I was born in the summer of 1974. My high school class was about 10% bigger than the year before us and the year ahead of us, and we weren’t unique - it was the same across the country. That’s because most of my class was conceived following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Post-war baby booms definitely exist, even if they are only mini-booms like the one we had.
Go back and look at the link @Kimstu gave in #209. It’s a pdf from the U.S. census.
The average age of first marriage of both men and women fell from 1890 to 1930, men from 26 to 24, women from 22 to 21 1/2. Small absolute changes but, like global warming, regular small changes can have major effects.
A slight bump occurred in 1940. Then the ages fell off a cliff. Again, the absolute numbers weren’t huge - men to 22 1/2, women to 20 - but the ages didn’t surpass 1940 until 1980. Demographically speaking, that’s major.
The chart shows three extremely different eras: 1890-1940, 1950-1980, 1980-today. None were outliers, unless all are and that’s meaningless. My mother was 38 when she married my 44-year-old father in 1949. Now that’s an outlier. (I have grandparents who were alive during the Civil War, which is more outlandish than outlying.)
Yes, that cite says exactly what Claude stated: marriage age for women was within the one year window of 21 to 22 until it dropped down to 20 around 1950. Stayed flat that young for a decade or so before starting to come back up. Then the more major shift in the other direction that leads to today.
Stated very well in that post:
My mom had four under five, so very similar. An ex-bf also came from a family of four kids, and he told me his mom once left them. Kinda. She packed a bag, walked to the bus stop, and waited for the bus. Before it came, she reconsidered and came home. A lot of women went crazy raising a passel of kids.
It occurs to me that if the link between urbanism and non-replacement birthrate is valid, then it rather puts paid to the old science fiction idea of people living perpetually in urban environments with humanity becoming something like a hive species– Homo Alveareus? No “WE”, no “Caves of Steel”, no “Mega City One”, etc. Unless reproduction becomes entirely artificial, in which case we really would have become something not quite human by preindustrial standards.
Yes-it is due to overcrowding. Experiments with rats & mice show that once overcrowded they start their own population control- eating babies, and other stuff. Once Humanity is no longer overcrowded, the birthrate will settle down.
8 Billion is too many, humanity should pare itself down (slowly) to about half that.
The Nebishes of Half Past Human and Godwhale come to mind as better examples, being all about a humanity that altered itself and the world to support as high a population as possible.
Human science has created the four-toed Nebish, a pallid, short-lived and highly programmable humanoid who has had the elements that do not facilitate an underground Hive existence (aggression, curiosity, etc.) bred out of it. The five-toed humans (called buckeyes) wander the biofarms that keep the trillions of Earth’s Nebish population fed. All vertebrates other than man and rat are extinct, so meat comes from other humans (and the occasional rat). The conflict between the Hives and the roving bands of five-toed original Humans, who are reduced to savagery and hunted like vermin by Hive Hunter Control, forms the backdrop of this novel.
Far from the highly advanced past, now an enormous human population – 3.5 trillion – covers every inch of the planet in underground shaft cities. Technology and science have degraded, and all freely breeding species have been exterminated except for the five-toed neolithic humans, who are classified as a garden varmint.
Interestingly, it used to be a pretty common idea in science fiction that the natural end state of any technological civilization was to destroy all life except the bare minimum needed in order to sustain itself. HG Well’s Martians did that, they were so vulnerable to Earth’s microorganisms because they’d deleted or lost their own immune system after destroying all microscopic life on Mars so long ago that they didn’t recall it ever existed.
Your mother and father were each born within a year of my mother and father. So it does happen.
My father was born in 1949 
My mom was older than my dad, too. But only by about a year and a half. They were married in 1948.
It depends upon the cause of the link.
In our society, the incremental cost of one more child in an urban area is much higher than that in a rural area. My mother in law grew up in a six room farmhouse that started out as a three room farmhouse - her father kept adding on more rooms each time his wife got pregnant. It’s harder to match living space with family size in a city, if you have to move living situations when the family gets larger. Also, young children can contribute more to the family at a younger age in terms of helping with chores and the like in the country than in the city.
If you make it easier to house and care for children in the urban areas, lowering the opportunity cost of having children, you’ll have more of them. So if those urban megalopolises have a replacement or near-replacement birthrate, they must have made it easier to have those kids.
I’m not sure that merely making having and raising children easier is enough; in a pre-industrial agricultural setting children were a positive asset: they worked from the earliest age they could and if production exceeded consumption every child benefited the farmstead family as a whole. I don’t see anything analogous in an urban setting short of being paid to have children, and even then the result would more likely be abused, neglected children.
Short of the artificial breeding mentioned upthread, bearing children is damn difficult to socialize. Even if more children might benefit society as a whole it can be a disaster on the personal level.
Sure, we have that today- sometimes and some places. Paid parental leave. Subsidized or free birthing. Free childcare and healthcare.
Uh, even with all that, children are a net cost to the vast majority of parents.
Right. Discussed in depth previously that financial incentives haven’t been effective with rare exceptions. Possibly because they haven’t been, and practically cannot be, big enough to offset the costs.
There’s also the issue of if financial incentives can offset the lifelong health costs of pregnancy and childbirth at all.
Except currently we have financial DIS-incentives.
Indeed people in developed nations who are having children have them in spite of almost every disincentive to do so.
Well economically having children is a negative in most of the “undeveloped” world as well. Even in rural subsistence economies … the payoff of having the labor and the old age insurance is much less as kids go to school and go off to the city as adults.
Kids are an economic drain almost everywhere.
But yeah maybe especially in wealthier economies, we have kids with full knowledge that they are a poor financial decision. Of course some people look at it the other way: we make money beyond what is needed to survive to be able to afford having children.
Instinct, I believe. People have one or two, then the reality of the downsides becomes undeniable and they stop.
I think that’s a lot of what’s going on. Nations rely on instinct as incentive for people to have children because it’s cheaper and easier, but that doesn’t go far enough to reach replacement rate. If financial incentives can work, nobody has been willing to raise them enough to show it (for money to be an actual incentive it would have to exceed the lifetime cost of having children, keep in mind).
And modern nations aren’t really culturally capable of social incentives; people are too cynical to do anything but roll their eyes if a government exhorts them about the glories of motherhood or women’s duty to the nation to have babies.