It sounds like the point they’re trying to make is that Americans don’t want to have children because things in the USA are getting bad, but if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.
It’s annoying to repeatedly read the same completely unsupported explanations for fertility rate declines.
if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.
That’s not how things work. In fact, that’s practically the opposite of how things work. Increased access to educational opportunities for women is strongly correlated with lowered fertility rates. It’s a well-known pattern. Or another way to frame it, is that poorly-educated women are more likely to have more children.
Part of the pattern is missing from this picture too - before this baby bust, was the baby boom, and before the baby boom, child mortality was a lot higher. A lot of medical advancements took place around the middle of the 20th century, which resulted in more children surviving to adulthood. Prior to this, people typically had many children because so many of them wouldn’t survive. It takes time for a society to adjust to higher life expectancies, resulting in a period where people continue to have many children just like their own parents did, despite no longer needing to.
However, those high rates don’t last. People adjust to the new health expectations, leading the next generation to have fewer children than the one before.
Add in other factors of a prosperous state, such as educational opportunities and access to comprehensive healthcare (which would include birth control), and it makes sense that “countries where it’s worse” would have more children, and “countries where it’s better” would have fewer. (Check the link above for more explanation. It goes into way more detail.)
Generally, people in poorer countries have more children. It’s a necessity for survival. They need the children to care for them in their old age. There is no pension, or Medicare or healthcare or nursing homes. Instead the family shares the load. In wealthier countries, we are meant to pay for 8t in conjunction with available social services and programs.
However, all things being equal, people have less children if they are pessimistic about the future.
I think the mistake you’re making here is that you’re comparing living conditions as they are today.
When you conceive a child today, however, that child is gonna be sentient over a timespan of maybe 80 years, with a significant part of that being decades in the future.
You can guess now that it doesn’t matter how the living conditions today are. It matters how the living conditions in the next decades are going to be.
I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.
It sounds like the point they’re trying to make is that Americans don’t want to have children because things in the USA are getting bad, but if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.
It’s annoying to repeatedly read the same completely unsupported explanations for fertility rate declines.
That’s not how things work. In fact, that’s practically the opposite of how things work. Increased access to educational opportunities for women is strongly correlated with lowered fertility rates. It’s a well-known pattern. Or another way to frame it, is that poorly-educated women are more likely to have more children.
Part of the pattern is missing from this picture too - before this baby bust, was the baby boom, and before the baby boom, child mortality was a lot higher. A lot of medical advancements took place around the middle of the 20th century, which resulted in more children surviving to adulthood. Prior to this, people typically had many children because so many of them wouldn’t survive. It takes time for a society to adjust to higher life expectancies, resulting in a period where people continue to have many children just like their own parents did, despite no longer needing to.
However, those high rates don’t last. People adjust to the new health expectations, leading the next generation to have fewer children than the one before.
Add in other factors of a prosperous state, such as educational opportunities and access to comprehensive healthcare (which would include birth control), and it makes sense that “countries where it’s worse” would have more children, and “countries where it’s better” would have fewer. (Check the link above for more explanation. It goes into way more detail.)
Generally, people in poorer countries have more children. It’s a necessity for survival. They need the children to care for them in their old age. There is no pension, or Medicare or healthcare or nursing homes. Instead the family shares the load. In wealthier countries, we are meant to pay for 8t in conjunction with available social services and programs.
However, all things being equal, people have less children if they are pessimistic about the future.
I think the mistake you’re making here is that you’re comparing living conditions as they are today.
When you conceive a child today, however, that child is gonna be sentient over a timespan of maybe 80 years, with a significant part of that being decades in the future.
You can guess now that it doesn’t matter how the living conditions today are. It matters how the living conditions in the next decades are going to be.
I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.
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