To tell you that if a UK woman has not had her first child by 28, there is a 50% probability she will never have children.

[RetiredMan]

I just watched the documentary linked below, about falling birth-rates, released on Youtube yesterday, by the guy who did the research.

(The fact in the subject is from an interview, the documentary itself only give the statistic for Japan, where the equivalent age is 26.)

Some factoids for those who won't watch the video (some are from the documentary, some are from two interviews with the maker that I've also watched.)

Birth-rates are below the level needed to keep population stable everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. (It looks like only a matter of time until it's true there as well.)

That the invention of the pill is causing this is disproved by the fact that rates fell suddenly in Japan 20 years before the pill became legal there. They fell at the same time as birth-rates in multiple other countries, so it's not that Japan has a different cause.

Women who do become mothers are not having fewer children than before, the issue is that suddenly a large chunk of women are having no children at all. In other words, the problem is not smaller families, the problem is fewer families. (If I remember rightly, Japan went from 1 in 30 women childless to 1 in 5, in the space of three years. It's now 1 in 3.)

I think I caught a statistic somewhere that 40% of US women are now destined to be childless. (Presumably that is among those becoming adult now. But I might be wrong about this statistic, may have misheard/misunderstood.)

One reason childlessness is a problem is that 4 out of 5 women who never have children are biologically fertile and would have liked to have had children, but just never made it happen. Obviously there will also be economic issues, if each 20-year-old entering the job market has to generate enough economic output to support multiple 70-year-olds.

Even though birth-rates are falling. generations already born before births peaked will caused older age brackets to have increasing numbers of people, so for a few decades, overall population will still increase despite births decreasing.

The birth-rate of a population can be 90% predicted by the average age at which a women has her first child. The exact figure has not yet been researched, but it appears to be the case that population will inevitably decline if women who want children do not have their first child by their mid-twenties.

Immigration will not be able to solve the economic problems caused by falling population. There will be nowhere with a people surplus for them to come from. (There was a jokey interview claim that India already has ghost villages, they need immigrants!)

The cause of the decline seems to be a failure of couples to get together in time to have children. The data shows a big drop in birth-rates every time there is a major economic crisis. In response to the crisis, people postpone having children, but once society has shifted to aiming to have children at an older age, it never shifts back to having them at the original age.

A metaphor that explains why couple-formation is down. Imagine you live in a village with a dance-hall that is open for three hours on a Saturday evening. Every young person is there for the whole three hours, and gets to see every other person they could potentially marry had have children with. Now imagine the opening hours are changed to six hours, but most people still only have the energy to go for three hours. Some people leave before the person they should have met and married arrives. Some people are half-way through getting to know one person when another person enters and catches there eye, one courtship is interrupted by a new possibility. Perhaps this disruption kills one potential relationship. If the time-period during which most men and women think they need to mate has changed from maybe as little as five years to as long as 20 years, the likelihood that any potential pair will be on the same page at the same time goes down.

Isn't there always a 50% probability that a woman won't have children? Either she will or she won't. 50-50.

Women who do become mothers are not having fewer children than before

This simply isn't true. The average number of children per mother in 1800 was 5.9. it's now 2.5.

When you take the time to properly understand the climate catastrophe a child born today will be facing it sadly seems a pretty selfish choice to make

How do women get men to commit? Well, this may be controversial, but I think offering them copious amounts of brain-melting sex might do the the trick...

(Obviously women would only do that if they thought what they were getting in return was worth it. It's their call.)

Dude, you are giving me seriously creepy vibes.

Shudders

@RetiredMan I thought in the UK women who had dc were having fewer dc than they wanted as well as more women not having dc?

<vomit, not envy.

I am pretty sure that no country has reversed the falling birth rate trend once it's below replacement rate.

If women are determined to have children, they need to get men to commit at a younger age. (Which should be easier, as women below the age of 30 have the upper hand in the dating market. 30 is the cross-over-age, after which men start to have the upper hand.)

That doesn’t fit with current society though. Once women were given the opportunity of equal education and sold a vision of ‘now that you have equal education, you can do whatever you want’, and that filtered down and solidified after a few generations, there has become a mismatch.

Previously, girls were ‘satisfied’ with a pathway of leaving school without having to have put much effort in (because why?), no further education, with the expectation all round that they would get married young, have children and hoover all day. Divorce was usually frowned upon, or not easy as it is today, so men could pretty much do anything they wanted and treat women however they wanted, and the women were stuck. But, that was all okay as women were ‘lucky’ enough to have a husband, have children and be able to spend the day hoovering. Then the concept of true equality of education hit and girls wanted to use that education.

So now, you have girls focusing on doing well at school and going in instead of marrying Brad down the road and pumping out babies the second they leave school. Then add in university. Then add in starting a career. Then add in getting established enough so that having children is not going to absolutely destroy it (although will likely derail and stall it), then add in time to then come up for car, look around and think of finding a partner. Given girls are now educated and savvy, most refuse to be sold a lie that you can ‘have it all’ with a satisfying career and family before 30yo, because for the vast majority it’s just impossible (and yes, acknowledging unicorns do exist but they are rare).

The other aspect, educated girls have clued onto is the cornerstone versus capstone relationship issue. Most accept, that if they partner young (before 30yo) and have a family, then that marriage is likely not going to last. Then there is the faffle with broken marriage, kids, trying to repartner, blended families, and trying to work all of that while maintaining a career that they want. Many have first hand experience of this or have seen it with friends families, been generally exposed to it in society. So, they are making the choice to wait for their ‘capstone’ relationship before having a family, with the preference to take the risk that it may mean no kids.

I believe the only way you can roll back society to women having children at a younger age now, would be to remove equality in education and the workforce which will and should never happen, otherwise the genie is out of the bottle, no stuffing it back in.

@RetiredMan Women do this more than ever trying to copy slop online with anal and deepthroating or whatever and it's not working. Homemade cooking and a shoulder to cry on might go further.

Increasing worldwide wealth means far fewer people in grinding poverty everywhere compared to 50 years ago, and the emergence of a global middle class. Somewhere in Malaysia right now there is very probably a Mumsnet equivalent, where people are being advised to "tinggalkan bangsat itu". There wouldn't have been a market for that 50 years ago.

Simultaneously, women everywhere (except Afghanistan 🤬) have increasing access to education, which we know reduces birthrates.

And also at the same time, life expectancy has increased. In much of Africa now life expectance is in the mid-60s, and it will continue to rise.

All three of those, on their own, are Very Good Things™, and yet their combination means that we are looking at a worldwide demographic disaster. The world's population is forecast to stabilise around 2050. At that point, population aging will become the norm, on average, in every country. Countries such as the Philippines that currently export care workers to places like the UK will need those care workers at home for their own elderly.

In other words, we —as a species — are going to become the victims of our own success, because we won't have the people around to sustain our current lifestyles into our collective old age. I'm mostly talking about one or two generations from now, but I think the last third of the 21st century will not be pretty. And that's assuming we magically get fusion power to work and fix global warming and other resource shortages; it's a more fundamental problem even than that. In 1953 South Korea was the poorest country in the world. Now it doesn't have enough people to staff its military.

This is also a problem at the level of individual countries, of course. Sadly the only people talking about it are the far right, for whom "more babies" means "more tradwifes for white men". But it's a real problem for everyone.

Immigration will not be able to solve the economic problems caused by falling population.

I've said this on many a thread. Western countries will all be fighting over young skilled workers and will incentivise them eg Portugal are looking at different taxes for the young already.

Fucking hell.🤢🤢🤮

The world is already overpopulated and increasing all the time. I don't think anyone has to worry about the population level being too low.

Lower is good, more old than young? that's the difficult bit.

Eew. On your backs ladies, do it for the pensioners! Just be a better shag and men will stop being feckless twats.

You do know that women are actually people in their own right? And not emotional support humans for men?

😀

Tomorrow I’ll either be dead or alive. It doesn’t mean there’s a 50% probability that I’ll be dead.

@samarrange economically I think we are already feeling the impact of our changing demographics

What is it with all these type of posts lately?
So tonight I've seen a trad wife style one, and now one about "falling birth rates"
Quick, get the women to have more babies 🙄

but yes it will get much worse b

Hmm.

Part of the problem is that many men don't want to 'tie themselves down' when they're in in their 20s. No, I don't have any stats for that - just anecdotal evidence from the world around me.

A mix of pervs and AI.

Do the water companies manage to take the contraception meds out of the water supply, or does everyone get their own - or not as the case may be -and someone else's contraception?

I think reducing the population can only be a good thing? 🤷‍♀️ I get that the state pension will have to end if there just aren't enough young people to support the old, but thinking of climate change and resource scarcity etc, fewer people = good, surely?

It's very interesting but we aren't a endangered species. Also shot me for this - why are we so specail that we must breed exponentially? She says with more than 1 child.