My parents came from the same small town. My father had 5 siblings. 1 had Downs syndrome, but the other 4 all had families of 2 or 3 kids. We had 3. My mother came from a mixed family and had 3 biological sisters and 4 step-siblings. All the families were of 2 or 3 kids. All of my holidays as a child were spent immersed in a thick atmosphere of family. It was exactly as much fun as you imagined.
Currently we have 4 kids and my 2 sisters each have 3, while my wife has 1 sister with 2 kids. My parents have passed away, but I bought our childhood home from my dad before he died and my sisters and I still regularly gather at our house for holidays. My wife's parents and sister live in a smaller town a couple hours away. The atmosphere at the gatherings that have 10 kids vs the ones that have 6 is noticeably different. It makes me grateful that my sister-in-law has multiple kids and doubly grateful that both of my sisters do as well.
As a parent, I can appreciate the challenge of larger families. As a kid, I never saw a downside. As a parent, giving my kids an experience of life overflowing with upside outweighs all the challenges.
Cowen's answer is one of those times you know he's being Straussian - because a subject is too hot to touch directly - by sending a classic signal of strange drop in the usual amount of insight, coherence, and rigor.
For starters - and as Hanson has pointed out many times in ways in which Cowen is surely familiar - it's not birth control. Birth control might explain a drop from an average of, say, 7 or more kids. It doesn't explain a drop from 3 to 1, especially when the 3 was when there was already chemical birth control, and indeed often accomplished with chemical birth control. Also, Cowen's Second Law is "There is a literature on everything" and that includes historical birth rate changes vs the introduction of chemical birth control. In particular, we have plenty of historical examples of average birth rates dropping a lot in particular classes or in whole societies prior to the availability of modern methods, or on the flip side, not changing for a while after such methods became available.
Also, that women "want fewer kids" is not an explanation of the thing people are wondering about, it *is* the thing people are wondering about, for which they are looking for an explanation. "Why are people eating less beef?" - "People - meat eaters in particular - just do not want that much beef." Thanks, genius. Ok, one could interpret this by saying the demand for beef would have fallen even if the price had stayed the same, which yes is a different situation from the demand curve staying the same but quantity demanded falling in response to a higher price. But for the whole fertility question discourse it is mostly just kicking the can to the more interesting question of *why* the current generation of women now want fewer kids than previous generations of women.
I think you make some excellent points but trying to find an answer to the "why" question makes a fundamental assumption women are making a conscious reasoned choice to have fewer children. That's probably true to a certain degree but I think there are some data points that tend to indicate it's a very path-dependent choice as Mr Kling notes in his suggestion for 'junior communities'. The percentage of women who have at least one child hasn't changed very much for married and unmarried women but what has changed is there are a lot more women who never marry. I often like to recycle the old project management observation that nine women can't have a baby in a month. Similarly, deferring marriage and family formation until later in life means less time and fewer opportunities to do both despite efforts to convince people otherwise. Trying to get fewer women to have more kids on average is not going to fix the problem but getting more women to have at least one child likely would. However, that's going to take a fundamental reordering of social priority away from both men and women spending their early adulthood accumulating credentials as Mr Kling notes.
I was for practical purposes an only child from age 11 onward, since my sisters were so much older than me and moved out, and before that, they were far enough older than me that there was little we could do in common. I longed for brother close in age to me. Fortunately near me there were some large families and that I had regular contact with kids my own age. Being an only child, IMO, is suboptimal. The forces mentioned in the article that press fertility down are plausible contributing factors. Cost of living, especially housing and college education(which is now considered a 'must have') I think also have a huge effect. One way or another, we need to make it easier for loving couples that can provide appropriate support and care to nurture the next generation can do so without constant fear of economic precarity ruining their family. Another factor to consider is the vision for the world's future. I submit that many, if not most people are alienated by recent and upcoming technology and see a future of diminished human meaning. AI fear is real (I fear it, and wish I had never lived to see it) and needs to be dealt with. Life extension, engineered babies (even fully in-vitro reproduction from engineered gametes), human-AI hybrids all are real possibilities and they would scare the shit out of many couples of child-rearing age that have 'situation awareness' of where we are and where we could soon be on the technological front. I wouldn't want to bring kids into a post-human world if I were still of child-rearing age - and I'm talking about even in the most optimistic 'utopian' scenarios(one man's utopia is another's dystopia), never mind the nightmare scenarios. We should not take lightly technology's role in reducing the desire to have babies. I'll close with my mantra - we should no longer take it as axiomatic that technological progress equates to human progress and act accordingly in our daily lives and civic lives.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, as the financial firms tell their clients. Also, value is subjective, and thus what net value a person, or writ large, a society places on any given technological advance with respect to human well-being could very well be negative - i.e. the technological advancement in question did not 'progress' humanity and indeed may have 'regressed' it. Further, if the Pareto principle applies (and why wouldn't it?) there is likely a trajectory of diminishing returns to each incremental technical advancement. E.g. would the average person give up any of: clean water, electric light, refrigeration, central heating, indoor plumbing and basic telephony and radio for a smartphone? I wouldn't. Lastly, while it's impossible to test, if a person or group of people could experience and evaluate against their normative value system two worldly states, today's, with all parameters(technological, social, political, psychological, emotional, spiritual, etc. etc.) in place and another worldly state from the past, which necessarily would be less technologically advanced, who's to say they would say today's is better? Probably they would, but as time and technology moves forward, I submit that it would become more and more likely people would prefer the prior state. Technology evolves faster than culture which evolves faster than biology and all exist within a single closed system - earth's biosphere. Like many other closed systems(a fermentation tank for example), it seems at least plausible that certain products of the system's activities end up harming or killing others. Technological system products being analogus to alcohol, in this example.
Yes, value is subjective, and individual. It's none of your business what value others place on their activities. Your mantra is full of "we" and as collectivist as Mao's one child policy.
I used to think like you once. Maybe I will again, dunno. “We” can’t be escaped, no matter how much libertarian individualists (like I once was) want to wish “we” away, it’s a fact of life. Groups of people form cultures, and polities, some of which are arguably more salubrious than others, and those cultures and polities have norms, and individuals within them are heavily influenced by those norms. And today’s cultures and polities’ evolving norms, I still submit, will come to a new and more skeptical relationship with technology, and that will be a good thing. And, no, such societal norms are not ‘Maoist’. That hyperbole is a tell that you cannot or will not engage the argument in serious way.
You don't know what I think. You have no claim to thinking like me. Just because you think you know how I think, and don't like it, is a sorry excuse for claiming I am not serious. It makes you the non-serious one.
Why should we care about fertility when per capita abundance on a finite planet is a better goal than population maximization, which only gives more people for the leaders to control to satisfy their egos?
Because people are the most important resource. Every scientific advance benefits everybody, unlike physical resources like homes or iron ore mines. The more advances, the more everyone benefits.
YES, but not everyone is allowed to be creative. No "advances" beyond terrorist bombing have come from the death cults of the world. If you believe that the most important thing in life is becoming a martyr and going to heaven with your virgins, you will not advance humanity. Few innovations have come from centralized government-monopoly institutions, and regulators have blocked innovation.
Until we develop low-cost, infinite-energy technologies (such as cheap fusion reactors), we will remain limited by the rocket equation and thermodynamics on a finite planet. We already have too many people on this planet.
There are only two limiting resources for humanity: ENERGY and Human Creativity.
Terrorists destroy in proportion to their numbers. Twice as many terrorists, twice as much terrorism, twice as many victims.
Scientists and engineers also innovate in proportion to their numbers, but their innovations apply to everybody, not just some multiple of their number. One scientist, 8 billion beneficiaries.
Without an energy solution, energy becomes a limiting resource, and the use of dilute solar energy for photosynthesis to produce food on a finite planet limits human population growth.
The protean Robin Hanson visited campus yesterday and engaged students about the seemingly inexorable decline of birth rates and other issues beyond the Overton window.
Compare Robin's overview in his blogpost, "A fertility reckoning:"
And Robin's recent emphasis on the causal role of youth movements in culture, structured by their communal delay of adulthood via high school and college (a podcast interview with transcript):
Factfulness by Hans Rosling in 2018 explains the fertility crisis. Once a family gets out of poverty by earning more than three dollars per day the fertility rate goes down. I don’t know why people don’t look at this as the primary reason.
"And create “junior living” communities (analogous to senior living communities, but instead catering to families with young children)."
I love the idea but implementation? I don't see the profit motive for private enterprise. Could government do it? I doubt it. On top of that there are logistic hurdles. First the parents-to-be have to be pretty sure of a spot. In a home they like. Tall order. And they have to do this while agreeing to move out when the kids are grown. Now you've knock out many of the people looking to (and do) live in the same house for 40+ years. (I've only been in mine for 30.)
They *think* it fulfills all their needs and desires.
Best to ask the only child later on if he or she succeeded in filling all those needs and desires, never felt the need of any little assist on that, found it to exactly suit their own needs and desires.
Wilcox quotes Kirk on what's in early marriage for men:
--“It’s the death of the bachelor mindset. It’s the death of the wondering eye. It’s the death of ‘I get what I want to do.’ It’s the death of playing video games until 1 a.m..” That may seem off-putting to some young men, but Kirk went on to say, of marriage and men, that “it’s the birth of a man” who now finds meaning, direction, purpose in something larger than himself, and is happy for it.
--
Meaning, direction, purpose in something larger than himself. I was pretty Free Marketeer / Libertarian when I arrived in Slovakia, but was looking for family & commitment. Neither Rand nor Heinlein are good examples of successful, happy, family oriented Libertarian-Individualists.
There is always a trade-off between Freedom & commitment. Every commitment, and rule, reduces freedom, reduces the freedom to violate the rule, to fail to act as previously committed. But life without commitment seems kinda empty, even if one is pretty successful at one-night stands or 2-month girlfriend playmates.
The Federal govt should certainly fund some local govt set-aside building tracts where the target buyers are young marrieds with at least two (one?) children, expecting (committing to?) more. So 4+ bedrooms. Here and in general Govt support for housing needs to be focused on building new houses, and especially nice, new developments. Not directly supporting the buyers, supporting the builders building new houses, which then get more efficiently allocated thru market-price signals.
Most affordable housing is recently vacated houses where the prior owners are selling in order to buy something better, usually bigger (if they're young), tho increasingly something smaller (if they're older).
There were many examples of individual women choosing early marriage Despite the peers & professors & family advising on waiting. Waiting in order to avoid divorce is reasonable, but far more costly than many of the cultural advisors.
Rob H has had a few posts on fertility too -- a big issue is early marriage. Another issue is for those who have kids, having more kids. Which is where the bigger drop has been, families of 1 or 2 kids rather than 4, 5, or 6*. Our society & culture & civilization will be better if the TFR moves back up to 2.1.
As Amish & other religions that focus on family gain a higher percentage of the young folk, there will be a change for the better. Tho invasion/ migration by high breeding Muslims or other less human rights oriented folks might result in the Great Replacement. Which seems very reasonable to fight against.
My parents came from the same small town. My father had 5 siblings. 1 had Downs syndrome, but the other 4 all had families of 2 or 3 kids. We had 3. My mother came from a mixed family and had 3 biological sisters and 4 step-siblings. All the families were of 2 or 3 kids. All of my holidays as a child were spent immersed in a thick atmosphere of family. It was exactly as much fun as you imagined.
Currently we have 4 kids and my 2 sisters each have 3, while my wife has 1 sister with 2 kids. My parents have passed away, but I bought our childhood home from my dad before he died and my sisters and I still regularly gather at our house for holidays. My wife's parents and sister live in a smaller town a couple hours away. The atmosphere at the gatherings that have 10 kids vs the ones that have 6 is noticeably different. It makes me grateful that my sister-in-law has multiple kids and doubly grateful that both of my sisters do as well.
As a parent, I can appreciate the challenge of larger families. As a kid, I never saw a downside. As a parent, giving my kids an experience of life overflowing with upside outweighs all the challenges.
Cowen's answer is one of those times you know he's being Straussian - because a subject is too hot to touch directly - by sending a classic signal of strange drop in the usual amount of insight, coherence, and rigor.
For starters - and as Hanson has pointed out many times in ways in which Cowen is surely familiar - it's not birth control. Birth control might explain a drop from an average of, say, 7 or more kids. It doesn't explain a drop from 3 to 1, especially when the 3 was when there was already chemical birth control, and indeed often accomplished with chemical birth control. Also, Cowen's Second Law is "There is a literature on everything" and that includes historical birth rate changes vs the introduction of chemical birth control. In particular, we have plenty of historical examples of average birth rates dropping a lot in particular classes or in whole societies prior to the availability of modern methods, or on the flip side, not changing for a while after such methods became available.
Also, that women "want fewer kids" is not an explanation of the thing people are wondering about, it *is* the thing people are wondering about, for which they are looking for an explanation. "Why are people eating less beef?" - "People - meat eaters in particular - just do not want that much beef." Thanks, genius. Ok, one could interpret this by saying the demand for beef would have fallen even if the price had stayed the same, which yes is a different situation from the demand curve staying the same but quantity demanded falling in response to a higher price. But for the whole fertility question discourse it is mostly just kicking the can to the more interesting question of *why* the current generation of women now want fewer kids than previous generations of women.
I think you make some excellent points but trying to find an answer to the "why" question makes a fundamental assumption women are making a conscious reasoned choice to have fewer children. That's probably true to a certain degree but I think there are some data points that tend to indicate it's a very path-dependent choice as Mr Kling notes in his suggestion for 'junior communities'. The percentage of women who have at least one child hasn't changed very much for married and unmarried women but what has changed is there are a lot more women who never marry. I often like to recycle the old project management observation that nine women can't have a baby in a month. Similarly, deferring marriage and family formation until later in life means less time and fewer opportunities to do both despite efforts to convince people otherwise. Trying to get fewer women to have more kids on average is not going to fix the problem but getting more women to have at least one child likely would. However, that's going to take a fundamental reordering of social priority away from both men and women spending their early adulthood accumulating credentials as Mr Kling notes.
I was for practical purposes an only child from age 11 onward, since my sisters were so much older than me and moved out, and before that, they were far enough older than me that there was little we could do in common. I longed for brother close in age to me. Fortunately near me there were some large families and that I had regular contact with kids my own age. Being an only child, IMO, is suboptimal. The forces mentioned in the article that press fertility down are plausible contributing factors. Cost of living, especially housing and college education(which is now considered a 'must have') I think also have a huge effect. One way or another, we need to make it easier for loving couples that can provide appropriate support and care to nurture the next generation can do so without constant fear of economic precarity ruining their family. Another factor to consider is the vision for the world's future. I submit that many, if not most people are alienated by recent and upcoming technology and see a future of diminished human meaning. AI fear is real (I fear it, and wish I had never lived to see it) and needs to be dealt with. Life extension, engineered babies (even fully in-vitro reproduction from engineered gametes), human-AI hybrids all are real possibilities and they would scare the shit out of many couples of child-rearing age that have 'situation awareness' of where we are and where we could soon be on the technological front. I wouldn't want to bring kids into a post-human world if I were still of child-rearing age - and I'm talking about even in the most optimistic 'utopian' scenarios(one man's utopia is another's dystopia), never mind the nightmare scenarios. We should not take lightly technology's role in reducing the desire to have babies. I'll close with my mantra - we should no longer take it as axiomatic that technological progress equates to human progress and act accordingly in our daily lives and civic lives.
Your mantra has been wrong for thousands of years. Some ancient Greeks complained writing was degrading people's ability to memorize.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, as the financial firms tell their clients. Also, value is subjective, and thus what net value a person, or writ large, a society places on any given technological advance with respect to human well-being could very well be negative - i.e. the technological advancement in question did not 'progress' humanity and indeed may have 'regressed' it. Further, if the Pareto principle applies (and why wouldn't it?) there is likely a trajectory of diminishing returns to each incremental technical advancement. E.g. would the average person give up any of: clean water, electric light, refrigeration, central heating, indoor plumbing and basic telephony and radio for a smartphone? I wouldn't. Lastly, while it's impossible to test, if a person or group of people could experience and evaluate against their normative value system two worldly states, today's, with all parameters(technological, social, political, psychological, emotional, spiritual, etc. etc.) in place and another worldly state from the past, which necessarily would be less technologically advanced, who's to say they would say today's is better? Probably they would, but as time and technology moves forward, I submit that it would become more and more likely people would prefer the prior state. Technology evolves faster than culture which evolves faster than biology and all exist within a single closed system - earth's biosphere. Like many other closed systems(a fermentation tank for example), it seems at least plausible that certain products of the system's activities end up harming or killing others. Technological system products being analogus to alcohol, in this example.
Yes, value is subjective, and individual. It's none of your business what value others place on their activities. Your mantra is full of "we" and as collectivist as Mao's one child policy.
I used to think like you once. Maybe I will again, dunno. “We” can’t be escaped, no matter how much libertarian individualists (like I once was) want to wish “we” away, it’s a fact of life. Groups of people form cultures, and polities, some of which are arguably more salubrious than others, and those cultures and polities have norms, and individuals within them are heavily influenced by those norms. And today’s cultures and polities’ evolving norms, I still submit, will come to a new and more skeptical relationship with technology, and that will be a good thing. And, no, such societal norms are not ‘Maoist’. That hyperbole is a tell that you cannot or will not engage the argument in serious way.
You don't know what I think. You have no claim to thinking like me. Just because you think you know how I think, and don't like it, is a sorry excuse for claiming I am not serious. It makes you the non-serious one.
Why should we care about fertility when per capita abundance on a finite planet is a better goal than population maximization, which only gives more people for the leaders to control to satisfy their egos?
Because people are the most important resource. Every scientific advance benefits everybody, unlike physical resources like homes or iron ore mines. The more advances, the more everyone benefits.
YES, but not everyone is allowed to be creative. No "advances" beyond terrorist bombing have come from the death cults of the world. If you believe that the most important thing in life is becoming a martyr and going to heaven with your virgins, you will not advance humanity. Few innovations have come from centralized government-monopoly institutions, and regulators have blocked innovation.
Until we develop low-cost, infinite-energy technologies (such as cheap fusion reactors), we will remain limited by the rocket equation and thermodynamics on a finite planet. We already have too many people on this planet.
There are only two limiting resources for humanity: ENERGY and Human Creativity.
Oh for Pete’s sake! Use your brain.
Terrorists destroy in proportion to their numbers. Twice as many terrorists, twice as much terrorism, twice as many victims.
Scientists and engineers also innovate in proportion to their numbers, but their innovations apply to everybody, not just some multiple of their number. One scientist, 8 billion beneficiaries.
Stop being a Luddite.
Until the terrorists get a nuclear weapon to achieve martyrdom goals, that is the big non-linearity. They are like a mental parasite on humanity.
Luddites have a million excuses for making society return to the stone age.
Without an energy solution, energy becomes a limiting resource, and the use of dilute solar energy for photosynthesis to produce food on a finite planet limits human population growth.
The protean Robin Hanson visited campus yesterday and engaged students about the seemingly inexorable decline of birth rates and other issues beyond the Overton window.
Compare Robin's overview in his blogpost, "A fertility reckoning:"
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/a-fertility-reckoning
And Robin's recent emphasis on the causal role of youth movements in culture, structured by their communal delay of adulthood via high school and college (a podcast interview with transcript):
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/robin-hanson-on-cultural-evolution
Factfulness by Hans Rosling in 2018 explains the fertility crisis. Once a family gets out of poverty by earning more than three dollars per day the fertility rate goes down. I don’t know why people don’t look at this as the primary reason.
That doesn't explain why. It's just correlation until it has even theoretical causation.
"And create “junior living” communities (analogous to senior living communities, but instead catering to families with young children)."
I love the idea but implementation? I don't see the profit motive for private enterprise. Could government do it? I doubt it. On top of that there are logistic hurdles. First the parents-to-be have to be pretty sure of a spot. In a home they like. Tall order. And they have to do this while agreeing to move out when the kids are grown. Now you've knock out many of the people looking to (and do) live in the same house for 40+ years. (I've only been in mine for 30.)
They *think* it fulfills all their needs and desires.
Best to ask the only child later on if he or she succeeded in filling all those needs and desires, never felt the need of any little assist on that, found it to exactly suit their own needs and desires.
Wilcox quotes Kirk on what's in early marriage for men:
--“It’s the death of the bachelor mindset. It’s the death of the wondering eye. It’s the death of ‘I get what I want to do.’ It’s the death of playing video games until 1 a.m..” That may seem off-putting to some young men, but Kirk went on to say, of marriage and men, that “it’s the birth of a man” who now finds meaning, direction, purpose in something larger than himself, and is happy for it.
--
Meaning, direction, purpose in something larger than himself. I was pretty Free Marketeer / Libertarian when I arrived in Slovakia, but was looking for family & commitment. Neither Rand nor Heinlein are good examples of successful, happy, family oriented Libertarian-Individualists.
There is always a trade-off between Freedom & commitment. Every commitment, and rule, reduces freedom, reduces the freedom to violate the rule, to fail to act as previously committed. But life without commitment seems kinda empty, even if one is pretty successful at one-night stands or 2-month girlfriend playmates.
The Federal govt should certainly fund some local govt set-aside building tracts where the target buyers are young marrieds with at least two (one?) children, expecting (committing to?) more. So 4+ bedrooms. Here and in general Govt support for housing needs to be focused on building new houses, and especially nice, new developments. Not directly supporting the buyers, supporting the builders building new houses, which then get more efficiently allocated thru market-price signals.
Most affordable housing is recently vacated houses where the prior owners are selling in order to buy something better, usually bigger (if they're young), tho increasingly something smaller (if they're older).
There were many examples of individual women choosing early marriage Despite the peers & professors & family advising on waiting. Waiting in order to avoid divorce is reasonable, but far more costly than many of the cultural advisors.
Rob H has had a few posts on fertility too -- a big issue is early marriage. Another issue is for those who have kids, having more kids. Which is where the bigger drop has been, families of 1 or 2 kids rather than 4, 5, or 6*. Our society & culture & civilization will be better if the TFR moves back up to 2.1.
As Amish & other religions that focus on family gain a higher percentage of the young folk, there will be a change for the better. Tho invasion/ migration by high breeding Muslims or other less human rights oriented folks might result in the Great Replacement. Which seems very reasonable to fight against.