[xkqd]

I’ve always held a belief that a lot of America’s social and economic inequalities are fueled by the consolidation of good, high paying jobs around a few major cities. I’d get behind any party that tries to tackle this by incentivizing the distribution of these jobs across America. If cheaper, quieter lifestyles result from this, all the better.

[dcolkitt]

At the very least, crowding the most intelligent and ambitious people into the country’s lowest fertility metro (the Bay Area) certainly seems like not a good idea from an inter-generational perspective.

[lolinder]

It seems like you might be mixing up cause and effect. I'd assume that the Bay area is the country's lowest fertility Metro precisely because it's filled with ambitious people.

[mensetmanusman]

The entire west is not having children, it’s not just the Bay Area.

[aksss]

Nearly the entire developed world after their growth booms. China will get there too. It’s a common enough pattern for wealthy countries worldwide.

[muyuu]

China has been in (artificially) in demographic decline for a while most of the country remains dirt poor.

There is no such cultural determinism. Many countries won't stop having children as their economy grows, in fact the opposite is happening in many places around the world.

[aksss]

Nobody said anything about "stop having children" (good night!) - back to reality: I think the established pattern for countries joining the developed world is large economic growth/dev, followed by baby boom, followed by declining rates of reproduction until under the replacement value. This happens not only because of changing priorities of a wealthier population and changing behaviors, but also the availability of birth control and lower mortality rates (infant and elderly).

So it's not that birth rates decline "as their economy grows" - the birth rates go up during the growth phase - it's what comes after in an established prosperous society: fertility rates decrease.

It's consistent enough to predict with some certainty. As prosperity has grown worldwide, so global TFR has dropped. This happens one by one with the individual countries following a predictable pattern.

China does have regulatory limits that keep their TFR lower than it otherwise would be, they are still in their (modern) growth cycle. Absent that regulation, with the economic boom they've been seeing in last twenty years you'd expect to see the fertility rate boom accordingly, and while it appears to be growing despite the regulatory constraints, it's still below replacement value. This slow growth in the face of structural prosperity changes is the impact of regulation, not organic. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...

[muyuu]

my entire point is that such determinism is illusory and your example wrong in every way

there are direct factors that explain away TFR drops that are not "prosperity" - in fact prosperity alone has historically increased TFR pretty much every time

drastic drops in fertility rates in Europe and North America respond to very specific cultural phenomena that are unlikely to happen in a similar fashion in Africa or the Middle East, more likely to happen in South America and parts of East Asia to some extent, but certainly not across the board

social pseudoscientists can spend as long as they wish looking at past charts, they still won't see causality and there is no better example than fertility predictions to showcase The Poverty of Historicism