It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.
The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.
It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
>Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.
Or in other words, they've been priced out of the market.
If there will be no sociofinancial niche for their children to inhabit this is in fact the rational course of action. See also: South Korean current birth rates.
That being said, a huge amount of the work being done (arguably all of it) is in support of humans. It would follow then that the more of us there are the more work is required, whereas if there were fewer of us less work is required. — I think the real concerns about birth-rate/population decline come from “borrowing against the future”, if that future never materializes then you cashed bad checks.
Also sort of. Some form of social organization seems to be necessary for humans to function. But humans are also pretty good (well - relatively speaking, it usually seems to require a war or revolution) at changing that form of social organization as technology, population, and environmental conditions change.
I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to get continued population growth next generation; a significant number of the people needed for it will never be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll have pockets of population that basically barricade themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate themselves from its collapse, and then the people within them, along with whatever form of social organization they happen to adopt.
The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand
It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments.
E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built.
But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive
Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.
Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons.
The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again.
Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that.
Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp
> statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.
As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness.
Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found my partner. We now own a house and are talking about kids.
The real toxicity here is the idea that women at large are somehow responsible for anyone's lack of dating success.
For anyone reading this who might be dating and feel disheartened- the hard truth is that you have two options: you can either blame the group of people you're trying to attract for having faulty preferences, or you can reflect and work on yourself and your approach. Only one of these has any chance of helping you.
One thing I do agree with you on: bitterness is extremely unattractive.
For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move.
That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.
Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
FWIW, one of my (male) friends is about 5'2" and met his wife on OKCupid. She's about 4'10".
Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
> Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
That's true, but dating apps are still a pretty toxic technology. It's got kind of a McNamara fallacy baked into it, they encourage users to setup filters on easy-to-quantity aspects (height, age) in a fairly thoughtless way, and entourage superficial, consumeristic evaluations. Most people would probably benefit from IRL interactions, which present a more holistic picture.
Perhaps there's a constructive version of this because I agree with the sentiment but it's a little harsh - dude is obviously feeling very betrayed and left out of society and either falling down the incel tunnel or doing recruiting for it.
There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" and that if some people don't want to have kids with some women then therefore -nobody- will do it.
Good luck out there everybody - the world changes in fascinating ways and it can definitely run some folks over but try not to get jaded and fall down a despair spiral.
They’re not completely wrong though. Data does show clearly that online dating has extremely lopsided behaviors. Women really do tend to message the top cohort of men by attractiveness much more so. Men have a more expected distribution. I think that causes a lot of men to really resent dating and women because they struggle and put in enormous effort and get nothing back. Online dating is a very toxic modern invention.
> There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous"
That fallacy isn't in there.
Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". And that's definitely another contributer to declining birth rates/families - because neither of them will feel remotely as committed to each other then they would've otherwise.
None of these are singular causes. They're all contributing to the whole situation. Which is precisely why I never made any such fallacy in my earlier comment.
> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding
By the 1700s the pregnant before marriage rate was roughly 30%. So about a third of all women in the 1700s had premarital sex that resulted in pregnancy. So the actual rate is of course even higher.
A lot of those marriages are a direct result of the pregnancy, too - one thing that did happen was the couple being pushed into marriage ASAP when the pregnancy was discovered.
> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly".
Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".
I agree, which itself is also contributing to falling birth rates. I think everyone in this thread is imagining me as a bitter incel being outraged by not getting the attention I supposedly deserve, which couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm merely observing a lot of factors which in aggregate can unquestionably be seen as causing this.
The reality is that the traditional gender roles where very positive in the context of reproduction, which was literally my first sentence of my first comment.
It is not a judgement on wherever we should aim to revert to them, it's just factual.
Arguing against that is basically at a level of arguing that water isn't wet.
Now to link this back to the discussion at hand: a significant chunk of society would consider premarital sex with people whom they aren't planning to marry to be promiscuous. And those people are part of the population which wouldve become families in a different age.
You keep claiming the things you're saying are unarguable and as obvious as water being wet, in a thread of folks repeatedly talking about the nuances and differences.
Birth rates going down seems to be a thing. That's about all I agree are facts here. I struggle to even meet you at "traditional gender roles" like that's some universal constant - is that Protestant America? Catholic Ireland? Is that one of the Chinese dynasties? Sub-saharan African tribal society?
I think, like most things, it's unlikely you've found the "as obvious as water being wet" single smoking gun to a broader solution.
Social pressure to marry young and breed will clearly have an effect on birth rates. I'd be surprised if anyone would disagree there, all other things being equal. It feels ridiculous to assert that is the only possible influence and even more ridiculous to assert one particular set of social norms is the only way back. I know so many people that don't fit this incredibly narrow view, including everything from "traditional" couples not wanting kids (for lots of different reasons from money to global stability to being jaded to genuinely not caring) to very very not "traditional" people who ARE having kids.
If this is worth talking about I think it's worth taking in more info than just blaming resentment over women being more empowered over their own lives (or more slutty or more undesirable or however you want to frame it).
Well, that's what happens when the dollar is the idol that people worship. When society collapses because of that, we will have deserved it because we worked our asses off to create the perverse incentives that led us there.
The answer is to remove the parents. Give birth and let the state raise the child. The parents continue to work and live childless without the costs and responsibilities. Society pays and gives this group an equal playing field.
Kinda like in Brave New World, or The Giver - or, for that matter, in hundreds of orphanages in real life?
This doesn't really work either. Having been loved by an attachment figure (usually a parent) seems to be essential to normal psychosocial development. Without it, kids can't really form bonds or groups. They never learn to trust, and without the ability to trust, they can't work in concert with other people. They end up violent and criminal.
If you tried to do this society-wide, society would collapse. Everybody would simply try to grab what they could and kill everybody else.
So Woman have to be pregnant for 9 months for only the state to go take the baby away.
Are you gonna suggest that State enforces procreation too?
This "answer" that you are saying is this close to being an Eugenics project. A govt. which has its officers arrest/detain babies because of their race and you are saying that these are the people that the babies should be left?
Also consider these people in your answer to be the slaves of the govt. because we live in a free world and yet propaganda can be so effective. I can't imagine what the propaganda can be if State raises the child.
Yes, Instead of trying to make the economy affordable so that childcare can be affordable, we go ahead and let the states raise our children.
Has even the notion of affordability become so foreign that we have forgotten it can exist?
I sincerely hope you were joking with this message and this wasn't the first thing which came into your mind.
The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.
It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.