This global phenomenon is what happens when you make having kids too expensive for the average person. That can be in medical costs in birthing and "opportunity cost" (hate that term) in having both parents working to make ends meet. It's almost like a conscious decision was made somewhere by someone to do those two things to reduce population. Well, it worked spectacularly. Used to talk about Japan in Russia being in "a race to the bottom" demographically. New leaders in the race are Korea / China...let's not forget the "trailing indicator" nature of the data being used for these insights. 15 Years ago I thought it was worse than we were writing about. I was wrong...It's WAY worse, and likely worse than what we currently see. I'm guessing someone somewhere is very happy with the population decline.
It's not only money. It's societal pressure and problems. In 1960, if you slapped your kid in the supermarket for acting up, no one batted an eye. Now, the police and child services are called. Your 10 year old kid walks alone a quarter mile to school? You're a bad parent, and the Gestapo shows up at your door. Your kid's class is disrupted by an undisciplined monster? Tough, that's the public system, and the bad kid has a right to be there. What're you gonna do about it? Homeschool!? You freak. How many people of childbearing age are products of divorce? That has an impact. In short, there are many risks in having children. How and why did it get this way?
Germanophile here again, myself, weighing in on the TFR in the USA, with its high health care costs, including the cost of giving birth, vs. Germany with its comprehensive health coverage due to socialized medicine (plus an even higher level of care for the well-off who can choose private insurance) that makes making babies much more affordable. Wait 'til you see how much better the German TFR is than the one for the States.
USA: 1.8
Germany: 1.6
Wait, what?! That is the wrong answer!
Okay, how about Finland, where babies are delivered for free in a nifty cardboard box crammed with free baby-care items?
Finland: 1.42
I guess it must have to do with other factors than cost. Perhaps it's down to the way that modern women have alternatives that many simply find preferable to bearing and raising children.
I believe "preferable alternatives" falls in the category of opportunity cost...or not. A choice is a choice, after all. Lots of different ways to look at a complex problem, solutions are complex as well.
Partially agree. However, Tel Aviv is a top 20 most expensive city. It seems to be a mix of opportunities, cost, desire, and culture. (Not in any particular order.)
Edit: It seems like desire and culture might also be closely connected.
In his 2014 book The Accidental SuperPower (which I thought was a great book), Peter Zeihan discussed global demographics by country (this was not the main thrust of the book). Zeihan argued that Russia's demographic collapse, especially in terms of its shrinking and aging ethnic Russian core population, meant that its window to project military power was rapidly closing. He made a bold prediction: if Russia wanted to secure its strategic frontier (including Ukraine) and buffer itself against NATO encroachment or regional instability, it had to act by the early 2020s, or it would no longer have the manpower or economic vitality to do so.
This book was published in 2014. He has written several books since then, updating some of his data. Population decline is a huge issue. Particularly in specific year groups. As you said, you can't make a 15-year-old without waiting 15 years.
One of the U.S.'s greatest assets is the continued desire of people to immigrate here. Our political focus on immigration has been illegal immigration. However, with strategic legal immigration policies, we can remain slightly healthier demographically. Immigration policy should be a key element of our National Security Strategy.
The total population is immaterial to the TFR—you can have 100 people with a TFR of 3.00 or 30 Million with a TFR of 1.21. The U.S. TFR steadily declined from 3.65 in 1960 to 1.66 in 2022.
While most developed nations see declining fertility rates due to urbanization, career focus, and economic pressures, Israel is an exception due to its unique mix of religion, culture, government support, and national identity concerns.
Dan Senor covers these issues and provides examples in each category of why Israel is so successful in this area. His best book on this topic, co-authored with Saul Singer, is: "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World". Dan discusses this book in detail on several podcasts, available in all major podcast hosting providers. Dan is also the host of an excellent podcast: "Call Me Back". CMB covers all things Israeli-related, especially topical issues, with superb SME guests.
From Grok: Dan Senor co-authored a book with Saul Singer titled "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World", published in November 2023. This book explores Israel's societal resilience and includes discussions about its demographics, such as its young and growing population in contrast to the aging and shrinking populations of other wealthy democracies. It highlights factors like Israel’s high birth rates, long life expectancies, and low rates of “deaths of despair” (e.g., suicide and substance abuse), tying these demographic strengths to the country’s social cohesion and cultural values. While their earlier book, "Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle" (2009), focused on Israel’s economic success and entrepreneurial culture, "The Genius of Israel" delves more deeply into the societal and demographic aspects that underpin the nation’s resilience.
Maybe we encourage the ROK to continue to build those magnificent ships they are building and just leave/give them to the US when they no longer have enough people to sail them.
Who else, here, had to read Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb," published in 1968? As for Israel's high TFR, it's all in the original instruction manual. It helps to read it.
Reading requirement by high school social studies teacher in 10th grade. If it wasn't extinction in the flash of a nuclear bomb it would be the slower, more painful starvation. Today we scare children with the "existential threat" of climate change.
Sicinnus: Young kids today are bombarded with doomsday scenarios, with "climate change" at the top of the list. I remote tutor a 7th grader and a 11th grader and their reading material and testing material are filled with climate disaster and cultural anniliation, with whites and westerners doing all the damage (Polynesians come off pretty clean). The SAT test is an appalling display of programmed indoctination.
The last time I was in Israel, I heard a rabbi say that Israel is the only country that’s becoming more religious as it’s becoming more prosperous. Also on the secular birth rate in Israel: The terms religious and secular mean something different in Israel than in the US. Religious means a commitment to following the biblical commandments as best one can and praying three times a day. The vast majority of the secular community believes in God but doesn’t commit themselves to rigorous adherence to the commandments. The last poll I saw put the atheists among Jewish Israelis at 1.5 percent of the population. So the birth rate above replacement among “secular” Jews is misleading. That population also believes in God.
The "key" or a "key"? Once you accept the preeminence of the state in child rearing (It takes a villiage, school districts transitioning/providing abortions w/o parental consent) then all you really need is a state to willing resource the entire process. There are several biotech companies diligently working on artificial mammalian uteri, ostensibly for such mundane uses as endangered species maintenance/restoration or space travel. ROK's TFR is 0.72 and the NORKs is 1.79. Which is valuable to the Kim's in the long run - money towards more nukes or enough incubators to increase the number of births per day by a mere 160, making an ersatz TFR of 2.1?
Well, this should assuage all of the Chicken Liittle’s wringing their hands and going around in circles bleating about the doom of global overpopulation. See, a silver lining!
Children of Men in real life isn't going to be a silver lining. Look at Russia. People die of dumb reasons at an increasing rate as it turns into a big empty place again.
When there was no state safety net and people had insufficient income to save? We had more children earlier to work and take care of us when we got older.
Now, we have the relatively recent Victorian concept of childhood that along with the increased family wealth has shifted the paradigm to fewer children later so we can take care of them longer. Makes ya' wonder if it's as much a shift from agrarian life as it might be secular.
As far as infrastructure? Automation, robotics, and now the dawn of AI have been and will continue to reduce the number of man hours needed to produce a given widget. Manning warships and fielding armies might become problematic. Perhaps maintenance will become the future as AI replaces engineers and assemblers?
Iain Banks postulates that the people of Earth cannot join the Culture until our sentient machines are fully integrated into society. Once we start taxing them, they are going to want the ballot. If the machine is built in China, but reaches sentience in Alabama where does it vote?
Interesting. When we arise into the Culture we can debate the extent of rights granted to sentient, but not sapient, machines. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, "the question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
There appears to be a fair argument that the China rate drop has been going on for a while, with the decline masked by standard authoritarian-society misreporting-to-cover-backsides. Some China commentators express vast skepticism about the current official population numbers which China reports to the world.
If those population numbers are in fact already well below reported numbers and the birth rate is subject to the same underreporting, the times could become interesting in the Middle Kingdom more rapidly than anyone expects.
You folks are coming at this issue from the wrong perspective. People are animals. We are driven by biology at a level we just don’t yet understand.
Looking at the data from a biologist’s point of view leads to the inescapable conclusion that when things are bad, people breed. When things are good, they don’t. It’s why poor people have so many more children than rich folks. That’s why there are so many children in Gaza, the poverty and instability is why folks breed. The worse things are, the more we reproduce.
Israel is a conundrum. On the one hand, they are rich, really rich. On the other hand, their riches are precarious. Every resident of Israel knows that it could all come crashing down at any second. Their wealth does not protect them so biology pushes them to breed.
We don’t need to worry; Trump has this. Once his tariffs push us into depression, and we are suffering from malnutrition, we will be breeding like rabbits.
A partial solution for the USA is immigration---provided that we have assimilation. By that I mean accept traditional American values, speak English and live the values. Yeah, I understand that we have native born populations who flunk those tests.
He failed to mention our future reality of AI- which could replace many jobs, less humans will be required(as robotics takes over), and is driven by Technocrats who are also eugenicists(and prefer the company of computers). Our culture has chosen to worship these billionaire tech giants, who tend to lack religion and/or morality. We really need a culture that has a majority of moral creatures who see a NEED to keep the human race going.
Why is my generation referred to as Baby Boomers? My lower middle class family, and everyone we knew, got help from the government to buy a house. Some of my cousins grew up in subsidized apartment buildings. My family wasn't poor or lumpenproletarian, but it was understood at that time that, in order to help families have children, housing should be affordable.
Nowadays, housing subsidies are for illegal migrants and the welfare class. If you want more children, help productive native families with their housing costs. Let me give you an example of how money affects people's decisions. I have always loved cats and had them. Since I retired, I no longer can afford cats. The vet expenses are a deal breaker for me and many other cat lovers. Some snide people will say, oh, another cat lady lol. But listen. When some right wing folks blame feminism or bad attitude on childless people, it's as frivolous and untrue as accusing people like me of being anti cat. You want more children, help people have more children, like the entire society did for the post war families.
I never discussed it with my parents but they married on 1 January 1946 when dad got home from the war. Then September 1946, June 1948 and October 1949 produced my brother, me and sister. There were 2 miscarriages too. I think a large part of the baby boom was just the joy of being alive after WWII and celebrating it.
Too bad about the cats, f.l. lady. I love cats, but currently have 2 dogs who won't permit me to have cats. At the moment, our government subsidizes some poor people to have children. Additional children born to single moms is an easy pay raise. I think the reason our TFR is declining is because kids are a PITA, expensive to raise, ungrateful, froward, a burden until 18 or until after college or to age 35-40 if they majored in Gender Studies or the Humanities. They get in the way of hedonism. And diapers. 'Nuff said, right? I and Me trumps We, now. I have 2 daughters, about 15 years of college between them. Successful, financially secure, prospering and happy. My wife and I took the gamble and got lucky. Some people just don't want to gamble with THEIR own future.
I am old enough to have watched the Great Society consign a certain demographic to a semi permanent ghetto status by actively facilitating single patent households.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw it coming 60 years ago...
I listened to this just the other day after it dropped on my iPhone podcast app. About a week and a half ago I came across Stephen J. Shaw's presentation a the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on the issue of population decline. We are going to need to increase the use of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence to compensate for the drop in fertility to prevent a GDP impact. Whichever nations master these technologies will become the most powerful economically and militarily. That said, I now think population decline is a much larger danger than climate change. Population decline will reduce the pressure on the climate. But we also need to look at why this is happening, and it is not happening just because more people are using birth control, or more married couples are choosing "one and done" or "two and through" as guidelines for having children. The reason this is happening is because the basics of relationships between men and women is breaking, as Dr. Morland points out. Culture has encouraged people to wait later until marriage. I am now convinced this has proven to be bad advice. The advice I would give a young person today is this: Your goal should be to be married by age 25, and have your first child by age 30, and have at least three children. There is a lot of fun to be had as a young, twentysomething, married couple before you have children. Once you get the cheap, off-season European trips and the discount Caribbean cruises out of your system, and share both wonderful and embarrassing adventures, plan to have your first child. If you have your first child before 30, you are more likely to have three kids. Each one of these is utterly counter-cultural today. Getting married before 30, having kids before 30, and having more than two kids is not what the culture encourages. We have turned young adults twenties into an extended teenage period. And we need to reverse that.
Be fruitful and multiply. I believe I read that somewhere.
This global phenomenon is what happens when you make having kids too expensive for the average person. That can be in medical costs in birthing and "opportunity cost" (hate that term) in having both parents working to make ends meet. It's almost like a conscious decision was made somewhere by someone to do those two things to reduce population. Well, it worked spectacularly. Used to talk about Japan in Russia being in "a race to the bottom" demographically. New leaders in the race are Korea / China...let's not forget the "trailing indicator" nature of the data being used for these insights. 15 Years ago I thought it was worse than we were writing about. I was wrong...It's WAY worse, and likely worse than what we currently see. I'm guessing someone somewhere is very happy with the population decline.
It's not only money. It's societal pressure and problems. In 1960, if you slapped your kid in the supermarket for acting up, no one batted an eye. Now, the police and child services are called. Your 10 year old kid walks alone a quarter mile to school? You're a bad parent, and the Gestapo shows up at your door. Your kid's class is disrupted by an undisciplined monster? Tough, that's the public system, and the bad kid has a right to be there. What're you gonna do about it? Homeschool!? You freak. How many people of childbearing age are products of divorce? That has an impact. In short, there are many risks in having children. How and why did it get this way?
Germanophile here again, myself, weighing in on the TFR in the USA, with its high health care costs, including the cost of giving birth, vs. Germany with its comprehensive health coverage due to socialized medicine (plus an even higher level of care for the well-off who can choose private insurance) that makes making babies much more affordable. Wait 'til you see how much better the German TFR is than the one for the States.
USA: 1.8
Germany: 1.6
Wait, what?! That is the wrong answer!
Okay, how about Finland, where babies are delivered for free in a nifty cardboard box crammed with free baby-care items?
Finland: 1.42
I guess it must have to do with other factors than cost. Perhaps it's down to the way that modern women have alternatives that many simply find preferable to bearing and raising children.
I believe "preferable alternatives" falls in the category of opportunity cost...or not. A choice is a choice, after all. Lots of different ways to look at a complex problem, solutions are complex as well.
> comprehensive health coverage due to socialized medicine
So even _more_ expensive than the US. Tax rates count too. The theory higher costs lead to smaller families continues to hold.
Partially agree. However, Tel Aviv is a top 20 most expensive city. It seems to be a mix of opportunities, cost, desire, and culture. (Not in any particular order.)
Edit: It seems like desire and culture might also be closely connected.
Concur. Cost is not only monetary and can be offset it multiple ways.
I'm just triggered by adverts for collectivism. Especially versions falsely claiming it is monetarily (or in any other way) cheaper. TANSTAAFL
Do women realize that the ending of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" was a warning?
Babies delivered in a cardboard box? Well, ahhh, sure.
Great topic.
In his 2014 book The Accidental SuperPower (which I thought was a great book), Peter Zeihan discussed global demographics by country (this was not the main thrust of the book). Zeihan argued that Russia's demographic collapse, especially in terms of its shrinking and aging ethnic Russian core population, meant that its window to project military power was rapidly closing. He made a bold prediction: if Russia wanted to secure its strategic frontier (including Ukraine) and buffer itself against NATO encroachment or regional instability, it had to act by the early 2020s, or it would no longer have the manpower or economic vitality to do so.
This book was published in 2014. He has written several books since then, updating some of his data. Population decline is a huge issue. Particularly in specific year groups. As you said, you can't make a 15-year-old without waiting 15 years.
One of the U.S.'s greatest assets is the continued desire of people to immigrate here. Our political focus on immigration has been illegal immigration. However, with strategic legal immigration policies, we can remain slightly healthier demographically. Immigration policy should be a key element of our National Security Strategy.
The total population is immaterial to the TFR—you can have 100 people with a TFR of 3.00 or 30 Million with a TFR of 1.21. The U.S. TFR steadily declined from 3.65 in 1960 to 1.66 in 2022.
While most developed nations see declining fertility rates due to urbanization, career focus, and economic pressures, Israel is an exception due to its unique mix of religion, culture, government support, and national identity concerns.
Dan Senor covers these issues and provides examples in each category of why Israel is so successful in this area. His best book on this topic, co-authored with Saul Singer, is: "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World". Dan discusses this book in detail on several podcasts, available in all major podcast hosting providers. Dan is also the host of an excellent podcast: "Call Me Back". CMB covers all things Israeli-related, especially topical issues, with superb SME guests.
From Grok: Dan Senor co-authored a book with Saul Singer titled "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World", published in November 2023. This book explores Israel's societal resilience and includes discussions about its demographics, such as its young and growing population in contrast to the aging and shrinking populations of other wealthy democracies. It highlights factors like Israel’s high birth rates, long life expectancies, and low rates of “deaths of despair” (e.g., suicide and substance abuse), tying these demographic strengths to the country’s social cohesion and cultural values. While their earlier book, "Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle" (2009), focused on Israel’s economic success and entrepreneurial culture, "The Genius of Israel" delves more deeply into the societal and demographic aspects that underpin the nation’s resilience.
Ron: I've got another book to recommend--the first book ever to be downloaded from the cloud to a tablet.
Maybe we encourage the ROK to continue to build those magnificent ships they are building and just leave/give them to the US when they no longer have enough people to sail them.
The US population in 1940 was just over 132 million.
And it manned a military with 11.6 million. four years later.
Today, the US population is approximately 345 million.
How does that math equate to a manpower problem?
Do all the whiz bang unmanned bob bobs really make sense?
Or does the fundamental calculus of personnel costs need to be recalibrated?
Who else, here, had to read Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb," published in 1968? As for Israel's high TFR, it's all in the original instruction manual. It helps to read it.
Reading requirement by high school social studies teacher in 10th grade. If it wasn't extinction in the flash of a nuclear bomb it would be the slower, more painful starvation. Today we scare children with the "existential threat" of climate change.
Sicinnus: Young kids today are bombarded with doomsday scenarios, with "climate change" at the top of the list. I remote tutor a 7th grader and a 11th grader and their reading material and testing material are filled with climate disaster and cultural anniliation, with whites and westerners doing all the damage (Polynesians come off pretty clean). The SAT test is an appalling display of programmed indoctination.
The last time I was in Israel, I heard a rabbi say that Israel is the only country that’s becoming more religious as it’s becoming more prosperous. Also on the secular birth rate in Israel: The terms religious and secular mean something different in Israel than in the US. Religious means a commitment to following the biblical commandments as best one can and praying three times a day. The vast majority of the secular community believes in God but doesn’t commit themselves to rigorous adherence to the commandments. The last poll I saw put the atheists among Jewish Israelis at 1.5 percent of the population. So the birth rate above replacement among “secular” Jews is misleading. That population also believes in God.
The "key" or a "key"? Once you accept the preeminence of the state in child rearing (It takes a villiage, school districts transitioning/providing abortions w/o parental consent) then all you really need is a state to willing resource the entire process. There are several biotech companies diligently working on artificial mammalian uteri, ostensibly for such mundane uses as endangered species maintenance/restoration or space travel. ROK's TFR is 0.72 and the NORKs is 1.79. Which is valuable to the Kim's in the long run - money towards more nukes or enough incubators to increase the number of births per day by a mere 160, making an ersatz TFR of 2.1?
Well, this should assuage all of the Chicken Liittle’s wringing their hands and going around in circles bleating about the doom of global overpopulation. See, a silver lining!
Children of Men in real life isn't going to be a silver lining. Look at Russia. People die of dumb reasons at an increasing rate as it turns into a big empty place again.
When there was no state safety net and people had insufficient income to save? We had more children earlier to work and take care of us when we got older.
Now, we have the relatively recent Victorian concept of childhood that along with the increased family wealth has shifted the paradigm to fewer children later so we can take care of them longer. Makes ya' wonder if it's as much a shift from agrarian life as it might be secular.
As far as infrastructure? Automation, robotics, and now the dawn of AI have been and will continue to reduce the number of man hours needed to produce a given widget. Manning warships and fielding armies might become problematic. Perhaps maintenance will become the future as AI replaces engineers and assemblers?
Alvin Toffler was born too early.
This is exactly why we need to tax the robots.
Skynet ain't going to tolerate being in the top tax bracket.
Anything that increases margin by lowering costs and increasing productivity will increase profit and thus pay more taxes.
Iain Banks postulates that the people of Earth cannot join the Culture until our sentient machines are fully integrated into society. Once we start taxing them, they are going to want the ballot. If the machine is built in China, but reaches sentience in Alabama where does it vote?
I say Alabama.
Define sentient. A tortoise is technically sentient. Perhaps you mean sapient.
Interesting. When we arise into the Culture we can debate the extent of rights granted to sentient, but not sapient, machines. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, "the question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
God Complex much Tom?
So long as the government has the power to tax the wealthy.
There appears to be a fair argument that the China rate drop has been going on for a while, with the decline masked by standard authoritarian-society misreporting-to-cover-backsides. Some China commentators express vast skepticism about the current official population numbers which China reports to the world.
If those population numbers are in fact already well below reported numbers and the birth rate is subject to the same underreporting, the times could become interesting in the Middle Kingdom more rapidly than anyone expects.
China's one child only policy is now more than 30 years old.
So three decades plus of an artificial breeding construct that has resulted in a preponderance of males.
What could possibly go wrong with that rational plan?
You folks are coming at this issue from the wrong perspective. People are animals. We are driven by biology at a level we just don’t yet understand.
Looking at the data from a biologist’s point of view leads to the inescapable conclusion that when things are bad, people breed. When things are good, they don’t. It’s why poor people have so many more children than rich folks. That’s why there are so many children in Gaza, the poverty and instability is why folks breed. The worse things are, the more we reproduce.
Israel is a conundrum. On the one hand, they are rich, really rich. On the other hand, their riches are precarious. Every resident of Israel knows that it could all come crashing down at any second. Their wealth does not protect them so biology pushes them to breed.
We don’t need to worry; Trump has this. Once his tariffs push us into depression, and we are suffering from malnutrition, we will be breeding like rabbits.
A partial solution for the USA is immigration---provided that we have assimilation. By that I mean accept traditional American values, speak English and live the values. Yeah, I understand that we have native born populations who flunk those tests.
Flunk...flail, flummox, flub, flee, fleece, flounder, flimflam, flense, and even flocculate.
So long as it's not flatulent :-)
Automation makes immigration obsolete. In any case, there's nothing more obvious that there's no such thing as assimilation.
You can't expect immigrants to assimilate when the socioeconomic and cultural elite themselves have contempt for American values.
He failed to mention our future reality of AI- which could replace many jobs, less humans will be required(as robotics takes over), and is driven by Technocrats who are also eugenicists(and prefer the company of computers). Our culture has chosen to worship these billionaire tech giants, who tend to lack religion and/or morality. We really need a culture that has a majority of moral creatures who see a NEED to keep the human race going.
Why is my generation referred to as Baby Boomers? My lower middle class family, and everyone we knew, got help from the government to buy a house. Some of my cousins grew up in subsidized apartment buildings. My family wasn't poor or lumpenproletarian, but it was understood at that time that, in order to help families have children, housing should be affordable.
Nowadays, housing subsidies are for illegal migrants and the welfare class. If you want more children, help productive native families with their housing costs. Let me give you an example of how money affects people's decisions. I have always loved cats and had them. Since I retired, I no longer can afford cats. The vet expenses are a deal breaker for me and many other cat lovers. Some snide people will say, oh, another cat lady lol. But listen. When some right wing folks blame feminism or bad attitude on childless people, it's as frivolous and untrue as accusing people like me of being anti cat. You want more children, help people have more children, like the entire society did for the post war families.
I never discussed it with my parents but they married on 1 January 1946 when dad got home from the war. Then September 1946, June 1948 and October 1949 produced my brother, me and sister. There were 2 miscarriages too. I think a large part of the baby boom was just the joy of being alive after WWII and celebrating it.
Too bad about the cats, f.l. lady. I love cats, but currently have 2 dogs who won't permit me to have cats. At the moment, our government subsidizes some poor people to have children. Additional children born to single moms is an easy pay raise. I think the reason our TFR is declining is because kids are a PITA, expensive to raise, ungrateful, froward, a burden until 18 or until after college or to age 35-40 if they majored in Gender Studies or the Humanities. They get in the way of hedonism. And diapers. 'Nuff said, right? I and Me trumps We, now. I have 2 daughters, about 15 years of college between them. Successful, financially secure, prospering and happy. My wife and I took the gamble and got lucky. Some people just don't want to gamble with THEIR own future.
I am old enough to have watched the Great Society consign a certain demographic to a semi permanent ghetto status by actively facilitating single patent households.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw it coming 60 years ago...
https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Moynihan's%20The%20Negro%20Family.pdf
I listened to this just the other day after it dropped on my iPhone podcast app. About a week and a half ago I came across Stephen J. Shaw's presentation a the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on the issue of population decline. We are going to need to increase the use of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence to compensate for the drop in fertility to prevent a GDP impact. Whichever nations master these technologies will become the most powerful economically and militarily. That said, I now think population decline is a much larger danger than climate change. Population decline will reduce the pressure on the climate. But we also need to look at why this is happening, and it is not happening just because more people are using birth control, or more married couples are choosing "one and done" or "two and through" as guidelines for having children. The reason this is happening is because the basics of relationships between men and women is breaking, as Dr. Morland points out. Culture has encouraged people to wait later until marriage. I am now convinced this has proven to be bad advice. The advice I would give a young person today is this: Your goal should be to be married by age 25, and have your first child by age 30, and have at least three children. There is a lot of fun to be had as a young, twentysomething, married couple before you have children. Once you get the cheap, off-season European trips and the discount Caribbean cruises out of your system, and share both wonderful and embarrassing adventures, plan to have your first child. If you have your first child before 30, you are more likely to have three kids. Each one of these is utterly counter-cultural today. Getting married before 30, having kids before 30, and having more than two kids is not what the culture encourages. We have turned young adults twenties into an extended teenage period. And we need to reverse that.