Consolidating Every Perspective on the Fertility Crisis

Trying to understand all the reasons people are not having kids around the world

Introduction

Previously I wrote about my confusion surrounding the population crisis.¹

I received a number of different responses, approaching the issue from various perspectives.

This post will seek to consolidate the various perspectives as to why people are not having kids.

This is a useful exercise because:

1. This is a global issue, and the reasons for the decline in birth rates are multifactorial. The only thing the US, India, China, Korea, Singapore, Ukraine, Slovenia, Canada, and Barbados have in common is a sub 2.1 replacement rate. 

2. I have yet to see a single post truly consolidate the various perspectives without giving implicit or explicit preference to one explanation or another.

3. The population crisis is a good entry point for several related issues in society right now (economic, political, ecological, relational, technological).

Framing

I will use the social contract as a framing device for this post. That is to say, the typical milestones the modal person in western society expects to go through over the course of his/her life. 

The milestone go something like this:

1. Get educated

2. Get a job

3. Buy a house/car

4. Find a partner, get married

5. Believe that a child is worth having

6. Conceive the child

7. Raise the child

Of course, one is not strictly obligated to go in this order, or complete every step, but overall I think it’s a fair representation of the general arc of the population as a whole.

When people point out why they are not having kids, they usually implicate one or several of these milestones, explaining how it has become increasingly infeasible relative to previous generations.

Breakdown

1. Get an education

   1. Minimum requirements: Previous generations could find meaningful employment with a high school diploma. Now, a college degree is virtually mandatory to be competitive in the job market. Additionally, many of the cognitively complex roles require several additional years of schooling, taking a person to their late 20s or early 30s before they are economically viable.

   2. Cost: The price of college/university has greatly outpaced inflation at nearly 1200% of 1980’s cost. Students are graduating with more debt than ever, and in the US, it is the only type of debt that cannot be forgiven. 

2. Get a job

   1. Job Hunting: Hiring practices have become more algorithmically driven and Kafkaesque, largely degrading the experience. Most applicants into the workforce suffer from a Catch-22, in which they require job experience in order to get a job, and in order to get the requisite job experience, they need a job.

   2. Competition: Employers have a much wider applicant pool due to a combination of outsourcing and globalization, thereby driving down wages.

   3. Lack of training: While education provides a general skill set, a lot of the necessary training takes place during the job itself. Companies are becoming increasingly reluctant to provide such training, lest the employee immediately takes their skills elsewhere.

   4. Fair compensation: There is evidence to suggest that wages have not kept up with productivity. A greater share of the wealth is driven by non-human labour i.e. capital.²

   5. Job stability: Job hopping has become necessary in order to keep up with inflation. The days of the “30 years and get the gold watch” style of career are long dead. Instead a lot of the workforce has been funnelled into the more tenuous “gig economy“, where a lot of the same benefits of traditional employment have been stripped away.

   6. Automation: Many sectors of the economy are at the risk of being replaced with robots, machinery, or large language models; jobs which are not cognitively demanding lead to a risk of more people dropping out of the workforce. Even if people do have the cognitive flexibility to move into a different career path, the transition period will be psychologically taxing.

   7. Pensions: A lot of the pension schemes have degraded from previous generations, going from defined benefit to defined contribution. With the increasing number of elderly relative to the prime working age population, it is very likely that younger generations will not be able to cash out on their own pensions.³

3. Buy a house/car

   1. Housing costs: Economic opportunity is largely concentrated within large population centers, and the majority of the cities are experiencing housing crises. This is due to a combination of a lack of supply, restrictive zoning policies, and the innate tension of incentives between renters and owners. Additionally, wealthy foreigners and private conglomerates have the opportunity to buy a large quantity of housing at scale, leading to the financialization of the housing market.

   2. Cars: Cars have additionally become expensive, especially since the pandemic. Nevertheless, in many cities, cars are still a necessity.

   3. Public transport: Many big metro areas have outdated transit systems relative to their current population, and the underlying infrastructure which supports these public systems tend to be underfunded or otherwise unworkable.

4. Find a partner, get married

   1. General frustration: Dating has become increasingly depersonalized, detached and kafkaesque. Both men and women feel exhausted with the process, as it feels equivalent to a job interview.

   2. Dating apps: Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble have a perverse incentive of monetizing people’s loneliness. Currently the dating apps are owned by a monopoly, and are a prime example of enshittification.

   3. Loneliness: The younger generation is more isolated and disconnected than ever, due to a lack of third spaces, a lack of time after work/school, and a fear of starting relationships in places like the workplace. 

   4. Politics: Algorithmically driven content is fostering a divide amongst the sexes, especially among the younger generation.⁴

   5. Overstimulation: A combination of porn and social media has given people unrealistic expectations of what is required of partnerships, leading people to feel as though it is not worth the effort of finding someone.

5. Believe that a child is worth having

   1. Opportunity Cost: For women in the workplace, they are increasingly judging the sacrifice of having a kid to be too great. Many of them are on lucrative career paths, and having a child permanently makes them less valuable in the economy.

   2. Practicality: Having children used to be a function of necessity, as this would lead to more labour in agrarian societies. In modern times, however, children are strictly a burden on their parents from an economic perspective well into adulthood.

   3. Existential risk: Considering things like climate change, the deterioration of youth mental health, and the p(doom) brought about by AI, many people are considering whether it is moral/ethical to bring children into the world.

   4. Pessimism: Social media and the 24 hour news cycle is causing people to feel as though they are perpetually low status, and otherwise have a negative outlook on life.⁵

   5. Status: General culture is changing; being childless is no longer stigmatized to the same degree as previous generations. If anything, the desire to conform to a traditional lifestyle is increasingly associated with low status behavior, considering it is largely represented by right wing outlets/representatives. 

   6. Biology: There is a small yet non trivial portion of the population who believe that their genes have made their lives a great deal more difficult than it otherwise could have been. Things like autoimmune disorders or unfortunate appearance come to mind.

6. Conceive the child

   1. Male fertility: This is where an actual fertility crisis might be lurking. Studies have come out suggesting that the average male has had a decline in sperm count, though studies have been disputed, however.

   2. Female fertility: On the side of women, those who choose to delay pregnancy until late into their later years might have trouble conceiving.

   3. Pregnancy: A growing number of women are increasingly aware of the harms/inconveniences associated with the physical act of being pregnant, and judge these risks to be too great.

   4. General vitality: Additionally, the North American population is more obese than ever, which has an impact on fertility as well.

7. Raise the child

   1. Parental expectations: Increasingly there is an expectation that both parents should be engaged in the child’s life. Latchkey kids are no longer permissible; the average man is more engaged in the child’s life today than the average woman was in the 1950s. This means investing in increasing amounts of time, effort, and money into having healthy and productive kids.

   2. Lack of kin networks: Increasing mobility means that people are increasingly detached from their extended family. This means that a given child no longer has siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbours to interact with — all of which would reduce the burden of parenting. Beyond this, the majority of children are now raised in a single parent household, which means that (very often) the mother has to be both the breadwinner and the domestic provider.

      1. Edit: Clarification — at present it looks like 25% of children are born to unwed mothers, while Melissa Kearney, author of the Two Parent Privilege asserts that the majority of children now born in the U.S are from single family units.

   3. Daycare costs: Given the lack of kin networks, the alternative is to put the child into daycare, which has become prohibitively expensive in many areas.

   4. Household burdens: Similar to pregnancy, women have to take up a disproportional share of the domestic work, once more leading to increased amounts of stress, anxiety, and burn out.

   5. Lack of government assistance: The number of subsidies, child credits and tax incentives is nowhere near enough to offset the economic and status costs.

Conclusion

Listing everything out in the above format, it clarifies why the majority of pronatalist positions tend to be shallow in presentation. The unspoken fact is that a lot of them have had a much simpler time completing several of the milestones listed above. For example:

1. They either bought a house before the housing crisis, or 

2. had their parents pay for their education, or 

3. bypassed the traditional hiring process by leveraging their own friend network, or 

4. they are naturally inclined for high status tech work, or 

5. they are naturally good at dating and fostering relationships, or 

6. they are in a relationship where both parties are happy to conform to traditional gender roles, or

7. have a large kin network who will take care of their children at relatively low-cost

8. they have some combination of the advantages above, or

9. they have an uncommon degree of conscientiousness which allowed them to have children even if they did not have any of the above advantages, or

10. have few/none of the advantages above, and deem children to be so fundamentally valuable that they’re willing to materially degrade their quality of life in all of the facets above.

As a result, they don’t necessarily understand what they are asking for when they ask for people to have more kids. They don’t realize they are implicitly making a judgement about people’s careers, financial situations, gender roles, ethical paradigms, and ability to find a partner.

1. Otherwise known as the “fertility” crisis, although I think this is a bit of a misnomer as it’s not really about fertility

2. It is debatable whether such aggregation and comparison of labour and productivity is representative of overall economic health, although I believe it points to the greater trend of assets compounding in value relative to simple labour.

3. Admittedly this is a bit of a self-referential argument, where the lack of children drive the pension dearth, although this could be a recursive loop.

4. I believe it is overrated, but I think that they might accidentally turn the fake problem into a real problem if the narrative continues, especially as social media favors the psychograph over the social graph.

5. I’ve delved into this a little bit further in my analysis of the vibecession.