This report came across my feeds:
Are we ready for all the other societal changes?
I keep running into men who want to create families, and women who think it’s beneath them to create the next generation (and that a career is somehow better). Somehow feminism managed to turn women into men instead of celebrating women-who-are-women, in a very ironic twist.
The silver lining is that the women who don’t want to be mothers (“I want to sit in a government cubicle and stamp papers!”) are removing themselves and their DNA from the gene pool. So the population drops? Arguably not a Bad Thing. And the children born to those women who want to be women are the future of society.
I haven’t seen anyone explain why it is happening. I don’t believe the common explanation that kids are unaffordable. Without understanding, I don’t know if selection is good or bad.
I think it is the rise of pensions and state safety nets. People are no longer concerned about who will help them in old age.
The cost of motherhood is greater now that women have more opportunities to participate in the economy. There are historical examples of this phenomenon, such as how the rising wealth of women in ancient Greece and Rome is associated with population decline.
The consistently higher TFR among insulated religious subcultures, such as the Amish and Mormons, suggests a future in which a larger fraction of the population is faithful.
“percent of women workers who receive wages”? What do the rest of them get? No! Don’t answer that.
The correlation between rising GNP per capita and declining fertility is very strong – but correlation is not causation. The female worker who does not receive wages is excluded from GNP, but there are many who would argue that the women workers who did not receive wages historically were contributing more to society than those who became mere wage earners.
Why did women want to become wage earners? In WWII, it was a national duty for Rosie the Riveter. Then society changed to adjust to the two-income family – everything became more expensive. Women found they had to work, because they needed the income to afford the higher cost of living. This dissuaded women from being able to have children. And then … the grapes being sour … feminists began to denigrate motherhood.
A future world with fewer people may not be a Bad Thing.
Unfortunately Mormons and Amish are a low population relative to Muslims who are also reproducing.
This is for homeless?
The only OECD country with a total fertility rate (TFR) above the replacement level (~2.1 children per mother) is Israel, with a TFR of 3.22. It supports the hypothesis that faith is the only factor capable of sustaining a population’s birth rate against economic development.
Is Israel committed to their faith? I think there may be a higher percentage of secular people in Israel than the US.
Between 2018 and 2022, the average fertility rate for Jews dropped from 3.17 to 3.03 children per woman, according to the Taub Center’s demography expert, Prof. Alex Weinreb. Among Muslim and Christian women, the decline was greater — from 3.20 to 2.91 among Muslims, and from 2.06 to 1.68 among Christians. Among Druze women, the decrease was from 2.16 to 1.85.
Boo hoo,fewer colleges? And “fewer people to fill jobs that require a college education”? Yeah what jobs are those, that couldn’t be filled by an intelligent person WITHOUT the BA, which is now just the social marker a high school diploma used to be?
And lemme pose one other hypothesis: if young people who might like to obey the drive to reproduce weren’t bombarded with scare propaganda that they have to start saving for their kids’ college eductions from pre-scjool age: By age 12, it’ll be TOO LATE, thou fools!—
—then maybe, just maybe, they’d be more spontaneous, less, apprehensive about reproducing.
Also, I think this is a reversible trend. When I started college, the seniors were still getting Bride magazine in the mail. And I remember talking with my anthro professor about how the Bryn Mawr students had changed over the past decade. Before our class, she said, all they seemed to care about was being feminine-“Is this the ‘feminine’ thing to do? “ she chided. I can still hear her delivering the ultimate reprimand in her academic bray: “NOT very scholarly”…
Marriage and motherhood just have to become cool again. It may seem now like that could never happen, but—of course it can. Just like the reverse happened between 1965 and 1975.
(Another maybe: maybe RFK Jr will root out the cause of low reproductive drive in our food supply or its packaging…)
I have always read, and in fact have observed,that when women entered the workforce in 1970s, that’s when the price of housing exploded: soon, a couple could ONLY live on two jobs.
I know you polymaths are gonna say “It’s not that simple.” No of course it isn’t, I’m not writing a research paper here.
But:
BIG blurry picture: after WW II, young women, who had had to do all kinds of work when all the young men were away, (read Dawn Powell!) married the young soldiers and began breeding like crazy, hence the now maligned Baby Boomers. And there, in their sparkling stainless steel kitchens, the women stayed till Betty Friedan called them out again with “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963.
I’m gonna start a new post “Demography II” because I’m so riled up ny two pieces I read this AM.
Betty Friedan doesn’t deserve to live in civilization since she, quite obviously, refuses to recognize that civilization is a war in which the sole individual sovereign decisions directing the evolution of humanity, is in the hands of women and their “choice”. If she wants to return to The State of Nature, I’ll be there waiting to challenge her to a mutual hunt in nature… that is unless, of course, she accepts the Shield of someone who would champion and discipline her lest her lip bring down upon her champion said challenge to a mutual hunt in nature to UN-Shield her.
Jesus was too kind to these liars.
Oh, dear @jabowery , really! I’ve got no brief for Betty F. And I don’t think she wanted to revert to a “state of nature”. I’m just pointing out that these attitudes go in cycles.
I did not intended to impute to you any particular opinion of Betty F.
Indeed, and as a result, so does civilization go in cycles.
Yabut how many of these new babies are named Muhammad, if you catch my drift.
If that’s the case, someone better tell Bibi and his Likud cabinet