit systems, etc.)
The entire success of humans as a species is based on technological advancements. What logic says that we're just going to reach an endpoint where that's going to dry up?
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u/mylittlebattles 23h ago
What miraculous save? In Sweden where I live Younger people will either suffer to pay for the elderly in a pay as a you go (PAYG) system or governments slash pensions. The current old age dependency ratio (OADR) is 3 workers per retiree and in Japan it’s about 2 workers per retiree and it will only get worse. Since the contribution is about 10-20% of your wage it would either have to drastically increase or be slashed and leave the old and vulnerable to the wolves. That’s not wholesome. If you couldn’t catch on to that.
And as people refuse to have kids, which you find to be marvelous, and the healthy life expectancy rises more and more people are going to be phased out of the workforce with less and less to replace them.
That’s not sustainable. It’s pretty simple.
The population doesn’t have to increase (which you think is what everyone wants) but unless we have genuinely marvelous scifi level automation SOON, many societies will suffer due to the old people just refusing to die and working age people refusing to breed.
What’s your solution? Force sweet old 70yr grandma to work bc the retirement age has increased to 80?
You’re not being utopian or heroic you’re not smarter or more enlightened you are just clueless if you think Sweden or most of the developed world having sub 2.1 TFR is a good miraculous thing. It’s a nightmare.
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u/tucker_case 10h ago
The population isn't going to level off and stay there though. It peaks and then falls off like a roller coaster. For various reasons that is bad.
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u/ElOsoPeresozo 1d ago
Daniel Quinn accurately described modern attitudes towards Malthus: a plane which can’t fly goes off a cliff. Everyone on it is rejoicing and marveling at their achievement because they are in mid-air, so they think they are flying. They haven’t hit the ground so they believe it will never happen, even as the plane is in free fall.
When it hits the ground, it will be too late.
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u/MonoBlancoATX 1d ago
In my experience, the people who want to "raise fertility rates" tend to be fond of things like white supremacy and eugenics.
So, why do we care about fertility rates on this sub?
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 18h ago
Economists and those who think we don't invest enough in children. If you think society gives too much money & power to old people instead of young people, it's going to get significantly worse when the population stops growing.
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u/MonoBlancoATX 18h ago
White supremacists, eugenicists, and fascists also care.
So, convince me that you're not in any of those groups first, and then I'll care about what you're saying.
People have been crying about " the population not growing" since Malthus, and likely before.
And yet, here we are. 8+ billion and growing.
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u/Skithiryx 15h ago
The biggest humanitarian reason to be worried is quality of life for the elderly in the future.
Lower birthrates mean fewer workers per retired old person. Means less revenue for governments to pay for the same number of retirees’ benefits (or increasing as medicine advances). Governments might claw back on them. And then also fewer workers means labour gets more expensive, so private labour to support the elderly also gets more expensive.
So there’s a possible future where more old people work into their grave and/or can’t afford to get the help they need to live at all comfortably.
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u/MonoBlancoATX 14h ago
The obvious answer to literally all of that is immigration.
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u/Skithiryx 14h ago
That works for now. What happens once the entire world’s birthrates fall?
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u/MonoBlancoATX 14h ago
There are 8+ billion of us and rising.
I think we can figure out how to cross that bridge when we come to it.
If you're worried about humanitarianism, worrying about relatively wealthy elderly people mostly in the West seems short sighted.
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u/wrenwood2018 1d ago
This article is so far off base with a particular agenda it is shocking. While splitting duties is definitely important, it isn't what is driving fertility rates up, this is nonsense. Fertility rates are higher in countries and segments if the populating that have not traditional family structures. In the US there are stark differences by political ideology. Reasons that are huge but not mentioned.
1) women are getting advanced degrees at a high rate delaying childbirth. My wife tapped out after two kids even though I wanted more because she was creeping near that "geriatric" pregnancy line. The second pregnancy took a ton out of her and she didn't rebound.
2) kids are expensive
3) for better or worse a growing amount of individuals prioritize themselves. The world is a giant competition they want to win. I've a colleague who wants to pursue surgery as her medical specialty. Her driving focus is on status and being the best. She will never have it in her to sacrifice anything in her life to raise kids. Kids require sacrifice. Society worships at the alter of self too much. Ambition rules.
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u/cmciccio 1d ago
This article is pretty shallow and only presents ideas in accusatory, divisive terms. The paper itself is much more nuanced and though it requires a lot more reading it gives a clearer picture of the complexity of the situation as well as offering a potential alternative explanations on page 24:
https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/11192/Downside_of_Fertility.pdf
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u/PaeoniaLactiflora 1d ago
I’m not all that surprised by this! Anecdotally, I’m firmly in the childless cat lady camp, but my decision not to have kids was hugely influenced by what I saw growing up: kids were hard, largely thankless work done mostly by women. Before I met my now-husband I had never been in a relationship where I even vaguely felt like having kids wouldn’t disproportionately fall on my shoulders. I still don’t want them, but just being in a relationship with someone that works toward equality in our household has let me consider that decision in a much more nuanced way, and I can imagine for plenty of women removing that barrier (and its corollaries e.g. career impact) would be enough to influence their decision.
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u/Altair13Sirio 1d ago
I mean, I think I'm pretty good at taking care of the house and I wouldn't mind doing that in the couple if I got married, but 1: one salary doesn't make a family stand on its own these days, and 2: if I did that I'd be called a loser, lazy freeloader or some shit like that or maybe I'd even be left by the hypothetical spouse for not being "man enough" so whatever.
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u/MyPacman 1d ago
Point 2) is pretty standard, every stay at home parent gets these attacks about being on easy street as a lazy freeloader. And any relationship where one doesn't appreciate what the other is doing, nor respects it, is doomed to failure. Statistically, it's more likely you would leave them, because 'bringing in the money' isn't actually equitable, and having an extra adult sized child is exhausting.
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u/anubiz96 1d ago
Eh society both men and women still view stay at home fathers with more disdain than stay at home moms. We haven't done the best job of redefining male gender roles. So, the guy above has a point . That being said i think the point is that both people would be working outisde the home and doing equal share inside the home. Not that more men would be come stay at home dads
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u/Vaumer 23h ago
That's a shame that there's still more pressure. My friend had a stay at home dad. Just seeing it, from a child's perspective as another logical option (his mom had the higher earning job) normalized it for me and my friends. I wonder if it's just one of those things where it takes a generation growing up with it for it to not be seen as so scary.
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u/one_bean_hahahaha 1d ago
Why do you assume doing housework requires you to quit your job? How do you manage now?
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u/Altair13Sirio 1d ago
I didn't mean it like that. I meant as a full "house husband" kinda thing. Right now I still live with my parents, I do my part, do the groceries, do the dishes and so on, but most of the work is done by my mother, who has always done this.
In a couple living together, if both people are working every day, going out from morning until 6 or 7 pm when you're lucky, you can't take care of the house as you would if you were there all day.
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u/one_bean_hahahaha 17h ago
Why does there need to be a housewife or househusband? If you didn't live with your parents, how would you cope? Housework is not a full time job. Single working people and double-income couples somehow manage. You start by prioritizing what really needs to be done versus what tv and rich people tell you needs to be done.
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u/Kuildeous 1d ago
The internet is the bane of troglodytes. Women used to have to suck it up and deal with bad marriages because they didn't know any better, and it certainly didn't help when their mentors--mothers, grandmothers, aunts, typically--simply told them that that was life and that they just have to deal with it.
Women have more and more learned lately that they don't have to stick with a bad marriage. If the husband (or to-be) cannot clear the very low bar society has set for them, women don't have to keep with it. Breaking up (or divorce) is better than dealing with it.
And it's comical (while being sad) to see guys whine about it because they've been benefiting from inescapable marriages to give them the wives who won't stand up to them, but now they're dealing with women who realize they can have a better life and will take the steps necessary to secure it. Now men have to rely on their personalities and behaviors to win women over, and they're learning that they aren't enough. They barely even register with a woman's interests.
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u/SyrusDrake 1d ago
Working two full time jobs barely pays enough for two adults to survive, people already have little to no time for relaxation and self-actualisation as is, and the world they would birth their children into is rapidly bafreling towards climate disasters and fascism? If only husbands did the laundry more often, then women would have more kids 🤔
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u/BoskoMaldoror 1d ago
Do women have any obligations when it comes to intra-gender dynamics? Just curious because I've never seen anything mentioned.
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u/wizean 1d ago
In the free world, no. If you want to change group leanings, it is done by policy benefits like tax breaks, retirement benefits etc.
For example, rebates and tax breaks for solar panels nudged a lot of people to install them in their houses.
Similar tax rebates could be given for child expenses but most countries don't.
Many people will say: "OOOO, Norway has low birth rate, therefore we should end democracy and institute slavery". While commonly proposed, that outcome is equivalent to lets end humanity.
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u/Cestpasmoe 9h ago
Tax rebates, which are inherently regressive, are not really the way to go here. Also, tax rebates can offset the comparatively low cost of solar panels. But you’ll hit zero tax long before you’ve offset the cost of raising a child. If you want to apply financial incentives for people to have children, you’re going to have to say it with cash. Tax breaks won’t do it.
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u/Vaumer 22h ago
To me, as a woman, it's the isolation that scared me off from having kids sooner.
You end up in a neighborhood where you have to drive everywhere. Young kids are so unpredictable that "let's meet at the event at 3" becomes impossible if the kid can't handle being wrestled into the car seat, or if there's a diaper blow-out.
It's cliché but I found a bikeable town with a park I can push my stroller to and that's close enough to downtown that I can still hang out with my single friends. I'm more responsible now, but I don't feel like I suddenly have to change who I am.
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u/MyFiteSong 1d ago
Similar tax rebates could be given for child expenses but most countries don't.
Tax rebates don't get it done. If you want to get women to have more children, you need to come up with programs and benefits that help women specifically. Tax rebates primarily benefit men and don't work. Men already want more children.
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u/wizean 1d ago
> Tax rebates don't get it done
Evidence ?
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u/MyFiteSong 1d ago
The countries that have tried it and it didn't move the needle.
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u/wizean 21h ago
That's false. No country has done meaningful change. They do PR stunts like, here's 20 bucks, should be enough to raise a child.
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u/MyFiteSong 19h ago
No it isn't false. For example. Hungary gives lifetime exemption from income tax for women who have at least 4 children. And in 2025 they're extending it to 3 or possibly 2 children because 4 wasn't working.
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u/wizean 17h ago
Hungary ranks last in the EU for gender equality in political and economic power. They are doing everything in their power to hurt women.
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u/MyFiteSong 17h ago
France, Greece and Taiwan also tried targeted tax breaks to increase fertility rate, without success.
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u/Vaumer 22h ago
If we're talking about birthrates here: Being emotionally and physically ready to carry a pregnancy. Being able to speak one's mind, stand up for oneself and advocate for oneself while being in a vulnerable state. Being prepared to stand up for one's rights if their workplace tries to punish them.
Also the same expectation to know how to take care of themselves and their space.
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u/WakeoftheStorm 1d ago
We're focusing on all the wrong things. When society is more efficient at producing goods and services from available resources with less labor than ever before, lower birth rates are a good thing.
The only reason it poses a problem is because we have an economic system which requires a steady influx of new labor to keep it running like a pyramid scheme. If workers retained the rights to the product of their labor, then the economy would dynamically scale with the number of participants.
No one needs to "step up" to change fertility rates, we just need a new system
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u/SRSgoblin 1d ago
Reminder that anyone talking "fertility rates" and being really concerned about them is usually a racist dogwhistle for White Replacement Conspiracists.
We are in an uncharted history with mankind. Go look at the global explosion of population since the industrial revolution. People live longer. People living longer means having to provide for more people, for longer. That is a burden on economies as it has consolidated power into old money in a way we haven't seen since the era of monarchies.
People aren't having babies because they feel like they can't provide for those babies. You have several extremely disenfranchised generations on earth right now who mostly believe they'll never be able to afford the amenities they believe they need tonhave a functional healthy family, AKA a good paying job and a home. The kinds of people having multiple babies per household end up being religious (people who believe they must because God says so), the uneducated ("condoms don't work!" crowd), or immigrants (and honestly I don't even really understand why for that one, won't even lie.)
If people could afford the lifestyles of our boomer parents during the era they had us kids, you'd see a lot more people choosing to have children. Guarantee it.
I am not concerned about "falling birth rates." If a few generations go by where more people die off the planet (hopefully from natural causes) than are born into it, it'll eventually stabilize. The world will be a different looking place, but humanity isn't in risk of dying out due to people not fucking.
We have to address the societal reasons people say they aren't having kids, and if you ask the majority of college educated white Millenials (aka the people not having babies) why they aren't having kids, the overwhelming answer is "can't afford it" and "don't want to bring a child into this world in it's current state."
Sorry if this entire rant is somewhat tangential to the topic, but I feel like I need to point it out whenever I hear people like Elon Musk being "really concerned about birth rates."
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u/stubbornbodyproblem "" 20h ago
It’s entirely anecdotal, but I can confirm this in my own life. My wife and I share the work as much as we are able.
And she jumps me just about every chance she can and always have. By choice we only have 3 kids.
But I will concede all three of them are struggling to find partners that want what we have showed them and taught them to want. 2 girls, 1 boy. And they all struggle with the toxicity in our US culture.
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u/CrownLikeAGravestone 1d ago
While I trust that Goldin knows (far) more than me about the subject, I'm really struggling to connect these statistics to the world I see around me. My social circles tend very progressive and defying of gender roles - the men seem to do, as far as I can tell, a fairly equal portion of the domestic labour - and yet the only people I know who even remotely want children are either the few traditional types where the women carry an outsized burden, and literally one other woman (who happens to earn 3x the median wage).
Everyone else is disinterested in children at best. Everyone. Even us creaky old ancient folk who were born last millennium; this isn't some early-20s phenomenon where people might change their minds.
And it isn't the partitioning of home-making duties that people talk about when we discuss this, either. People talk about economics, about the environment, about politics - but primarily they just don't seem to want it. Even if you offered my social groups the opportunity to have an equally easy and secure life with added children I'm highly confident the prevailing response would be "...but why would I want that?".
Now, again, this is anecdotal and people who write peer-reviewed articles on the subject are better informed, but I wonder how exactly this disconnect has happened. Is it possible that places with better gender-balance in terms of domestic labour also give people a better sense of security? A sense of purpose, hope for the future, lessened life stressors - things that make it more likely for people to want altruistic things for their procreations? How much of this is truly a causative "men don't do the dishes" relationship?
And of course, there's the ever-present critique of these kinds of articles; simply telling men "not good enough" isn't going to change shit. I absolutely agree that domestic labour should be apportioned fairly without regard for outdated gender roles, but simply pointing at the fact it isn't is not so helpful. How do we actually incentivise that change, if we want it?