Capitalism runs on surplus labor, which was only able to work for the last several decades because of a population boom because women were not educated empowered (this is referred to as a (“demographic dividend”). Now that women are educated and empowered, fertility rates are rapidly falling, and labor surplus is falling. What comes next when you run out of labor to squeeze for profits? I don’t know, but I think it’ll be interesting to observe, and the fertility rate globally is likely to continue to fall well into the future (~40% of pregnancies annually are unintended; as systems improve to further prevent unintended pregnancy, this will lead to lower fertility rates).
Any efforts to improve socioeconomic systems to make having children a more attractive economic proposition (and thereby increasing the fertility rate) will take years to implement, perhaps longer, if at all. Like a furnace warming a room, it’s getting colder faster than the thermostat can ever raise the temperature back up.
Did you read the article? It makes an interesting comparison of the birth rate of West Germany (that had a capitalistic industrialisation model) and East Germany (with a communist industrialisation model) and suggests that East Germany did create such an socioeconomic model where woman were in the workforce (in large numbers) and also didn't hesitate to become mothers because of the support structures provided for them. Ofcourse, capitalistic consumer culture here is an important factor too - many affluent people today don't want to have kids or a large family because they are afraid of the impact it will have on their consumerist lifestyle.
Scandinavian countries provide robust parental support, in some cases with shared parental leave exceeding a year, and the fertility rate has still not gone up.
In the context of improving systems to make the idea of having children more palatable, my thoughts are a four-day work week, fully subsidized childcare, universal healthcare, etc. Outside of a few countries who may have some pieces of these policies, I don’t believe there’s any political appetite to implement these policies at scale.
Broadly speaking, the economic and time burden of having children in the current macro is simply too high for many. They are luxury good.
Yes but you won't hear them talk about what happened to people who consistently chose not to work. Which is relevant here because motherhood was effectively one of the only ways women could get out of working for a longer period of time (3 months before, sometimes more, and a full year after birth), without going to prison ... or worse. Plus a baby was one of the very few ways to get a raise.
Of course this fact isn't mentioned in the article.
I will say, one of the very few things that the Soviet communists should receive credit for is indeed their rejection of traditional social norms. Equality for women was much further along on the other side of the Iron curtain. Women became doctors sooner. Women became professors sooner. Etc. That was definitely a Soviet achievement. True.
But something this article really tries to downplay: this didn't stop fertility rate from falling fast. It just took slightly longer before it started falling. Slightly.
> an economic system predicated on individual autonomy and naked self-interest whose incentives run counter to child-rearing
A free market is just the natural state of things which reflects what people want vs the reality of resource constraints. For example, even in communist societies there will always be a (underground) free market.
Real estate: there's not enough of it, new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit. Young people without families optimize for themselves and continually are willing to compromise for less space for the same money but minimum_space(single) << minimum_space(family+kids)
So new construction, particularly large apartment building have few to no units that anyone could actually raise a family in and trend towards "studio" concrete cylinders.
Places with more space are zoned for exclusive residential and are thus tremendously boring.
Mixed use places are full of vacant commercial space because lowering the rent would trigger property revaluation and the places that aren't vacant are tremendously expensive because of the large amount that has to go to paying the rent ... or paying their low-to-middle income employees who spent half their income on rent.
All of this money is getting sucked out of the economy into A) people who want real estate income without working and B) the financial system giving them loans.
Nobody wants kids because they have to chose between expensive housing where it's boring and extremely expensive housing where it's not. Just furthering the generation on generation the young paying for the previous generations real estate "investment" growth.
Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit
Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
>Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand.
Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service.
And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.
People who want to have kids have kids. There have been worse economic conditions, and far worse living conditions for folks in the not very distant past and they still had large families.
There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much.
I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.
My take for a while is that if the low birth rates persist and do become a critical problem, we might just have to do a boring thing that we do for other areas where the unregulated market or society doesn’t produce enough of something or doesn’t solve a problem. We might just have to subsidize it and basically pay people to have kids.
You’re being downvoted but for those of us not in the know, what’s wrong with Jacobin? (Keep in mind not all of us are from US/the West), the obvious may be lost on us.
Nothing crazy just more highly biased opinion pieces masquerading as journalism just on the far left instead of the right. They have a narrative and they pick stories and “facts” to fit it. Just expect better on hacker news.
I hope that most people would try to get their news from sources who endeavor to report with as much of an objective perspective as possible, but I expect that most are comfortable with getting an editorial or interpretation of the facts from a biased perspective. I can read Jacobin with the same interest as I read the National Review, but I would never trust either to give me an unobjective statement of facts.
Jacobin has a reputation of being in the category of affirm-your-biases news media, albeit one that is left-leaning. Something strong enough that you'd have a prior that any Jacobin article is going to blame all of society's ills on capitalism, and since it's strongly baked into the priors of its readers, there's going to be no real investigation after blaming capitalism.
Which this article basically does, at first glance. It assumes capitalism is bad for baby-rearing, doesn't really motivate why, and instead just goes East Germany had a higher birth rate than West Germany before reunification, then after reunification, it flipped, therefore capitalism causes low birth rates.
I’ll respond to you but thanks for everyone who responded - I appreciate the perspective especially the call out to the Jacobians group from the other poster.
Honestly - it’s hard to find a publication that isn’t biased, or in many cases just outright wrong outside of a narrow subject matter and are ignorantly pushing someone’s propaganda because they don’t know better. The Atlantic, Economist are posted often and come to mind. I’m exaggerating slightly I’m sure Jacobian has a reason for being disdained.
How do you define bias? I feel like many publications are
"biased" towards Austrian economics despite little evidence for their benefit, and many examples of it's proponents driving their homelands into the ground.
Should I declare everyone who says positive things about libertarianism as "biased" and discount their points?
It’s sort of like a leftist publication for leftists that have never read anything and don’t base anything in any economics or theory or historical context and just do unresearched reactionary “capitalism bad” stuff.
I do not know any actual leftists that take it seriously it mostly just serves to embarrass everyone.
> the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".
The 100B+ of hospice/daycare/and multiple other medicare related fraud schemes that is happening every year. Perpetrated by the people that keep saying things like "communism was never implemented right" or "make the rich pay their fair share".
But the reality is, if all the excess tax money that is collected does not go to where the problems are, and is just being boarded onto a plane in a bag with 2M dollars headed to Mogadishu - then you can't blame capitalism for the mess we're in.
I don't understand how this is a counterargument to the article's claim that capitalism is to blame for the declining birthrate around the world. Could you connect the fraud to the birthrate for me?
The opposite of capitalism is some form of socialism or communism. We know that it CAN'T work (at least in America) because all of the extra money to help people is stolen. So Capitalism is better than any other form of getting money in people's pockets. More money in pockets means more chances for babies.
The reality is we need to fix all the jobs being sent to people from other countries. The stat just came out that in the last 5 years 90% of the jobs went to foreign born people. We also need to reverse the climate doomerism that's pushing people to lose faith in life in general.
Can you ask both your questions at once instead? Also please argue in good faith, the 3rd or 4th most hit topic in the last 5 months has been the amount of Fraud we've been enveloped in. To ask your original question like that reeks of disingenuity.
Just a reminder that actual adult scientists at the ACS (American Chemical Society) have calculated (for all to see) that the excess heat being trapped just over the continental USA since 1750 is about 28 500 Hiroshima bombs.
The amount of people who can't see the difference between a monetary system captured by central planners who stand in the way of the free market at every turn and who, in their continuous debasement, perpetuate a K-shaped economy, and capitalism, is quite alarming.
But I suppose that we can't expect much when they've been educated by government employees.
funny thing is india, it's not about money. I know tech bros here who make really good income, have good residential properties and cars, they aren't complaining about not having enough money to marry, they just don't find any woman who is willing to marry them.
Most people who are having kids in india are lower income people.
so i just don't understand when people say it's because of money issue, when people with comfy jobs fail to have babies, it's not about money.
In India, from what I have personally observed it is mostly a mental health issue (anxiety disorders / depression):
1. Many men and women fear to commit to a relationship today and are increasingly remaining single, or marrying late (in their late 30's or 40's). Thus, even those who marry can't have a large family as the older you get the more fertility issues you have (along with additional anxieties of how to manage young kids when you are old).
2. For indian women in particular, it is also anxiety about loss of freedom if they can't work. Thus, even those who marry young, try to avoid having a large family as they fear it will be an impediment to their career (which means less financial freedom, and the fear of being under the "control" of a male spouse).
3. And finally there's the western capitalistic consumerism , where even spouse or a kid can be seen as an impediment to enjoying a consumerist lifestyle by the individual in their "pursuit of happiness".
What you're saying mostly applies to general category people. If you spend any time listening to middle class families it all comes down to the cost of getting a good education if the kids didn't get a "government seat." As an example, a medical degree in a private college can cost 1cr for tuition fees alone.
The kids pick up on this lament consciously or unconsciously and realise that the more kids they will have, the worse the problem.
The "poor" people get subsidies and freebies, and the more children they have, the more sops state governments throw away at them.
I'm also told, but can't confirm it, another factor is social media pushing fancy vacations abroad spending their entire income.
I would not say it’s capitalism but rather industrialization. Children are assets when they can help with farm work but become an expense when work moves to a factory/office setting.
The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
> The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
> Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
This. It's not some bargain-bin homo economicus thinking like the GP proposes ("Children are assets when they can help with farm work..."). It's that capitalism has evolved to squeeze the life out of everything in order to maximize short-term profits for the shareholders, and it's corrupted almost everything that stands in its way.
And with AI, there's hope that capitalism can continue unabated even after literally squeezing the population to death.
Unless you are seeing the population decline issues in China... then blame socialism and it's long time one child policy. A system predicated on the socialists in power having a sort of "paternalistic wisdom" that it can enforce on society regardless of the individual interests of any set potential parents in having a larger family than their socialist masters wish.
It irrelevant - babies are not needed for population growth - there's plenty of countries that are overpopulated all that is required is redistribution of the people we have rather than making more. If we look at these issues globally rather than on a per country basis it looks easier to resolve/different.
That's being pedantic - of course I mean babies from other countries as well as adults - when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment.
Governments need population growth to maintain economic growth - steady state population is very much against economic growth - the population must grow for the good of the economy and therefore the country.
> ...when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment.
It's not just rich places that are becoming less fertile.
"Demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions." - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise...