I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend of falling birth rates and what, if anything, we can do to reverse it.
The birth rate is falling across the world, in both wealthy and developing nations, in societies that seemingly have little in common culturally or politically. If this trend continues, the global population will level out within a few decades and then start to shrink. If this is a problem we need to collectively address – and not everyone agrees that it is – then the first thing we need to do is to figure out the cause.
This column proposes one possible explanation, and a solution to go with it.
Within the last two decades, for the first time ever, humanity became a majority-urban species. But cities are crowded and expensive, and tens of millions of people around the world are struggling with the burden of sky-high housing prices. Could this also be the cause of our birth woes: people forgoing having kids just because they can’t afford enough space for a family? Would building more affordable housing increase the birth rate as well?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
In spread-out rural regions, land is cheap and there are few barriers to population growth. However, in an urban setting, space comes at a premium. If your apartment doesn’t have an extra bedroom, having kids requires moving to a bigger place. That can be a costly proposition, if it’s financially feasible at all.
The repercussions of super-expensive housing don’t stop there. It also makes it harder for young adults to move out from their parents’ houses, delaying them from starting families of their own. It causes a trickle-down effect that increases the prices of everything else, including school taxes and daycare. It forces even people who have homes to devote a greater and greater share of their budgets to upkeep, leaving less for everything else.
With the deck so heavily stacked against them, it’s no surprise that some people decide kids are a luxury that’s simply too expensive to afford.
Why would we want to raise the birth rate? The population is leveling off, and that’s a good thing, because we have enough resources for everyone currently alive to theoretically have a good standard of living, but that would no longer be the case if the population were much higher.
Brendan Rizzo, with the current birth rates the world population is predicted to keep rising for a few decades (due to old people living longer) and then to start dropping. So at some point we will want to raise birth rates, but maybe not yet.
There is one population I know of that raised its birth rates after a significant drop, and those are secular and other non-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. Ashkenazim were among the first populations in Europe to undergo a demographic transition (fast growth followed by fast drop in birth rates). 3 of my grandparents came from families with10+ kids (many of whom did not survive to adulthood). My grandparents and their siblings all had 0-3 kids each, with 0-1 being very common. Then of those who survived the Holocaust and other aspects of WWII and moved to Israel, 2-3 kids was the typical number, continuing to the next generation. Families of 3 kids are very common among secular Jewish Israelis (religious Jews are somewhere in the 5-7 range with a long tail to that distribution). These are urban people, living in a pretty densely populated country with fast rising cost of living, including housing prices.
What makes a difference in Israel, IMO is a sense of optimism and purpose. These have been eroding in recent years, so we’ll see how this develops.
There are lots of good reasons for a falling birth rate. Surviving is less labor intensive so you don’t need 12 kids to do the work that a pre-industrial life required, or that an industrial, robot-dependent economy can support; most of the kids you do have will not die before they’re 5; women are no longer chattel in most places and more can choose not to be baby factories, and they have the technology to realize that choice even in developing countries; lots of people just find they enjoy being childless, and don’t have to have children.
The magats and christofascists think Gilead is the answer to increasing their desired populations, so we have that to look forward to. Japan is still trying to figure it out. Adequate and affordable child-care options would be a big component of any voluntary solution (unless you’re in the Gilead camp). Same for housing.
Right now though, most countries need to keep gradually decreasing their populations. About the only places that are really keen on a boom are countries worried they won’t have enough fodder for their military. That’s generally the biggest motivator for government involvement like baby bonuses and other child-bearing incentives. The Orange House has already mused about this out loud, but they won’t implement any ideas until they can figure out how to make sure that only more white babies are born.
@Ridana, the idiot in the White House was considering a one-time bonus of $1k per baby born at the same time he’s threatening funding cuts for daycare and early learning. Then there are the expected cuts to health insurance at a time when a simple, uncomplicated birth runs $40k. Anecdotally, the local news ran a scam alert on cheap infant carseats and how they’re most likely unsafe, and showed various models of approved carseats that are going for $400 and up. Only idiots who can’t do math would think the $1k payment would be worth it.
Speaking of idiots who can’t do math, a coworker was ranting about a neighbor who adopted three school-aged children (part of a family group)–he insisted “She’s only doing it for the money she can deduct from her taxes at the end of the year.” Adoption–besides being a huge sink of time and paperwork–can end up costing $50k/child. But the costs don’t end at adoption–you still have to feed and clothe them and pay for their health and dental insurance and if you love them, pay for sports clubs or whatever else they’re interested in. The $3k (or whatever it is now) child deduction on taxes doesn’t even come close to matching what parents spend on their children in a year, much less cover the cost of adopting them.
@Adam, my husband posted a comment the other day that never showed up and he said to ask you about it. He used my laptop because it was up and running when he read whatever it was you posted.
Did he comment under the name M’thew? It got held up in moderation, but I approved it.
Nope. I spoke with him and he said he had a lot of links to back up his assertions. Maybe that ran afoul of the software?
Also, just another thought on population: in the USA’s economic heyday of the 1950s, the country (and the world) had about half the population it does now. Also in the USA, there was a religious push starting in the 1980s for the fundagelicals to go full “quiverfull” (describing a man’s children as righteous arrows in his quiver that would take over the world) and have 10, 15, 20 kids–whatever the woman’s body could bear before breaking down. Famously, Andrea Yates’ husband kept impregnating her despite doctors’ orders not to since every pregnancy damaged her mental health and made her psychoses even worse. Despite that, she had 6 kids in 8 years and her mind snapped and she drowned them all in the bathtub believing she was saving them from going to hell. Less horrifically, there was a cable channel in the US showing religious clown car families, and the formula seemed to be that if a family hit 10 kids, they’d get their own tv show.
I don’t see any other comments that got held in the moderation queue. Sorry about that! I wish I knew what happened.
Also, sorry–got embroiled in the “why didn’t my comment post?” discussion and didn’t finish my thought, which is:
At least in the United States (and from what I read, Japan), raising children who are nurtured and educated to self-sufficiency is a very expensive thing to do, and the primary responsibility for this usually falls to a mother who’s also working fulltime and trying to juggle housework and other obligations often including care of elderly/infirm parents…and all signs point to this misadministration making the task so much harder with funding cuts. In this scenario, anyone who’s on the fence about having children will likely fall on the side of not having them. I don’t think a dip in population is necessarily a bad thing because I’m pretty sure we’re at or just over carrying capacity worldwide.
Israel? Seems to me like the secular and modern-religious population is trying to compete with the ultra-Orthodox population. The ultra-Orthodox men get exemptions from military service to study Jewish religious lore, and secular Jews often resent that. These religious-lore students claim that their studies are an important part of defending the State of Israel, but that makes it seems like these men are a brigade of sorcerers.
The only reason why a declining birth rate is seen as a “problem” in the developed world is that bigots/nationalists want an alternative to immigration. Immigration is only way these nations keep their populations stable while maintaining a thriving economy and political freedoms.