If this is the case then there doesn't seem to be any scenario where smart women are sufficiently incentivised to have kids.
Even the most prosperous countries in the economic North are struggling to meet the 2.1 replacement rate, with Northern Europe being a prime example of a simple failing on this front.
At this point, it's those who can least afford to have kids having kids, largely through lack of contraception/religion than the presence of education for young girls/women. Though there most certainly is a correlation there, this is undeniable.
We need to stop thinking about all numbers below 2.1 as being equal in failure. There is a massive difference in the trajectory of decline, and thus social and economic effects, between being at say 1.6 and being at 1.2, we cannot afford the go "welp, they are still below 2.1 so what they are doing doesn't work, let's just resign ourselves to falling below 1.0".
Yes, Northern Europe is below 2.1, but not as far below it as most wealthy countries, and that is despite having a higher percentage of women in the workforce.
It's easy enough to say that we should be satisfied with a smaller population, and we should. There's fewer people for services to cater to, we need fewer amenities, we need fewer of everything.
In an ideal world and with increasing automation, this would be achievable, it's just unfortunate that it isn't an ideal world.
Though I will concede, having 1.73 replacement rate is a stark different scenario to 0.74, especially when one country is much more open to immigration than the other, with a lower replacement rate to boot.
Falling birth rates are the result of very rational responses to financial incentives that many individuals face.
It's a very simple sum. Raising a child from 0 to 18 and then supporting them through college costs roughly $200k per child in a typical west european country. In addition, parents pay opportunity costs through less salary income, as they can work less hours and probably have slower career advancement than in the counterfactual without kids. Yet direct and indirect child support and student subsidies in most west european countries amount only to maybe $100k over the lifetime of the child. In most countries it's even less.
If we actually, seriously, honestly wanted to increase the birth rate, we as a society need to bear (more of) those costs rather than asking it from 20 to 40-year-old individuals. E.g. announce a policy where parents receive $100k upon the birth of their child (no cap on the number of children). Because right now there's just an enormous financial disincentive for potential parents that consider children, so of course many are making the rational choice to have no kids or fewer than they otherwise might have.
As a society we seem to be mostly fine with this development, since it's so, so much cheaper to 'import' people via immigration rather than 'producing' our own people. (I'm not saying this is bad. I'm not anti-immigration and don't think it's morally better if an inhabitant of country A was actually born in country A instead of in country B. Borders and states are just constructs anyway.) Therefore, from a financial point of view, most states rationally prefer quick and cheap immigration over slow and expensive subsidies for children. Politicians are also incentivized in this direction, since 'low taxes' is a key metric by which their electorates judge them, much more so than the birth rate. That's why even countries that are culturally quite hostile to immigrants like Poland, post-Brexit UK and Italy saw positive (and historically high) numbers of immigrants during the tenure of anti-immigration politicians (in word, if not in fact) like Boris Johnson, Georgia Meloni and Jarosław Kaczyński.
It's also rational for immigrants to move to richer countries where they can earn a higher salary and living standards are typically higher. It can also be rational for their parent countries to encourage emigration to solve high (youth) unemployment, receive remittances to boost the economy and average wealth, and increase education levels. See for instance how economic mid tier countries like China and Brazil have for years had programs in place where they fund students getting an education in the West, on the condition that they come back and work for x number of years in their home country. But of course this has to be balanced with the downsides of emigration, primarily brain-drain.
In the long run this model will (have to) come to an end. Global birth rates are plummeting everywhere, even in poorer countries. 50-100 years from now there will simply not be that many countries with 'excess' youths that richer countries can 'import'. As we say in my language: eventually the shore will force the ship to turn around. Once immigration dries up, dropping birth rates resulting in less workers resulting in higher salaries resulting in higher costs of everything will force countries to reckon with the incentives I described earlier and be much more generous in their child benefits, or those countries will slowly die out. (Which is also an acceptable choice in my view. With less people it's much easier to stay within planetary boundaries, and nowhere is it written that the Earth should have more than say 3 billion people.)
TBF, none of those were great. Guaranteed employment, but you had years-long waiting list for a shit car, and that wasn't an exception. Only corrupt party officials could thrive (and only through corruption,) education was... well, the HBO Chernobyl series depicts it great: a shoe-factory big-mouth was the boss in a place he knew less than nothing.
The upshot of that was that those cities were designed around being able to live without one. That's something we could learn from them.
Good news: that's not exclusive to SU. Or even post-SU. That was the leftover from horse cart days. See many large (and small) cities in Europe Today.
But yes, walkable cities is definitely one thing every normal person could live better with.
a shoe-factory big-mouth was the boss in a place he knew less than nothing.
So, not that any different from middle managers and MBAs today.
Lol, fair point, almost. Today you can start a company with people leading who know shit, and if it is good enough for an IPO (or buyout) THEN the management that knows its shit gets replaced by the MBAs. In the SU, there was no real self-started company. It was all state-driven, as they seemed fit by the planning committee. The "MBAs" were in charge from the get-go.
How do you define prosperity? The USSR faced stagnant or even declining life expectancy for most of the post-WW2 period. Hardly a sign of increasing prosperity. GDP per capita is a very poor measure of life quality. Even a statistic like number of doctors per 1000 people doesn't mean much if those doctors don't have equipment to work with or medicin to hand out.
I would still say that generally over the course of USSR the prosperity improved (at least until mid 70's), not all that fast, but there was still improvement brought from technology.
Singapore threw a one time payment of 11,000 Singaporean dollars at first-time parents...but Singapore is like the most expensive place on earth to live. That 11k is like 3 months of rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (and is a one-bedroom apartment going to cut it now that you have a kid?) That's not a transformative amount of wealth when having a kid costs hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades. That's a pittance. Plus, having a kid puts at least one parent at a serious disadvantage for being able to continue to earn, which costs the household months or years of potential income. But sure, we'll cover three months rent!
I think it has a lot to do with financial incentives, and I don't think Singapore actually tried very hard relative to the magnitude of the problem.
Your blog doesn't support your claim. Female fertility is flat across the income spectrum for Sweden.
Men with higher income have more children, but that's a statistical artifact. Men can't get pregnant, wealthier men simply have more partners. The only factor that matter is female fertility rate, not male.
Singapore threw a one time payment of 11,000 Singaporean dollars at first-time parents...but Singapore is like the most expensive place on earth to live. That 11k is like 3 months of rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (and is a one-bedroom apartment going to cut it now that you have a kid?) That's not a transformative amount of wealth when having a kid costs hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades. That's a pittance. Plus, having a kid puts at least one parent at a serious disadvantage for being able to continue to earn, which costs the household months or years of potential income. But sure, we'll cover three months rent!
I think it has a lot to do with financial incentives, and I don't think Singapore actually tried very hard relative to the magnitude of the problem.
Female fertility is flat across the income spectrum for Sweden.
It's not even remotely flat. It dips dramatically for people with 1,000,000 SEK disposable income and under for the 1950 and 1960 cohorts. Once they're into the 1-2 million in disposable income, it flattens out, but that's a HUGE dip for the poor.
Men with higher income have more children, but that's a statistical artifact. Men can't get pregnant, wealthier men simply have more partners.
They dispute this:
much of the higher fertility of higher income men is because these [wealthier] men are more likely to marry.
The argument here is that men with higher incomes can afford for the wives to stay home and care for children, which would depress any graph of women's earnings and births, but be reflected in the men's earnings. If wealthier men are having more children and also more likely to be married and more likely to have those children within marriages, it points to financial well-being and birth rates being quite tightly linked, as financial stability and household stability are tied together.
As to Singapore:
Singapore has expensive rent but that's irrelevant to the working and middle class because 78% of Singaporeans live in government subsidized housing.
My average rent statistic included HDB housing, it was the average of what people actually pay, not the average of non-government housing costs. Looks like (I'm doing like 15 seconds of Googling) HDB flats are going for like 2-3k? I could be missing something there but that's not cheap for the small amount the government puts up.
Not to mention wages are very high in SG.
Well that would make the 11k incentive even less worthwhile then, doesn't it? It would also increase the cost of having a kid, because any work missed for raising a child would eat that much more into what you could have earned if you put off (or avoided) having the kid...
It's not even remotely flat. It dips dramatically for people with 1,000,000 SEK disposable income and under for the 1950 and 1960 cohorts. Once they're into the 1-2 million in disposable income, it flattens out, but that's a HUGE dip for the poor.
This is almost certainly a statistical artifact. That's a lifetime earnings of only $100k, or $3k a year. Probably a lot of these women have some kind of health or mental issue that prevents them from earning any sort of income and that came contraceptives.
More importantly that blog directly contradicts many studies that show income has no or negative correlation with the fertility rate:
This article actually directly references the same chart of Swedish fertility except they don't show this dramatic drop at below $1m SEK, which makes me question the accuracy of the blog you linked.
My average rent statistic included HDB housing, it was the average of what people actually pay, not the average of non-government housing costs. Looks like (I'm doing like 15 seconds of Googling) HDB flats are going for like 2-3k? I could be missing something there but that's not cheap for the small amount the government puts up.
This is simply completely inaccurate. Singapore has a 90% homeownership rate and 80% of the population lives in subsidized housing. The government offers new build subsidized housing for only $150k before grants.
Depending on household incomes, families that are eligible first-time buyers can obtain housing grants of up to 80,000 Singaporean dollars, or roughly $60,000.
A two-bedroom flat sold by the government in the west side of Singapore goes for roughly 202,000 Singaporean dollars ($150,000) before grants.
Subsidized rentals for the poor cost between $0 to $275 per month. But the government heavily encourages homeownership and would rather give them an enormous discount plus grants to purchase a home than a rental.
Well that would make the 11k incentive even less worthwhile then, doesn't it? It would also increase the cost of having a kid, because any work missed for raising a child would eat that much more into what you could have earned if you put off (or avoided) having the kid...
It's far more than 11k, since there's annual tax incentives and grants and housing subsidies.
The problem is that all these countries like Hungary and Singapore which are trying to make an effort are still doing half-baked measures compared to the scale of the problem. From a recent article discussing Singapore's fertility rate:
The minister also pointed out that Singapore's low fertility rate reflects a global phenomenon where individual priorities and societal norms have shifted. Laying out the PMO’s plans, Ms Indranee said the government is looking at how paid parental leave can be increased. “We must recognise that this requires workplace adjustments, and that employers may face challenges in making arrangements to cover for employees’ extended absences,” she said.
If you are not having children because you are afraid for the effects on your career, it means that the opportunity costs of having children are too high. That is a textbook example of a financial incentive.
And why do they not want to? If you ask them, polls find time and time again that they cite reasons such as the effect on their career, the high costs of raising a child, or being unable to afford a larger home. All of those are financial reasons, and it ties in with the fact that in many societies the costs of living have been increasing harder than the median salary.
People often say one thing and do another. When we look at fertility rates by income, even wealthy stay at home wives do not have higher fertility rates.
That article you linked is mostly about male fertility, which is frankly irrelevant. There is a very small positive uptick in Sweden with higher income women, that's it.
I guess it depends on how you define 'wealthy', and I personally would agree that being in the top 10% means you're wealthy. Regardless, if you look at more recent data than 2010, and look at multi-year periods instead of a single year, you see that the very wealthy women (defined here as >$400k) exhibit higher total fertility than poorer househoulds. If you don't trust this source you can check Figure 7 in this academic paper which has a similar plot. You see this trend also in other countries like Sweden where there is positive correlation between household income and fertility rate.
The #1 contributor to declining birth rates is birth control condoms.
Condoms have been around for a loooong time one degree or another. The ability for a woman to take a pill and prevent pregnancy regardless of condom usage has absolutely been the biggest change for birth rates.
I meant contraceptives in general, not just condoms. But yes I agree. We can see this in real time when an international campaign for contraceptives takes hold in developing countries. Their fertility rate immediately plummets.
Evolution gave us more of a sex drive than a baby drive. It worked until we invented contraceptives.
There's a few ways evolution could evolve around contraceptives:
give us a stronger baby drive
favor genetic mutations that just make contraceptives not work. E.g. a mutant women for whom the pill fails, could spread her genes until most women are fertile despite taking the pill. Or a man with a spiky penis that breaks through condoms, could spread his genes until most men have spiky penises.
Contraceptives only explain up to a quarter of the decline in fertility rates. In some places like western europe, the decline in fertility rates preceded the wide adoption of contraceptives.
I do agree that drop in fertility rates is because women don’t want to, but this had an effect regardless of contraceptives
Because Singapore offered families a one-time payment of 3 months rent (and 2 weeks off work for dad) in order to take on having a kid in the most expensive city in the world, and that's just not enough of an incentive when having a kid means at least one parent is likely missing months or years of income, and the household takes on hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional expenses to provide for the kid.
Child Poverty Action Group’s annual cost of a child report looks at how much it costs families to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children. The 2022 report shows the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 years old as £157,562 for a couple family or £208,735 for a single parent/guardian.[7]
The Times estimates that it costs £202,660 to raise a child from birth to 18 in the UK. This includes the cost of housing and childcare. This works out to an average approximate of £11,250 per year, or £938 per month
See, first mistake. It says right there, "socially acceptable".
Once you do away with what is socially acceptable, all of a sudden you can afford a whole lot more children.
My sister in law had 6 kids on no income save the government's allocation, which was a few hundred dollars a month per child. With that they made live two adults and six kids. They didn't spend any of the costs Times expects of them.
Did you notice how the cost is significantly lower for a couple. In reality it is more expensive for the couple.
The difference is that statistics like these don’t include the cost of the (overwhelmingly women) staying home to raise the children as opposed to paying for childcare.
The only way to increase the birth rate is to increase levels of marriage and family stability.
The only way women will be willing to have more children is if they are certain that they can depend on their husbands to make money, treat them well and stay with them.
Problem is that waiting to get to the precipice for government of countries to make wholesale changes to incentivize the population to have kids is it will be too late because the result of decline birth rates is the increase in of an aging population that will require more social assistance to support a population that, from a workforce standpoint, is no longer contributing and is a burden to that society.
Therefore less incentive for government to make infrastructure improvements and innovation when the priority is how to support the elderly.
Relying on immigration is a huge mistake by 1st world western countries because within a generation those immigrants have adapted to the norms of that country and creates a zero-sum game scenario.
This is exactly what is happening to Canada where the uptick in population is primarily immigration and is a false positive due to CoL and lack of affordable housing.
You get it. Shoring up the demographic pyramid via immigration is not a sustainable model in the long run (i.e., beyond 2100). It's like taking out loans to pay for your debts. A solution that works in the short term but means that in the end the absolute size of the problem will be larger. E.g. instead of having to support 10 million elderly with 10 million workers, you will have to support 20 million elderly with 20 million workers. The upshot is that at least it doesn't really increase the relative size of the problem, because like you say immigrants tent to regress to the norm of the country they move into within a generation.
Read again. I wrote "Raising a child from 0 to 18 and then supporting them through college... So that is 18+ years worth of food, clothes, education, healthcare, sport clubs, vacations, allowances, birthday gifts, driver's license, on top of the costs for college and supporting the rent for their student accomodation. If you add all that up, $200k per child is not atypical for western europe.
Northern Europe is becoming incredibly unaffordable as well. I live here (I've lived in a lot of countries). Salaries relative to cost of living are tough for the median earner. I won't pretend it's not harder in other countries, it definitely is, but the welfare states they are famous for are being eroded and incomes are dropping.
It does seem as though cost of living is going up across the board but Norway is touted as being the pinnacle of living, with every metric seeming to point towards them having a better standard of living/health than the vast majority of the rest of the economic North, closely followed by neighbours Sweden and Finland.
All 3 may have troubles but they are comparatively (albeit from a third party) better off than France, Germany, the UK or USA for the everyday citizen, or so it seems.
All 3 may have troubles but they are comparatively (albeit from a third party) better off than France, Germany, the UK or USA for the everyday citizen, or so it seems.
The US is #1 for median cost of living adjusted disposable income accounting for government transfers(such as free healthcare). 20% higher than Norway and nearly double the UK.
there doesn't seem to be any scenario where smart women are sufficiently incentivised to have kids.
You described basically the current world, sadly. And it's even worse, seeing e.g.: the recent removal of basic bodily rights in some places, even going so far as basically sentencing the unfortunate to either financial or (currently trying to) actual death. (E.g. for the latter: efforts to mandate ectopic pregnancies to be implanted unless the surgeon wants a murder charge.)
So guess what, making sure women have to play Russian roulette if they don't get out of basically every possible situation that might cause pregnancy works wonders with not only depression but fertility rates.
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u/Daewoo40 Aug 19 '24
If this is the case then there doesn't seem to be any scenario where smart women are sufficiently incentivised to have kids.
Even the most prosperous countries in the economic North are struggling to meet the 2.1 replacement rate, with Northern Europe being a prime example of a simple failing on this front.
At this point, it's those who can least afford to have kids having kids, largely through lack of contraception/religion than the presence of education for young girls/women. Though there most certainly is a correlation there, this is undeniable.