Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.

Agreed with all of this but,

"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"

That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.

There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.

You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.

In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.

In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.

house prices

It's worth remembering that schools in American farming regions would shut down during planting and harvest seasons just 100 years ago.

Large families were your source of farm labor.

Appreciate you putting it bluntly.

I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.

You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.

Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.

I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.

Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.

Well put. Adding that for those who are looking to have kids, there are generational considerations. It's not only the parents wanting the middle-class life for themselves, but it's also understanding that raising a child with that level of access to resources is what ideally sets the child up for a better life onward. The impact is exponential down the line, and no one wants to be responsible for a move in the opposite direction generationally.

If you are referring to the US in your unsupported decline assertion the numbers don't support what you are saying (I disagree the US is more in decline than it was in the 70s/80s. It has different structural problems today, like housing and wealth concentration, but that isn't the same thing).

There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.

IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.

Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.

People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security; this used to be done by the parents rejecting marriages that didn't bring enough dowry and extreme punishment for extra-marital relationships.

Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.

(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)

It's not just women either. The older the father is the more you get risks for certain things like mental illness in the child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect

No need to gender this, and I feel like people would be more receptive to the issue if it wasn't. Everybody ages: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12801554/

True - but, honest question that I've always wondered: Do we know the degree of this problem as it relates to whether or not people have kids? I.e. yes, it takes longer to get pregnant, but how much less likely does it become to get pregnant at all?

> was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over

When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.

What are these European student debts you speak of, outside of the UK (which emphatically does not want to be considered part of Europe)?

Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.

The implication of "and it turns out..." is that all else is equal, but clearly it's not. Would women still choose to have babies if they didn't have to work also? I admit that it's basically moot - we can't seem to figure out how to have a society where both members of a couple are free to choose whether or not to work. I'm only pointing out that this trend doesn't mean what you're implying about women's desires.

While none of this is wrong, men are also choosing not to have babies, which points to a broader root cause.

Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc.

The incentives just aren't there.

> like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?

It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.

Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.

In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.

Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents.

I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.

For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.

We spent decades fighting teen pregnancy for this?

Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear.

Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.

Right train of thought, but as others have pointed out, this is spitting on a fire.

in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough.

Right why would we change the behavior that got us here? Just provide some incentives and problem solved right?

How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?

More like guaranteed housing because not even having a college degree is a sufficient condition to enter the middle class in this day and age.

This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.

Phone + PC/TV probably takes an hour or two of people their day on average. If they didn't have access to it I assume they'd be meeting up with other people out of boredom and that'd lead to sex, doesn't seem too strange.

Or you spend all your time on your phone and can't understand why you're just not getting ahead in life.

In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it.

Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.

This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.

Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society

You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.

The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.

I have more energy in my 30s than my 20s

> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.

Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.

Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.

Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.

Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.

We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.

That sounds more like "hormone-driven people don't know why they had children".

Eh, that argument works on any claim and is nonfalsifiable-ish, so I think it can be ignored.

People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.

If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.

both points are fair, but operate at different levels. the former: willpower. the latter: constraints.

and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.

yeah make sense, we do things, rationalize them later, i get it, i certainly am sensitive to it.

People are very conscious that a child costs a lot to raise and the reality is usually worse than their estimates. They know children will impact their career and promotion opportunities, so a lower expected income just when they need it more. They know they no longer live next to their parents so the support structure they have in place is flimsy.

You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.

Okay

It's unclear what you're saying. Obviously it's not hedonistic to "want" those things, as you say. You might use the term if they try to have their cake and eat it too, irresponsibly.

Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).

And do you think this is bad?

The degeneracy of these millennials who want to maintain healthy sleep habits...

>The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free".

Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.

Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.

My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.

it's more like people are forced to move where the jobs are. mobility is demanded by the industry.

I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.

Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.

So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.

Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.

Many people think a well manicured lawn sprayed with pesticides is preferable to local wildflowers and shrubs.

They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.

SamPatt, it isn't necessarily individuals making individual decisions. Yeah, very few supervillains.

But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?

both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?

Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).

And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.

We live in a blessed window.

People shutting down efforts to transition from fossil fuels because they can make more money from fossil fuels and will be dead before they experience any of the consequences are the typical example.

It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock.

They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.

I doubt anybody wants to produce more and more people. Most predictions for total population size I have seen are rather asymptotic.

We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".

>in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children,

huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)

In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.

Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.

Probably pretty obvious why they're saying so, given the fresh throwaway account.

University students are predominantly female in Israel as in North America, so female education isn't a differentiator for fertility rate.

I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.

And those in turn might not want to be here themselves and when given the choice decide to break the chain.

In surveys, Orthodox Jewish women rate their happiness with life higher than secular women. You could argue that this is subjective, but I think you would find the same if you look at other derived markers, like substance abuse, suicide, etc.

There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.

The 42.7M tourists that went there in 2025 just enjoyed seeing the incredible decay of a dying country, a morbid fascination or sorts. /s (obviously)

Japan is not without problems related to a shrinking population i.e. https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/21/japans-immigration-poli...

but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.

> if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down

Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.

This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.

https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.

(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)

> What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?

300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.

It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.

But they have some ideea how many people need to work to make them that much money.

Depends what we mean by freeze up. Revolutions usually mean some part of the elite class gets killed or exiled. Happens all the time.

> more taxes are needed

Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.

There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.

When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.

Here is what it actually means.

When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?

When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.

This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?

History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.

Honestly great question. I think of it as:

I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.

I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.

> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline

> Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.

Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.

With renewables and nuclear we have basically unlimited energy, which can solve a lot of resource related issues.

What are you concerned we would run out of?

Yeah, see those millions laid of last 5-10 years, everyone got better, more fulfilling jobs. Companies are falling over each other with ever more outrageous perks and salaries. Excellent healthcare, plentiful housing, unlimited education opportunities, nothing is scarce any more.

Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.

When people say "people can't afford homes now" your referring to places like NY, MA, and CA where people can't afford homes because the local governments have made it basically impossible to build to match the demand in the areas? I.e. Massachusetts despite being one of the most desirable places to live ranks 50th in housing production per capita.

You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?

> how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million

You don't. You only sell 50 million.

> this leads to layoffs

Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.

> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services

Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.

> most stocks will tank

By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.

Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.

Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.

The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.

A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.

The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.

Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)

I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens).

If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.

If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.

But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.

Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.

Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.

Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.

The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.

That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year? Better to spend it while it’s whole.

That changes future value calculations, too.

These are things not to mess with lightly.

Exiting the workforce for a decade (Replacement fertility rate is 2.1 implying some people will have 3 kids, spaced 2 years apart plus 5 years of child-rearing until kindergarten) has an opportunity cost that is potentially in the millions of dollars, depending on the industry, and the time costs of child rearing doesn't suddenly end at 5 either.

I wish society had taxed me (desired path zero children) more in some way that would have routed the resources to my friend who would have wanted to start having kids earlier and have more. Instead, the combination of regional housing crisis with contemporary parenting standards meant she and her husband waited for career progression to have the money for the space to start.

> Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice.

Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?

Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?

As per usual arrangement, the internet can't stand a nuanced opinion, but instead jumps straight to extreme conclusions. Nowhere did I say anything about wallowing in poverty.

What overpopulation?

You're right. It insults neanderthals, who we are learning were surprisingly advanced.

I live somewhere with two nines of utility power reliability, I mention that to say everybody's backup (or lack thereof) is well tested. I've got UPSes on most of my computers and a standby generator that pops on after about 10 seconds. DSL from my ILEC has zero backup power; sync drops when the power drops. I don't know about the cable. Municipal fiber doesn't drop so far, but I haven't had a long outage since I got it; my ISP has a generator where they route customer packets. We get cell coverage for about 4-8 hours, depending on which network you're on and if the outage started overnight coverage usually lasts until people wake up.

After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.

My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless.

I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.

Brave up, get skilled there's plenty of game out there.