[Aurornis]

It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age.

Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.

It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

[ivape]

Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on. I don’t think people of yesteryear contemplated if they were ready to start a family. I don’t think they contemplated if a job was the “right fit”, and I doubt they scoured the world looking for their soulmate. So, if you live in our current time period where you are never “complete”, then you may have a hard time feeling confident about any next step.

Obviously the downside to this was that just about any idiot from yesteryear saw themselves perfectly qualified to start a family.

The solution is somewhere in the middle.

[Mawr]

No need to contemplate anything if your run-of-the-mill average job lets you support your entire family and purchase a house.

[coldtea]

They also didn't contemplates it as something ubearable if they had to live many persons or even extended family in the same small house, including rentals, and if two persons had to work hard. Manual laborers, factory workers, etc, farmers where both father and mother worked, still had many children.

It's not like this only happened in the window between 1940s-1980s where the run-of-the-mill average job let you support your entire family and purchase a big enough house.

[the_real_cher]

People are acting confounded that the birthrate is goong down.

But if people cant afford kids they wont have them.

Its like super simple.

[FeloniousHam]

I don't agree with the premise (data point: I grew up poor, with siblings), but certainly the inverse isn't true.

[the_real_cher]

Singular data point. Were talking macro level.

Talking about the educated West where people have the information and tools to make the decision.

Context inference is important

[positr0n]

Macro level poorer people have more children than middle class and up people. In the "educated west" (and elsewhere in the world as well I think).

[htek]

Exactly. I suspect the lack of understanding or overcomplicating the reason the birthrate is declining may have something to do with the much higher than average salary of the average HN commenter relative to the average worker's salary in the US. It's common for people who need to go to the doctor to avoid going to the doctor because they can't afford it. A baby is an order of magnitude more expensive than that and an ongoing expense of doctor visits and potential ER visits among other costs and logistical issues.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on.

I don't think so. I think it's because

    A new couple can't support themselves when
    rent=1mo typical wages. It is impossible to pair off.    

    Parenting time is up 20-fold from the 1950s.
    Was a few hours wk. Now it's ceaseless, 24/7 adulting.

    Childhood is effectively ruined due to 
    - eradication of free ranging area thanks to automobile
    and trespassing culture. 
    - eradication of regular hours of adult-free peer time
    where critical social and growth skills are learned.
    Modern childhoods are spent in boxes w/ adults.

    Poor mental health follows and kids cope using devices.
    So adults predictably want to take that away as well.

[ivape]

What is the perfect amount of money and time for you? I suspect many things are not good enough for you and others.

[nothercastle]

That’s what it is for me but also because family life was super scary and uncool. Not a high virtue for the youth.

[navane]

Because there's nothing in the article. It's a couple loosely correlated events around '35-'55 that anyone can Google together in 10 minutes. The article has no more authority that anyone's post around here.

My bet is still WW2. The fact that the boom started earlier than '45 is easily explained by his own quoted graph in which the birthrate plummets in the 20s (which I would assign to WW1), the first rise is merely a correction.

Why would one result in a bust and the other into a boom? For one, the economy followed the same bust ('29) boom pattern. WW1 ended unresolved, showed the evil of man in general, where WW2 resolved WW1 and showed the evil of particular man, and it wasn't us, but which we defeated.

WW2 learned a lot of lessons from WW1 which made post war society thrive for not only the rich.

[ascagnel_]

One significant difference between WW1 and WW2, at least in the US -- the country realigned itself for wartime in a way it did not the first time around. You had women entering the workforce in ways they did not during WW1, which meant you had some families earning dual incomes. At the same time, the US instituted a rationing scheme, so even though households were earning more money, they couldn't spend as much.

Two other significant differences: the GI bill for returning vets (which made it significantly easier for them to get higher education) and the rise of automobiles (which in turn unlocked suburbs and mass home ownership) gave households somewhere useful to put their money.

[labcomputer]

The data doesn't exactly support your argument though:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother

Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother:

* 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then

* 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century

* 40-44 is higher than the 20th century except the 1960's

[usefulcat]

Bear in mind, those appear to be absolute numbers, not relative to world population.

[121789]

You are looking at the full world numbers, which isn’t really what’s being discussed in this thread. Try filtering for South Korea or the US

[labcomputer]

Sure thing, boss:

If we filter by US,

* 15-19 is down almost 80% (!!!) since the mid-century peak.

* 20-24 is down about 60% since the mid-century peak.

* 25-29 is about flat since mid-century

* 30-34 is higher than any time in the 20th century

* 35-39 is higher than any time in the 20th century

* 40-44 is higher than any time in the 20th century

In other words, the story is about the same as global.

Remember, I was responding to a comment that stated "Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all."

If I was going to steel-man your argument, I would note that 20-24 is the cohort with the largest numerical reduction in the US... but then the argument still rests on splitting hairs that 20-24 are not technically teenagers, and teenage pregnancies "only" account for 40% the total reduction in fertility (while teenage mothers only accounted for 16% of births in 1970).

Of course, it's hard to square splitting those hairs with the definitive statement "not the driving factor [...] at all" (emphasis mine). In fact, the only way it makes sense is if you define "recent" to mean "since 2017", but measuring things like this over a period of less than a decade is silly anyway.

The data is also abundantly clear than older women are having more babies (not just a greater percentage, but actually more babies). In Japan women ages 35-44 had more babies in 2023 than any time since 1950. In Korea, women ages 30-44 had more babies than any time since 1980.

[interloxia]

Change in births, by age of mother, United States

Estimated number of births each year by the age of the mother. 1950-2023 relative change. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother?s...

Birth rate by women's age group, United States https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-by-age-gro...

[frm88]

The second graph is so interesting. Pulling the slider shows less births but an average increase in the mother's age (which in turn accounts for less births if you're looking at 35+ yo first time mothers you don't expect n more kids to follow for (among others biological/medical reasons)). It would be interesting to have a complementary chart on divorces just to have a look whether existential uncertainty plays a role in age decisions.

[UncleMeat]

I said "a" reason.

[andrekandre]

  > Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

its a microcosm of our entire political discourse as of late imo: everyone is talking anecdotes and feels and barely anyone is bringing the receipts (and if they do its barely noticed)

[d0gsg0w00f]

But people's anecdotes are part of their life experience. I trust my personal life experience over anything I read, and if I trust a person, I value theirs over anything I read too.

That's just how humans are.

[superice]

I get it, you like stories of individuals. We should figure out a way you can listen to more stories, so you can form an even better opinion! Perhaps we write them out, shorten them a bit. Or perhaps group them by similarity. And then if we count the types of story per category… and boom, we’ve invented statistics!

[coldtea]

And ...boom! we lost the nuance, and shoehorned together disparate elements into a bunch of measurements, as if those explain everything (as opposed to needing explanations and a working theory themselves, and often fitting multiple theories about how they came about).

Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...

[mensetmanusman]

I know how to use statistics to tell nearly any story though, and I would love to trust statistics…

It has to do with unknown unknowns.

[superice]

And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that shortcoming.

[coldtea]

I'd prefer a lie with a story over a lie with statistics.

At least the former doesn't pretend to be scientific or objective, it's just a story.

[mensetmanusman]

The point is that if you have over 100 correlates to assess a situation, any particular story you try to tell is probably a lie even with the best intentions.

[coldtea]

>this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).

It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.

As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.

[mensetmanusman]

A minority of pregnancies end in a birth in nyc among black women. There are 70 million fewer Americans than otherwise.