[spullara]

There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial support. Add that into your observation that the world is more fun and selfish and it multiplies.

A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.

All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.

[decidu0us9034]

I love how the original post says this happens across vastly different societies regardless of all these different variables people are offering as possible explanations. For example, in India (which this article is about), women have a much lower rate of workforce participation than other industrialized countries. I think a lot of people who are replying are men and don't understand how physically tasking and painful pregnancy is. It seems like most women are fine having two if there's a high chance they'll make it to adulthood and they have access to family planning/contraceptives. That makes sense to me. Not sure why this is so confounding to people. Not much more of an explanation needed than that lol

[linkregister]

I agree that women's employment is the common factor in all societies with reduced birth rates.

> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k

That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.

1. Teen Births in the United States: Overview and Recent Trends, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184

[spullara]

oops! yes, per 1k.

[just_mc]

> A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate

This was my first intuition.

[pjc50]

This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.

[em-bee]

if they work at companies we have 2x the workers

i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.

[trumpdong]

Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.

[Qem]

> Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies

If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas that remain high cost.

[spullara]

This is already happening in Japan where they are garbage collecting and consolidating them.

[bombcar]

Small towns survived for millennia before industrialization; and they could likely survive again, if anyone wanted that life.

[antasvara]

The Venn diagram of "people that want traditional small town life" and "people that currently live in a small town" has a smaller overlap than you'd think.

The small towns in my area are desirable not just because they're small, but because they're small and have the same amenities as a bigger town. These towns are also increasingly relying on debt to fund decades of deferred maintenance just to keep the amenities they already have alive.

This would become dire if (for example) property values fell, as residential real estate taxes make up the majority of tax revenue. This might happen if demand for the town fell (perhaps due to fewer people), which would quickly become a catastrophic cycle (revenues fall, roads and schools deteriorate, which makes the town less desirable, repeat ad infinitum).

[bombcar]

This is oft repeated, though examining the small town budget (though perhaps I'm not in a "small" town at 10k residents) shows that the vast majority of the property tax goes to the schools, roads et al are a rounding error.

In a future with few or no kids, schools won't be needed.

[dpark]

I bet the set of people seeking out “small town life” are more likely to have children than the average city dweller. If so, the funding problem gets worse over time for small towns. More kids with fewer adults funding schools.

[antasvara]

The balance here is that good schools are one of the amenities that keep property values high and they have pretty high fixed costs.

So you lose some economy of scale when enrollment drops, you have to cut school funding, which makes the schools worse, which makes the town less desirable, which drops real estate prices, etc.