Joel Kotkin lists many. The most interesting to me was
A 2012 National Health Statistics Report found that barely six percent of childless American women under 44 were “voluntarily childless.”
Perhaps marriage and family will stage a comeback in 10 or 20 years.
Revealed preferences. The 6% aren’t sterile, they could get pregnant within three months if any of them wanted to in actuality.
They want kids, but can’t find a way to have them without making tradeoffs they have decided they don’t want to make.
As to Kling’s statement about the next 10-20 years, that doesn’t make sense. Why would people growing up in a low fertility society be more likely to start families? Social norms would be against it. They would have less lived experience with which to chart the building of a successful family, economic trends will favor singles more (all of the new building in my city is living spaces for singles).
Anyway, this seems the place to post this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-KeI-5W4AU2Y5g.jpg:large
We’ve never had below replacement childbirth before. We’ve had eras were child mortality was so high population shrank despite people giving birth plenty, but below replacement birth is a new phenomenon.
I’d say it’s worse than that if you correct for generation.
Harris, Gabbard (now out), Booker, and Buttigieg have no natural children (neither did George Washington or James Madison).
O’Rourke has 3 kids, but is practically a hyper-fertile prolific outlier for the candidates around his age, bringing up the average, so better to use median or mode than mean.
In Europe, there was a recent streak of childless heads of state – Macron (France), Merkel (Germany), May (UK), Gentiloni (Italy), Rutte (Holland), Lofven (Sweden), Bettel (Luxembourg), Sturgeon (Scotland), Juncker (EU Commission), Varadkar (Ireland), Kurz (Austria – though he’s only 33).
I think Arnold’s point on the timing is that those 94% are childless because they are not married yet, and so are likely to get married and have kids fairly soon. If they didn’t plan on getting married, they would likely just have kids now.
That does raise the question of whether or not people all understood the question with regards to “voluntarily” in the same way. Did they interpret it as “I just don’t want kids ever” or “I am not in a place to have kids now so I chose not to have them now,” of “I suppose I would want kids if a highly specific set of circumstances presented itself, but I am not really interested in that. I already have 3 dogs.” I hope they interpreted it as the former since that seems to be the thrust, but who knows?
Childless 40 year will have a variety of reasons for not having kids so their is a fair share of these people:
1) It is biological which is growing because they wait until 30 instead of 23.
2) They never married.
3) They can’t afford.
4) They are career focused like European leaders or some member of the Democratic Party running for President.
While this explains a lot the drop in birth rates it is not everything as single motherhood has dropped to 38% last several years and there is smaller families.
The US has two periods of below level fertility:
1) Early 1970s from (1971 – 1977) when ~3.2M babies born those years.
2) Early Great Depression (1931 – 1936) when fertility rates were 2.2 babies per female but that was well before a lot of modern medicine. Infant morality itself was about 6% in 1930 compared to .7% today.
They might have fewer children than older generations though because of starting later.
Maybe they can be called spincels.
Why do you care? I do think this will be a problem what if this is just a stage of late capitalism?
1) You said capitalism price mechanism is the best to ration resources. And what resources are more expensive than labor? So people are learning to ration labor supply long term.
2) 70% of the drop in the US birth rate is from lower single motherhood that has been the heaviest with minority women. Sounds like the right thing to me.
3) It is Far East Asian tigers that have the lowest birth rates and latest marriage. Are these nations the closest to free market libertarians?
4) I still say the main cause is it is taking longer for post-HS to get themselves into adulthood. Taking longer to establish careers and get married. Low birth is a sign of this. If you think we need more young people should pursue more working class positions, then lets think of ways to make their lives better.
(Note Most New York and California live in dense cities which tends to lower birth rates.)
And one other note the Post WW2 years is the historical outlier not the norm. Due to high birth rates and low infant morality, the net birth rates may have been the highest during that period. (Lyman Stone in theory and the global population grew the fastest in the 20th century.)
Why do you care?
Less life being brought into the world to experience its wonders and add to the human experience. People aren’t to experience the joys of family life that they claim to want. Demographic death spirals.
1) You said capitalism price mechanism is the best to ration resources. And what resources are more expensive than labor? So people are learning to ration labor supply long term.
Individuals are not starting families so that they can ration labor supply for the economy 30 years from now????
2) 70% of the drop in the US birth rate is from lower single motherhood that has been the heaviest with minority women. Sounds like the right thing to me.
That doesn’t quite sound right. Fertility has fallen off the most amongst the upper classes. Smart liberal women in particular have below East Asian fertility levels. Underclass fertility is just above replacement, so the dysgenic trends should be obvious.
As to broken homes, Fishtown has higher fertility then Belmont:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFozcWpX0AArxwK.jpg:large
There appear to be fewer people having children at 16 or 18, which is great, but doesn’t really change the big picture.
3) It is Far East Asian tigers that have the lowest birth rates and latest marriage.
Yes, to their great potential peril. There is a reason that “Singapore is an IQ shredder” is considered
Are these nations the closest to free market libertarians?
These nations consider libertarianism an idiotic political, social, and economic system. They do learn some empirical lessons from the value of free markets and often score high on business freedom indexes, but are far from libertarian in so many ways.
4) I still say the main cause is it is taking longer for post-HS to get themselves into adulthood. Taking longer to establish careers and get married. Low birth is a sign of this. If you think we need more young people should pursue more working class positions, then lets think of ways to make their lives better.
Isn’t Steve Sailers entire political platform called “affordable family formation”. It’s not like people don’t have ideas to address this.
(Note Most New York and California live in dense cities which tends to lower birth rates.)
Another reason going whole hog into great centralization driven policy is probably demographic death.
1) It more a conceptual statement here and people are more technocratic about having births. And in my situation if I had been born 5 years later where the Great Recession hit harder, our family might have only had 1 kids versus 3 kids that all born by 2006.
2) The big drop in upper class suburban married couples happened in mostly 1980s not after 2008. They were already 1 or 2 kids and done. The drop in single motherhood has been from 45%(1.9M births) in 2008 to 38% (1.5M+ births) in 2017. That is ~400K births of the ~500K+ drop since 2008. Conservatives know this but don’t like the solution here.
And the demographic with the largest fertility rates are Hispanic-Americans moving from 3.0 to 1.95 babies per female. (White births were already in the ~1.8 range dropping to 1.61.6 today while Asian-Americans are dropping to 1.5.)
3) Couldn’t a IQ nation like Singapore mean that people are more careful about family formation? Isn’t that one of the big themes of the Bell Curve, that lower IQ people make worse family decisions? So what if the solution is lower IQ people have less kids and invest more in their one kids?
4) Then what is to be done here to help make family formation higher. The majority of the economic growth is very urban based right now and the city growth in Texas is huge but other rural/semi-Rural has not been. (Semi-Rural and Rural economics is more manufacturing and agriculture which have not grown a lot since 2012.)
Another reason going whole hog into great centralization driven policy is probably demographic death.
What if all this is happening naturally with global competitive economy? I don’t see a government action here but most people are making their decisions. (The US cities gaining the most are more large cities in Red States especially in Texas.)
1) “people are more technocratic about having births”
I think its more that they aren’t being technocratic about births. They are either not marrying or marrying late and there is just a lot less time to have kids. If they could plan their lives better I bet they would achieve something closer to their desired fertility.
2) Stating that “X% of post 2008 fertility drop” is a bit narrower a claim then one makes it out to be. Especially when it really amounts to a change amongst Hispanics immigrants.
The big picture is what happened after the baby boomers. That’s the huge ongoing massive drop. In 1960 it was 3.65. In 1970 2.5. In 1980 1.84. As states, for high IQ leftists it cratered to 0.64. That is the phenomenon that interests me, not minor fluctuations in a number already below replacement.
3) In all developed countries the low IQ don’t suppress their fertility. The high IQ do.
4)
a) Huge tax and other incentives for people to have children, especially the right people. I don’t mean another couple of grand for a child tax credit, I mean enough money that middle and upper middle class people don’t see having a kid as a huge financial burden.
b) Make it easier to build housing, and I don’t just mean permits I mean making it easier to build the kind of housing large middle class families want (the kind with good schools and safe streets, so you need other reforms too).
c) End most immigration, deport basically anyone you can.
“What if all this is happening naturally with global competitive economy?”
There appears to be a strong incentive to harvest demographic capital built into modern OECD political economy. You can gain a temporary economic boost by having fewer children, because for a short while your dependent ratio is a lot lower. In the long run this bites, but as as been noted “in the long run we are all dead.” I think Asia is going to get slammed by this, especially China.
Unfortunately, the boneheaded solution everyone seems to come up with is “replace your babies with low IQ brown babies”, which is incredibly unproductive of a solution. At least Singapore was smart enough to siphon away the demographic gold of the rest of the world, but that’s why they call it an IQ shredder (its relationship to global IQ is parasitic and destructive).
If they could plan their lives better I bet they would achieve something closer to their desired fertility.
Isn’t that being more technocratic in general? So if we get people planning their lives better at 15 then society will altogether be better off. But aren’t kids at 15 planning their lives better today than ever before? So the post WW2 boomers and Gen X the main failure was kids failing as teenagers versus now where the main failure is moving towards post-HS years. (Go watch Rebel without A Cause for HS Melodrama of the issues.
Anyway, the drop in 1970s came from the ‘Divorce’ Revolution that was heavier with college educated that led to less middle children. And the unplanned solution was the middle class learned to marry later. (Charles Murray as an example of a 1970s divorce!) But this did lead to the urban/suburb drops in birth rates in 1980s and 1990s that the urban working classes started following since 2008.
One of the greatest things that happened to this nation in 1990, is the crime rate started dropping. It is amazing because nobody literally predicted this and I lived through (OK in the OC suburbs) the Rodney King riots. And what happened in the early 1970s, the desire for early family formation slowed down and birth rates dropped 1971 – 1976 across all developed nations. (So it is analogous to abortion theory to crime drops but seeing the larger picture. Also think abortion policy as the early marriage Black Swan.) So I see unplanned solution to the Bell Curve concerns was simply lower classes and IQ will follow the middle class lead , marry later and have less children.
You can avoid catastrophic failure by avoiding risk. So you get less divorce if you get less marriage. You get less single parents if you get fewer parents.
That’s not what I think reformers were shooting for. They certainly hoped people would avoid teenage pregnancy or painful divorce, but not because they gave up on the most important things in life and thus couldn’t fail at a game they didn’t even play.
As for the underclass, I don’t see much evidence they are about to achieve dramatically lower fertility than today. The main problem today is that those that should be having kids aren’t. Which is bad for both them and society in the grand scheme of things.
Agreed, this is not the Bell Curve solutions he was looking for but it appears to Singapore solutions we got. Which is we can run a better society if the bottom 80% have less children.
1) There still is a lot of issue of single motherhood (38% is too high) and even teen pregnancy. So Compton is not as bad as 1990 but still has lots of problems. And I know Baltimore did not have the urban revivals as strong as other large minority cities. But the upper middle income families are still having less babies. (The family income to babies is a U-shaped with the very poorest and very riches the higher birth rates. Although as you move up working class, middle class and upper middle you see babies born decline.)
2) Most people are waiting for marriage until 30ish.
3) A lot of this Lyman Stone identifying the problem of workism cultures but he misses: How do you avoid workism in a capitalist society? If you want to gain a class (or sub-class) you need to work harder and too much family time
“Which is we can run a better society if the bottom 80% have less children.”
This won’t solve low fertility among the top, which is the real problem. It’s a problem regardless of what anyone else does, as the main issue is people en masse aren’t fulfilling the core function of being a human being, which they claim to desire.
The left half of the bell curve having 2.1 kids is not a threat. On net I think anti-natalism talk harms overall (it reduces top fertility and does nothing to bottom fertility). Immigration is a separate issue.
“urban revivals as strong as other large minority cities”
There are few large minority cities (we don’t count Asian as minority, like Harvard) that had revivals. People write articles about how there are no black people in San Fransisco. All minorities in NYC are crammed into the crappy boroughs (is anyone claiming that the Bronx is going through a revival). DC is famously a shitty eastern black half and a thriving western white half. Boston, Seattle, etc are all very very white/asian.
There are cities with lots of minority share. The Rust Belt cities that have very high black % dating back to the great migration. Nobody is saying they are going through a revival.
“How do you avoid workism in a capitalist society?”
You reward people for raising children and you don’t create supply bottlenecks for essential family formation goods.
4) I still say the main cause is it is taking longer for post-HS to get themselves into adulthood. Taking longer to establish careers and get married.
A major (the major?) reason for this is more and more time spent in school. Which would be necessary except that most schooling beyond a certain point is mainly signalling.
I wish I saw a politically possible way of changing this.
All societies need signaling that young people have (mostly) followed the rules and they need to reach adulthood. Years ago it was for men were married and spent 2 years in the military.
Agreed. What bothers me is that this method of signalling is wasteful, incredibly expensive (of both time and money) and has major negative externalities.
‘Voluntary’ if we ignore their voting for more household taxes.
as always, revealed preference is especially important when it comes to female self-reporting on their mating strategies
Lowering births is not a new reality. It is the Post War Baby Boom is the historical outlier.
One reality people forgot about birth rates is the US first experienced below replacement births in the Great Depression years of 1931 – 1935 with birth fertility rates of 2.2 babies/female. (We have remember the medical technology of 1932 here so replacement levels were probably closer to 2.4 – 2.5 babies per female.)
Voluntariness is really a continuous variable. In theory, what you’d as is “what % of men would you be willing to have children with?” Obviously a difficult question to answer, but the general point is that someone who’d only have kids with Ryan Gosling and no one else (I.e. has very high standards that are unlikely to be met) is tacitly voluntarily childless. I expect most women who are ‘involuntarily childless’ could have had children, likely even with reasonably qualified men, but preferred childlessness to going below their standards. And the factors most likely causing this trend today are still on the upswing, so I wouldn’t expect marriage and family to make a comeback soon, if ever.
*what you’d ask, not as
Some public intellectuals and commentators have conceded the facts of Murray’s Coming Apart, that the left half of the population is experiencing rampant family chaos and associated social pathologies. They claim, however, that the upper echelons have the werewithal and capability to adjust and have adapted to the new circumstances and norms by establishing a “new equilibrium”.
But we are not actually in equilibrium, in the numerical sense, and instead in a blip, because demographically the upper echelons are imploding, and combined with the force of assortative marriage, means that the smart fraction is shrinking fast and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The bottom line and ugly truth is that having kids puts one at a tremendous, structural, and systematic disadvantage in more professional contexts, which is the kind of pressure more likely to influence the parts of the population with the highest levels of human capital. Which puts us on the road to ruin (unless we start widely embracing what are now quasi SciFi solutions like genetic engineering.)
If we are going to listen and learn to progressives, then “structural disadvantage” for parents is exactly the kind of thing we should be looking at in terms of implementing policy to mitigate what is a kind of collective action problem.
Let’s face it, after lots of experiments all over the world, child-credit level subsidies (in addition to not being well-targeted) are just not effective in helping out with this issue.
Which is why you’re going to need large penalties for childlessness, or affirmative action for parents so that they are welcomed and included at important staff and senior positions in every organization, and that we have diversity in the “reproductive status” at the elite level, with more kids meaning more benefit.
So, one idea could be to leverage the “issuance authority for the license to work a white collar job” role that has been captured by higher education and to say, “No Kids, No College”. You need at least one natural child and be married to the other biological parent in order to matriculate in an 2-year progra, 2 for a bachelors, 3 for a masters, and 4 for any graduate or professional degree.
Get HR involed, and start enforcing quotas at every level, especially and progressively (heh) at the highest levels. So, something similar for GS-levels, military ranks, being a CEO on a board of directors. You can’t make SES without at least 3 kids, etc.
That might all sound pretty extreme, but, keep in mind that this is the way the current system already works for other categories and classes, and also, nothing less is going to work to compensate for the impairment of workaholic competitiveness that is the natural consequences of procreation.
If we are going to have anti-discrimination rules, then they might as well apply to speech and parents, and not just members of the de facto coalition of groups belonging to the leftist vote bank. The future will be one in which we get rid of those clients (unlikely) or one in which both parties embrace clientalism.
Let us be honest here, companies want to know very little of employee’s family chooses. It is illegal to ask in an interview but they really don’t want to dictate terms to employees and they don’t wish to return to the days of when they had to protect married men over women or unmarried men. This is not favored position here.
Oh! “…the days of when they had to protect married men over women or unmarried men…”.
They did not have to. They wanted to. And it was not married men but families and children. Can you see how low has society’s moral sense fallen? How immoral is to sack a family man and replace him with a cheaper, younger, female eunuch?
Reasonable point about past societies and that did happen a lot in the Post WW2 years that women who worked the WW2 tank plants would return home when their husbands returned from the war. (It is the ending of A League Of Their Own Dotty character.)
And many firms supported this until the 1960s and 1970s when society changed. No longer was beneficial to set priorities of married men versus a better women in the office.
Arnold, I think you left out an important part of the quote:
As generational researchers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have pointed out, American millennial attitudes about families and preferred housing types do not differ significantly from those of prior generations, albeit with a greater emphasis on gender equality. A 2012 National Health Statistics Report found that barely six percent of childless American women under 44 were “voluntarily childless.” The vast majority of millennials, meanwhile, want to get married and have children.
May I be so bold as to suggest that gender equality and family formation are two goals that are at loggerheads with each other, given the preference of many (most?) women to marry up in socio-economic status?
I think these goals are at odds even before one begins to think about women’s marrying preferences. Any increase in family formation reduces the number of women in the workforce during their prime years (and often permanently), which increases the “wage gap” and reduces female representation in high places. One cannot promote both family formation and equality of outcome at the same time. Well, actually, one could, and I’m afraid to say it because I don’t want to give anyone ideas, but: in addition to making employers provide generous paid leave for long absences, the state would have to probably have to compel employers to count the ‘experience’ of having and rearing children as more valuable than relevant work experience in hiring and promoting process. So, a physicist who spent 5 years in the work force then 5 years raising a kid would have to be considered *more* qualified for a position than someone who has merely worked as a physicist for 10 years, to offset the attrition on female workplace participation caused by child-rearing and keep female representation in esteemed professions ‘equitable.’
There is truth in this statement but I think that it is slightly off the mark as well. Part of the problem is the progressive framing of the issue as “gender equality” rather than “female meritocracy”. There is absolutely a tradeoff between work and family life but the resulting demographic shift described in the article represents a reality to be accommodated rather than a problem to be solved.
We want to prevent a suboptimal equilibrium. If we can separate out regret and signalling from the survey results, a large number of women self-reporting a desire for more (or any) children may represent an opportunity. Perhaps better information and/or tools can improve what are ultimately problems of matching and timing.
What does voluntarily mean? Involuntary childlessness is like involuntary long term unemployment in a tight labor market. All it really means is that one feels social pressure to not admit that one chooses not to pay the opportunity cost.
Perhaps it means that one would like the tradeoffs to be more favorable. I.E. yes I made this decision, but it was really painful, so why can’t we change society in such a way to make this decision easier.
Sometimes that’s illegitimate (I will only marry Ryan Gosling).
But sometimes it’s just dumb shit. My wife desperately wants to work part time, but her firm won’t allow it. It isn’t that they think part time is less productive or anything, its just that it’s very hard for their small firm to buy benefit policies that properly scale and can be accounted for with part time work. It’s too big an administrative lift for them, so they just banned the practice. But if the way benefits were done in this country were different (and the shape of that market is heavily influenced by the decisions we’ve made) then it would be way easier for her to work part time while the kids were young and thus it would be easier to have more kids without her giving up her career.
I guess you could say “give up your career”. And we are debating that at least in the short term. But wouldn’t it just be easier if it weren’t such a stark choice. This class of impediments is different then “I want to marry Ryan Gosling”.
I don’t think this would be enough on its own (we need lots of other changes), but its an example.
“I don’t want to marry Ryan Gosling. I just want to live with him on the weekends.”
Better part time benefits should be an important, pro-family position that most women who are, or want to be, working mothers would understand and support. Yeah, make it applicable to both sexes, for married folks with kids.
One reason education is so lousy relative to the so good edu in the 50s & 60s is the large number of highly intelligent women willing to be lower paid teachers in order to get shorter work hours and longer summer vacation, with the kids.
My own Med Doctor wife with a PhD, now a professor instead (in Slovakia, less wage difference), made her choice partly because of our kids (3 in first 4 years).
We’re also pro-life, so we can expect that there is slowly increasing pro-family & pro-life (anti-abortion) numbers of people entering the pipeline for future adult voters. But it’s going to be more like 50-90 years, unless other shocks occur.
Which is very likely, tho I can’t know what those likely shocks will be.
Perhaps not.
Why almost all the women questioned wanted to marry and have children, yet they did not? Because they feel that they cannot. It is terribly difficult for a young woman to find a stable environment with a reliable partner, which are the minimal conditions in which the female of our species reproduces. I observe the new generation and I cannot see signs that things are changing.
> It is terribly difficult for a young woman to find a stable environment with a reliable partner
Not in the slightest, now or forever. There is difficulty in many women, often in Western cultures, accepting the trade offs for that and not getting to enjoy their cake.
> which are the minimal conditions in which the female of our species reproduces
All of human history is running proof that is not the case.
The answer is to give men more economic opportunity and social status (education) relative to women, otherwise there will be no change.
and maybe call it “affirmative action”. When everything is viewed through a zero-sum lens then social justice activism and national protectionism are indistinguishable other than the perceived beneficiaries.