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.

The countries with the highest birth rates are the ones that make it easiest for mothers to have a career - affordable education and healthcare and childcare, paid mat leave, enough holidays or sick days to deal with sick children, high enough salaries to pay for such families without sacrificing all standards of living, etc

This doesn’t seem quite believable to me. Of course you must mean among developed countries, but is that even accurate?

😂

And do what exactly?

Force a woman to have a child?

Social media has warped the minds of a generation of young women. If you think porn is dangerous for young men, take a look at what Tic Tok is doing to the minds of women. They are being told how they are so much better, more valid and deserve perfect lives. That no "ordinary" man is good enough to date, let alone have children with.

Men don't need to "step up". It's actually women who need to "step down". Some of us, and a vast majority of young women, live in a fantasy world. They think they are the most beautiful creatures to ever exist and that some multi millionaire guy, with a six pack, a Bentley and 600k followers on his Instagram is going to come along and wife them up. This isn't going to happen. So there's nothing left but staying single and childless.

Take away all the fake up, falseness and filters, and all those "stunning", "gorgeous", "living their best life" young women would be what they really are. Ordinary, nothing special, real life without the photoshop. And there's nothing wrong with that. We are all like that. But women are telling each other that they are better than ordinary life. We need to stop this nonsense.

As an aside, I think falling birth rates are a good thing. We have made a mess of this planet. And a few billion less of us is probably a good thing.

I don’t really know how to word this to make sense so bear with me. If birth rates are falling, are we now to assume that they will level out to some sort of consistent lower level rather than we cease having children altogether which is an obvious problem? If so this is a temporary problem and eventually we will have a more manageable number of people on the planet? Surely the argument about an aging population is also temporary as people live longer but also are more productive into the later years of life with advances to medicine keeping us healthier for longer? As the older generation die off and the new smaller younger generation come through the years the situation will normalize to new levels which may be more sustainable to the planet. Sure, there may be ghost towns etc but maybe a return to nature isn’t the worst idea.

Already I can tell that me at 47 is vastly different to my parents and aunts and uncles at 47… I just feel like we are reaping the benefits of more knowledge about longevity and a healthier lifestyle?

A lot of these porn obsessed freaks seem to want to only want anal now so perhaps it’s more the man at fault anyway

@Maxorias

”The countries with the highest birth rates are the ones that make it easiest for mothers to have a career - affordable education and healthcare and childcare, paid mat leave, enough holidays or sick days to deal with sick children, high enough salaries to pay for such families without sacrificing all standards of living, etc.”

Nope it’s the exact opposite of that. The countries with the highest birth rates are impoverished sub-Saharan countries with none of the things you talk about.

Countries with affordable education, childcare, pay equality, paid maternity leave etc (eg the Nordic countries) all have collapsing birth rates, despite all the pro-family measures.

You would think this would be obvious. But I live in sub Saharan Africa so it’s in my line of sight everyday along with no government will to change the storyline. Foreign Aid helps in the short term but until the people themselves change their mind set it will remain the case.

Another case of the middle ground being better for us all. Better education would mean better governmental choices and less immigration up north. Unfortunately often education and upliftment is in the hands of those in power and it takes war to see them toppled from their thrones creating more of the same.

deleted due to quote not showing up in the first post! 😀

I was not necessarily saying it will work or not on a grand scale , I mean tbf I did state even in scandi countries with lots of gov support even their birthrate isn’t skyrocketing.

My point is more let’s not invest all this resources into trying to make it “more attractive” or pose it as a problem if a woman doesn’t want kids. I used to work in education or social services and honestly if anything they/we/society need to just focus more on the kids that are here as so many families - even middle class ones - are neglecting or even abusing their kids in some ways. Rather than actively trying to engineer higher birth rates.

Especially if you’re not going to tackle things like climate change, growing wealth inequality and housing crisis globally or and perhaps most importantly the culture which raisss and allows men to be terrible/absent fathers and partners with little repercussions to them, but massive consequences to multiple children.

And honestly sadly there ARE many women (and men) who were unsure about having kids or even against it but had them due to societal pressure sometimes combined with partner pressure and now regret it.

I’d prefer someone be on the fence and not have kids and regret it later (or not) than have kids and regret it. As it’s massively damaging to the kids who can often sense it and figure it out once they become adults.

They're now trying to "encourage" women to have kids with all the subtlety of a communist parade and I expect it'll work even less - you can force someone to have an abortion, you can't force them to have a baby and raise it (and if you could I doubt the end result would be a useful sane worker).

Agreed. But I fear with the way some sections of the U.S. far right are going , who are now spreading their messsge further, this is exactly their end goal.

Men need to want children more than they currently do. Many men are at best ambivalent about it and put it off until their same aged partner is losing fertility.

Also currently if your marriage breaks down financial support from the father is often poor, even if he pays child maintenance. Having more children than you can support alone both financially and practically is a dangerous choice for women.

Even the men who want 50/50 residency after a split are not ideal, as the woman is the one who has taken the big hit to her earning power up to that point and is now expected to run a house big enough for a family on her reduced salary while receiving no maintenance. It is very difficult to replace that lost earning power later on and her pension will also suffer.

Women who are determined not to lose any earning power or pension due to childbirth tend to have no children or fewer children. Because it's risky for her personal finances and she can't guarantee being appropriately compensated.

I have never wanted children my entire life. No amount of carrots or sticks could make me change my mind.

@AlmostwelshI think you are spot on. Women cannot afford dc and of course they want to keep their work position. I agree men put off having dc or even forming lasting relationships.

I wonder if people really have a strong idea of what different TFRs mean for a country. We all have an intuition that "a bit over 2 is replacement" and that therefore "below 2 is falling", mixed with a bit of "the earth is overpopulated so that's a good thing".

A slow decline would probably be fine - you could slowly tinker with, say, pension funding giving everyone decades of notice to plan, etc.

However E&W's TFR is 1.4, Scotland's is 1.25.

Very roughly, especially in a developed country with low child mortality, TFR divided by 2 times 100% is the size of the next generation relative to the previous. So TFR of 2.0 --> next gen is 2/2 * 100% = 100% of the size of the last gen, i.e. roughly the same size. (Replacement rate is actually something like 2.08 in the UK - a very small bit above 2, not 2.2 or 2.4 as I often see cited.)

With a TFR of 1.4 (England & Wales):

• Next gen is ~70% of the last, so a 30% decrease
• Population halves in just 2 generations, or about 60 years (absent immigration)

With a TFR of 1.25 (Scotland):

• Next gen is ~62% of the last, so a nearly 40% decrease
• Population halves in less than 1.5 generations, or about 40 years

Comparison with the post-baby boom generation

• Next gen was about ~80-90% of the baby boom, so a 10-20% decrease

That starts to be within human lifetimes and means you need radical not incremental solutions - whether that's radical mass migration, or radical reforms to pension policy, or radical investment in technology to reduce the need for a standing army, etc etc.

How radical? Somewhere between 2x and 4x as radical as the solutions we needed after the baby boom, because the natural population is decreasing 2-4x as fast.

See @OneAmberFinch's excellent post showing the magnitude of the issue. With current fertility rates, you're looking at dramatic falls in population over quite short time periods, rather than a manageable gentle decline. Levelling out will only occur if at some point fertility rates recover to replacement levels but I'm struggling to imagine a scenario under which this might happen - if anything the economic turmoil associated with rapid population crash and a top-heavy demographic pyramid will make women even more reluctant to have children.

Without going into a debate on immigration. Do you think that the politicians actually use this data when policy making and the general public just don’t (or don’t want to) understand?

So what is the possibility of the rapid decline being like a disaster level event as a once off (over say 30 years) and then we recover with a replacement rate of 1 for 1?

Im not really applying my mind to the maths so forgive me.

@OldOrMaybeNotThatOld

I'm sure some politicians are aware but the majority, as with climate change, simply don't grasp the magnitude of the issue. Their time horizon is 5 years max.

In order to 'recover' from a disaster-level population crash to a stable population you need to get the TFR back to 2.1. It's currently 1.4 in England and Wales.

In the past, when countries have had a disastrous population crash (Ireland is a close to home example), they have suffered huge economic decline but then once the factor causing the population decline is resolved (famine and emigration in the case of Ireland), the population rapidly stabilised. This is because the TFR never declined: women were still having babies, but they were either dying or leaving, and old people were dying much earlier.

Now we have the TFR at record lows, and longevity at record highs - so we don't actually (yet) see a population decline as people are living longer than ever. Unfortunately when you have a large number of economically inactive elderly people, and fewer economically active young pople, that is problematic. Western countries have so far plugged the gap with immigration (most apparent in the care sector, where there simply aren't enough young people to care for all the elderly people) - but this is becoming politically more and more untenable.

None of my close female friends or I (around 8 of us) have kids and every one of us is educated with good jobs with partners with good jobs. Scientists, doctors, engineers and finance executives. We could have all easily afforded them and none of us wanted them. Not all women want children, not even close.

Every generation is smaller than previous one so less people to have kids - plus socially it becomes normalised not to or to have one or two at most. It could go on centuries like the population rise.

Plus you reach the point where adding more dependents ie kids is hard because there are so many depenedents already - (ie older people who also need more health care).

Lower fertility is also related to urbanization and young people fock to urban centers - this has some experts worried there won't be enough people growing the food. Then longer term will there be enough people to maintain existing infrastructures.

We've been under the replacement level in UK nearly 50 years - immigration has filled gaps. Plus every where but sub saharan africa is seeing fertlity drops so attracting immigrants could get competative and countries could get creative in trying to keep their young population.

We also seeing ageing populations have an effect on economies - stagnation and rising health care costs. Innovation sceintfic and technoogical is also asscoaited with younger members of society - so worried progress will slow or stop. It has an effect on voting - there is always an older voting block - and population below is always less - can mean getting changes is harder.

TBH the population decline and aging populations are baked in Europe at least - China as well likely - it will be adapting and how fast the population declines.

If you think women can’t be forced to have babies — oh, please. History says otherwise, and I can dream up a few modern twists in no time.

Step one: ban women from universities. Scrap any meaningful education while you’re at it. Leave a couple of “useful” courses, of course — cooking, cleaning, maybe ironing — to enhance those all-important wifely skills. God forbid a woman had a qualification she could actually use to support herself.

Step two: if you do allow women into higher education, punish them properly. Let’s say an 80% income tax for daring to “squander” their precious fertile years on books instead of babies. Nothing like fiscal policy to drive home the lesson.

Step three: outlaw contraception entirely. That way survival itself depends on attaching yourself to a man — literally any man will do. The OP could probably find himself a nice 18-year-old that way.

And for the uncooperative women who somehow slip through the cracks? Don’t worry. There’ll be state-sponsored “impregnation clinics” waiting. Because heaven forbid a womb goes to waste

The Incels are completely correct aren’t they?
For men to get what they want women will have to be controlled and their choices removed.

Then men can be happy again. Earn the money, get a dependant person to serve them, get children without having to do the parenting.

This is a late stage capitalism issue. We expect women to do the double whammy of contributing through paid work while also producing the next generation.

Women with careers can't afford to do this to a large extent.

I have some distant relatives who do seem to be bucking the trend. They are a large family and have numerous babies, giving birth between the ages of 16 and 30. All the women have 2+ children. The key is that most of the women don't have careers, or if they do it's work that can be flexible as a self employed person, such as hairdresser. The women are the rocks of the family and support their sisters, children and grandchildren with their young families. They don't marry and the men are not the focus of the family (although some do contribute financially and work in factories, building sites). Most of the women have jobs in things like retail and hospitality and arrange childcare with other family members around shifts. They support each other and all live very locally - often walking distance. I'm not privy to their finances, but they probably do claim benefits where they are entitled to.

The latest addition to the family has 18 year old parents who are not in education, something that the middle classes would tut at. This baby has been welcomed with pride and love by all the family, who are supporting the young parents in many practical ways. The grandmother is in her 30s, the great grandmother in her 50s. These young grandparents are key in supporting the young parents and do so. The children of the family are well looked after, attend school regularly and have hobbies and do sports.

This is a way of life that was common when birth rates were higher. The isolated lives many people live now feeding the corporate machine has removed all the support women used to have when having children, hence they have fewer and often none.

I don't think men want this. They don't want any financial dependants at all - neither a wife nor children. Very, very few men and women hook up "below their pay grade". They want companionship and sex with someone who is financially independent. Women increasingly seem to want the same. And children simply don't figure in that kind of calculation.

It’s a lot to take in. I’m childless not by choice but for a multitude of reasons including the age at which I met someone decent enough to want to breed with meant that I was beyond my most fertile years. Initially not having children was painful but as I’ve gotten older I’ve actually become quite self centered in the way I think and whilst I know that we really should be looking out for each other other and doing things that are in the best interests of future generations, I am quite comfortable with the idea that I die and none of this is my problem or my children’s problem because I don’t have any.

@Almostwelsh your distant relatives are very much outliers. They would also be routinely demonised as "net takers" on here.

And to add… I have step children and my SD is very much of a Christian marry young and have children young mindset. There are some young people wiling to do the saving of the world.