Interesting article, but everything is simply exaggerated here. Trust me, it is not my brain thinking my balls or something. Instead of asking you the price of childbirth or your readers, we may try to ask the market. Surrogacy can cost quite of lot, but with some quick google searches it seems that we have between 50k and 100k for the surrogacy compensation+contingent fees (not including legal or fertility stuff). https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finance/articles/how-much-surrogacy-costs-and-how-to-pay-for-it. So the number you give do seem to be too high. But to be fair, this the price to pay someone who is willing to do it (probably the women that have easy pregnancies?) and may not have better marketable skills.
For the « after child part », it is more complicated but numbers seem to high here too. But the number does not matter, the ones that are having the kids are not really counting that kind of stuff. It’s all about culture anyway, and western culture does not cultivate self-sacrifice, courage, strength and thinking that people with no children are weirdos/losers.
We should just look at Israel and discover what they are doing, even educated secular women have a good fertility rate there. It is possible to have a fairly liberal society and somehow have women make a sufficient amount of baby
I think you have to put that number if context though. All the compensation when you add benefits is going to be in the range of $80-100kish. But the median earnings of women in their 20s in the US is only about $30k, and in their 30s about $40k (that's actually on the higher end). And those are the ages of surrogates and half make less than that, and you have to assume that most surrogates are on the low end of the income spectrum. So what you are really talking about is paying them the equivalent of about 3 times their annual income.
And it is women who earn more who are least likely to have babies. This presents a pretty clear factor in favor of that -- opportunity cost. If you paid them three times their income, it'd be a lot more.
It's not hard to see why Israel is an outlier. Jewish people are much like Mormons (I live in Utah) -- a religious culture with serious pressure to marry and have children, and a persecution complex based on recent history. But even with Mormons...they had on average more than 4 kids per woman in 1960, about 2.5 per woman in 2010, and today it's about 1.8. But Utah has had a booming economy. Israel is surrounded by enemies who want them all to die and has living ancestors who survived an actual genocide -- that'll motivate a people. My guess is they would've started trending like Mormons, but I imagine Oct 7 will cause a bounce and keep that motor running. There's no other OECD country that has a fertility rate above 1.8. South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong are all below 1.0. Other than Israel, if you look at every country on the globe, it is only the true "shit hole countries", so to speak, where it's above 2.
To be honest, I was always aware that being a surrogate pays quite a lot but it seems to me that surprisingly few women are ready to do it. Which does give weight to the argument that pregnancy is really scary to women. Though it should be taken into account that this it is a pregnancy for a child that is not yours and that being a surrogate mother is « weird », and people don’t like having weird status.
To add to the discussion: there is also an article from cremieux that explains that actually, women want to have more children. Even the smart ones have above replacement fertility rate. I also read somewhere that the ones that have more children than they initially wanted are happier than the ones that have less, which I assume is because women that have more kids than expected on average have good lives. In many countries, income vs fertility graphs have an U-shape (poor and very rich women have the most kids). All of this points out to the direction that if there was no problem for women (good husband, high income, good education/work/life balance, no fertility problems due to the age,etc…), there would be no birth rate crisis. And that women being afraid of pregnancy does not « naturally » cause low fertility in free countries (+ the Israel example shows that it is possible without exceptional policies or culture changes)
There are a lot of studies, even by some pro family conservative think tanks, and it pretty much always shows that mothers are less happy than non mothers. It's not really an enormous effect but it's there. The same relationship is not shown for men. Men with kids actually in the house are very slightly less happy than those without, but fathers whose children are grown are happier. Women with all different numbers of kids either in or out of the house are less happy than women without kids. Again, not an enormous effect like they're all miserable or something, but a statistically significant one. Happiness isn't everything to everyone, nor the most important thing to some people, so they find meaning or other values more important than day to day happiness. It is true that the first kid causes the biggest drop in happiness for mothers, and it is less bad with each extra one up to four. The explanation I have heard is that once you have four kids, you basically are just totally abandoned to that and your kids are your entire life, just inevitably. Whereas if you have less, you're still experiencing some ambivalence and trying to hold on somewhat to who used to be and an idea of yourself as an independent person who is not solely a mother. Though also it could just be that if you have four kids, it's likely bc you really love having kids and are particularly suited to it, since 4 kids is very unusual these days. https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-happier-in-the-long-run
What's interesting about the study results there is that it shows that fathers enjoy parenthood way MORE now than they did pre 1980. Which was right around the time fathers started being expected to be actively involved with childrearing. Before 1980, men without kids were way happier than those with. Now it's the opposite. Maybe that's bc it's now more optional and we no longer have a significant cohort of men who have kids they never wanted, which was the case pre -1980 when basically everyone was expected to have kids...and I believe there's always been a sizeable minority of people, both men and women, who simply are not suited for it. Or maybe it's because increased involvement makes it more enjoyable. Or maybe it's because the increase in women working and eroding of gendered family roles where the man bore the sole responsibility for financial support has been a huge boon to make wellbeing. If it's the last one, they could at least say thanks feminism! Whatever the reason, it does seem that the changes to father's lives since the women's lib movement have mostly made life better for fathers, not mothers. Isn't that ironic? And yet it's all the young men bitching about feminism and wanting to go back to the 50s...which they only think because they never actually lived through that model of life and don't have any real concept what it was like. They forget about the part where one little slip up with your girlfriend at age 17 and you'd have her dad with a shotgun to your head, and you were stuck with her, and could kiss your own dreams goodbye because you better get a job pronto, to support her and the baby for the rest of your life, whether you liked it or not.
Yeah, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, there WERE a lot more unhappy and miserable marriages back then. I remember it...back in the 80s it really was not at all uncommon to hear like your neighbors or the couple down the street just straight up violently screaming at each other and at war. Way more abuse and misery within families. Marriages are much more peaceful and happier now, but there's also a lot less of them.
But on the other hand, I fully agree about young men not having sufficient incentives to not be worthless bums. If I compare my own dad, who had a shotgun marriage at 19 and fully accepted and lived up to the responsibility as well as just being an impressive person in multiple ways, and compare him to my little brother, who is a typical video-game addicted 20-something, they're practically a different species. But that isn't just because of the shotgun marriage aspect, it's also because my brother is a completely spoiled and coddled little shit who has been allowed to be like that while maintaining a very nice lifestyle because his parents and girlfriends enable it. Like it's basically my dad's fault...I guess he didn't want his son to go through what he did, so he made his life WAYYYY too nice and easy, and now his son is a worthless bum.
Interesting- do you think perhaps that civilisation makes life easier for men, often too easy, negatively affecting their esteem and capabilities, whereas it doesn’t really do the same for women because of the natural demands on them?
Shotgun marriages would really be a faux solution in search of a problem, doing more harm than good. Change one thing, you have to change everything in that regard. Least worst choice is "live and let live".
> We should just look at Israel and discover what they are doing, even educated secular women have a good fertility rate there. It is possible to have a fairly liberal society and somehow have women make a sufficient amount of baby
Why does everyone think Israel's fertility is noteworthy when they're a Middle Eastern country located in the Middle East and filled with the Haredim who are basically like the Ashkenazi answer to the Amish, with a suntan?
Looking at it another way, are there opinion polls by sex showing whether women or men favor surrogacy more? Here’s one: https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/tabs_OP_Surrogacy_20151130.pdf. A quick and possibly wrong calculation shows that the sex differences are right at or within the margin of error (with 95% confidence). So women and men are basically the same on pregnancy of other people?
It does surprise me a little, I expected more women to be against it because of potential « abuse » of poor women or something. I guess this is a good sign. I hope more countries make surrogacy legal.
But if you want to use that as proxy for whether men or women are concerned about the fertility rate, I think there are some better metrics we can look at.
I found a survey in Singapour about natalist policies. It seems men like them more but the policies that they really like are paternity leave and shared parental leave, so this is mainly about making themselves more comfortable haha ( https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12546-023-09309-8.pdf , page 12 and page 14 table 3)
I wonder what it looks like in other countries, especially in Europe where some forms of paternity leave are already implemented.
This is what happens in a civilization where having children ceases to be a social norm women must conform to.
I acknowledge the huge physical cost of pregnancy, but I don't think that the only reason women ever got pregnant and had children was male oppression - it was conforming to the social norm of having children. And this norm was not a product of male oppression - it's a result of a cultural evolution that allowed sustaining and growing our civilization. As evo psychs say: civilizations without social norms forcing women to have children might have existed in the past - but they are not our ancestors. If we don't change anything, the western civilization will be outpopulated by more fertile civilizations, and with that, our progress in gender equality and human rights might be lost.
Women are especially hardwired to follow social norms, which leads them to having children in a healthy society. I witnessed that firsthand: my wife's desire to have a first child was correlated with seeing her friends and family have them around the age of 30. Now, as many of them are having their second children, the idea of us having a second child comes up more and more often.
Oh I don't think it was male oppression exactly, just more that if you had sex, you ended up with babies, and that was that. Sure, a few ancient civilizations had some primitive forms of birth control but those would not necessarily be known by or accessible to all women. 100 years ago it was not that unusual for women to have like 10 kids and I don't think either they OR the father necessarily wanted them all, it's just what happened and people didn't really think that you could do anything about it.
In the 50s and 60s, most marriages happened bc the mom was already pregnant. Don't forget in the US Roe v Wade didn't happen until almost the 1970s and as soon as it was legalized there was a HUGE spike in abortions. My own mom married my dad bc she was pregnant (and very much not wanting to be) with my sister, a year before Roe v Wade. I once asked her, if abortion had been legal when you got pregnant. Would you have had an abortion? And she said probably. So, there you go. Legal and accessible abortion and very effective long acting birth control like IUDs just haven't been around for more than a couple generations, and human behavior doesn't change THAT fast, but now it obviously has.
20 years ago, when people found out that I didn't plan to have kids, they either didn't believe it or it struck them as some entirely unthinkable, strange thing. Many people said to me "it never even occurred to me that you could just not have kids". But now it has occurred to them, because the incentives are so plainly obvious, so we see what we see. And the cover article of the New York Times today is all about how all millennial moms are having a mid life crisis bc being a mother is so hard and awful and none of them were prepared for it and nobody told them how hard it would be.
I personally am not concerned with things like one culture taking over another. Every culture exposed to modernity and capitalism and modern media/tech succumbs. Not the other way around. Every millennial I know was raised religious, conservative, to not have sex before marriage, and to have lots of babies (Utah Mormons). Almost all of them have rejected it for themselves. What is culture anyway in such a rapidly changing world? People in general believe all kinds of things today that were unthinkable 30 years ago. Their behavior and lifestyle and opinions are almost unrecognizable. When you have watched your own culture radically change several times over within your own lifespan and everyone you know believes totally different things than they did 25 years ago, it's hard to put much stock into the staying power of a culture anyway.
I mean, just to give a very small example, but I never would have believed I'd see the day when black and Hispanic Americans would NOT be homophobic, or would be hippies or cowboys. And yet here we are today and in the US an ultra flaming gay black guy dressed up in assless chaps is a hugely popular mega star and a black woman has a hit country album... things change all the time. I think mostly we're all powerless to the incentives of technology, so this train isn't going to stop unless something takes us technologically back to the dark ages. Conservative and rural people have ALWAYS had way more kids than everyone else, and half their kids have always defected and left for cities. I work with a lot of conservative Mormon guys who have 5 to 8 kids and for every single one of them, at least half their kids have totally rejected their faith and politics. I realize that there have been times in history where things swing backwards, like Iran in the 1970s. But that usually only happens in a pretty disastrous violent manner that results in society rejecting all kinds of technology and art and freedom in general. So while I know some right wing guys harbor secret fantasies of something similar happening, it's not likely, and if it did, they wouldn't enjoy it as much as they think. They're all addicted to their modern conveniences and technology and freedoms and porn just as much if not more than women, despite whatever barbarian revolt fantasies they have.
“And the cover article of the New York Times today is all about how all millennial moms are having a mid life crisis bc being a mother is so hard and awful and none of them were prepared for it and nobody told them how hard it would be.”
Aye, this is a big, big contributor as well. How often does the New York Times run cover stories about how joyous, loving, exciting, energizing, fulfilling, and life-affirming parenthood is? Have they ever done that?
Parenthood is hard, but it has been worth it, a million times over. As an individual, my single greatest regret in life, and it’s not even close, is stopping at two and not fathering an entire gaggle of kids. And I am largely the primary caregiver now that they are school age; I do 90% of the meals, I organize all the extracurriculars, I am point person for school communications, etc.
The real secret is…it’s not really as hard as outlets like NYT make it out to be. It’s actually pretty easy once you surrender to it. But that’s the trouble. The “surrendering” phase isn’t optional. Most of the discontented parents I speak with refuse to surrender to the experience. They are still pining for lifestyles they gave up for the kids, and it makes them bitter and anxious.
The problem is unrealistic expectations. Mothers are constantly being told what they are missing out on, they constantly told how shitty their lives are and how much better things would be if they had never had kids. They are told, and believe, that they have to do these 10 things every day or they will be shitty mothers. It’s all nonsense. Your kids just want your time and attention and love. Everything else is window dressing.
But the New York Times will never run an article saying any of that. It will run 10 articles recounting the misery of mothers who, let’s be honest, simply have the wrong mindset.
I know this is a big thing…and trust me, I see the status-competition squabbles and intra-mom judgment fights on social media ALL THE TIME. Though I think this is something they do to themselves and I really don’t know why. Mothers are SO exquisitely over-sensitive to perceived slights or “judgment” from other women/mothers. Honestly I don’t get it. I do know a few moms who just do not care and it doesn’t bother them at all, so obviously it’s possible, and yet why do so many fall into this? I’ve never understood how what other women think even effects their lives — sometimes not even women they know! Who cares what anyone else thinks??
I don’t know, I’m pretty immune from this type of criticism or judgment myself, but that may just be because I’m arrogant and just assume everyone else is envious, lol. Or call it “secure”, if you want to put another spin on it. But it has absolutely always amazed me how mothers drive themselves crazy with this sort of thing, worrying what other moms think and engaging in some sort of strange status competition for which there’s not even a prize. It may just be wired-in, for them to care a lot about what other women think. Probably there’s some evolutionary reason for it because women who didn’t care a lot about their status and being liked, historically, perhaps didn’t survive. But nowadays it’s pointless and that kind of neuroticism just makes their lives worse.
Right. "motherhood is hard and moms are struggling" is a disingenuous framing, for its incompleteness. "Mothers are miserable because they care more about peer group approval than what their children actually want and need" is the correct framing, for its obvious truth. When parents complain about extracurricular burnout...buddy, your kid does not give a shit about his 5th after school activity. Why are you doing it? Not because Joey wants to, that'd for damn sure.
In the early days, I resented my children and my family for the limits I perceived they imposed on me. "If only i didn't have these kids, i could go do xyz". I was there man, I felt that hard. This is very common among new parents. Mature adults embrace their new identity and grow out of that immature phase. Unfortunately, many mothers (and fathers, let's be real, they feel it just as much, but they complain about it less) are not mature, functioning adults.
But today, deep into it, there is literally no activity on the planet I would rather do than two hours of board games with my little nerd son, or pushing my daughter on the swing until my arms are sore, or taking a solid hour to cook pancakes because the four year old fucked it up five times. You couldn't pay me enough money to give that up. Yes, the pancakes take longer than they would if i was single. If you care more about that than the time you spent with your kid, yeah, you are reading too many NYT times articles (royal you, not you you).
There's gonna be lots of fucked up teenagers in a few years, the grown kids of these parents who secretly resent their own kids because they were incapable of surrendering and committing themselves to the larger purpose.
100%. It truly is very bizarre how parents -- mostly moms -- drive themselves crazy with all these things that surely they must realize do not matter?? Do they really think anyone is going to remember, or care, whether their 9 year old that they had to drag kicking and screaming and causing an argument went and played in some travel sports match? Do they really all expect their children to turn into Olympic athletes or something? Yet they are spending literally thousands every year on travel sports, etc. That and the constant bickering over parenting styles.
My perception, just based on observation because all of my friends are moms, mostly to tweens and teens, is that the large majority of them give themselves tons of completely unnecessary anxiety, and that it is absolutely a self-generated thing. It's not their husbands demanding they live up to those standards. It's not their kids. It's not their employers. If anything, their husband and kids mostly likely would be happier if they would just chill out a bit! But then that's part of what makes them resentful, is that they're mad that they're the worried and anxious ones and that no one else APPRECIATES it -- that then leads to the self-martyrdom thing. It's a very strange self-reinforcing trap.
I also find it weird that parents almost universally complain about the same things -- travel sports, over scheduling, phones, helicoptering -- but they're the ones doing it! If they all stopped, it would be solved. It seems to be a collective action thing...they all hate it but they're all terrified to be the only ones who stop, or they fear their own kid will fall behind.
The insanity of parenting culture is actually the main reason my husband I decided we weren't going to have kids. We knew we would be SO far out of step with what's considered acceptable (we're way too old school) and it just seemed like too much of an uphill battle to fight. You can say that's cowardly, and maybe you'd be right, but really we did not want any part of that. We already deal with enough craziness from our fellow dog-owners...even half of them have lost their damn minds lol.
As for being concerned with other cultures taking over, we might need to put this in context. First, I agree that "Every culture exposed to modernity and capitalism and modern media/tech succumbs.", but this process takes time, and in transition, a lot of friction happens. Second, US is unmatched in assimilation of immigrants into their culture, however EU countries have historically been much worse than that. For US, increased immigration would probably mean more Hispanics which are not that different from US culture (both based on the European/Christian core values), but for EU it means mostly Middle Eastern and African immigrants. And it also seems to me that in US immigrant ghettos are more likely to form, which separates the foreign cultures from the "natives", while in EU it's more like everyone mixed together.
We have already seen how major cities in Western Europe have become less safe and worse places to live because of foreign culture immigrants that were not properly assimilated into the society. I don't want the same to happen to my country, Poland, and one solution would be to do what it takes to fix fertility here and now. But I understand how fertility and, relatedly, increased immigration might be of lesser concern for for someone living in US (and even more so for an affluent upper class woman... wait... luxury beliefs?).
I think it must be very different in Europe. For one thing, you actually have different languages, cultures, genetic relatedness, etc. etc. Everyone in the US is already a mongrel and most people have no idea who their own great-grandparents are or where they came from, unless they take a 23 and Me type test. And we also don't really have a national culture anyway...Alabama is nothing like Vermont which is nothing like Ohio or Nevada, they practically ARE different countries, culturally, yet everyone is free to pass between them or move whenever they want. And we also don't really have a welfare state or many government benefits, like in Europe -- the only real benefits are ones you have to directly pay into decades to even receive anything.
I certainly would not want to be overrun by immigrants from a very different culture, in the European context. Besides the factors above, I also imagine that just your long history warring with each other, and not having the feeling of safety by having two enormous oceans on either side, lead to further wariness.
Back when I was much more poor and lived in a bad neighborhood, there was an apartment complex two blocks away that housed entirely Sudanese Muslim refugees, and it wasn't fun living near them. There were several murders there just in a one-year period. So I get it, I just think in the US it's very different, as you note.
And anyway, I am not pro-immigration anyway, unless it's merit-based best and brightest. Our current system is the opposite of that. But I don't think there's any urgent "crisis", and there are plenty of people who would prefer a steady or slowly declining population in any event, so there's no social consensus on taking action. By the time we get to an actually declining population -- which is not currently projected to happen until 2080 in the US -- who knows what the situation will be anyway, with AI, robots, etc. Think about how much has changed the past 60 years...trying to make policy for something 60 years in the future just seems silly to me.
In Poland and Europe overall, the population is already in decline - for us it's not planning 60 years ahead, it's happening now and right now the best we can do is at least not turn it into a slippery slope.
Your argument makes sense in your geopolitical context, but without it, it can turn into a luxury belief. The problem with luxury beliefs is that they work for the elite (e.g. US - no issue with TFR/population decline/immigration), but impose costs when adopted by lower classes that have their own problems and can't handle them well (e.g. EU), so they should always come with context or even disclaimers in the tone of "The stunts you are about to see are performed by professional athletes, do not try this at home".
screw you and your little dog too. male oppression. Amazon window to the world. I am free. Social norm lock me up under the forlorn mourn with my righteous subject. normy. eat cow cowboy.
Interesting article. I can only speak for myself, but what decided it for me was realizing how few truly close connections there are outside of family. My ILs are happy people with tons of friends, but only their kids, DILs, and grandkids made it on the list of people they would spend their last day on earth with. When my mom got sick, it was me dealing with the gross, disgusting, mundane aspects of her care and her bad behavior, not the nurses or doctors. I realized that, beyond my husband and a few friends, I was pouring my life out into things like my job, that I cared about but didn't care about me back. It doesn't always work out, but when it does, the bond between a mother and child is deeper and stronger than almost anything else. I decided I wanted to pour my life into something that has a chance to be like that. I think you raise an excellent point in another comment that the extreme narcissism and lack of responsibility encouraged from children to parents now is a major reason it's losing its appeal.
I wouldn't try to convince anyone else - maybe in a few years I'll decide this was a horrible idea and I should've started a cat rescue instead. But that was the thought process that made all the body horror of pregnancy and birth sound worth it.
I'm not a woman but I had a similar realization. When I was younger I did not want kids and did not see why I would have them. As I got older, I realized that the only people who were still in my life as I moved around and changed between jobs or social circles, were my direct family members. I don't speak to anyone today that I spoke to 10 years ago, aside from my family and relatives. And I imagine that when I retire it will be the same. Family members are the only people who've ever been willing to sacrifice for me in a meaningful way and vice versa.
Maybe if we didn't live in such a heavily atomized society these family relations wouldn't feel so irreplaceable. If you and everyone you know all are born, live and die in the same town for all of your lives, maybe you could form a lot of really close bonds with those people even though they aren't directly related to you. But that's not how the world works anymore.
I live far away from both my family and most of my old friends, but I am still very tight and close with friends from 30 years ago and text or talk with them frequently, get together whenever we can, etc. This makes me sad because I think that your friends from childhood and early adulthood are in many ways the least replaceable -- no one else went through the same formative/coming of age experiences with you.
I agree and my life trajectory, which I imagine is mirrored to some extent by everyone, has been one in which those friends from youth slowly fall away as people move away for one reason or another. I am someone with very little interest in trying to maintain relationships with people that I may never see in person again, or only very occasionally at significant expense. I don't enjoy friendships carried out only via text messages, email, or talking on the phone.
So, as soon as someone lives outside my driving range, I will lose touch with them. I am sure this is also the case for many other people. I would guess it is more common for men than for women. This is why I speculated on how things might be if you and most other people never left your hometowns. In order to maintain contact with much of anyone from where I grew up, I'd have to stay in that hometown, and even if I did that today, many of those other people I grew up with would still move away for their own reasons.
I believe this is also affected generationally by the increasing fragmentation of the culture. There is no longer any one common cultural experience that we all share together, not even as youth. I already witnessed and experienced quite a lot of social turnover as a young adult as people got in fights and cut ties over social justice nonsense, and that was a while ago now. I can only imagine how it is today where you might have to grapple with things like people in your social circle deciding to become trans.
See, this is interesting to me because virtually everyone else in my hometown DOES still live in my hometown...I'm the one who moved thousands of miles away. But they never hang out with each other -- in fact some of the only times they get together is the once every couple years I visit. Probably because they're busy with their kids, at least in part.
But I've also never had a fall-out or anything close to it, with anyone over politics/social issues. The only reason I can even comprehend of that happening would be if I found out that they were secretly serial killers of dogs or something. And that is definitely not because we all agree...I have friends/family adamantly opposed to almost everything I believe, and wouldn't ever have any if we had to agree.
I absolutely can see that there's no longer any common culture, or even really generational culture, because things are so fractured and in little sub-cultures and bubbles.
But you are making me curious about something I'm currently forgetting the name of...affiliative-ness or kinship orientation or something...I have seen some references to this as a personality trait. Which essentially measures how much one prefers their own kin to non-relatives.
I don't remember ever preferring or feeling closer to family than friends...not as a child, not as a young adult, and not now. And I can make friends with and like almost every individual (it's just people in the abstract I don't like, ha). My husband is the same way and I also notice this with other intentionally childless people. Like there's an unusually high proportion of teachers who don't want/have their own kids even though they obviously love kids and like people in general.
It makes me wonder if this personality trait is the factor that really drives this. I wish I could remember what the word for it is, so I could do a survey about it, and Google is not helping me.
I guess the question to me is, if you feel that you must have daily physical/visible contact with people to stay interested in them (which I do understand), why did you move away from your hometown and family in the first place? You felt you had to, for economic reasons?
>I guess the question to me is, if you feel that you must have daily physical/visible contact with people to stay interested in them (which I do understand), why did you move away from your hometown and family in the first place? You felt you had to, for economic reasons?<
I did choose to attend a certain college largely based on the fact that most of my high school friends were going there, and stayed in that town for a good number of years. By the time I eventually left it, all but one or two of those people had moved away themselves.
Policy could simply be oriented toward removing obstacles and making it easier for women to have children *if* they want them (much easier said than done), while still respecting individual autonomy etc.
Yes you could do that, but conservatives and wealthy Democrats don't what that, so its a nonstarter. We actually had a temporary reversal of the long-term trend of declining birthrates in the postwar period. That was accompanied by a downward shift in the age of marriage and childbirth. Historically people married earlier when they perceived that their life prospects were favorable.
Boys who manage to be gainfully employed right out of high school are much better prospects for marriage and some of the girls more interested in marriage and family would marry them and have children in their late teens or early 20's. Others would go to college and then life as single women for some time, often at home. By the time my mom was 25, most of her friends were getting married or already were married, and she was still living at home. She joined the foreign service where she met my dad, they married and my sister was born in 1958 when my mom was 27. My mother-in-law also went to college while some of her sisters did not. Some years out of college she was still single, while her younger sisters had married and already had kids. She told my wife than she felt that it was her time to marry and she did. My wife was born in 1954 when her mom was 27.
So even back in those days there were plenty of women who were not eager to have kids right away and others who had children very young, and the observation that the other women in your environment were marrying and having children influenced you to get married and have children yourself.
But after economic policy over 1964-1979 destroyed the New Deal economy, a new world emerged in which it was harder for boys coming out of high school to get gainfully employed, and so were not good prospects for marriage. Pregnancies still happened of course, but generally the girls didn't marry the boys (often because the parents objected to their daughter getting stuck with a loser). Teenage pregnancy in the 1950's often meant the couple married and made a reasonable go of it (and so serve as models for girls who did not get into trouble). By the 1980's teenage pregnancy led to bad outcomes; girls who got pregnant young would not serve as role models. 1950's unmarried women in their late 20's might feel like they were lagging in life if they had friends and relatives who were already married with children and doing fine. 1980's unmarried women at this age would have few positive examples of early marriage and children. So marriage happened later.
But then a new phenomenon emerges, the ratio of college women to college men started to rise, meaning women who might want to marry and have children in their 30's would find most the suitable men taken and those left unappealing. After a couple more decades of cultural evolution in this environment you have plenty of women who have decided to go it alone.
Honestly as hilariously exaggerated as this article, I do see your point. But ultimately this will be a self correcting problem.
The two fundamental things a society requires to exist are young men dying in war and young women giving birth. Men are no longer willing to die for this decrepit country [I'm speaking about the US, but it's true most other places too] and women are not longer willing to give birth.
This will eventually break society. We can already see the welfare system being strained. And once these things break, all of the things that make "strong, independent women (TM)" possible are just going to go away. Then men will die and women will give birth.
Remind me why young men dying at war is fundamental to the existence of a society? Because the country I live in hasn’t participated in a major war for 80+ years and I wouldn’t say our society is on its last legs. Sorta sounds like you made that up in your head, bro. Or maybe a podcaster told you.
Every nation in history was formed formed and maintained out of war. Your country is probably a protectorate of the USA. Your wars have been outsourced to The Empire. Frankly, it's amazing a normal adult doesn't understand this.
Nah bro - I wouldn’t say we’re a “protectorate of the USA”, and conscription/ compulsary military training ended well before I was born.
I see your framing - “everyone must sacrifice to keep society ticking, and men sacrifice more because they die in war”. But, the thing is, since the end of WWII almost 80 years ago, only a tiny fraction of my country’s young men have died in war. And society rolls on. So your simple little equation isn’t working.
"Nah bro - I wouldn’t say we’re a “protectorate of the USA”, and conscription/ compulsary military training ended well before I was born."
If you have a US military base in your country, you're a protectorate.
"I see your framing - “everyone must sacrifice to keep society ticking, and men sacrifice more because they die in war”. But, the thing is, since the end of WWII almost 80 years ago, only a tiny fraction of my country’s young men have died in war. And society rolls on. So your simple little equation isn’t working"
Yeah you're referencing the most peaceful time in all of human history. This is an anomaly that is rapidly coming to an end. The US dollar is deteriorating and with it the US empire. Once the US is no longer patrolling the waves, there will no longer be global trade in the way we understand it today. Once that happens then we return to the natural state of humanity: war and preparation for war.
This is ultimately a retirement / social security / pension crisis, at least I think that is the valid way to talk about it. It should not be personal, it should not be a finger pointed that you, yes you, should breed. It is a social problem - how will society function if 80% of people will be retired and 20% try to provide for that 20% ?
Otherwise it would be a no-problem at all, human population going back to 2Bn 100 years ago would do a whole lot good to the planet, to real estate prices, to not feeling crowded all the time.
So it is not even a not enough children problem: it is specifically a not enough children compared to the number of future old people problem.
And no, working until 75 will not be a solution because no one will hire us. I am 46 and already starting to struggle to keep up with technology - fuck the cloud based todo list, TODO.TXT on the desktop works fine. I am already complaining about the good old days of just pulling a database table on a Delphi form instead of all this totally complicated web development thing. How will I do at 60? Dunno, but at 75 really can't work.
Jul 24·edited Jul 24Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
Thanks for writing this, very thought-provoking. I have ten children. Two were born in a birth center, two in a hospital, and six at home. My wife vastly preferred the homebirths. We had a birth pool full of warm water, like a big bathtub. Just the midwife is there. It’s painful, it’s damaging, but it isn’t psychologically scarring like a hospital birth.
It’s sad that the medical system, mostly run by men, has made birth so horrible. It’s demeaning. A woman on her back with her feet in stirrups is pretty much the worst position to have a baby in. But the doctor has access! And that’s all that matters….
Proportionally, a woman having a baby is similar to a man peeing out an almond. Anyone that’s had a tiny little kidney stone and wanted to die can imagine the pain.
Our crappy society has turned what should be a mountaintop experience for a woman into a humiliating and worthless trial.
Overall though your essay is pretty sad. Our modern world has turned childbearing, childrearing, marriage, and family into a horrid mess. I can't blame people for not wanting to take part. But if they only knew there was another way to do things!
As a pronatalist grand multipara, I roughly agree with your price list. The question is just how to make the rest of society pay, in one or another currency.
I mean honestly, people keep coming up with these crazy tax schemes that reward the whole family etc, but why not just directly pay the woman? Funny no one ever suggests that, it's always envisioned as a payment to her and her spouse or the family as a whole. And I've never really seen any women make the argument...even if they want more money they'll frame it to support the children or something, they never directly ask to be compensated. Now obviously a payment to a woman will benefit the whole family but no one likes the idea of it going to her directly as compensation for two years of giving up her body for another.
There's a story that a long time ago in a dusty foreign shtihole far far away, the people were starving. Foreign aid came but it was stolen by warlords. So foreign armies came to protect it. When the aid was issued, they'd found that if they issued it to the men, it'd be sold off for ammunition or qat. So they issued it to the women of the household.
They gathered the women together in a compound, and the men stood outside. The woman would get 5kg of rice which she'd put on a cloth around her head down her back, the 5kg of flour which she'd perch on top of her head, a kg of beans which she'd put under one arm along with a bottle of cooking oil. In the other arm would go an infant, and at one leg she'd have beside her a toddler, and usually a third child trailing behind.
As she came out of the compound, the man accompanying her - usually her husband, but sometimes an uncle or father - would stand up from where he was sitting with his mates, not take on any of the burdens, and walk along ahead of her with his stick.
Now, the Western world is somewhat improved from this dusty foreign shithole, but I think we can reasonably say that if you pay women directly it'll just go to the family anyway. The same is not true of paying into the man's bank accounts.
We’re not going to set up a vast welfare apparatus to tax men to pay for single mothers to have a brood of kids. We already have something like that with the current welfare state and it destroyed marriage for the bottom 50% of society.
Look, what we’re mainly talking about here is trying to put middle class DINKs and middle class families on even financial footing. Right now not having kids gives you a leg up bidding for scarce resources (like real estate) and it’s a red queen race to the bottom.
Traditionally, the man is supposed to pay his female partner. The idea that female reproductive services should be for free is just a continuation of the idea that sex should be for free.
(And breastfeeding is unnecessary, actually. People could just quit doing that. Technically, a baby only needs nine months of a human female body.)
I agree nursing is not as necessary/beneficial as people think, especially once you remove cofounders like education and income from the studies. But in the US, it's a fervent belief to the point of being a cult. I have friends that breast fed their kids til they were 3!
All of our foster girls, including the one we adopted used formula. I don't think my granddaughters nursed either. Modern formula is very good. Back in the day when formula was not as good, smart women nursed. Both my mom and MIL nursed. My wife, who has a daughter from a previous marriage also nursed, but she really liked it, made her feel like some kind of earth mother (she's an old school feminist).
I think there are a lot of materialistically rational reasons why women don’t want kids. Particularly in a world where it is optional as opposed to being a necessity.
I personally think this is a problem that women will ultimately need to resolve themselves. But I don’t think it is too far away from the impulse men have for pursuing casual sex but not wanting to have the responsibility. Or how men don’t feel the necessity to commit to a single woman at all.
In a world defined by atomized individuals that pursue their maximum individual happiness, familial and intergenerational obligations take a back seat to careers and personal wealth generation. I don’t think we can bridge the “fertility crisis” so long as we use that as an axiom. This is not a fault of women, but a broader problem with capitalism tbh.
Yeah I don't consider it a "fertility crisis". For one thing, even with current projections we're supposed to get to 10 billion humans before it actually starts to decrease, and 10 billion is an enormous amount. Second, it's not that hard to turn it around fairly quickly if and when it starts having an actual negative effects on anyone (which it currently does not seem to). Most women are fertile for a 25 year period and if something happened where suddenly it was truly like OH NO THERE ARE ZERO KIDS, you could remedy it quite quickly. Look how ridiculously quickly we've expanded the past 100 years -- you can just do that again.
But I do think it would involve EITHER making having babies and raising kids much more appealing than it is currently, OR having conditions in general be much worse and scary and bad, so that people are just back in a let's not go extinct survival mode.
One reason it seems incredibly unappealing (at least to my eyes), is the completely one-way flow of "intergenerational obligations", currently. Forget filial piety or respecting one's elders, parents nowadays allow their children to treat them like garbage. Parents have essentially no authority, are entitled to no respect, are expected to endlessly coddle self esteem and pour in affection and resources, and the child owes zero in return and is entitled to cut them off entirely if they feel like it. Now that children are personal choices and luxuries rather than what you get whether you like it or not, they are endlessly indulged and it's very hard to see, as an outsider, parenthood as anything but being a glutton for punishment. This is the other big reason we decided we couldn't have kids...because we knew we would be considered way too disciplinarian and harsh, in a manner that isn't really acceptable in today's society. And I'm not really talking about like Medieval levels of harsh parenting or anything, but even just raising a kid like people used to in the 80s and 90s is now deemed to be child abuse.
I'm not particularly convinced of the fertility crisis being easy to reverse or not being a problem. I'll to keep this bit brief though.
I think the reversal would take both take at least a generation and a massive change in social attitudes and behaviors. That just doesn't happen overnight as trends in just about every culture and country are going the opposite direction.
While being a problem comes from broader intergenerational analysis. Older generations consolidating wealth and ruling over the young. But also older generations losing any ability to retire as they have limited to no young to replace them. Followed by the massive social upheavals of population movements.
I don't think of the fertility crisis as a death of humanity, but a death of a lot of really valuable social structures that are only sustained because of our incredibly wealthy world. A world that I think will become much more desperate as we consume that wealth and not allow it to properly flow intergenerationally. It will consolidate and rot out how we live.
From there though, I get the bit with finding a solution. Which you seem to be fairly conscious of the problems with the solutions even if you don't fully acknowledge the problem itself. Discipline and social obligations require people to sacrifice their personal wants to resolve it. There really seems to be no way around that. I heard someone put it well, "Convincing someone to eat their vegetables will always be harder than convincing them to eat Fast Food". It comes off as something that may eventually be confronted when we are only incredibly desperate. Worse, we may not even get to confront it on our terms.
I had some interesting conversations with liberals conscious of this, and they were frustrated with the liberal solutions not working. Funding, tax incentives, programs, education, normal liberal responses to problems. But the problem is that one day they will not be the people drafting the responses to it. It will be the illiberal people making the decisions. For my part on this, if liberals want to fix this, they have an opportunity to do it on their terms.
This part has always happened though: Older generations consolidating wealth and ruling over the young." It's just that so many more people live for such a long time now. By the time your boss quits and makes space for a successor, or a parent dies and passes on family wealth, the inheritor is already in their 60s. So in a sense the problem is just as much with too many old people.
Don't forget the positives. It used to be a big problem for parents with wealth to divide their holdings among their heirs. Rich families still often turn against each other and fight when the parents die. With only one or two kids, that's no longer an issue, and childless people will be giving what they have to charity.
I do agree that that it is better to come up with reasonable solutions and plan ahead, rather than making desperate ones. However, I've never seen the US, at least, do ANYTHING that isn't what is easiest/most convenient until there's basically no other choice and they're facing an emergency. In the US we always put off for tomorrow what we could do today, unless it's making money.
Our economic system is dependent on continuous growth since it is based in debt. I believe Simone and Malcolm Collins have a video up on this which is very illuminating.
Because the system requires continuous growth, more and cheaper goods, for one, the birth rate deficit isn't in my opinion, quite so clean.
People argue all day about the migrant crisis in the USA and Europe being a sort of ideological problem, somehow about the white race in particular. As if someone was setting out to sabotage the European.
I can see why people think this because of media and academic rhetoric.
However the importation of the third world is being allowed and facilitated for one reason, money. It is allowed and will not be stopped by voting because it is necessary to keep the system running. More and cheaper labor. And Ai is nowhere near solving this.
So as the population of natives shrinks the third world must pour in to keep up with the debt system. The GDP must grow or implode.
A few people having more children won't stop this really. And having many children in an attempt to provide enough tax slaves and laborers to keep the machine running isn't any more appealing than immigration itself.
I think it could be a combination of the two: both for propping up the all glorious GDP and “replacement” of the white “race,” as they have so often claimed.
Yeah it's basically a problem of the usurious system and Europeans and many other countries are essentially debt slaves to it... it's also leading to replacement of Asian countries tho they are more resistant to immigration of course
Tbh, that “academic rhetoric” is a very real thing that I wouldn’t discount. It is in places much further than just the academy.
But to your point. I think mass migration is the solution to this in western countries while in eastern they try technology. Technology does not seem capable of fixing this, and mass migration seems to be a disaster.
Not only is mass migration demonstrating that humans aren’t interchangeable cogs for a society. It is also incredibly short sighted. It can work if the developing world had high birth rates; it is just “skimming off the top” so to speak to help out developed nations. But the developing world is having collapsing birth rates. With current trends, you will have the catastrophe of low birth rates obliterating the developing world faster than the developed if you keep those mass migrations going.
Liar Liar pants on fire. Mass immigration IS designed to wipe out the white race. Peter Sutherland, George Soros and Nicolas Sarkozy and many others have said so openly. Weasel words and non sequitirs. And actually AI could solve most of the problems
I hope Ai can! Possibly it's done by design but I'm increasingly convinced the population collapse is global and a big reason for elites allowing for open borders is to keep their system from breaking.
I think of problems that places like Japan faces, where business owners stay well into their 60s and 70s because there is nobody to replace them. They have no option for retirement because *they* are what fuels the economy; the younger generation is too small to rely on investing in them for economic rewards. So they have to work themselves into a very old age.
As far as the ruler shop of the old, we in the US have been ruled by baby boomers for over 30 years now. That is something they never dealt with their own parents because they were a large enough political cohort to take over. Smaller younger generations will be stuck having no real political or economic voice because they aren’t large enough to make the splash until they are hitting retirement. That is not the historical case. Our nations founders was a broad mix of people ranging from their 20s to their 50s. Which can be seen in other political bodies throughout time until only very recently where we see our leaders be on actual life-support they are so old.
Another part of intergenerational wealth that is not really talked about is breakdown of families. Families are one of the biggest sources of intergenerational wealth if you happen to not be on of the elite. That means the wealth is instead being channeled into consumption habits (corporations that take that wealth) as opposed to invested in intergenerational channels. That means those that do have families will have a harder time while wealth is centralized further and further. But families is kind of tangential to this, so maybe worth exploring another time.
Not to be overly pessimistic, but I’ll agree with you. I think we are doomed to suffer this problem. In the meantime, people will point fingers at everything else before they confront needing to make tough personal choices like raising families. It is easier to scapegoat immigration, capitalism, and baby boomers while promising nationalism, socialism, and asserting our own political agency than to make 20+ year commitments to things like raising families.
As there are more old people the tax burden on the young will increase and their political power will diminish. They will themselves have fewer children to compensate and it will death spiral. There is no obvious way out.
Excess third world populations aren’t useful and can’t make up the shortfall.
> the tax burden on the young will increase and their political power will diminish. They will themselves have fewer children to compensate
So ... let’s make those young, politically powerless people who can’t afford to have children more miserable—and less able to afford children—by taxing them more, for the benefit of the few who can?
It's the economy stupid. Women are simply overvalued in the workplace as well as society When the "gender pay gap "has become an all important issue to be addressed it shows how skewed the dynamic has become, when it's actually in the other direction with women taking more time off work than men and getting equal pay for totally different work just because theyre working in the same company. And to round it off nicely borrowing a line from Alice in Wonderlands character......What are you for?
I saw an amazing quote by Darlene Bereznicki the other day.
“Men want to have kids, and I get that, you know - I prefer when things are made for me too. But men want to have kids like how kids want to have a dog.
Just like ‘I promise to take care of it, I promise!’
And then you’re like ‘Will you buy it food?’
‘Nah, you know I don’t know how to go to the store by myself’.”
This is demeaning to fatherhood and pretty un-representative of my own situation and every other father I know. I'm afraid Ms Bereznicki is badly mistaken. Best I can tell she doesn't have kids herself, so I'm not sure how she came to this conclusion.
There are many, many exceptional fathers who lift heaven and earth to give their families good lives. Every father in my network is of this type.
We need to stop pretending that mothers are heavily put-upon, constant sufferers who are weighed down by their useless husbands. Not only demeaning and debasing, but inaccurate to boot. Prevalence of these lies is one of the reasons so many young women have been lead down the primrose path of voluntarily childlessness, and consequently miss out on the most exceptionally meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful experience of their lives.
Sure, there are many great fathers out there. Sounds like you’re one of them - good on you.
But there are also many, many deeply unhappy women who feel exploited, trapped and even abused in their marriages. There’s a reason the divorce rate is what it is.
Marriage is a big gamble, and more and more young women are realising that. That is a good thing. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, or won’t, get married. It means they will approach marriage with due caution, which gives them a better chance of forming a healthy, fulfilling, long-lasting partnership.
Yes, sure, but there are also many, many deeply unhappy men who feel exploited, trapped, and emotionally abused in their marriages. The difference is, these men never file for divorce, they simply suffer in silence, both because that's how men are wired, but also because they would rather resign themselves to unfulfilled life than break up their families. They place the family unit above their personal happiness. Nobody cares about these men, they are at best ignored and at worst blamed for the pain their shitty wives cause.
I’m becoming unsure that you’re one of the good ones. Huge numbers of women also “suffer in silence” for the supposed good of the family unit. You’re trying to make men out to be stoic and superior, and women to be weak complainers, and it’s bogus - not only because women too “resign themselves to unfulfilled lives”, and indeed have *long* been expected to “place the family unit above their personal happiness”.
But also, the idea that parents who are miserable, exploited, unhappy and abused can nevertheless create a healthy, happy home is *nonsense*. Bonkers. The kids *know* when their parents are miserable and it affects them deeply. So many adults wish their parents *hadn’t* stayed together “for the kids”.
"Oh, Come on! What do you mean by "I don't take care of it enough"? I hugged it for a few minutes, and watched "Adventure time" with it didn't I?...Oh, and I gave it a sandwich!"
Aug 29·edited Aug 29Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
Great piece and a cathartic read.
Scientific literature gets into the insane physiology of pregnancy. And there's a rich feminist tradition of critically examining pregnancy and birth and its costs to women. The Shulamith Firestone quote about "shitting a pumpkin" comes to mind after reading this piece.
But the dominant culture doesn't really wrestle with what pregnancy actually asks of women in a serious, specific manner. Your chart is awesome. I'd really encourage the men reading to think about their answers seriously.
I started my Substack "Placental Mammal" because I'm exasperated at how little the physiology of pregnancy — which is enabled and controlled by the placenta — enters into cultural and philosophical discussions about pregnancy and reproduction, especially when it comes to abortion rights. It's awesome to see another writer ringing the bell about it!
Very cool, skimming your articles I will definitely want to dive in. After watching a documentary once on how very, very tiny kangaroos are when they're born and squiggle their way up and into the mother's pouch, I've always thought it's a terrible shame we can't be marsupials! Seems like a much kinder system for mom. Though I'm sure there's some kind of trade-off in brain development, being born so early.
I always thought laying an egg would be pretty great, until I did more reading on the physical toll of making eggs.lol. The marsupial way does sound pretty appealing!
Aug 29·edited Aug 29Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
I think the data of fewer women wanting kids is just reflective of the shitty mate market they face. I bet if you'd polled women in 1850 most would have wanted kids because most of the tradeoffs weren't as bad even though the physical risks were greater Now having kids is no guarantee of at least having a man financially support you and being able to at least avoid demeaning paid labor or being able to actually do much of the rewarding/meaning part of raising small kids. One can simultaneously see it is a real problem to have say a 1.3 fertility rate and a massive population of retired bad health seniors but also see that the lowering fertility rate is understandable and not because a bunch of evil feminists have brainwashed women out of having kids.
I am starting to think that this is a lot more of the issue than I had previously thought. I have been mulling on this recently, and I'm not sure WHY it never occurred to me previously, but I guess it's just so baked in that I never noticed the "water I'm swimming in" so to speak. But it occurs to me now that basically everyone born around roughly 1980 or after has grown up in a culture where it is entirely normalized and acceptable (or least legal and not harshly punished) for men to abdicate all responsibilities if they feel like it...divorce, cheating, abandonment, not marrying a woman they impregnate. And everything in culture I've ever known my whole life since at least Bill Clinton was President sends the message that ultimately you cannot ever expect to rely upon or trust a man and that you're a big dummy if you do. I don't even think that's necessarily a conscious thought for most women, it's just sort there in the underlying calculus and makes taking a leap of faith like that far more terrifying.
Shades of Louise Perry and Mary Harrington! "Feminism" has been great for (many) males; not so much for everyone else.
Assuming we want the good parts of our culture to persist at least for the lifetimes of great-nephews and -nieces, the questions become: how do we incentivise men to stay loyal and to fully participate in bringing up their chidren, and how do we train them to do it, now that the art has been lost?
(Or nearly lost; as Tove writes, there are still some "high-investment" men around. Although perhaps it's just their fellow men making them look good by comparison.)
Trying to shame men and telling them what they "should" want clearly isn't working; nor are attempts at indoctrination with either "traditional gender roles" or egalitarian beliefs. (Especially when flavoured with "personal fulfilment" and "happiness" seasonings.)
Johann Kurtz (indirectly) raises the idea of using status as a carrot. Maybe that'll do it, if taken far enough. Maybe.
High-investment fatherhood will have to be the easy path in life for men, that's for sure.
Yes, I'm not sure really. Certainly they are not going to listen to women who try to hector, shame, or cajole them into it. I think somehow the men have to, though it's hard to see how.
My wife was hesitant to have children. Was worried about career, etc.
We have two now and she was far more enthusiastic about having the second one than the first.
Being a parent is frustrating and you make a lot of sacrifices, but you also grow personally in a way that someone who doesn’t have children never will.
Being alone or being a DINK is easy. You’d think with so much more money and free time available they’d be more interesting, but there’s a limit to how much someone can grow if they’re not up to the challenge of raising a child.
I’ll leave you with a fun fact:
Did you know that children raised by single fathers show roughly the same outcomes as children raised by two parents? It’s the single mothers who can’t handle the responsibility of turning children into adults.
I believe that. I have a friend who is a single father after his life basically abandoned them bc she decided she'd rather party, and he's an excellent dad. And my parents divorced and I lived every other week with each of them, so I got to experience years of what it is like in a single father household versus a single mother household. Dads are less neurotic (though both my parents were perfectly responsible and capable of handling it) and also most kids are over indulged these days and moms are worse about that. Also boys in particular need to have an adult man in the house that they fear, to keep their ass in line once they hit puberty, and most teenage boys don't fear their mom.
So dads are great...IF they stick around, which plenty don't. I was lucky bc my dad stayed involved in my life. But most of my friends had divorced parents and their dads just eventually disappeared. Many hadn't spoken to them in years, not even a call to say happy birthday. So there are a lot of dads who just are not very connected to their kids and will fade away as soon as they have a new girlfriend. But amongst the dads who ARE responsible, they are excellent. Higher variation among men, as in all things.
I don't really buy the parents growing thing, sorry. Their lives change for sure, but that does not necessarily mean for the better (or the worse). But it's pretty ridiculous to say they're more interesting, that's a complete joke and a way higher percentage of historical figures and famous scientists, thinkers, and artists had no kids than the standard population. Parents are much more self involved and inward thinking in my view, and often take a flagrantly I'll do anything for my kid and everyone else in the world can go fuck off attitude. What's so mature and enlightened about that? Which I don't mean as an insult anyway, it's natural and what happens when you have someone else to be responsible for, especially when that someone is the only thing that can carry your genes forward after you die. But I don't think that makes them better people, in fact I see parents acting in extraordinarily selfish and greedy ways on behalf of their own kids that would not be acceptable if they did it for themselves all the time (like pulling strings to get them an unfair advantage). They just take a pass for themselves and deem it to not be self centered because it's for their progeny instead of themselves, but it's the same thing. Anyway I have no beef with parents and am glad they do it, and many parents are great people but plenty arent. So whatever they want to tell themselves about being superior is fine with me.
When you're a parent, you're far more sensitive to cultural shifts that aren't good for children. Weird content, weird people (dragqueen story hour), incredibly stupid ideas like shutting down schools for 18+ months, etc.
I may have been more of a world citizen when I was single and didn't have kids, but I've come to realize that making your local area the best it can be is a far more important struggle.
It hasn't stopped me from keeping up with world events. I'm still more informed than most people without kids are. Lots of people who don't want children aren't scientists or engineers. They're not even big readers.
I didn't say parents were better people. I said raising a child creates personal growth that's simply not possible to get any other way. There are plenty of deadbeat parents who fucking suck who experience no personal growth from having children because they essentially take no responsibility for raising their children into functional adults.
"I fed them, clothed them, and kept a roof over their heads!" is the rallying cry of shitty parents who wonder why their adult children are fucking morons who suck at life. They never taught their children anything but their own bad habits and laziness.
But for parents who put the work in to develop their children, it's very rewarding to see them blossom into readers, thinkers, and plotters of mayhem.
The familial investment in the community is horribly overlooked compared to single people. Single people by nature are much more transient while families are pushed to be invested in community issues. Be it education, crime, or simply maintaining the property of the area.
Single fathers are relatively rare. I’m not surprised their kids tend to have decent outcomes compared to the kids of single mothers, because fathers probably more likely to abandon their children by orders of magnitude. The minority of men who raise children alone probably are wealthier than most single mothers and depend heavily on help from
Found this fascinating, thanks for sharing. Have quite a few female friends who expressed minimal interest in having kids and have always come away confused by it. As a guy who always wanted kids myself, I largely equated the two in my mind and while I intellectually understood the difference, putting a number on it is a totally different experience. Some thoughts below:
While I'm willing to concede that my desire is largely based on instinct and then post-hoc rationalized, I don't see how the rationalizations are in-and-of-themselves wrong. It seems that the same economic system that provides the freedom of choice through economic security that women now have is dependent on--at a minimum--a supply of new labor large enough to support them as they age. To be blunt, with rare exceptions, people over 70 are a substantial economic drain on society given our current welfare system. Immigration can serve as a stop-gap, but can only shore up the system if the same choice against carrying children continues to be made. The technological solution (artificial wombs) seems the ideal situation, but I have no expertise with which to handicap when we can expect wide-scale rollout, so I'm ignoring it (if I shouldn't, let me know). With that in mind, would you agree or disagree with limiting participation in those welfare programs to only those with children, particularly given that it is an implicit subsidy from families to the childless (through the spending that parents use to raise their children who then pay into welfare which covers all individuals, not just parents)?
As for your question: somewhere between $100-150k; though with the caveats that I have valuable skills and a network that I know I could rely on to cushion the worst case situations.
I don't really know much about artificial wombs either. If someone is attempting to develop one, they probably keep it quiet because it's way too Brave New Worldy for most people.
But again, it's weirdly women who seem more likely against them.
Even though it's very obvious that at least some women would like to take advantage of them, given the fact some already pay to outsource pregnancy, via surrogacy. These are mostly very rich women, celebrities, etc who do this of course, and most normal people can't afford it. I believe the going rate is about what you quoted you would require (around $100-$150k), so there you go, you hit on the market clearing price!
Though if it ever happens, I would expect that people would rapidly shift from thinking it was immoral and weird to rapidly adopting it, til eventually it was the norm for everyone but a few fundamentalists or hardcore anti-tech people. And that eventually it would be like that scene in Brave New World where the people are horrified and revolted to even think about how babies used to get born. At least, that was pretty much the reaction that happened when they made us watch "The Miracle of Birth" in school when I was in 9th grade....the whole class was screaming like it was a horror movie.
Anyway, I would be happy to accept not getting a social security payout, if it means I also don't have to pay towards school taxes. Because I pay a lot more each year in school taxes for other people's kids than I do towards social security, which is capped. ;)
I'm not really sure I buy the argument about subsidization, anyway. If you have a non-working wife and two kids, only you are paying into social security, yet both you AND your wife will get social security benefits, and you'll also both get Medicare even though only you paid towards it, and if something should happen to both of you, your kids will get your social security. Whereas both my husband and I pay into these, and only we will get anything out. So we're paying in for 2 and getting benefits for 2, while you're paying in for 1 and getting benefits for 4. You can't count your future kid's contributions that you assume but don't know they'll make 30 years in the future, that's silly. If we did it that way, your contributions shouldn't matter because your own dad already took the credit for you.
And besides, this all assumes functional people...the reality is, there are millions of people who are basically helpless and will never contribute much if anything at all. Every purposely childless person I know is EXTREMELY responsible and careful about money and usually risk averse and a very long-term planner -- those traits are why they don't have kids -- and I'd warrant a guess that in general they pay in far more over a typical lifetime than they ever get in benefits, as a collective, if you compared them to typical families. That's just my intuition since I know a lot of these people, it would be interesting to see an actual study on that.
I also think people are maybe over-exaggerating in their mind how much help old people need? In my neighborhood, we're one of the youngest couples on our block, and most of our neighbors are in their 70s and 80s. They're not THAT helpless. It's not like there are paid helpers going in and out every day. Most of them still mow their lawns and work on their gardens and drive etc. If they can't, a neighbor will help them. And then once in a while they die. I think that normalizing holding on to elderly people who can't function at all for years on end in some nursing facility, draining the family for 5 figures a month, is what should be un-normalized.
You are not paying any social security or Medicare taxes towards yourselves. These are pay as you go systems, every dollar you pay is already spent. Only the taxes of the next generation can pay for you, and you didn’t create a next generation. The whole reason we have a looming shortfall is people didn’t have enough kids.
I think it’s extremely unlikely you are going to voluntarily waive you Medicare and social security when you are older. There is no empirical track record of people acting that way.
It would be more reasonable to base social security and Medicare taxes on number of kids. Those with lots of kids don’t have to pay and those that do t have kids have to pay more. Then in some sense the childless will have born the cost of raising the next generations taxpayers so that everyone can collect benefits.
I do pay "to raise" the next generation. I pay school taxes for kids, for schools I will never use and which actually do most of the raising of kids, since kids spend most of their waking hours in school. I pay way more in school taxes each year than I do Medicare or SS tax, btw. And only parents get the tax exemption for having dependents and the EITC for each kid. For a typical family that adds up to about $15k per year PER KID in tax credits and free education that parents get and childless don't (not even taking into account govt subsidies for healthcare and food for poor kids). So I feel I've paid plenty, that's hundreds of thousands more over a lifetime that parents benefit from govt subsidy that people like me pay into and don't receive.
You pay school taxes to the schools, not to parents. You then offer parents a product they may not value much and don't give them the option of spending the money a different way then the school system decides. You even (single people as a whole) have the gaul to vote in school board elections despite not having kids in the schools! If single people didn't vote we'd have school vouchers by now.
K-12 schooling is $810B a year.
Medicare is $944B and Social Security is $1.4T. A large share of Medicaid spending is on nursing homes and duals. Medicaid is $824B.
Even that understates because Medicare and Medicaid both pay below reimbursement and rely on private pay to make up the difference.
So old age benefits dwarf K-12 spending, and that's under the current regime. When you retire the strain will be even worse, which is why everyone says the programs are going bankrupt.
Meanwhile, Social Security is a cash benefit. You can spend it how you want. K-12 spending involves zero choice by parents. Many parents value public education so low they send their kids to private school or homeschool where they get nothing. We just went through a two year span where K-12 schools didn't even open their doors.
Well, this is getting pretty far afield, but I pay taxes to schools, and schools then grant parents a free place to put their kids every day for 12 years. I could care less about voting on school board elections or any of that, and I disagree that all or even most parents are as anti-public school as you clearly are. However, if parents wants to fight that out amongst themselves or decide how those tax dollars are spent, I'm fine with it and don't care. The fact remains, it's a value worth about $12k per year PER KID that parents get and that people without kids pay into, and don't act like that isn't a significant transfer, even if not in your preferred form. But that's how taxes work, no one gets the system they most wish, it's all a big compromise so that everyone is some level of dissatisfied, as in all compromises.
Childlessness is strongly associated with leftism. If the childless couldn't vote leftists would win zero elections and we would have school choice.
"it's a value worth about $12k per year PER KID that parents get and that people without kids pay into"
You got it when you were a kid.
Anyway, what is spent and what its worth are different. Obviously you people are afraid to let parents have the money, which is why the childless vote overwhelmingly left.
BTW, we didn't even get free daycare for two years because leftists (who are far less likely to have kids) shut down the schools.
Happy to say I was never exposed to that particular horror in sex ed. Thoughts are below in approximately the order of your response.
Would be curious your thoughts on why you think it's largely women against artificial wombs, not an idea I've about before so don't have a sense. Also, if they were viable, what approximate percent of women who decline to have kids now do you think would reconsider? Or would it simply replace the method of birth and not the rate?
Your point on paying for other kid's education/childcare I would argue is technically true but directionally wrong . Total public K-12 spending is about $850B, SS is 1.3T, and Medicare is ~$800B. If you account for cohort effects, I would estimate the US gov spends ~3x more over an individuals lifetime after they retire compared to their childhood. In my view, a system without an implicit subsidy would mean those numbers were closer to 1:1.
The non-working wife point I agree with, but the gap in labor force participation between men and women has shrunk so much I'm not sure it matters. On your contributions being credited to your dad, I would argue that's basically true. At least, it's functionally how SS works.
As for functional people, my experience has been largely similar. Considering selection effects, I would agree that compared to the average family childless individual probably gives more than they take (with a caveat that as the percentage who choose to be childless grows, I suspect this will reverse).
While I agree the elderly aren't helpless, I don't agree that that's the relevant standard. The standard from a societal viewpoint is net productivity (do they add more to society than they consume), not helplessness. The fact that they don't is why retirement savings were invented in the first place. Every increase in the number of elderly without a corresponding increase in the working age population leads to either a greater burden on those still working or a decline in living standards for the elderly (which is not likely given the rates old people vote at). There's a balance between supporting those who've paid their dues and those still coming up, and my concern is that we so favor the former that we stifle the latter. Which I find incredibly bleak.
On a personal note, fuck nursing homes. Never felt more like a pinata in my life than when my grandmother got Alzheimer's. Absolutely leech-like institutions.
I have sometimes wondered if anyone has ever looked into the effect that watching "The Miracle of Life" had on students -- I think this only happened in the 80s and 90s and likely only in liberal states. It has a VERY graphic, VERY gross full birth shown... you get the delight of watching the placenta be emitted after the baby and everything. If the point of showing it to a mixed-sex class of 14 and 15 year olds was to impress upon us the importance of birth control, it was incredibly effective, I'll give it that.
I don't disagree with any of your points. I had been thinking about my personal tax situation, since where I live we have a 5% flat tax on all of your income to fund schools, and while I pay 6.5% for social security, that's capped lower than my total income so I definitely pay more towards schools.
I mentioned social security because that's the point that people worried about a shrinking/flat population usually mention. But as you point out, it is Medicare which is the far bigger problem. Now that my and my husband's parents are getting up there in age, we have both been horrified to see what goes on. Their doctors are recommending surgeries and procedures to our dads non-stop. Knee replacements, shoulder replacements, revision surgeries, hand surgery, carpal tunnel surgery, nasal block surgery, eye surgery, ablation...it never ends. I swear one of our parents is in the hospital or recovering from a surgery almost every month. And they're fairly typical, not overweight, moderately fit people and I simply do not believe all these procedures are necessary -- and most have not created any improvement. If anything, get weaker and more tired and older seeming every time they recover from surgery, it's not something 80 year old bodies should be going through multiple times a year.
But this problem doesn't need to be solved at the other end of the lifespan. There are seriously mis-aligned incentives where doctors are paid per procedure and Medicare billing is just a machine (especially in Florida). We've tried to encourage them to be skeptical and ask do you REALLY need another surgery when you seem fine, but they are of a generation where you just trust doctors and don't assume pecuniary motives. And besides they don't care, because Medicare pays for it (i.e. working people). Anyway that is a rant far off topic, but it's a huge problem. Still, one would hope that it is a more simple fix to reform or modify our legal/welfare/economic systems than to try to convince people to have kids they don't seem to want. I'm joking of course, we can't fix or change anything in this country, if it requires consensus.
And with you on the nursing homes too. Very similar situation with my grandma, which went on for five years while the family was told the entire time that she would likely only live another week. And probably cost half a million dollars by the end.
On artificial wombs, I haven't looked deeply into this. But in general it seems that with any new bio-tech advancement, there tends to be a lot of controversy, at least a first. And that a greater share of men tend to be in the camp that sides with giving less weight to bio-ethical concerns and more weight on progress and technology. Maybe that's just a function of more men having a highly rationalist/utilitarian mindset, I'm not sure. After googling it, I find we are actually farther along than I'd thought, and 300 lambs have been successfully brought to term for 4 weeks in an artificial womb. And apparently the FDA is considering human trials, however ONLY for pre-term babies, not baking them from scratch. It's hard to see how the FDA would ever allow that. In fact I'm sure they will not. So if it gets developed it will be in another country.
But I would imagine this kind of thing goes like most technological changes...widespread taboo and rejection, but then you have early adopters, maybe in foreign countries if it isn't legal here and maybe hiding/lying about it at first, but eventually it starts to become more visible and common, and eventually people start admitting it more publicly, until eventually you get a critical mass and then it just becomes accepted and common. I have seen that happen with so many things in my life that it's hard to take anyone's opinions on anything new seriously, when I've seen so many people do complete 180s and accept and/or tolerate things they were once hardcore opposed to (see: gay marriage, polyamory, Botox, plastic surgery, online porn). So I can't really predict how much it would shift things, but it wouldn't be nothing. If you look at Botox for example...I can recall when it was widely considered to be something only a truly psychotic/pathologically vain person would do, injecting botulinum toxin into your face to paralyze your muscles. But it has increased by 25% year-over-year basically every year since it rolled out in the early 2000s, and is now considered completely normal and in many areas par for the course.
So, I'm pulling these figures out of thin air but just basing it on what I know about women choosing elective C-sections or similar procedures...if there was not a lot of social stigma AND it was affordable , I would guess about 1/4 to 1/3 of women would choose it. Of the women who are now saying they don't want kids, which I'll peg around 20% because I don't think we can assume the Zoomers will all stick to their positions, maybe a third or half might change their mind? This is a pretty out-there thought experiment so it's hard to say, but I hear a LOT of them say things like "if I could have the dad's support role, I'd totally do it".
This was going to be a standalone comment, but I was really curious to see how much discussion there had been in the comments about artificial wombs, so I'll just drop it here:
The problem with this piece is that, if true (and I have no reason really to doubt that it is) the future looks grim, perhaps especially for women.
The inevitable conclusion is that we have to hope the species endures long enough for artificial wombs to mature. Based on my admittedly limited understanding of the state of the art (and your own discussion above), I'd say we have a really good chance of that. After that, all bets are off. Perhaps of all technologies, this is going to be one that is going to take a long time to fully adopt, as you've correctly identified above. But if the choice is between that and extinction, or even maybe significant degrowth, let alone the opportunity to become a interplanetary or interstellar species, it's a pretty easy choice.
Men are archetypically the useless gender, and are beneficial primarily for things that are only secondarily related to the preservation/perpetuation of the species, or even of civilization, like war and innovation. If you kill off a bunch of men but leave the women intact, historically, populations have rebounded (cf. 1914-1970). Without women, it's over.
If women make themselves useless in the same fashion by the process described in this piece, I'd say there's a pretty good chance humanity becomes a single-gender species, even. That's of course not going to be true except in the fairly long run, but I'd consider it a strong possibility on such a time scale (10%? Maybe 20%? over say the next 250-500 years). Could be that gender will be female, but I'd bet against it. I already feel like enough of a misogynist having typed out all the foregoing, so I'm not going to spell it out more than that unless I have to, but I trust you know what I'm talking about.
So, I've had this in the back of my mind now, and would like to push back on a few things.
1) I really don't think it's about men's balls speaking instead of their brains. The kind of men concerned about the fertility crisis really do have an ethics based around the preservation and enhancement of society. That's almost an inevitable conclusion when you try to rationally understand the big picture -- you realize, goddamnit, we need society to maintain itself, even at the expense of the individual. Work, laws, cultural/social norms, technological progress ... everything comes down to the question of: does this benefit society as a whole?
2) I would question how much of this can really be attributed to women having "true, free choice". In every society, choices occur against a background of incentives. The truth is, society has destroyed the incentives for Western women to become mothers. Status shifted from motherhood to career success, for example. This is not an indictment of women, it's an indictment of the society they inhabit. Every society ideally allocates status in ways which facilitate the prosperity of the whole. When young men and women dream of becoming Tiktok famous rather than engineers and scientists, that's a problem. And when women aren't becoming mothers, that's a problem, too. These are problems of incentives, not individual irrationalities. People aren't really talking about showing women that it's somehow rational to become mothers, because if the incentives are fucked up, who can blame them? But people *are* interested in how the incentive structure can be readjusted, so that women will rationally make that choice themselves.
On your first point, I understand that's how a lot of people feel but I also think it's a very strange way to think about the world, personally. People who don't yet exist but will exist in an unknown future will make their own decisions about how they want things to be, and trying to guess that or impose our will on them without knowing the future circumstances seems odd to me. First of all, things change so rapidly that even trying to make these predictions is futile. If people from 50 or 100 or 250 years ago tried to make such predictions they would fail terribly. Second, I bet if you surveyed most Americans today and asked them if their preference was that people 40 or 60 years ago had had more or less kids, so that our population today was a lot or a little smaller or larger, you'd get just as many people saying they'd wish for less, than the other way around. Especially all the young people dealing with housing shortage and ridiculously competitive admissions and those kinds of issues. Plenty of people would say they'd prefer we were at roughly 1980 levels of population (225M instead of 335M).
And also, the perpetual growth side of things simply has no logical end point. At SOME point growth has to stop and the pro-growthers will never tell you when that would be...15B people? 30B? 50B? They literally have no answer but "we have to go intergalactic". That is not a good answer. If that's what one's whole ideology depends on, it's unconvincing full stop. Go ahead and get even close to that technology and capability, and THEN have that conversation. Until then, given they have no answer to when/how growth should stop, a gradual decline in growth and adjustment to economic systems that depend on growth seems like a perfectly sane and GOOD way to deal with what would otherwise be a much crueler and more devastating situation if we maintained 20th century like growth forever.
On your second point, I fully agree with you that it's an incentives issue. But I have not yet seen anyone make a proposal for HOW to shift those incentives. And I think that's partly because they don't seem to want to address the actually severe and inherent material discrepancy in incentives, as between men and women, simply based on biology. Forget about society, even in cave man days your starting point is that costs to women are 1000X greater than to men. Then add in society, where we see that 1. money is the ultimate arbiter and reflection of status, and motherhood makes it much harder to get money (single mothers are the poorest people in our society), and 2. men reveal their preferences by allocating most of their attention and money to young nubile non-mothers and have almost zero interest in watching, paying attention to, or giving money to mothers (in fact we had to make laws to force them to). So given these incentives, what does anyone expect? Men COULD, for example, all start bestowing attention and love and resources and status upon and lauding mothers, but they don't. They give it lip service, while their actions are the opposite. Just one simple example, but if you look at which social media accounts women follow with respect to the opposite sex (as far as influencers/celebrities), you will find that it is almost entirely married men, usually with kids. Women like their content about their family life and their wives and funny reels about their kids. That does not apply the other way around. When men follow female influencers, they're hot non-mothers. They already complain about having to subsidize single mothers. So they can talk all they want about changing status, but their actual behavior is the total opposite of what they're peddling and in that context expecting women to act against the obvious incentives is futile.
Aug 29·edited Aug 29Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
> Is it truly impossible that you are just overlaying post-facto rationalizations onto inchoate emotions that are neither pure nor objective?
Who said evolutionary pressures aren't pure and objective? If anything those would be the least ideologically tainted, and the more in tune with our nature!
Interesting article, but everything is simply exaggerated here. Trust me, it is not my brain thinking my balls or something. Instead of asking you the price of childbirth or your readers, we may try to ask the market. Surrogacy can cost quite of lot, but with some quick google searches it seems that we have between 50k and 100k for the surrogacy compensation+contingent fees (not including legal or fertility stuff). https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finance/articles/how-much-surrogacy-costs-and-how-to-pay-for-it. So the number you give do seem to be too high. But to be fair, this the price to pay someone who is willing to do it (probably the women that have easy pregnancies?) and may not have better marketable skills.
For the « after child part », it is more complicated but numbers seem to high here too. But the number does not matter, the ones that are having the kids are not really counting that kind of stuff. It’s all about culture anyway, and western culture does not cultivate self-sacrifice, courage, strength and thinking that people with no children are weirdos/losers.
We should just look at Israel and discover what they are doing, even educated secular women have a good fertility rate there. It is possible to have a fairly liberal society and somehow have women make a sufficient amount of baby
I think you have to put that number if context though. All the compensation when you add benefits is going to be in the range of $80-100kish. But the median earnings of women in their 20s in the US is only about $30k, and in their 30s about $40k (that's actually on the higher end). And those are the ages of surrogates and half make less than that, and you have to assume that most surrogates are on the low end of the income spectrum. So what you are really talking about is paying them the equivalent of about 3 times their annual income.
And it is women who earn more who are least likely to have babies. This presents a pretty clear factor in favor of that -- opportunity cost. If you paid them three times their income, it'd be a lot more.
It's not hard to see why Israel is an outlier. Jewish people are much like Mormons (I live in Utah) -- a religious culture with serious pressure to marry and have children, and a persecution complex based on recent history. But even with Mormons...they had on average more than 4 kids per woman in 1960, about 2.5 per woman in 2010, and today it's about 1.8. But Utah has had a booming economy. Israel is surrounded by enemies who want them all to die and has living ancestors who survived an actual genocide -- that'll motivate a people. My guess is they would've started trending like Mormons, but I imagine Oct 7 will cause a bounce and keep that motor running. There's no other OECD country that has a fertility rate above 1.8. South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong are all below 1.0. Other than Israel, if you look at every country on the globe, it is only the true "shit hole countries", so to speak, where it's above 2.
Exactly so.
How much would we have to pay Cardi B to be a surrogate?
To be honest, I was always aware that being a surrogate pays quite a lot but it seems to me that surprisingly few women are ready to do it. Which does give weight to the argument that pregnancy is really scary to women. Though it should be taken into account that this it is a pregnancy for a child that is not yours and that being a surrogate mother is « weird », and people don’t like having weird status.
To add to the discussion: there is also an article from cremieux that explains that actually, women want to have more children. Even the smart ones have above replacement fertility rate. I also read somewhere that the ones that have more children than they initially wanted are happier than the ones that have less, which I assume is because women that have more kids than expected on average have good lives. In many countries, income vs fertility graphs have an U-shape (poor and very rich women have the most kids). All of this points out to the direction that if there was no problem for women (good husband, high income, good education/work/life balance, no fertility problems due to the age,etc…), there would be no birth rate crisis. And that women being afraid of pregnancy does not « naturally » cause low fertility in free countries (+ the Israel example shows that it is possible without exceptional policies or culture changes)
There are a lot of studies, even by some pro family conservative think tanks, and it pretty much always shows that mothers are less happy than non mothers. It's not really an enormous effect but it's there. The same relationship is not shown for men. Men with kids actually in the house are very slightly less happy than those without, but fathers whose children are grown are happier. Women with all different numbers of kids either in or out of the house are less happy than women without kids. Again, not an enormous effect like they're all miserable or something, but a statistically significant one. Happiness isn't everything to everyone, nor the most important thing to some people, so they find meaning or other values more important than day to day happiness. It is true that the first kid causes the biggest drop in happiness for mothers, and it is less bad with each extra one up to four. The explanation I have heard is that once you have four kids, you basically are just totally abandoned to that and your kids are your entire life, just inevitably. Whereas if you have less, you're still experiencing some ambivalence and trying to hold on somewhat to who used to be and an idea of yourself as an independent person who is not solely a mother. Though also it could just be that if you have four kids, it's likely bc you really love having kids and are particularly suited to it, since 4 kids is very unusual these days. https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-happier-in-the-long-run
What's interesting about the study results there is that it shows that fathers enjoy parenthood way MORE now than they did pre 1980. Which was right around the time fathers started being expected to be actively involved with childrearing. Before 1980, men without kids were way happier than those with. Now it's the opposite. Maybe that's bc it's now more optional and we no longer have a significant cohort of men who have kids they never wanted, which was the case pre -1980 when basically everyone was expected to have kids...and I believe there's always been a sizeable minority of people, both men and women, who simply are not suited for it. Or maybe it's because increased involvement makes it more enjoyable. Or maybe it's because the increase in women working and eroding of gendered family roles where the man bore the sole responsibility for financial support has been a huge boon to make wellbeing. If it's the last one, they could at least say thanks feminism! Whatever the reason, it does seem that the changes to father's lives since the women's lib movement have mostly made life better for fathers, not mothers. Isn't that ironic? And yet it's all the young men bitching about feminism and wanting to go back to the 50s...which they only think because they never actually lived through that model of life and don't have any real concept what it was like. They forget about the part where one little slip up with your girlfriend at age 17 and you'd have her dad with a shotgun to your head, and you were stuck with her, and could kiss your own dreams goodbye because you better get a job pronto, to support her and the baby for the rest of your life, whether you liked it or not.
BINGO
What’s up with this happiness crap???
Yeah, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, there WERE a lot more unhappy and miserable marriages back then. I remember it...back in the 80s it really was not at all uncommon to hear like your neighbors or the couple down the street just straight up violently screaming at each other and at war. Way more abuse and misery within families. Marriages are much more peaceful and happier now, but there's also a lot less of them.
But on the other hand, I fully agree about young men not having sufficient incentives to not be worthless bums. If I compare my own dad, who had a shotgun marriage at 19 and fully accepted and lived up to the responsibility as well as just being an impressive person in multiple ways, and compare him to my little brother, who is a typical video-game addicted 20-something, they're practically a different species. But that isn't just because of the shotgun marriage aspect, it's also because my brother is a completely spoiled and coddled little shit who has been allowed to be like that while maintaining a very nice lifestyle because his parents and girlfriends enable it. Like it's basically my dad's fault...I guess he didn't want his son to go through what he did, so he made his life WAYYYY too nice and easy, and now his son is a worthless bum.
Interesting- do you think perhaps that civilisation makes life easier for men, often too easy, negatively affecting their esteem and capabilities, whereas it doesn’t really do the same for women because of the natural demands on them?
Shotgun marriages would really be a faux solution in search of a problem, doing more harm than good. Change one thing, you have to change everything in that regard. Least worst choice is "live and let live".
> We should just look at Israel and discover what they are doing, even educated secular women have a good fertility rate there. It is possible to have a fairly liberal society and somehow have women make a sufficient amount of baby
Why does everyone think Israel's fertility is noteworthy when they're a Middle Eastern country located in the Middle East and filled with the Haredim who are basically like the Ashkenazi answer to the Amish, with a suntan?
Looking at it another way, are there opinion polls by sex showing whether women or men favor surrogacy more? Here’s one: https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/tabs_OP_Surrogacy_20151130.pdf. A quick and possibly wrong calculation shows that the sex differences are right at or within the margin of error (with 95% confidence). So women and men are basically the same on pregnancy of other people?
It does surprise me a little, I expected more women to be against it because of potential « abuse » of poor women or something. I guess this is a good sign. I hope more countries make surrogacy legal.
But if you want to use that as proxy for whether men or women are concerned about the fertility rate, I think there are some better metrics we can look at.
I found a survey in Singapour about natalist policies. It seems men like them more but the policies that they really like are paternity leave and shared parental leave, so this is mainly about making themselves more comfortable haha ( https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12546-023-09309-8.pdf , page 12 and page 14 table 3)
I wonder what it looks like in other countries, especially in Europe where some forms of paternity leave are already implemented.
This is what happens in a civilization where having children ceases to be a social norm women must conform to.
I acknowledge the huge physical cost of pregnancy, but I don't think that the only reason women ever got pregnant and had children was male oppression - it was conforming to the social norm of having children. And this norm was not a product of male oppression - it's a result of a cultural evolution that allowed sustaining and growing our civilization. As evo psychs say: civilizations without social norms forcing women to have children might have existed in the past - but they are not our ancestors. If we don't change anything, the western civilization will be outpopulated by more fertile civilizations, and with that, our progress in gender equality and human rights might be lost.
Women are especially hardwired to follow social norms, which leads them to having children in a healthy society. I witnessed that firsthand: my wife's desire to have a first child was correlated with seeing her friends and family have them around the age of 30. Now, as many of them are having their second children, the idea of us having a second child comes up more and more often.
Oh I don't think it was male oppression exactly, just more that if you had sex, you ended up with babies, and that was that. Sure, a few ancient civilizations had some primitive forms of birth control but those would not necessarily be known by or accessible to all women. 100 years ago it was not that unusual for women to have like 10 kids and I don't think either they OR the father necessarily wanted them all, it's just what happened and people didn't really think that you could do anything about it.
In the 50s and 60s, most marriages happened bc the mom was already pregnant. Don't forget in the US Roe v Wade didn't happen until almost the 1970s and as soon as it was legalized there was a HUGE spike in abortions. My own mom married my dad bc she was pregnant (and very much not wanting to be) with my sister, a year before Roe v Wade. I once asked her, if abortion had been legal when you got pregnant. Would you have had an abortion? And she said probably. So, there you go. Legal and accessible abortion and very effective long acting birth control like IUDs just haven't been around for more than a couple generations, and human behavior doesn't change THAT fast, but now it obviously has.
20 years ago, when people found out that I didn't plan to have kids, they either didn't believe it or it struck them as some entirely unthinkable, strange thing. Many people said to me "it never even occurred to me that you could just not have kids". But now it has occurred to them, because the incentives are so plainly obvious, so we see what we see. And the cover article of the New York Times today is all about how all millennial moms are having a mid life crisis bc being a mother is so hard and awful and none of them were prepared for it and nobody told them how hard it would be.
I personally am not concerned with things like one culture taking over another. Every culture exposed to modernity and capitalism and modern media/tech succumbs. Not the other way around. Every millennial I know was raised religious, conservative, to not have sex before marriage, and to have lots of babies (Utah Mormons). Almost all of them have rejected it for themselves. What is culture anyway in such a rapidly changing world? People in general believe all kinds of things today that were unthinkable 30 years ago. Their behavior and lifestyle and opinions are almost unrecognizable. When you have watched your own culture radically change several times over within your own lifespan and everyone you know believes totally different things than they did 25 years ago, it's hard to put much stock into the staying power of a culture anyway.
I mean, just to give a very small example, but I never would have believed I'd see the day when black and Hispanic Americans would NOT be homophobic, or would be hippies or cowboys. And yet here we are today and in the US an ultra flaming gay black guy dressed up in assless chaps is a hugely popular mega star and a black woman has a hit country album... things change all the time. I think mostly we're all powerless to the incentives of technology, so this train isn't going to stop unless something takes us technologically back to the dark ages. Conservative and rural people have ALWAYS had way more kids than everyone else, and half their kids have always defected and left for cities. I work with a lot of conservative Mormon guys who have 5 to 8 kids and for every single one of them, at least half their kids have totally rejected their faith and politics. I realize that there have been times in history where things swing backwards, like Iran in the 1970s. But that usually only happens in a pretty disastrous violent manner that results in society rejecting all kinds of technology and art and freedom in general. So while I know some right wing guys harbor secret fantasies of something similar happening, it's not likely, and if it did, they wouldn't enjoy it as much as they think. They're all addicted to their modern conveniences and technology and freedoms and porn just as much if not more than women, despite whatever barbarian revolt fantasies they have.
“And the cover article of the New York Times today is all about how all millennial moms are having a mid life crisis bc being a mother is so hard and awful and none of them were prepared for it and nobody told them how hard it would be.”
Aye, this is a big, big contributor as well. How often does the New York Times run cover stories about how joyous, loving, exciting, energizing, fulfilling, and life-affirming parenthood is? Have they ever done that?
Parenthood is hard, but it has been worth it, a million times over. As an individual, my single greatest regret in life, and it’s not even close, is stopping at two and not fathering an entire gaggle of kids. And I am largely the primary caregiver now that they are school age; I do 90% of the meals, I organize all the extracurriculars, I am point person for school communications, etc.
The real secret is…it’s not really as hard as outlets like NYT make it out to be. It’s actually pretty easy once you surrender to it. But that’s the trouble. The “surrendering” phase isn’t optional. Most of the discontented parents I speak with refuse to surrender to the experience. They are still pining for lifestyles they gave up for the kids, and it makes them bitter and anxious.
The problem is unrealistic expectations. Mothers are constantly being told what they are missing out on, they constantly told how shitty their lives are and how much better things would be if they had never had kids. They are told, and believe, that they have to do these 10 things every day or they will be shitty mothers. It’s all nonsense. Your kids just want your time and attention and love. Everything else is window dressing.
But the New York Times will never run an article saying any of that. It will run 10 articles recounting the misery of mothers who, let’s be honest, simply have the wrong mindset.
I know this is a big thing…and trust me, I see the status-competition squabbles and intra-mom judgment fights on social media ALL THE TIME. Though I think this is something they do to themselves and I really don’t know why. Mothers are SO exquisitely over-sensitive to perceived slights or “judgment” from other women/mothers. Honestly I don’t get it. I do know a few moms who just do not care and it doesn’t bother them at all, so obviously it’s possible, and yet why do so many fall into this? I’ve never understood how what other women think even effects their lives — sometimes not even women they know! Who cares what anyone else thinks??
I don’t know, I’m pretty immune from this type of criticism or judgment myself, but that may just be because I’m arrogant and just assume everyone else is envious, lol. Or call it “secure”, if you want to put another spin on it. But it has absolutely always amazed me how mothers drive themselves crazy with this sort of thing, worrying what other moms think and engaging in some sort of strange status competition for which there’s not even a prize. It may just be wired-in, for them to care a lot about what other women think. Probably there’s some evolutionary reason for it because women who didn’t care a lot about their status and being liked, historically, perhaps didn’t survive. But nowadays it’s pointless and that kind of neuroticism just makes their lives worse.
Right. "motherhood is hard and moms are struggling" is a disingenuous framing, for its incompleteness. "Mothers are miserable because they care more about peer group approval than what their children actually want and need" is the correct framing, for its obvious truth. When parents complain about extracurricular burnout...buddy, your kid does not give a shit about his 5th after school activity. Why are you doing it? Not because Joey wants to, that'd for damn sure.
In the early days, I resented my children and my family for the limits I perceived they imposed on me. "If only i didn't have these kids, i could go do xyz". I was there man, I felt that hard. This is very common among new parents. Mature adults embrace their new identity and grow out of that immature phase. Unfortunately, many mothers (and fathers, let's be real, they feel it just as much, but they complain about it less) are not mature, functioning adults.
But today, deep into it, there is literally no activity on the planet I would rather do than two hours of board games with my little nerd son, or pushing my daughter on the swing until my arms are sore, or taking a solid hour to cook pancakes because the four year old fucked it up five times. You couldn't pay me enough money to give that up. Yes, the pancakes take longer than they would if i was single. If you care more about that than the time you spent with your kid, yeah, you are reading too many NYT times articles (royal you, not you you).
There's gonna be lots of fucked up teenagers in a few years, the grown kids of these parents who secretly resent their own kids because they were incapable of surrendering and committing themselves to the larger purpose.
100%. It truly is very bizarre how parents -- mostly moms -- drive themselves crazy with all these things that surely they must realize do not matter?? Do they really think anyone is going to remember, or care, whether their 9 year old that they had to drag kicking and screaming and causing an argument went and played in some travel sports match? Do they really all expect their children to turn into Olympic athletes or something? Yet they are spending literally thousands every year on travel sports, etc. That and the constant bickering over parenting styles.
My perception, just based on observation because all of my friends are moms, mostly to tweens and teens, is that the large majority of them give themselves tons of completely unnecessary anxiety, and that it is absolutely a self-generated thing. It's not their husbands demanding they live up to those standards. It's not their kids. It's not their employers. If anything, their husband and kids mostly likely would be happier if they would just chill out a bit! But then that's part of what makes them resentful, is that they're mad that they're the worried and anxious ones and that no one else APPRECIATES it -- that then leads to the self-martyrdom thing. It's a very strange self-reinforcing trap.
I also find it weird that parents almost universally complain about the same things -- travel sports, over scheduling, phones, helicoptering -- but they're the ones doing it! If they all stopped, it would be solved. It seems to be a collective action thing...they all hate it but they're all terrified to be the only ones who stop, or they fear their own kid will fall behind.
The insanity of parenting culture is actually the main reason my husband I decided we weren't going to have kids. We knew we would be SO far out of step with what's considered acceptable (we're way too old school) and it just seemed like too much of an uphill battle to fight. You can say that's cowardly, and maybe you'd be right, but really we did not want any part of that. We already deal with enough craziness from our fellow dog-owners...even half of them have lost their damn minds lol.
Thanks, that's.. insightful.
As for being concerned with other cultures taking over, we might need to put this in context. First, I agree that "Every culture exposed to modernity and capitalism and modern media/tech succumbs.", but this process takes time, and in transition, a lot of friction happens. Second, US is unmatched in assimilation of immigrants into their culture, however EU countries have historically been much worse than that. For US, increased immigration would probably mean more Hispanics which are not that different from US culture (both based on the European/Christian core values), but for EU it means mostly Middle Eastern and African immigrants. And it also seems to me that in US immigrant ghettos are more likely to form, which separates the foreign cultures from the "natives", while in EU it's more like everyone mixed together.
We have already seen how major cities in Western Europe have become less safe and worse places to live because of foreign culture immigrants that were not properly assimilated into the society. I don't want the same to happen to my country, Poland, and one solution would be to do what it takes to fix fertility here and now. But I understand how fertility and, relatedly, increased immigration might be of lesser concern for for someone living in US (and even more so for an affluent upper class woman... wait... luxury beliefs?).
I think it must be very different in Europe. For one thing, you actually have different languages, cultures, genetic relatedness, etc. etc. Everyone in the US is already a mongrel and most people have no idea who their own great-grandparents are or where they came from, unless they take a 23 and Me type test. And we also don't really have a national culture anyway...Alabama is nothing like Vermont which is nothing like Ohio or Nevada, they practically ARE different countries, culturally, yet everyone is free to pass between them or move whenever they want. And we also don't really have a welfare state or many government benefits, like in Europe -- the only real benefits are ones you have to directly pay into decades to even receive anything.
I certainly would not want to be overrun by immigrants from a very different culture, in the European context. Besides the factors above, I also imagine that just your long history warring with each other, and not having the feeling of safety by having two enormous oceans on either side, lead to further wariness.
Back when I was much more poor and lived in a bad neighborhood, there was an apartment complex two blocks away that housed entirely Sudanese Muslim refugees, and it wasn't fun living near them. There were several murders there just in a one-year period. So I get it, I just think in the US it's very different, as you note.
And anyway, I am not pro-immigration anyway, unless it's merit-based best and brightest. Our current system is the opposite of that. But I don't think there's any urgent "crisis", and there are plenty of people who would prefer a steady or slowly declining population in any event, so there's no social consensus on taking action. By the time we get to an actually declining population -- which is not currently projected to happen until 2080 in the US -- who knows what the situation will be anyway, with AI, robots, etc. Think about how much has changed the past 60 years...trying to make policy for something 60 years in the future just seems silly to me.
In Poland and Europe overall, the population is already in decline - for us it's not planning 60 years ahead, it's happening now and right now the best we can do is at least not turn it into a slippery slope.
Your argument makes sense in your geopolitical context, but without it, it can turn into a luxury belief. The problem with luxury beliefs is that they work for the elite (e.g. US - no issue with TFR/population decline/immigration), but impose costs when adopted by lower classes that have their own problems and can't handle them well (e.g. EU), so they should always come with context or even disclaimers in the tone of "The stunts you are about to see are performed by professional athletes, do not try this at home".
America occupies Europe.
All you've done is shown how vile selfish promiscuous and pro paedophilia women like you are.
screw you and your little dog too. male oppression. Amazon window to the world. I am free. Social norm lock me up under the forlorn mourn with my righteous subject. normy. eat cow cowboy.
Interesting article. I can only speak for myself, but what decided it for me was realizing how few truly close connections there are outside of family. My ILs are happy people with tons of friends, but only their kids, DILs, and grandkids made it on the list of people they would spend their last day on earth with. When my mom got sick, it was me dealing with the gross, disgusting, mundane aspects of her care and her bad behavior, not the nurses or doctors. I realized that, beyond my husband and a few friends, I was pouring my life out into things like my job, that I cared about but didn't care about me back. It doesn't always work out, but when it does, the bond between a mother and child is deeper and stronger than almost anything else. I decided I wanted to pour my life into something that has a chance to be like that. I think you raise an excellent point in another comment that the extreme narcissism and lack of responsibility encouraged from children to parents now is a major reason it's losing its appeal.
I wouldn't try to convince anyone else - maybe in a few years I'll decide this was a horrible idea and I should've started a cat rescue instead. But that was the thought process that made all the body horror of pregnancy and birth sound worth it.
I'm not a woman but I had a similar realization. When I was younger I did not want kids and did not see why I would have them. As I got older, I realized that the only people who were still in my life as I moved around and changed between jobs or social circles, were my direct family members. I don't speak to anyone today that I spoke to 10 years ago, aside from my family and relatives. And I imagine that when I retire it will be the same. Family members are the only people who've ever been willing to sacrifice for me in a meaningful way and vice versa.
Maybe if we didn't live in such a heavily atomized society these family relations wouldn't feel so irreplaceable. If you and everyone you know all are born, live and die in the same town for all of your lives, maybe you could form a lot of really close bonds with those people even though they aren't directly related to you. But that's not how the world works anymore.
I live far away from both my family and most of my old friends, but I am still very tight and close with friends from 30 years ago and text or talk with them frequently, get together whenever we can, etc. This makes me sad because I think that your friends from childhood and early adulthood are in many ways the least replaceable -- no one else went through the same formative/coming of age experiences with you.
I agree and my life trajectory, which I imagine is mirrored to some extent by everyone, has been one in which those friends from youth slowly fall away as people move away for one reason or another. I am someone with very little interest in trying to maintain relationships with people that I may never see in person again, or only very occasionally at significant expense. I don't enjoy friendships carried out only via text messages, email, or talking on the phone.
So, as soon as someone lives outside my driving range, I will lose touch with them. I am sure this is also the case for many other people. I would guess it is more common for men than for women. This is why I speculated on how things might be if you and most other people never left your hometowns. In order to maintain contact with much of anyone from where I grew up, I'd have to stay in that hometown, and even if I did that today, many of those other people I grew up with would still move away for their own reasons.
I believe this is also affected generationally by the increasing fragmentation of the culture. There is no longer any one common cultural experience that we all share together, not even as youth. I already witnessed and experienced quite a lot of social turnover as a young adult as people got in fights and cut ties over social justice nonsense, and that was a while ago now. I can only imagine how it is today where you might have to grapple with things like people in your social circle deciding to become trans.
See, this is interesting to me because virtually everyone else in my hometown DOES still live in my hometown...I'm the one who moved thousands of miles away. But they never hang out with each other -- in fact some of the only times they get together is the once every couple years I visit. Probably because they're busy with their kids, at least in part.
But I've also never had a fall-out or anything close to it, with anyone over politics/social issues. The only reason I can even comprehend of that happening would be if I found out that they were secretly serial killers of dogs or something. And that is definitely not because we all agree...I have friends/family adamantly opposed to almost everything I believe, and wouldn't ever have any if we had to agree.
I absolutely can see that there's no longer any common culture, or even really generational culture, because things are so fractured and in little sub-cultures and bubbles.
But you are making me curious about something I'm currently forgetting the name of...affiliative-ness or kinship orientation or something...I have seen some references to this as a personality trait. Which essentially measures how much one prefers their own kin to non-relatives.
I don't remember ever preferring or feeling closer to family than friends...not as a child, not as a young adult, and not now. And I can make friends with and like almost every individual (it's just people in the abstract I don't like, ha). My husband is the same way and I also notice this with other intentionally childless people. Like there's an unusually high proportion of teachers who don't want/have their own kids even though they obviously love kids and like people in general.
It makes me wonder if this personality trait is the factor that really drives this. I wish I could remember what the word for it is, so I could do a survey about it, and Google is not helping me.
I guess the question to me is, if you feel that you must have daily physical/visible contact with people to stay interested in them (which I do understand), why did you move away from your hometown and family in the first place? You felt you had to, for economic reasons?
>I guess the question to me is, if you feel that you must have daily physical/visible contact with people to stay interested in them (which I do understand), why did you move away from your hometown and family in the first place? You felt you had to, for economic reasons?<
I did choose to attend a certain college largely based on the fact that most of my high school friends were going there, and stayed in that town for a good number of years. By the time I eventually left it, all but one or two of those people had moved away themselves.
Much to think about, but a key point is that many women say that they *want* a greater number of children then they eventually *do* have. https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want
Policy could simply be oriented toward removing obstacles and making it easier for women to have children *if* they want them (much easier said than done), while still respecting individual autonomy etc.
Yes you could do that, but conservatives and wealthy Democrats don't what that, so its a nonstarter. We actually had a temporary reversal of the long-term trend of declining birthrates in the postwar period. That was accompanied by a downward shift in the age of marriage and childbirth. Historically people married earlier when they perceived that their life prospects were favorable.
Boys who manage to be gainfully employed right out of high school are much better prospects for marriage and some of the girls more interested in marriage and family would marry them and have children in their late teens or early 20's. Others would go to college and then life as single women for some time, often at home. By the time my mom was 25, most of her friends were getting married or already were married, and she was still living at home. She joined the foreign service where she met my dad, they married and my sister was born in 1958 when my mom was 27. My mother-in-law also went to college while some of her sisters did not. Some years out of college she was still single, while her younger sisters had married and already had kids. She told my wife than she felt that it was her time to marry and she did. My wife was born in 1954 when her mom was 27.
So even back in those days there were plenty of women who were not eager to have kids right away and others who had children very young, and the observation that the other women in your environment were marrying and having children influenced you to get married and have children yourself.
But after economic policy over 1964-1979 destroyed the New Deal economy, a new world emerged in which it was harder for boys coming out of high school to get gainfully employed, and so were not good prospects for marriage. Pregnancies still happened of course, but generally the girls didn't marry the boys (often because the parents objected to their daughter getting stuck with a loser). Teenage pregnancy in the 1950's often meant the couple married and made a reasonable go of it (and so serve as models for girls who did not get into trouble). By the 1980's teenage pregnancy led to bad outcomes; girls who got pregnant young would not serve as role models. 1950's unmarried women in their late 20's might feel like they were lagging in life if they had friends and relatives who were already married with children and doing fine. 1980's unmarried women at this age would have few positive examples of early marriage and children. So marriage happened later.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/two-visions-of-america-bedford-falls
But then a new phenomenon emerges, the ratio of college women to college men started to rise, meaning women who might want to marry and have children in their 30's would find most the suitable men taken and those left unappealing. After a couple more decades of cultural evolution in this environment you have plenty of women who have decided to go it alone.
Honestly as hilariously exaggerated as this article, I do see your point. But ultimately this will be a self correcting problem.
The two fundamental things a society requires to exist are young men dying in war and young women giving birth. Men are no longer willing to die for this decrepit country [I'm speaking about the US, but it's true most other places too] and women are not longer willing to give birth.
This will eventually break society. We can already see the welfare system being strained. And once these things break, all of the things that make "strong, independent women (TM)" possible are just going to go away. Then men will die and women will give birth.
Remind me why young men dying at war is fundamental to the existence of a society? Because the country I live in hasn’t participated in a major war for 80+ years and I wouldn’t say our society is on its last legs. Sorta sounds like you made that up in your head, bro. Or maybe a podcaster told you.
Every nation in history was formed formed and maintained out of war. Your country is probably a protectorate of the USA. Your wars have been outsourced to The Empire. Frankly, it's amazing a normal adult doesn't understand this.
Nah bro - I wouldn’t say we’re a “protectorate of the USA”, and conscription/ compulsary military training ended well before I was born.
I see your framing - “everyone must sacrifice to keep society ticking, and men sacrifice more because they die in war”. But, the thing is, since the end of WWII almost 80 years ago, only a tiny fraction of my country’s young men have died in war. And society rolls on. So your simple little equation isn’t working.
"Nah bro - I wouldn’t say we’re a “protectorate of the USA”, and conscription/ compulsary military training ended well before I was born."
If you have a US military base in your country, you're a protectorate.
"I see your framing - “everyone must sacrifice to keep society ticking, and men sacrifice more because they die in war”. But, the thing is, since the end of WWII almost 80 years ago, only a tiny fraction of my country’s young men have died in war. And society rolls on. So your simple little equation isn’t working"
Yeah you're referencing the most peaceful time in all of human history. This is an anomaly that is rapidly coming to an end. The US dollar is deteriorating and with it the US empire. Once the US is no longer patrolling the waves, there will no longer be global trade in the way we understand it today. Once that happens then we return to the natural state of humanity: war and preparation for war.
Yep. The fecund will inherit the Earth. The rest is just the trash taking itself out.
Exactly that's why I stopped reading at the point where she said women have power.
This is ultimately a retirement / social security / pension crisis, at least I think that is the valid way to talk about it. It should not be personal, it should not be a finger pointed that you, yes you, should breed. It is a social problem - how will society function if 80% of people will be retired and 20% try to provide for that 20% ?
Otherwise it would be a no-problem at all, human population going back to 2Bn 100 years ago would do a whole lot good to the planet, to real estate prices, to not feeling crowded all the time.
So it is not even a not enough children problem: it is specifically a not enough children compared to the number of future old people problem.
And no, working until 75 will not be a solution because no one will hire us. I am 46 and already starting to struggle to keep up with technology - fuck the cloud based todo list, TODO.TXT on the desktop works fine. I am already complaining about the good old days of just pulling a database table on a Delphi form instead of all this totally complicated web development thing. How will I do at 60? Dunno, but at 75 really can't work.
Thanks for writing this, very thought-provoking. I have ten children. Two were born in a birth center, two in a hospital, and six at home. My wife vastly preferred the homebirths. We had a birth pool full of warm water, like a big bathtub. Just the midwife is there. It’s painful, it’s damaging, but it isn’t psychologically scarring like a hospital birth.
It’s sad that the medical system, mostly run by men, has made birth so horrible. It’s demeaning. A woman on her back with her feet in stirrups is pretty much the worst position to have a baby in. But the doctor has access! And that’s all that matters….
Proportionally, a woman having a baby is similar to a man peeing out an almond. Anyone that’s had a tiny little kidney stone and wanted to die can imagine the pain.
Our crappy society has turned what should be a mountaintop experience for a woman into a humiliating and worthless trial.
Overall though your essay is pretty sad. Our modern world has turned childbearing, childrearing, marriage, and family into a horrid mess. I can't blame people for not wanting to take part. But if they only knew there was another way to do things!
As a pronatalist grand multipara, I roughly agree with your price list. The question is just how to make the rest of society pay, in one or another currency.
I mean honestly, people keep coming up with these crazy tax schemes that reward the whole family etc, but why not just directly pay the woman? Funny no one ever suggests that, it's always envisioned as a payment to her and her spouse or the family as a whole. And I've never really seen any women make the argument...even if they want more money they'll frame it to support the children or something, they never directly ask to be compensated. Now obviously a payment to a woman will benefit the whole family but no one likes the idea of it going to her directly as compensation for two years of giving up her body for another.
There's a story that a long time ago in a dusty foreign shtihole far far away, the people were starving. Foreign aid came but it was stolen by warlords. So foreign armies came to protect it. When the aid was issued, they'd found that if they issued it to the men, it'd be sold off for ammunition or qat. So they issued it to the women of the household.
They gathered the women together in a compound, and the men stood outside. The woman would get 5kg of rice which she'd put on a cloth around her head down her back, the 5kg of flour which she'd perch on top of her head, a kg of beans which she'd put under one arm along with a bottle of cooking oil. In the other arm would go an infant, and at one leg she'd have beside her a toddler, and usually a third child trailing behind.
As she came out of the compound, the man accompanying her - usually her husband, but sometimes an uncle or father - would stand up from where he was sitting with his mates, not take on any of the burdens, and walk along ahead of her with his stick.
Now, the Western world is somewhat improved from this dusty foreign shithole, but I think we can reasonably say that if you pay women directly it'll just go to the family anyway. The same is not true of paying into the man's bank accounts.
Lots of European countries have universal cash payments to mothers.
My wife gets about $500 a month to her bank account as long as our three children remain in school. It’s not means tested and not taxable.
Does it cover the financial cost of our children? Not nearly. Does it help? Absolutely.
We’re not going to set up a vast welfare apparatus to tax men to pay for single mothers to have a brood of kids. We already have something like that with the current welfare state and it destroyed marriage for the bottom 50% of society.
Look, what we’re mainly talking about here is trying to put middle class DINKs and middle class families on even financial footing. Right now not having kids gives you a leg up bidding for scarce resources (like real estate) and it’s a red queen race to the bottom.
Traditionally, the man is supposed to pay his female partner. The idea that female reproductive services should be for free is just a continuation of the idea that sex should be for free.
(And breastfeeding is unnecessary, actually. People could just quit doing that. Technically, a baby only needs nine months of a human female body.)
I agree nursing is not as necessary/beneficial as people think, especially once you remove cofounders like education and income from the studies. But in the US, it's a fervent belief to the point of being a cult. I have friends that breast fed their kids til they were 3!
All of our foster girls, including the one we adopted used formula. I don't think my granddaughters nursed either. Modern formula is very good. Back in the day when formula was not as good, smart women nursed. Both my mom and MIL nursed. My wife, who has a daughter from a previous marriage also nursed, but she really liked it, made her feel like some kind of earth mother (she's an old school feminist).
Interesting article.
I think there are a lot of materialistically rational reasons why women don’t want kids. Particularly in a world where it is optional as opposed to being a necessity.
I personally think this is a problem that women will ultimately need to resolve themselves. But I don’t think it is too far away from the impulse men have for pursuing casual sex but not wanting to have the responsibility. Or how men don’t feel the necessity to commit to a single woman at all.
In a world defined by atomized individuals that pursue their maximum individual happiness, familial and intergenerational obligations take a back seat to careers and personal wealth generation. I don’t think we can bridge the “fertility crisis” so long as we use that as an axiom. This is not a fault of women, but a broader problem with capitalism tbh.
Yeah I don't consider it a "fertility crisis". For one thing, even with current projections we're supposed to get to 10 billion humans before it actually starts to decrease, and 10 billion is an enormous amount. Second, it's not that hard to turn it around fairly quickly if and when it starts having an actual negative effects on anyone (which it currently does not seem to). Most women are fertile for a 25 year period and if something happened where suddenly it was truly like OH NO THERE ARE ZERO KIDS, you could remedy it quite quickly. Look how ridiculously quickly we've expanded the past 100 years -- you can just do that again.
But I do think it would involve EITHER making having babies and raising kids much more appealing than it is currently, OR having conditions in general be much worse and scary and bad, so that people are just back in a let's not go extinct survival mode.
One reason it seems incredibly unappealing (at least to my eyes), is the completely one-way flow of "intergenerational obligations", currently. Forget filial piety or respecting one's elders, parents nowadays allow their children to treat them like garbage. Parents have essentially no authority, are entitled to no respect, are expected to endlessly coddle self esteem and pour in affection and resources, and the child owes zero in return and is entitled to cut them off entirely if they feel like it. Now that children are personal choices and luxuries rather than what you get whether you like it or not, they are endlessly indulged and it's very hard to see, as an outsider, parenthood as anything but being a glutton for punishment. This is the other big reason we decided we couldn't have kids...because we knew we would be considered way too disciplinarian and harsh, in a manner that isn't really acceptable in today's society. And I'm not really talking about like Medieval levels of harsh parenting or anything, but even just raising a kid like people used to in the 80s and 90s is now deemed to be child abuse.
I'm not particularly convinced of the fertility crisis being easy to reverse or not being a problem. I'll to keep this bit brief though.
I think the reversal would take both take at least a generation and a massive change in social attitudes and behaviors. That just doesn't happen overnight as trends in just about every culture and country are going the opposite direction.
While being a problem comes from broader intergenerational analysis. Older generations consolidating wealth and ruling over the young. But also older generations losing any ability to retire as they have limited to no young to replace them. Followed by the massive social upheavals of population movements.
I don't think of the fertility crisis as a death of humanity, but a death of a lot of really valuable social structures that are only sustained because of our incredibly wealthy world. A world that I think will become much more desperate as we consume that wealth and not allow it to properly flow intergenerationally. It will consolidate and rot out how we live.
From there though, I get the bit with finding a solution. Which you seem to be fairly conscious of the problems with the solutions even if you don't fully acknowledge the problem itself. Discipline and social obligations require people to sacrifice their personal wants to resolve it. There really seems to be no way around that. I heard someone put it well, "Convincing someone to eat their vegetables will always be harder than convincing them to eat Fast Food". It comes off as something that may eventually be confronted when we are only incredibly desperate. Worse, we may not even get to confront it on our terms.
I had some interesting conversations with liberals conscious of this, and they were frustrated with the liberal solutions not working. Funding, tax incentives, programs, education, normal liberal responses to problems. But the problem is that one day they will not be the people drafting the responses to it. It will be the illiberal people making the decisions. For my part on this, if liberals want to fix this, they have an opportunity to do it on their terms.
This part has always happened though: Older generations consolidating wealth and ruling over the young." It's just that so many more people live for such a long time now. By the time your boss quits and makes space for a successor, or a parent dies and passes on family wealth, the inheritor is already in their 60s. So in a sense the problem is just as much with too many old people.
Don't forget the positives. It used to be a big problem for parents with wealth to divide their holdings among their heirs. Rich families still often turn against each other and fight when the parents die. With only one or two kids, that's no longer an issue, and childless people will be giving what they have to charity.
I do agree that that it is better to come up with reasonable solutions and plan ahead, rather than making desperate ones. However, I've never seen the US, at least, do ANYTHING that isn't what is easiest/most convenient until there's basically no other choice and they're facing an emergency. In the US we always put off for tomorrow what we could do today, unless it's making money.
Our economic system is dependent on continuous growth since it is based in debt. I believe Simone and Malcolm Collins have a video up on this which is very illuminating.
Because the system requires continuous growth, more and cheaper goods, for one, the birth rate deficit isn't in my opinion, quite so clean.
People argue all day about the migrant crisis in the USA and Europe being a sort of ideological problem, somehow about the white race in particular. As if someone was setting out to sabotage the European.
I can see why people think this because of media and academic rhetoric.
However the importation of the third world is being allowed and facilitated for one reason, money. It is allowed and will not be stopped by voting because it is necessary to keep the system running. More and cheaper labor. And Ai is nowhere near solving this.
So as the population of natives shrinks the third world must pour in to keep up with the debt system. The GDP must grow or implode.
A few people having more children won't stop this really. And having many children in an attempt to provide enough tax slaves and laborers to keep the machine running isn't any more appealing than immigration itself.
The purpose of the system is what it does.
But the consequences won't be shrugged off.
Ideology & the underlying system/economy go hand in hand
I think it could be a combination of the two: both for propping up the all glorious GDP and “replacement” of the white “race,” as they have so often claimed.
Yeah it's basically a problem of the usurious system and Europeans and many other countries are essentially debt slaves to it... it's also leading to replacement of Asian countries tho they are more resistant to immigration of course
You're so cowardly and dishonest about the globalist agenda being pushed by Soros etc which is blatantly anti white in nature
Tbh, that “academic rhetoric” is a very real thing that I wouldn’t discount. It is in places much further than just the academy.
But to your point. I think mass migration is the solution to this in western countries while in eastern they try technology. Technology does not seem capable of fixing this, and mass migration seems to be a disaster.
Not only is mass migration demonstrating that humans aren’t interchangeable cogs for a society. It is also incredibly short sighted. It can work if the developing world had high birth rates; it is just “skimming off the top” so to speak to help out developed nations. But the developing world is having collapsing birth rates. With current trends, you will have the catastrophe of low birth rates obliterating the developing world faster than the developed if you keep those mass migrations going.
Liar Liar pants on fire. Mass immigration IS designed to wipe out the white race. Peter Sutherland, George Soros and Nicolas Sarkozy and many others have said so openly. Weasel words and non sequitirs. And actually AI could solve most of the problems
I hope Ai can! Possibly it's done by design but I'm increasingly convinced the population collapse is global and a big reason for elites allowing for open borders is to keep their system from breaking.
I think of problems that places like Japan faces, where business owners stay well into their 60s and 70s because there is nobody to replace them. They have no option for retirement because *they* are what fuels the economy; the younger generation is too small to rely on investing in them for economic rewards. So they have to work themselves into a very old age.
As far as the ruler shop of the old, we in the US have been ruled by baby boomers for over 30 years now. That is something they never dealt with their own parents because they were a large enough political cohort to take over. Smaller younger generations will be stuck having no real political or economic voice because they aren’t large enough to make the splash until they are hitting retirement. That is not the historical case. Our nations founders was a broad mix of people ranging from their 20s to their 50s. Which can be seen in other political bodies throughout time until only very recently where we see our leaders be on actual life-support they are so old.
Another part of intergenerational wealth that is not really talked about is breakdown of families. Families are one of the biggest sources of intergenerational wealth if you happen to not be on of the elite. That means the wealth is instead being channeled into consumption habits (corporations that take that wealth) as opposed to invested in intergenerational channels. That means those that do have families will have a harder time while wealth is centralized further and further. But families is kind of tangential to this, so maybe worth exploring another time.
Not to be overly pessimistic, but I’ll agree with you. I think we are doomed to suffer this problem. In the meantime, people will point fingers at everything else before they confront needing to make tough personal choices like raising families. It is easier to scapegoat immigration, capitalism, and baby boomers while promising nationalism, socialism, and asserting our own political agency than to make 20+ year commitments to things like raising families.
As there are more old people the tax burden on the young will increase and their political power will diminish. They will themselves have fewer children to compensate and it will death spiral. There is no obvious way out.
Excess third world populations aren’t useful and can’t make up the shortfall.
> the tax burden on the young will increase and their political power will diminish. They will themselves have fewer children to compensate
So ... let’s make those young, politically powerless people who can’t afford to have children more miserable—and less able to afford children—by taxing them more, for the benefit of the few who can?
The system is so short-sighted that it can't cut off its nose to spite its face, because it can't see that far.
It's the economy stupid. Women are simply overvalued in the workplace as well as society When the "gender pay gap "has become an all important issue to be addressed it shows how skewed the dynamic has become, when it's actually in the other direction with women taking more time off work than men and getting equal pay for totally different work just because theyre working in the same company. And to round it off nicely borrowing a line from Alice in Wonderlands character......What are you for?
I saw an amazing quote by Darlene Bereznicki the other day.
“Men want to have kids, and I get that, you know - I prefer when things are made for me too. But men want to have kids like how kids want to have a dog.
Just like ‘I promise to take care of it, I promise!’
And then you’re like ‘Will you buy it food?’
‘Nah, you know I don’t know how to go to the store by myself’.”
This is demeaning to fatherhood and pretty un-representative of my own situation and every other father I know. I'm afraid Ms Bereznicki is badly mistaken. Best I can tell she doesn't have kids herself, so I'm not sure how she came to this conclusion.
There are many, many exceptional fathers who lift heaven and earth to give their families good lives. Every father in my network is of this type.
We need to stop pretending that mothers are heavily put-upon, constant sufferers who are weighed down by their useless husbands. Not only demeaning and debasing, but inaccurate to boot. Prevalence of these lies is one of the reasons so many young women have been lead down the primrose path of voluntarily childlessness, and consequently miss out on the most exceptionally meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful experience of their lives.
Sure, there are many great fathers out there. Sounds like you’re one of them - good on you.
But there are also many, many deeply unhappy women who feel exploited, trapped and even abused in their marriages. There’s a reason the divorce rate is what it is.
Marriage is a big gamble, and more and more young women are realising that. That is a good thing. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, or won’t, get married. It means they will approach marriage with due caution, which gives them a better chance of forming a healthy, fulfilling, long-lasting partnership.
Yes, sure, but there are also many, many deeply unhappy men who feel exploited, trapped, and emotionally abused in their marriages. The difference is, these men never file for divorce, they simply suffer in silence, both because that's how men are wired, but also because they would rather resign themselves to unfulfilled life than break up their families. They place the family unit above their personal happiness. Nobody cares about these men, they are at best ignored and at worst blamed for the pain their shitty wives cause.
I’m becoming unsure that you’re one of the good ones. Huge numbers of women also “suffer in silence” for the supposed good of the family unit. You’re trying to make men out to be stoic and superior, and women to be weak complainers, and it’s bogus - not only because women too “resign themselves to unfulfilled lives”, and indeed have *long* been expected to “place the family unit above their personal happiness”.
But also, the idea that parents who are miserable, exploited, unhappy and abused can nevertheless create a healthy, happy home is *nonsense*. Bonkers. The kids *know* when their parents are miserable and it affects them deeply. So many adults wish their parents *hadn’t* stayed together “for the kids”.
Can’t take a joke, can you?
It's about as funny as a bad commercial on daytime television. Sure, your motivated-or-otherwise mileage may vary.
I’m sorry you’re so upset about a woman making a joke about how many men are not involved fathers.
Hit dogs holler.
And partisan hacks are destroying the world. Yes, look in the mirror.
"Oh, Come on! What do you mean by "I don't take care of it enough"? I hugged it for a few minutes, and watched "Adventure time" with it didn't I?...Oh, and I gave it a sandwich!"
Great piece and a cathartic read.
Scientific literature gets into the insane physiology of pregnancy. And there's a rich feminist tradition of critically examining pregnancy and birth and its costs to women. The Shulamith Firestone quote about "shitting a pumpkin" comes to mind after reading this piece.
But the dominant culture doesn't really wrestle with what pregnancy actually asks of women in a serious, specific manner. Your chart is awesome. I'd really encourage the men reading to think about their answers seriously.
I started my Substack "Placental Mammal" because I'm exasperated at how little the physiology of pregnancy — which is enabled and controlled by the placenta — enters into cultural and philosophical discussions about pregnancy and reproduction, especially when it comes to abortion rights. It's awesome to see another writer ringing the bell about it!
Very cool, skimming your articles I will definitely want to dive in. After watching a documentary once on how very, very tiny kangaroos are when they're born and squiggle their way up and into the mother's pouch, I've always thought it's a terrible shame we can't be marsupials! Seems like a much kinder system for mom. Though I'm sure there's some kind of trade-off in brain development, being born so early.
I always thought laying an egg would be pretty great, until I did more reading on the physical toll of making eggs.lol. The marsupial way does sound pretty appealing!
I think the data of fewer women wanting kids is just reflective of the shitty mate market they face. I bet if you'd polled women in 1850 most would have wanted kids because most of the tradeoffs weren't as bad even though the physical risks were greater Now having kids is no guarantee of at least having a man financially support you and being able to at least avoid demeaning paid labor or being able to actually do much of the rewarding/meaning part of raising small kids. One can simultaneously see it is a real problem to have say a 1.3 fertility rate and a massive population of retired bad health seniors but also see that the lowering fertility rate is understandable and not because a bunch of evil feminists have brainwashed women out of having kids.
I am starting to think that this is a lot more of the issue than I had previously thought. I have been mulling on this recently, and I'm not sure WHY it never occurred to me previously, but I guess it's just so baked in that I never noticed the "water I'm swimming in" so to speak. But it occurs to me now that basically everyone born around roughly 1980 or after has grown up in a culture where it is entirely normalized and acceptable (or least legal and not harshly punished) for men to abdicate all responsibilities if they feel like it...divorce, cheating, abandonment, not marrying a woman they impregnate. And everything in culture I've ever known my whole life since at least Bill Clinton was President sends the message that ultimately you cannot ever expect to rely upon or trust a man and that you're a big dummy if you do. I don't even think that's necessarily a conscious thought for most women, it's just sort there in the underlying calculus and makes taking a leap of faith like that far more terrifying.
Shades of Louise Perry and Mary Harrington! "Feminism" has been great for (many) males; not so much for everyone else.
Assuming we want the good parts of our culture to persist at least for the lifetimes of great-nephews and -nieces, the questions become: how do we incentivise men to stay loyal and to fully participate in bringing up their chidren, and how do we train them to do it, now that the art has been lost?
(Or nearly lost; as Tove writes, there are still some "high-investment" men around. Although perhaps it's just their fellow men making them look good by comparison.)
Trying to shame men and telling them what they "should" want clearly isn't working; nor are attempts at indoctrination with either "traditional gender roles" or egalitarian beliefs. (Especially when flavoured with "personal fulfilment" and "happiness" seasonings.)
Johann Kurtz (indirectly) raises the idea of using status as a carrot. Maybe that'll do it, if taken far enough. Maybe.
High-investment fatherhood will have to be the easy path in life for men, that's for sure.
Yes, I'm not sure really. Certainly they are not going to listen to women who try to hector, shame, or cajole them into it. I think somehow the men have to, though it's hard to see how.
My wife was hesitant to have children. Was worried about career, etc.
We have two now and she was far more enthusiastic about having the second one than the first.
Being a parent is frustrating and you make a lot of sacrifices, but you also grow personally in a way that someone who doesn’t have children never will.
Being alone or being a DINK is easy. You’d think with so much more money and free time available they’d be more interesting, but there’s a limit to how much someone can grow if they’re not up to the challenge of raising a child.
I’ll leave you with a fun fact:
Did you know that children raised by single fathers show roughly the same outcomes as children raised by two parents? It’s the single mothers who can’t handle the responsibility of turning children into adults.
I believe that. I have a friend who is a single father after his life basically abandoned them bc she decided she'd rather party, and he's an excellent dad. And my parents divorced and I lived every other week with each of them, so I got to experience years of what it is like in a single father household versus a single mother household. Dads are less neurotic (though both my parents were perfectly responsible and capable of handling it) and also most kids are over indulged these days and moms are worse about that. Also boys in particular need to have an adult man in the house that they fear, to keep their ass in line once they hit puberty, and most teenage boys don't fear their mom.
So dads are great...IF they stick around, which plenty don't. I was lucky bc my dad stayed involved in my life. But most of my friends had divorced parents and their dads just eventually disappeared. Many hadn't spoken to them in years, not even a call to say happy birthday. So there are a lot of dads who just are not very connected to their kids and will fade away as soon as they have a new girlfriend. But amongst the dads who ARE responsible, they are excellent. Higher variation among men, as in all things.
I don't really buy the parents growing thing, sorry. Their lives change for sure, but that does not necessarily mean for the better (or the worse). But it's pretty ridiculous to say they're more interesting, that's a complete joke and a way higher percentage of historical figures and famous scientists, thinkers, and artists had no kids than the standard population. Parents are much more self involved and inward thinking in my view, and often take a flagrantly I'll do anything for my kid and everyone else in the world can go fuck off attitude. What's so mature and enlightened about that? Which I don't mean as an insult anyway, it's natural and what happens when you have someone else to be responsible for, especially when that someone is the only thing that can carry your genes forward after you die. But I don't think that makes them better people, in fact I see parents acting in extraordinarily selfish and greedy ways on behalf of their own kids that would not be acceptable if they did it for themselves all the time (like pulling strings to get them an unfair advantage). They just take a pass for themselves and deem it to not be self centered because it's for their progeny instead of themselves, but it's the same thing. Anyway I have no beef with parents and am glad they do it, and many parents are great people but plenty arent. So whatever they want to tell themselves about being superior is fine with me.
When you're a parent, you're far more sensitive to cultural shifts that aren't good for children. Weird content, weird people (dragqueen story hour), incredibly stupid ideas like shutting down schools for 18+ months, etc.
I may have been more of a world citizen when I was single and didn't have kids, but I've come to realize that making your local area the best it can be is a far more important struggle.
It hasn't stopped me from keeping up with world events. I'm still more informed than most people without kids are. Lots of people who don't want children aren't scientists or engineers. They're not even big readers.
I didn't say parents were better people. I said raising a child creates personal growth that's simply not possible to get any other way. There are plenty of deadbeat parents who fucking suck who experience no personal growth from having children because they essentially take no responsibility for raising their children into functional adults.
"I fed them, clothed them, and kept a roof over their heads!" is the rallying cry of shitty parents who wonder why their adult children are fucking morons who suck at life. They never taught their children anything but their own bad habits and laziness.
But for parents who put the work in to develop their children, it's very rewarding to see them blossom into readers, thinkers, and plotters of mayhem.
I recommend it.
The familial investment in the community is horribly overlooked compared to single people. Single people by nature are much more transient while families are pushed to be invested in community issues. Be it education, crime, or simply maintaining the property of the area.
Single fathers are relatively rare. I’m not surprised their kids tend to have decent outcomes compared to the kids of single mothers, because fathers probably more likely to abandon their children by orders of magnitude. The minority of men who raise children alone probably are wealthier than most single mothers and depend heavily on help from
Grandmothers and aunts.
Please give a citation for that fun fact because every motherless household I have encountered has had real elements of tragedy in it
https://medium.com/the-knowledge-of-freedom/single-father-households-do-vastly-better-than-single-mother-heres-the-real-reason-why-8a7fd7c5611d#id_token=eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6ImEzYjc2MmY4NzFjZGIzYmFlMDA0NGM2NDk2MjJmYzEzOTZlZGEzZTMiLCJ0eXAiOiJKV1QifQ.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.RSym9enHcMPw9bD6xTMTEynleLNTDB7T_RK-92o4JMLaFg0ZAf70bMtK6Z1kjMi5peTEMP93EnHkr3uwXkgqtDF26tL1R5ZxB0I8F51zttgn7XqoFSJA0yy49lAF6sDyL-yONaKOGgRmQgE6EDAmznhTtimLra64SfTEUufwqpSS6_ZbgC9cRFs_fXvL7jEUoTTsB9MvlcvyzrCkXaFJ6fEqI06nDkhtUm5FWpYcC3dE_Erip-NgptAjjjHP5PJK5FaQDAa5bmNLzikDlld9ho2u0CuQvdjTxBYsXAHia1jelPMWFFipClI94qQD4d474-1NemL6jx1p6wCmBXRctw
I can’t read it without a membership?
I don’t quite have the time this morning to hunt down the non-paywalled research. Sorry :(
Fair enough
Found this fascinating, thanks for sharing. Have quite a few female friends who expressed minimal interest in having kids and have always come away confused by it. As a guy who always wanted kids myself, I largely equated the two in my mind and while I intellectually understood the difference, putting a number on it is a totally different experience. Some thoughts below:
While I'm willing to concede that my desire is largely based on instinct and then post-hoc rationalized, I don't see how the rationalizations are in-and-of-themselves wrong. It seems that the same economic system that provides the freedom of choice through economic security that women now have is dependent on--at a minimum--a supply of new labor large enough to support them as they age. To be blunt, with rare exceptions, people over 70 are a substantial economic drain on society given our current welfare system. Immigration can serve as a stop-gap, but can only shore up the system if the same choice against carrying children continues to be made. The technological solution (artificial wombs) seems the ideal situation, but I have no expertise with which to handicap when we can expect wide-scale rollout, so I'm ignoring it (if I shouldn't, let me know). With that in mind, would you agree or disagree with limiting participation in those welfare programs to only those with children, particularly given that it is an implicit subsidy from families to the childless (through the spending that parents use to raise their children who then pay into welfare which covers all individuals, not just parents)?
As for your question: somewhere between $100-150k; though with the caveats that I have valuable skills and a network that I know I could rely on to cushion the worst case situations.
I don't really know much about artificial wombs either. If someone is attempting to develop one, they probably keep it quiet because it's way too Brave New Worldy for most people.
But again, it's weirdly women who seem more likely against them.
Even though it's very obvious that at least some women would like to take advantage of them, given the fact some already pay to outsource pregnancy, via surrogacy. These are mostly very rich women, celebrities, etc who do this of course, and most normal people can't afford it. I believe the going rate is about what you quoted you would require (around $100-$150k), so there you go, you hit on the market clearing price!
Though if it ever happens, I would expect that people would rapidly shift from thinking it was immoral and weird to rapidly adopting it, til eventually it was the norm for everyone but a few fundamentalists or hardcore anti-tech people. And that eventually it would be like that scene in Brave New World where the people are horrified and revolted to even think about how babies used to get born. At least, that was pretty much the reaction that happened when they made us watch "The Miracle of Birth" in school when I was in 9th grade....the whole class was screaming like it was a horror movie.
Anyway, I would be happy to accept not getting a social security payout, if it means I also don't have to pay towards school taxes. Because I pay a lot more each year in school taxes for other people's kids than I do towards social security, which is capped. ;)
I'm not really sure I buy the argument about subsidization, anyway. If you have a non-working wife and two kids, only you are paying into social security, yet both you AND your wife will get social security benefits, and you'll also both get Medicare even though only you paid towards it, and if something should happen to both of you, your kids will get your social security. Whereas both my husband and I pay into these, and only we will get anything out. So we're paying in for 2 and getting benefits for 2, while you're paying in for 1 and getting benefits for 4. You can't count your future kid's contributions that you assume but don't know they'll make 30 years in the future, that's silly. If we did it that way, your contributions shouldn't matter because your own dad already took the credit for you.
And besides, this all assumes functional people...the reality is, there are millions of people who are basically helpless and will never contribute much if anything at all. Every purposely childless person I know is EXTREMELY responsible and careful about money and usually risk averse and a very long-term planner -- those traits are why they don't have kids -- and I'd warrant a guess that in general they pay in far more over a typical lifetime than they ever get in benefits, as a collective, if you compared them to typical families. That's just my intuition since I know a lot of these people, it would be interesting to see an actual study on that.
I also think people are maybe over-exaggerating in their mind how much help old people need? In my neighborhood, we're one of the youngest couples on our block, and most of our neighbors are in their 70s and 80s. They're not THAT helpless. It's not like there are paid helpers going in and out every day. Most of them still mow their lawns and work on their gardens and drive etc. If they can't, a neighbor will help them. And then once in a while they die. I think that normalizing holding on to elderly people who can't function at all for years on end in some nursing facility, draining the family for 5 figures a month, is what should be un-normalized.
You are not paying any social security or Medicare taxes towards yourselves. These are pay as you go systems, every dollar you pay is already spent. Only the taxes of the next generation can pay for you, and you didn’t create a next generation. The whole reason we have a looming shortfall is people didn’t have enough kids.
I think it’s extremely unlikely you are going to voluntarily waive you Medicare and social security when you are older. There is no empirical track record of people acting that way.
It would be more reasonable to base social security and Medicare taxes on number of kids. Those with lots of kids don’t have to pay and those that do t have kids have to pay more. Then in some sense the childless will have born the cost of raising the next generations taxpayers so that everyone can collect benefits.
I do pay "to raise" the next generation. I pay school taxes for kids, for schools I will never use and which actually do most of the raising of kids, since kids spend most of their waking hours in school. I pay way more in school taxes each year than I do Medicare or SS tax, btw. And only parents get the tax exemption for having dependents and the EITC for each kid. For a typical family that adds up to about $15k per year PER KID in tax credits and free education that parents get and childless don't (not even taking into account govt subsidies for healthcare and food for poor kids). So I feel I've paid plenty, that's hundreds of thousands more over a lifetime that parents benefit from govt subsidy that people like me pay into and don't receive.
You pay school taxes to the schools, not to parents. You then offer parents a product they may not value much and don't give them the option of spending the money a different way then the school system decides. You even (single people as a whole) have the gaul to vote in school board elections despite not having kids in the schools! If single people didn't vote we'd have school vouchers by now.
K-12 schooling is $810B a year.
Medicare is $944B and Social Security is $1.4T. A large share of Medicaid spending is on nursing homes and duals. Medicaid is $824B.
Even that understates because Medicare and Medicaid both pay below reimbursement and rely on private pay to make up the difference.
So old age benefits dwarf K-12 spending, and that's under the current regime. When you retire the strain will be even worse, which is why everyone says the programs are going bankrupt.
Meanwhile, Social Security is a cash benefit. You can spend it how you want. K-12 spending involves zero choice by parents. Many parents value public education so low they send their kids to private school or homeschool where they get nothing. We just went through a two year span where K-12 schools didn't even open their doors.
Well, this is getting pretty far afield, but I pay taxes to schools, and schools then grant parents a free place to put their kids every day for 12 years. I could care less about voting on school board elections or any of that, and I disagree that all or even most parents are as anti-public school as you clearly are. However, if parents wants to fight that out amongst themselves or decide how those tax dollars are spent, I'm fine with it and don't care. The fact remains, it's a value worth about $12k per year PER KID that parents get and that people without kids pay into, and don't act like that isn't a significant transfer, even if not in your preferred form. But that's how taxes work, no one gets the system they most wish, it's all a big compromise so that everyone is some level of dissatisfied, as in all compromises.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-gender-sexual-orientation-marital-and-parental-status/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/lib-cons-cohorte.png
Childlessness is strongly associated with leftism. If the childless couldn't vote leftists would win zero elections and we would have school choice.
"it's a value worth about $12k per year PER KID that parents get and that people without kids pay into"
You got it when you were a kid.
Anyway, what is spent and what its worth are different. Obviously you people are afraid to let parents have the money, which is why the childless vote overwhelmingly left.
BTW, we didn't even get free daycare for two years because leftists (who are far less likely to have kids) shut down the schools.
Happy to say I was never exposed to that particular horror in sex ed. Thoughts are below in approximately the order of your response.
Would be curious your thoughts on why you think it's largely women against artificial wombs, not an idea I've about before so don't have a sense. Also, if they were viable, what approximate percent of women who decline to have kids now do you think would reconsider? Or would it simply replace the method of birth and not the rate?
Your point on paying for other kid's education/childcare I would argue is technically true but directionally wrong . Total public K-12 spending is about $850B, SS is 1.3T, and Medicare is ~$800B. If you account for cohort effects, I would estimate the US gov spends ~3x more over an individuals lifetime after they retire compared to their childhood. In my view, a system without an implicit subsidy would mean those numbers were closer to 1:1.
The non-working wife point I agree with, but the gap in labor force participation between men and women has shrunk so much I'm not sure it matters. On your contributions being credited to your dad, I would argue that's basically true. At least, it's functionally how SS works.
As for functional people, my experience has been largely similar. Considering selection effects, I would agree that compared to the average family childless individual probably gives more than they take (with a caveat that as the percentage who choose to be childless grows, I suspect this will reverse).
While I agree the elderly aren't helpless, I don't agree that that's the relevant standard. The standard from a societal viewpoint is net productivity (do they add more to society than they consume), not helplessness. The fact that they don't is why retirement savings were invented in the first place. Every increase in the number of elderly without a corresponding increase in the working age population leads to either a greater burden on those still working or a decline in living standards for the elderly (which is not likely given the rates old people vote at). There's a balance between supporting those who've paid their dues and those still coming up, and my concern is that we so favor the former that we stifle the latter. Which I find incredibly bleak.
On a personal note, fuck nursing homes. Never felt more like a pinata in my life than when my grandmother got Alzheimer's. Absolutely leech-like institutions.
I have sometimes wondered if anyone has ever looked into the effect that watching "The Miracle of Life" had on students -- I think this only happened in the 80s and 90s and likely only in liberal states. It has a VERY graphic, VERY gross full birth shown... you get the delight of watching the placenta be emitted after the baby and everything. If the point of showing it to a mixed-sex class of 14 and 15 year olds was to impress upon us the importance of birth control, it was incredibly effective, I'll give it that.
I don't disagree with any of your points. I had been thinking about my personal tax situation, since where I live we have a 5% flat tax on all of your income to fund schools, and while I pay 6.5% for social security, that's capped lower than my total income so I definitely pay more towards schools.
I mentioned social security because that's the point that people worried about a shrinking/flat population usually mention. But as you point out, it is Medicare which is the far bigger problem. Now that my and my husband's parents are getting up there in age, we have both been horrified to see what goes on. Their doctors are recommending surgeries and procedures to our dads non-stop. Knee replacements, shoulder replacements, revision surgeries, hand surgery, carpal tunnel surgery, nasal block surgery, eye surgery, ablation...it never ends. I swear one of our parents is in the hospital or recovering from a surgery almost every month. And they're fairly typical, not overweight, moderately fit people and I simply do not believe all these procedures are necessary -- and most have not created any improvement. If anything, get weaker and more tired and older seeming every time they recover from surgery, it's not something 80 year old bodies should be going through multiple times a year.
But this problem doesn't need to be solved at the other end of the lifespan. There are seriously mis-aligned incentives where doctors are paid per procedure and Medicare billing is just a machine (especially in Florida). We've tried to encourage them to be skeptical and ask do you REALLY need another surgery when you seem fine, but they are of a generation where you just trust doctors and don't assume pecuniary motives. And besides they don't care, because Medicare pays for it (i.e. working people). Anyway that is a rant far off topic, but it's a huge problem. Still, one would hope that it is a more simple fix to reform or modify our legal/welfare/economic systems than to try to convince people to have kids they don't seem to want. I'm joking of course, we can't fix or change anything in this country, if it requires consensus.
And with you on the nursing homes too. Very similar situation with my grandma, which went on for five years while the family was told the entire time that she would likely only live another week. And probably cost half a million dollars by the end.
On artificial wombs, I haven't looked deeply into this. But in general it seems that with any new bio-tech advancement, there tends to be a lot of controversy, at least a first. And that a greater share of men tend to be in the camp that sides with giving less weight to bio-ethical concerns and more weight on progress and technology. Maybe that's just a function of more men having a highly rationalist/utilitarian mindset, I'm not sure. After googling it, I find we are actually farther along than I'd thought, and 300 lambs have been successfully brought to term for 4 weeks in an artificial womb. And apparently the FDA is considering human trials, however ONLY for pre-term babies, not baking them from scratch. It's hard to see how the FDA would ever allow that. In fact I'm sure they will not. So if it gets developed it will be in another country.
But I would imagine this kind of thing goes like most technological changes...widespread taboo and rejection, but then you have early adopters, maybe in foreign countries if it isn't legal here and maybe hiding/lying about it at first, but eventually it starts to become more visible and common, and eventually people start admitting it more publicly, until eventually you get a critical mass and then it just becomes accepted and common. I have seen that happen with so many things in my life that it's hard to take anyone's opinions on anything new seriously, when I've seen so many people do complete 180s and accept and/or tolerate things they were once hardcore opposed to (see: gay marriage, polyamory, Botox, plastic surgery, online porn). So I can't really predict how much it would shift things, but it wouldn't be nothing. If you look at Botox for example...I can recall when it was widely considered to be something only a truly psychotic/pathologically vain person would do, injecting botulinum toxin into your face to paralyze your muscles. But it has increased by 25% year-over-year basically every year since it rolled out in the early 2000s, and is now considered completely normal and in many areas par for the course.
So, I'm pulling these figures out of thin air but just basing it on what I know about women choosing elective C-sections or similar procedures...if there was not a lot of social stigma AND it was affordable , I would guess about 1/4 to 1/3 of women would choose it. Of the women who are now saying they don't want kids, which I'll peg around 20% because I don't think we can assume the Zoomers will all stick to their positions, maybe a third or half might change their mind? This is a pretty out-there thought experiment so it's hard to say, but I hear a LOT of them say things like "if I could have the dad's support role, I'd totally do it".
This was going to be a standalone comment, but I was really curious to see how much discussion there had been in the comments about artificial wombs, so I'll just drop it here:
The problem with this piece is that, if true (and I have no reason really to doubt that it is) the future looks grim, perhaps especially for women.
The inevitable conclusion is that we have to hope the species endures long enough for artificial wombs to mature. Based on my admittedly limited understanding of the state of the art (and your own discussion above), I'd say we have a really good chance of that. After that, all bets are off. Perhaps of all technologies, this is going to be one that is going to take a long time to fully adopt, as you've correctly identified above. But if the choice is between that and extinction, or even maybe significant degrowth, let alone the opportunity to become a interplanetary or interstellar species, it's a pretty easy choice.
Men are archetypically the useless gender, and are beneficial primarily for things that are only secondarily related to the preservation/perpetuation of the species, or even of civilization, like war and innovation. If you kill off a bunch of men but leave the women intact, historically, populations have rebounded (cf. 1914-1970). Without women, it's over.
If women make themselves useless in the same fashion by the process described in this piece, I'd say there's a pretty good chance humanity becomes a single-gender species, even. That's of course not going to be true except in the fairly long run, but I'd consider it a strong possibility on such a time scale (10%? Maybe 20%? over say the next 250-500 years). Could be that gender will be female, but I'd bet against it. I already feel like enough of a misogynist having typed out all the foregoing, so I'm not going to spell it out more than that unless I have to, but I trust you know what I'm talking about.
So, I've had this in the back of my mind now, and would like to push back on a few things.
1) I really don't think it's about men's balls speaking instead of their brains. The kind of men concerned about the fertility crisis really do have an ethics based around the preservation and enhancement of society. That's almost an inevitable conclusion when you try to rationally understand the big picture -- you realize, goddamnit, we need society to maintain itself, even at the expense of the individual. Work, laws, cultural/social norms, technological progress ... everything comes down to the question of: does this benefit society as a whole?
2) I would question how much of this can really be attributed to women having "true, free choice". In every society, choices occur against a background of incentives. The truth is, society has destroyed the incentives for Western women to become mothers. Status shifted from motherhood to career success, for example. This is not an indictment of women, it's an indictment of the society they inhabit. Every society ideally allocates status in ways which facilitate the prosperity of the whole. When young men and women dream of becoming Tiktok famous rather than engineers and scientists, that's a problem. And when women aren't becoming mothers, that's a problem, too. These are problems of incentives, not individual irrationalities. People aren't really talking about showing women that it's somehow rational to become mothers, because if the incentives are fucked up, who can blame them? But people *are* interested in how the incentive structure can be readjusted, so that women will rationally make that choice themselves.
On your first point, I understand that's how a lot of people feel but I also think it's a very strange way to think about the world, personally. People who don't yet exist but will exist in an unknown future will make their own decisions about how they want things to be, and trying to guess that or impose our will on them without knowing the future circumstances seems odd to me. First of all, things change so rapidly that even trying to make these predictions is futile. If people from 50 or 100 or 250 years ago tried to make such predictions they would fail terribly. Second, I bet if you surveyed most Americans today and asked them if their preference was that people 40 or 60 years ago had had more or less kids, so that our population today was a lot or a little smaller or larger, you'd get just as many people saying they'd wish for less, than the other way around. Especially all the young people dealing with housing shortage and ridiculously competitive admissions and those kinds of issues. Plenty of people would say they'd prefer we were at roughly 1980 levels of population (225M instead of 335M).
And also, the perpetual growth side of things simply has no logical end point. At SOME point growth has to stop and the pro-growthers will never tell you when that would be...15B people? 30B? 50B? They literally have no answer but "we have to go intergalactic". That is not a good answer. If that's what one's whole ideology depends on, it's unconvincing full stop. Go ahead and get even close to that technology and capability, and THEN have that conversation. Until then, given they have no answer to when/how growth should stop, a gradual decline in growth and adjustment to economic systems that depend on growth seems like a perfectly sane and GOOD way to deal with what would otherwise be a much crueler and more devastating situation if we maintained 20th century like growth forever.
On your second point, I fully agree with you that it's an incentives issue. But I have not yet seen anyone make a proposal for HOW to shift those incentives. And I think that's partly because they don't seem to want to address the actually severe and inherent material discrepancy in incentives, as between men and women, simply based on biology. Forget about society, even in cave man days your starting point is that costs to women are 1000X greater than to men. Then add in society, where we see that 1. money is the ultimate arbiter and reflection of status, and motherhood makes it much harder to get money (single mothers are the poorest people in our society), and 2. men reveal their preferences by allocating most of their attention and money to young nubile non-mothers and have almost zero interest in watching, paying attention to, or giving money to mothers (in fact we had to make laws to force them to). So given these incentives, what does anyone expect? Men COULD, for example, all start bestowing attention and love and resources and status upon and lauding mothers, but they don't. They give it lip service, while their actions are the opposite. Just one simple example, but if you look at which social media accounts women follow with respect to the opposite sex (as far as influencers/celebrities), you will find that it is almost entirely married men, usually with kids. Women like their content about their family life and their wives and funny reels about their kids. That does not apply the other way around. When men follow female influencers, they're hot non-mothers. They already complain about having to subsidize single mothers. So they can talk all they want about changing status, but their actual behavior is the total opposite of what they're peddling and in that context expecting women to act against the obvious incentives is futile.
> Is it truly impossible that you are just overlaying post-facto rationalizations onto inchoate emotions that are neither pure nor objective?
Who said evolutionary pressures aren't pure and objective? If anything those would be the least ideologically tainted, and the more in tune with our nature!
This is true. I just wish they would admit it, instead of constantly going on about social security. 😊