r/pronatalism

>Stern and colleagues compared single people and partnered individuals on life satisfaction ratings and the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).

>The study used a survey of more than 77,000 Europeans over the age of 50 and was the first of its kind to look across cultures and at people who had been single their entire lives. The findings reveal that, in addition to lower life satisfaction scores, lifelong singles are less extroverted, less conscientious, and less open to experience, compared to partnered people.

>For families considering relocating for work or couples planning to welcome their first child, the study highlights critical factors for judging a city's "lifestyle fit" beyond mere proximity to the office:

>The mobility-cost trade-off: Parents routinely prioritize living near essential services like schools and health care, even if it forces them into a longer work commute. This is a trade-off families must weigh consciously.

>City-specific "friendliness": Cities possess distinct structural personalities. New York and Chicago tend to support parents better based on the study's metrics, whereas Houston and Virginia Beach are highly favorable for single individuals.

A summary:

"Money & Macro" (economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort) interviews Prof. Charles Goodhart, who argues that global demographic aging is ending a decades-long era of cheap labor, low inflation, and low interest rates. According to his thesis, "The Great Demographic Reversal," a shrinking global workforce will shift bargaining power back to workers, driving up wages and creating permanent structural inflation. As central banks raise interest rates to combat this inflation, heavily indebted governments and economies will face severe financial strain. Climate change and wars add to the difficulty.

To add: European states ofc have their own difficulties, as pay-as-you-go pension systems are prevalent.

>Why does getting by on one income feel so impossible?

>“Nothing is stopping a typical married American couple from accepting 1960s material conditions in exchange for one parent being a full-time homemaker,” Yglesias argues. Even after adjusting for inflation, he calculates that a single male earner today still makes more than men made in the 1970s. “The issue is that living that lifestyle—never taking plane trips for vacation, rarely dining out, having a small house—would mean living like a poor person by today’s standards.”

>In other words, our shared definition of the good life has risen proportionate to our collective wealth. Everyone is richer than people used to be, which has made today’s higher standards the norm. The hitch is that our new, higher standards almost certainly require that most families rely on two full-time workers or be relatively “poor,” and “people don’t want to do that.” In fact, this really turns out to be true. 

The first mayor religion already shrinks because of low birth rates.

>In Finland, beginning in 2011, individuals in a cohabiting partnership that last longer than 5 years or who have a child with their cohabiting partner have the right to demand financial compensation for unpaid household work, similar to the laws allowing married couples in a divorce to do so.

>My analysis for the CSJ estimates that the Finnish reform reduced the number of couples marrying and reduced the number of couples cohabiting, while also reducing fertility. Making cohabitation more like marriage, especially for cohabiting parents, resulted in a broad-spectrum shift away from family life. Some people used the strengthened cohabitation rules as a replacement for marriage, some cohabiters avoided having kids to evade those rules, and some people were scared away from moving in together at all.

It's sobering that sometimes laws created to protect people have major unintended consequences

For discussions specifically focused on women, feminism, fertility, and pronatalism, check out r/NatalistWomen.

It's a good complement to this subreddit, especially for conversations about women's experiences and perspectives on family formation and fertility.

Relevant discussions can also be crossposted between the communities!

We will be highlighting a few related communities over the next few days. If you'd like us to spotlight yours, please message us!

Number of children	1 FT + 1 not working	1 FT + 1 PT	Both FT
1 child	52.5%	52.4%	60.9%
2 children	38.0%	41.5%	34.7%
3 children	8.3%	5.6%	4.4%
4+ children	1.2%	0.5%	0.0%

I thought the economic makeup of households versus the number of children was interesting data.

>Paying a $75,000 baby bonus to every baby born in America would cost $250-$300 billion/yr, a pretty huge financial commitment.

>Can we create big bonuses without ... problems?

>The answer is yes. At the Institute for Family Studies, we have spent the last year and more quietly working with partners in Finland to develop a bleeding-edge baby bonus proposal.

>The basic idea is simple: instead of paying a baby bonus for current kids from current tax revenues, on a constant tax-and-transfer treadmill, instead, we can use current tax revenues to make productive investments to pay for a much more lucrative future baby bonus. Instead of fighting against market forces driving low fertility, we propose embracing the market and creating an actuarially-sound, zero-unfunded obligation, long-run-zero-cost investment program. Too good to be true? Let’s work through it.

...

>Exact effects will vary, but our Finnish partners used the best available evidence and a very sophisticated modeling approach, and found that a benefit rather like the one we propose would boost Finnish fertility practically all the way to replacement rate

I have a used copy of "Atlas of World Population History," published by Penguin in 1975, written by an Oxford professor and a historian. It gives historical population figures (estimates mostly of course) for most countries in the world from ancient times to 1975 and then a guess for 2000.

The interesting part is the final section about the world as a whole. It talks about S-curves and declining rates of fertility due to modernity, and then write one paragraph about trends beyond 2000, something it does not do for any countries.

They think humanity will choose "quality over quantity":

"Our guess is that instead of moving further towards a theoretical limit - which is somewhere around 20 billion - the human population, on this Earth at least, will never approach closer to it than the 21st century level of between 8 and 9 billion."

It's rare, I think, to encounter population forecasts made in the midst of concern about overpopulation which under-estimate where we end up, since we're already between 8 and 9 billion and still growing at a fair clip.

The book says nothing that I can find about the possibility of declining global population. The assumption is that we'll level off somewhere and then stay there unless there's some catastrophe.

Climate change is probably one of the most discussed topics of our time. A global study shows that 60% of young people (16 to 25 years old) are very concerned about climate change. More than 45% of respondents said that feelings about the climate influence their everyday lives. Three-quarters of them said they thought the future was scary. More than half (56%) think that humanity is doomed. Among these people with these existential fears for the future, there are certainly many believing Christians. There are some aspects that suggest that climate change should promote a positive view of reproduction rather than a negative one. Experts such as Paul Morland even take the view that fewer births could lead to a less successful fight against climate change in the long term.

Source https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext

A young, dynamic society is more innovative than a society that is ageing. Japan is a very good example of this. It is precisely these innovations that can make the decisive difference in the fight against climate change. In addition, aging societies exacerbate problems such as rising costs in the health care system, high burden on the pension fund with fewer and fewer contributors, etc. Such a society is much more susceptible to the above-mentioned problems pushing the problem of climate change out of consciousness. In the long term, the world will also face threats, such as the threat of asteroid impacts, which require a dynamic and innovative society to defend against them. When it comes to resource consumption, as with climate change, it is probably more important that society is young, dynamic and innovative than that it is smaller than it is today. The Middle East shows what a gamechanger innovation can be. A region of the world that has always suffered from water shortages can produce drinking water in unprecedented quantities through desalination plants that convert seawater. In countries such as Kuwait and Qatar, over 90% of the water supply comes from desalination plants.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/07/1135235/desalination-technology-water/

Young Christians concerned about climate change should not let this stop them from starting a family. On the contrary, a large young and innovative Christian generation can make an important and decisive contribution to climate protection.