Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
201

Yeah. I said that rather badly. Thanks for the call-out.

What I meant was that if substantially nobody wants more than two, then substantially nobody can have less than two or else population shrinkage (or collapse) will inevitably occur.

IOW, the absence of willingness to have large families will remove the option to have no family. Assuming a constant population is to be maintained.


Now your cite indicates the actual trend here in the USA is rather the opposite. Having more than 2 kids is a/the popular option with many many people. Which in turn affords the opportunity for one- or zero-child families to other people.

In one way that’s the best of both worlds. A variety of options are available to everyone. And as long as the rough balance comes out to 2-ish we can sustain that variety indefinitely.

OTOH, that can turn into another form of polarization. Folks who favor large families may be doing it for religious or social reasons that quickly translate into political reasons. Which might ensure there are enough future people, but not a good mix of future people.

202

So perhaps pertinent to that from the Gallup citation:

A statistical analysis that accounts for the effect of demographic and attitudinal variables finds the strongest predictors of ideal family size are race/ethnicity and church attendance. In addition, age, income, religious affiliation or lack thereof and political identification are also meaningful predictors. Educational attainment is unrelated to the preferred number of children once the effects of other variables are taken into account.

Also important to this discussion:

the greater risk of the U.S. population shrinking due to a declining birth rate may stem from young adults waiting much longer than prior generations to start having children rather than from a decreased desire to have children altogether.

That’s how I see it. The ability to prevent unintended pregnancy and births being widely available prevents large numbers of the more than preferred family size entrants, and by allowing delay increases the number with less than their ideal preferred family size, including those with zero when their ideal would have been two or even three if they were able to quickly and easily conceive once they decided they were ready.

So maybe in a highly developed wealthy country, such as America, more affordable and more effective means of boosting fertility for women aging out of peak fertility would be of marginal impact.

Again my position is that immigration of a younger demographic is the best option, but that runs into the same concern you have when viewed by certain segments of most Western countries right now:

The whole “replacement” bit, and that sort of view is ascendant all over.

203

Fair enough; maybe make it “families” or “couples” instead of women. Doesn’t really change much at any rate.

204

That baleful idea is never far from the surface. Sadly.

In my own case, the group I fear is the profoundly religious. Almost regardless of which faith and certainly regardless of which ethnicity.

205

Do you think that 60 years ago a Stay at Home Dad (with Mom bringing home the bacon) would have been lauded for his ambition? I’d say that ambitious would have been among the last adjectives out of people’s mouths.

Parenthood was an acceptable ambition for women because society considered them unsuited for other roles.

206

Not sure how this ties into the subject, or how big a factor it might be, but among my childless friends I see definite effects of their parents/relatives/society trying to push the needs of other’s children onto them. Sometimes explicitly so: You don’t have the cost/difficulties of having children, thus it is sort of your moral duty to compensate by taking on some of those costs/duties for those who do.

Things like, Of course you’ll take over child care for a few hours/a night/a weekend/whatever because your child-having sibling needs a break! Of course you’ll pay for the extra-curricular activities or contribute to the college fund of your sibling’s kids because you have all that money you’ll just spend on silly hobbies or frivolous pleasure otherwise. Of course you will be the employee asked give up your share of time off on holidays or do the necessary overtime on weekends so that the parents can be with their children. Of course your parent will leave the family house to the child with children because they need it more. And lots of things like that.

207

And 60 years ago, it was unacceptable for Native Americans to raise their children as Native Americans rather than as if they were descendants of Europeans. So??

208

Women are the ones physically carrying the pregnancy and giving birth, and the ones going through the pains and dangers associated with it. They also have to face the negative impacts it will have on their career.

Understand why women choose the way they do. All of the science fiction books in the world won’t give you the answer.

209

You said parenthood was an acceptable ambition as long as you could remember, but it was only acceptable for women, and only because they “couldn’t” do the work that men did.

Now that women are openly encouraged to do whatever they want with their lives, they don’t want to be pigeonholed as moms right out of high school. This means college, and a work life, and parenthood, for all its benefits, happens later, is less popular, and results in fewer kids.

Since we’re not going to take that away from women, if we want a higher birthrate, perhaps part of the answer is to make parenthood and rearing children an actual valued part of society, not just for people who are marginalized.

210

I am not understanding what your point is.

Parents who do not stay at home are just as much parents as those who stay at home. There is no question that fathering children was considered something of value by societal norms in almost every society, with carve outs of respect in some societies for those called to serve god instead.

Norms of my parents time was for the mother to be SAH. My father worked long hours. He still valued his role of father and aspired to have a large family.

Fathers today are not staying at home the majority of the time but they are much more involved in parenting more often than in decades past. They have internalized that hands on parenting, changing the diapers, wiping the snotty noses, making the lunches, bring to the doctor’s appointments, is valuable work and they increasingly share in it.

And that neither increases nor decreases family size. Nor is it the result of a greater societal value placed on fathering children.

211

And?? I still don’t get how your point relates to mine. Injustice in the division of labor within couples doesn’t change the fact that parenthood has been an occupation largely taken on by couples (single motherhood was majorly frowned upon sixty years ago, and shotgun weddings were still a thing), and it was a laudable occupation for couples, then, now, and all the times in between. You have no argument to the contrary, you just don’t like the internal division of labor as it used to be. Neither do I, but so freakin’ what?

Now that women are openly encouraged to do whatever they want with their lives, they don’t want to be pigeonholed as moms right out of high school. This means college, and a work life, and parenthood, for all its benefits, happens later, is less popular, and results in fewer kids.

Sure, have I ever argued that that wasn’t so? But that doesn’t change the reality that:

Wanting to have children is almost universally considered to be a Good Thing unless your friends and family have reason to think you’re not ready for that yet. So it’s not just an acceptable ambition, it’s a generally laudable one.

Actually, I have to take issue with this:

parenthood, for all its benefits, happens later, is less popular, and results in fewer kids.

It is ‘less popular’ with women and girls under 22 or 23 years of age in the sense that they don’t have to have kids if they don’t want to. How popular was it with them before? Who knows - women and girls didn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter, as you point out.

But women 25 and older are having MORE babies per capita than they were in 1990. And they are largely CHOOSING to do so. Seems to me that in that age cohort, having kids is as popular as ever, if not more so.

(FWIW, there’s a difference between ‘popular’ and ‘laudable.’ Popular has to do with individual choices, laudable is about society’s attitude towards them. If I were to run for local office, people would consider that laudable, but it damn sure isn’t a very popular activity.)

212

Maybe that was the case. But the author claimed otherwise on both points.

Maybe so, but it’s quite clear that despite the number of people in America who don’t want us to have immigrants from nonwhite parts of the globe, they keep on coming, and our population keeps growing.

213

This discussion seems to be avoiding the copious evidence that reductions in global fertility (yes, even in some developing nations) have in part an ecological component, which is completely unsurprising to endocrinologists who have been observing environmental exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals for decades.

The notion that we have an never-ending need for geometric growth of the human population is driven by the truly ‘dismal science’ of macroeconomics, whose practitioners can’t imagine any system in which fiscal growth is the only metric of socioeconomic health, notwithstanding how the resource footprint of a modern human, as ‘powered’ by the not-inexhaustible ‘carbon pulse’ of fossil hydrocarbons, has grown by orders of magnitude even since the beginning of industrialization and is now many orders of magnitude more than any other megafauna. The assertion that the world is so big that we can never exhaust the natural resources or release enough pollution that it cannot be diluted is given lie by anyone familiar with any area of environmental science; even if we optimized agricultural and industrial use of natural resources and minimized ‘waste’, we would still be overwhelming the natural ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet with multiple billions of people using resources at thousands of times the replacement rate.

The argument of needing to grow the population to many more untold billions in order to reap innovation and intellectual advancement would carry more weight if we were actually ensuring that we were providing educational and vocational opportunities that advance knowledge and the ability to use resources in a sustainable manner instead of ignoring and underemploying a significant majority of the current human population. As it is, we need to be making more educated, better informed, and more environmentally and socially aware people who have greater opportunities to contribute something useful rather than just making more people to bicker and fight amongst themselves.

The technofabulism that we can support many times the current population with robotically-managed hydroponics (using what resources to construct these massive indoor farms?), and the complete unreality that giving tax breaks to women who agree to have large families somehow compensates for the loss of economic opportunity and personal intellectual enrichment is the kind of Silicon Valley utopianism (with a dark, Handmaid’s Tale sort of dystopian ideals) that has these people desperately grasping at every life extension or ‘digital consciousness transfer’ scheme that any huckster and hype man comes up with. And frankly, being lectured by Peter Thiel-inspired rants about how ‘other people’ need to have more children, or someone like Elon Musk who can barely be bothered to care for and parent the children he has fathered, smacks of a neo-serfdom where the purpose of consumers is to breed more consumers and serve the needs of the wealthy technocratic class who dreams up these absurd schemes. What a tiresome bunch of ‘Fifties scifi retreads.

Stranger

214

Yes, but the negative career impacts aren’t due to the pregnancy itself. They’re due too all the time and effort spent raising the child after it’s born. Men are equally capable of doing all of that, but even when they’re willing to do so society makes it really hard. It’s every thing from major issues like lack of paternity leave to petty crap like social disapproval or schools always calling mom first regardless of what’s listed on the form.

Pregnancy has often been considered the female equivalent to goung to war. If we considered parenting like national service then it would like giving half the population a 2 year term and the orher half a 20 year term.

215

There almost certainly are, because in the past they’d not have been given the choice. They’d have just been raped and impregnated, because until quite recently women we nigh-universally slaves in all but name.

Which is why we are having these problems, we’ve never in our history had to worry about incentivizing women into having children. Just coercing them. That was the decision of her male owner, not hers to make at all. If she said no she’d just be beaten into submission and raped until pregnant, to the widespread approval of society at large.

We still haven’t adapted to the idea women have to be given a reason better than “because we say so, slave”.

216

It would be interesting to evaluate the cost of creating an immigrant worker vs. raising a domestic one. When you raise a kid, you have to provide education, healthcare, etc. some of which is paid for by the family, and some of which is paid for by the state. So you may be getting a better deal on the migrant worker who comes here as a young adult and ready to produce economic output.

217

Some of them certainly are. Pregnant women have to fight against discrimination at work a lot more than you think.

218

It seems to me that the sociocultural factors swamp the ecological ones. The issue is not being avoided; it simply is not what limits fertility at this point.

… is not under discussion in this thread up to now? The discussion is instead on the possible means to achieving just replacement rates, and the ignored request in the OP was to put aside debate over whether that was or was not A Good Thing.

But since “technofabulism” is being raised, let us throw another wrinkle into the discussion!

Extension of life, and more importantly healthspan, has leveled off across the developed world but at the same time there is extensive research in understanding the fundamental processes underlying aging. It is not exclusively in the realm of science fiction to imagine key breakthroughs in the next several decades that offer dramatic healthy and functional life extension.

Healthy and functional would need to key as a population that lives 50 to 100% longer can not expect to retire at 65 and be supported by those replacement rate births entering the workforce for another 65 years or so.

Assuming decades in which life and healthspan extensions are such that there are fewer people dying, fewer shuffling off and making room, fewer needing to be born to provide replacements, a lower birth rate may be just what is needed. And that preceding dramatic extensions so that it is a smaller cohort living longer I think would be ideal.

Again the data says you are wrong. Very few Americans (including women) endorse a preference to have no children and those numbers have stayed consistent according to Gallup.

I don’t actually know how many women a century or more ago did not want children but were forced to, be it by marital rape or just no other economic option other than being valued as mother. I don’t think you do either. My WAG is that the number was likely about the same it is now. The desire to reproduce is more a biological one than a sociocultural thing. And socioculturally across the world through history many women perceived that having children who survived to becoming successful adults were their means of survival past childbearing age range.

219

That’s pretty morbid. Why should only a select few enjoy the benefits of this wondrous future?

220

A bit of an excluded middle here, I think: there’s quite a bit of room in between the current eight billion humans and ‘a select few.’