u/Brayden_709

I learned (or had my memory refreshed) when reading this article on Spiked, composed of selections from an interview with the demographer Stephen J Shaw of documentary Birth Gap.

You can watch the complete interview here.

I hope that the article (and the interview, and the documentary) is useful and enlightening to you, too.

A few choice quotes from the Spiked interview from Mr. Shaw:

>You can only be master of your own destiny if you’re fully informed of the realities behind the choices you’re making. That’s the heart of the problem. People don’t know the brevity of the fertility window. We are very good at teaching young people – rightly so – about how to avoid pregnancy at the wrong time. But we stop there. We don’t explain that there isn’t infinite time to make that call, and that this affects both men and women. Men seem to think they’ve got so much longer – which, technically, they do. But if they wait, they’ll still need to find a younger woman who they’re able to have children with.

>[...]

>When I ask British people at what age a childless woman might have a 50 per cent chance of ever becoming a mother, the answers I get are somewhere between 35 and 40. Actually, in the UK, it’s 28. In Japan it’s even lower, at just 26. I haven’t come across a nation where that age is more than 30. So people are really out of tune with biological reality. We simply haven’t given them the facts they need to make fully informed decisions.

>[...]

>In that sense, I look at today as ‘the good old days’. Right now, most of us are accustomed to having schools as part of our neighbourhoods – maybe even the same one we ourselves attended as children. If you take a school away from anywhere, the community around it collapses. Why? Because young parents, or potential parents, move to where there still is a school. And then they move again and again and again. What you’re left with are areas abundant in housing where nobody really wants to live, because there’s no community. The older people who remain there can’t afford to move, because the areas where the younger people are going – where the jobs are, where the schools are – are getting more and more expensive. So the idea that there will be some good things to come out of this, that you’ll be able to have ‘more space’, is wishful thinking. Parts of society will simply be left to decline. Buildings won’t be repaired, streets won’t be maintained and vermin will appear.

Shaw also mentions the decline of Detroit, as a possible model for a shrinking society. I am unconvinced, but within a decade we will have a larger variety of shrinking societies to choose and source data from, ranging from Japan to Spain to Thailand.

Two bits of data that Shaw also mentioned:

• the number of children born per mother is ~2.3 across decades
• the number of children born per American mother is actually increasing

Shaw is a demographic expert, and I am not: but even so, a casual (five minute) web search could not substantiate these claims. The data may well be out there, but expect to dig a bit to find it.

One truth that shines out: women need to know their actual fertility window, so they can make an informed decision should they desire marriage and children.

Also: you must have families with children, if you want a viable local community.

If you make giving birth a horrible experience, complete with abuse of authority, all to protect the profit margin, fewer people will choose to give birth.

And yes, this is about American hospitals.

>Again, what is so striking is that Talento’s daughter had a generally uncomplicated birth and a healthy baby, yet the experience was miserable for all concerned.

The reason, of course, is that Talento had the inside knowledge to understand the hidden (and not-so-hidden) financial incentives driving many of the hospital’s protocols — and the confidence to help her daughter push against them.

Both sides wanted a healthy mother and child. But the hospital preferred a speedy, highly medicalized (and not coincidentally more profitable) birth. The nurses refused to accept any challenge to their authority.

The result was a slow-motion disaster, even though nothing actually went wrong.

I know far too little about the American medical system to give good recommendations or a plan of action.

Even a system that provides comfortable, safe births at low prices has no guarantee of improving the birth rate.

South Korea, Norway, and Japan are great places to give birth... and all have noticeably lower fertility rates than the US.

But that does not justify the American horror show. At all.

Americans are capable of doing better.

This YouTube video, "Sex, Marriage, and Markets What’s Driving the Baby Bust" from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) approaches the issue from a somewhat different vector.

New News

Later in the video, the speakers (host Paul Mueller, and guests Jeff Degner and Aidan Grogan) note the rising costs — housing, but also food and schooling — that discourages American family formation (3:24). Naturally, the higher the cost of an action, the fewer will do that action.

But what caught my attention is the lack of an empirical tie between affordability/finances and declining birth rates. This could be understood intuitively - poorer nations have a higher birthrate than richer nations, and more poor families have children than rich families - but it's good to have some (more) data to back intuition.

From 35:01

>We want to bring down the cost of housing that control inflation and so forth to make it objectively, you know, more affordable for people to start families. Uh, which undoubtedly is a big problem right now. But even if that is achieved, you still have the problem of opportunity costs and the cultural shift away from pro-family and pro-natal attitudes. And that cannot come from government. And rich women tend to have fewer children than poor women. So kind of defeats the whole affordability, right? Seems doesn't seem to be economics related.

And and also Melissa Carney and a few other economists did a study where they looked at fertility patterns in the US on a state-by-state basis to see where fertility went down the most or where it dropped the most significantly. and they thought that there was no correlation between declining fragility and cost of living increases. So it has everything to do with people's mentality and not as much with cost of living, housing, etc. as as we would think.

Now that that they may be influential in a certain way and of course we should try to bring the cost of living down and really prioritize that, but that's not going to be a solution. nor are the various pro-natal policies that countries like Poland or Hungary or Scandinavian countries have implemented at best that can just lead to a very marginal increase in fertility. In some cases, they don't bring about any increase in fertility. And again, it's because the assumptions behind it, the presuppositions are misguided.

I think yeah, and maybe to push back a little bit here, I might call what you described there, I might call it the Keynesian curse. Keynes of course had the infamous line that "Well, inflation doesn't matter because in the long run we're all dead."

Um well that to me speaks to a cultural personal attitude around the future and it and it does then speak to family life. Children are a long-term investment. So why make it right? They are costly in a sense of dollars and cents but also in terms of time and the trade-offs involved.

Old News

Earlier in the video, the speakers agree that cultural shifts are the greatest factor in the declining birthrate, with two children now seen as the global idea (20:00). It should be noted that many people - majority, of adults now see children as a burden, not a blessing. (40:05) The costs are up-front and clear, while the rewards are vague, distant, and uncertain. (41:41)

As young women are now strongly leftist while young men are somewhat centre-right (12:52), young women are definitely less traditional, and less interested in family and children than young men.

Declining religious belief are also associated with the declining birthrate, and leftists as a rule are uninterested/hostile to such beliefs.

Those women who do have five or more children are quite religious, as Catherine Pakaluk discussed in in her book, "Hannah's Children" (28:28). Few women follow this road.

Post-Video Considerations

In addition to the relative lack of importance money has in deciding to form a family, the importance of young women and their hostility to family formation is worth noting.

In earlier posts, I disagreed with the belief that the lack of children can be tied on women. I still think so: compared to earlier generations, few young men are interested in sacrificing their lives to care for a wife and numerous children. They don't see a benefit to it... especially when factoring in the likelihood and costs of divorce, and losing access to children.

However, it would be wrong to hold women unaccountable, and only blame men. Many American women are either uninterested in, or openly hostile, to faith and family. Even those who are not ideologically committed to or sympathetic to the socialist/leftist project often place career first, family second (if ever). And the lesson of divorce taught many women that they cannot depend on a man to keep his marriage oath: an important factor that women must keep in mind.

Old Lessons

FIRST: Religious people who

• actually do love each other,
• love their children,
• are willing to sacrifice real material benefits today for greater but vague and uncertain benefits tomorrow,
• and keep their marriage oaths,

are the most likely people to shape the future.

SECOND: Money isn't as important as faith. Faith in God, faith in each other, faith that your children will be better and live better than you did.