[broken-kebab]

It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

[keerthiko]

> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png

[nearbuy]

I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).

In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.

Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.

To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.

[echelon]

Every economic bracket got smartphones and internet.

The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.

Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.

Evolution didn't anticipate this.

[r14c]

Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.

[echelon]

You're right, but it's a fun phrase.

So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.

It would be ironic if this was the great filter.

[fragmede]

Will we discover life extension technology before we stop having children and humanity simply dies off? Between Altered Carbon and Children of Men, I feel like that's a book and a blockbuster movie waiting to be written.

[echelon]

If conscious machines are even 80% as smart as us and 1) never die and 2) can replicate memories, why would anyone have children again? I'd imagine we'd desperately try to build brain uploads or be intolerably jealous of our eternal life robot kin.

We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.

[broken-kebab]

If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.

[scoofy]

Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.

[broken-kebab]

It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".

[gopher_space]

I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:

1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.

and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.

[sltkr]

The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.

Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.

Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.

Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.

[trumpdong]

Affordability is relative to a lifestyle though. Not starving to death is the absolute lowest level.

[sltkr]

Right. Kids cost time and money. So the lifestyle you can afford _with_ kids is slightly lesser than _without_ kids. But this is true at all income levels below the richest 1% or so.

Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.

That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.

So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.

[scoofy]

Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.

As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.

[echelon]

The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic.

Smartphones are why we don't have kids.

Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.

The internet is why we don't have kids.

Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.

Modern life is TOO FUN.

Fun is why there are no more babies.

Babies are not fun.

Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.

Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.

Babies are the anti-dopamine.

For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.

There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.

----

Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

The answer is probably "fuck no".

And you know why.

Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.

[thelastgallon]

Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.

[Izikiel43]

> Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

Yes, next question

[abc123abc123]

No, next question.

[scoofy]

This is an unfalsifiable pet theory. It is hardly worth discussing.

[echelon]

Don't be so dismissive.

Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.

https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575

The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.

It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.

We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.

We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?

Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.

That's why the babies have disappeared.

Fun killed babies.

[peyton]

Yep, the real answer’s electricity.

[linkregister]

Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.

1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948

[roenxi]

I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.

Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.

Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.

[linkregister]

1. Proven causation is a high bar for drawing conclusions in conversation or on a website.

2. Luxembourg is the only microstate in the chart. Fixation on a singular outlier is not useful.