fredrikholm
today at 10:19 AM
> Everybody is asking why birth rates plummet. It’s simple. Having a family costs a fuckton of money.
It's a factor, it's not the only factor.
Decrease in teenage pregnancies, decrease in alcohol consumption, contraception and day after pills, higher levels of education, less socialized culture, less generational housing etc.
Having a child is more than often a deliberate, calculated decision that is made by adults whereas in the old world pregnancies happened left and right with little to say about it. Support systems existed because the problem was pervasive. Now the problem is generally gone, and the support systems thereafter.
No country has managed to reverse the trend of declining birth rates. The better quality of life people have, the fewer children people tend to have.
It's not just about who does and who doesn't have children, it's also how many children per family. 1-2 children is the new normal. My grandpa was #7.
> No country has managed to reverse the trend of declining birth rates.
Perhaps we can learn from the past? Birthrates between the world wars were below replacement level in much of the western world. Then the trend reversed for a while.
Question is why was this the case? I feel a natural explanation is it's a reaction to there being less people around on account of the huge number of deaths, in which case there's probably little reason to worry: if birth rate increases as population drops then the system should tend to equalise itself. If it's something else related to a gigantic war specifically then it's a bit less certain (one very important question is was the growth just a displacement in time from all the couples who could not have a child during the war but now can?).
woodpanel
today at 10:56 AM
> No country has managed to reverse the trend of declining birth rate
May I point you to the State of Israel? Its TFR sits at 3.
And if we really want to be nitpicky, and concentrating on the "reverse"-part of your statement, then even Balkan countries shine, as they literally managed to reverse the trend.
fredrikholm
today at 11:17 AM
> And if we really want to be nitpicky, and concentrating on the "reverse"-part of your statement, then even Balkan countries shine, as they literally managed to reverse the trend.
That same bump is now reversing and the general trend of depopulation continues to accelerate. IIRC Bosnia has the lowest birth rates in all of Europe.
I appreciate the push back; I was overly confident in that statement. I do think however that it's correct to state that the slow trend across all developed countries could be summarized as "aggressively downwards".
Israel is literally the one exception.