World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says
231 comments
·June 10, 2025joegibbs
donsupreme
That's why I don't understand the tax incentive for having children isn't much higher in the US.
Of course you don't want people to abuse the system, perhaps with some income threshold, then you are allowed to take much higher child deduction. And child care deduction should have no cap.
Right now having children is exactly as you said, a very non-competitive move in the modern society
koliber
…you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension.
Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned.
Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
bluecalm
>>Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
toomuchtodo
We say people, but broadly speaking, the global population ballooned because women were not educated and empowered. Now that they are, witness the rapid global total fertility rate decline (educated, empowered women delay childbirth, have less children, or no children). Socioeconomic systems have been freeloading off of uncompensated labor of women in the aggregate. How will they change? That remains to be seen.
morepedantic
Perhaps there should be a social security deduction for every dependent child you had that tax year? For example, each dependent child that year could be a refund of 3.1% of income up to the social security maximum, such that at 4 children all 12.4% is returned to you?
mym1990
This just isn't true. How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way. It certainly doesn't impact my 401k or other retirement savings unless you are linking population growth to the growth of the asset markets and the structural integrity of the social security system(I can see the point of view here, but I wouldn't call this a "subsidy").
CaptArmchair
If a pension system is purely based on repartition: yes. But that's not the case in most countries. Pension plans mostly involve pension funds which are rooted in the financial markets. It's the individuals responsibility to max out their pension plan, and fiscal policies are used to incentivize this.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
bot403
Financial markets are fueled by growth. Growth in real terms (not merely inflation) requires increases in GDP which requires real output by people at it's core.
I'd be worried about expected financial growth of any retirement fund over the long term if population is flat or declining.
alexey-salmin
Who will work in these companies that you own? Who will consume the goods they produce and fuel revenues?
The home ownership is real, but you can't feed of that. You can live in your home yourself if you'd like, but if you plan to rent it out for profit you'll need young people to work and pay the rent.
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Cool, then give pension only to people with children! (mostly joking, I have kids so this works great for me)
tokioyoyo
200 years ago, you also didn’t really have much to do. Now you can have a fairly fulfilling life with 0-2 children, bringing it below the replacement level.
alexey-salmin
> this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension.
Funny thing is, it's still the children who pick up the tab in both of these cases, just someone else's children.
morepedantic
Funny thing is, 100% of social security is paid for by US tax payers in that tax year.
tstrimple
Never mind help you out when you were old. Children were often put to work both inside and outside the houses at young ages. I'm sure plenty of parents with 10 children saw an ROI on them based off of their work. At some point the older children literally raise the younger children. Cram them all into one room... you get efficiencies of scale.
smitty1e
> when devising economic incentives
As capitalism has yielded to materialism, men and women have forgotten to prioritize the sacrement of marriage.
I'm not here to boss anyone in particular around, but one must judge the tree in general by the fruit.
mym1990
200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life. Quality of life today is much higher than it was 200 years ago as well. While the cost of having children is undoubtedly going up, there are more factors in play than just the doom and gloom of the world. Even in pronatalist regions like Scandanavia, birth rates are falling. Education and advancements in contraception play a huge part in these declines, and are on the more positive side of the equation.
I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).
reycharles
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30
If you take out infant mortality the life expectancy wasn't all that different from what it is today. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/
mym1990
Fair point, this was a blind spot for me!
josephcsible
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life.
That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.
dragonwriter
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30
Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.
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zzo38computer
My opinion is:
There are advantages and disadvantages of the reduced human population; I think the advantages are more significant.
At this time, human population is too much and should be reduced, so anyone who does not want to have children should not have children (this is the good way to do it, voluntary, rather than being forced or "expected" to do one way or other way). Humans is not the only living things in this world. What is not enough population at this time is insects.
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mordae
> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
const_cast
> The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
No, actually, it's women's rights. In every single country that has developed, we see birth rates drop as women get more rights.
Why? Because when women have the economic and legal freedom to control their lives, a lot of them choose not to have children. When they don't have that choice, surprise surprise, we don't see that.
Okay, we have a problem here. Turns out having kids, overall, is not a very sweet deal. People by and large only do it if you force them. Okay, we don't want to force them. So now we have to make incentive structures.
msgodel
Based on the data I've seen it looks more like they're forced into the labor force more so than deliberately choosing not to have children. Most seem to reach middle age with fewer children than they say they want.
const_cast
I mean, maybe, but we have to acknowledge that women were deliberately kept out of the labor force as a means of oppressing them. It's a lot easier to abuse women when they're not financially free.
It's a tricky problem space because it's tempting to just say "fuck it" and roll back the clock. But I don't think that'll work, because inevitably we'll just re-develop and we're back at square one.
We need novel solutions that incentivize women to have children without pushing them into situations where they can be taken advantage of.
Balgair
ACX had a good review of a pro-natal book here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...
TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics.
The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine):
"
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
...
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. "
Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid.
My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.
BobaFloutist
Now, there is a reasonable argument that we as a society should put greater value on childcare and should subsidize it as a viable, reasonably lucrative career.
Flatcircle
Car seats and public schools going to shit definitely didn’t help. And the two working parents. Tough times
yumraj
Car seats??
morsch
That was my reaction as well. They're probably referring to something along these lines: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
mdeeks
Doesn't this study say that it had a very low impact?
> they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980
tpetry
Its a joke. A few weeks ago JD Vance listed the reasons for birthrate decline. There wasn‘t any serious like one like the costs. But car seats…
morepedantic
The car seat phenomenon is real, well studied, and interesting. The explanation is not only logical, but is exactly what you called a "serious" reason: cost. Parents must often buy a new car with the 3rd child, because they cannot fit 3 car seats in their current vehicle.
coffeebeqn
No one from the current childbearing generation can afford to buy a house near any major city. No… that can’t be it
Flatcircle
many friends I know mention stopping at two kids rather than three so they don't have to upgrade to more expensive cars that can carry more kids. Before the 80's you'd pack as many kids as you had in whatever car you had. My dad literally drove a two seater and had two kids.
morepedantic
Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car. The new car is more expensive to buy, operate, and maintain.
Today there are many narrow car seat options on the market, so 3 across seating is possible in full size sedans, but not compact cars. A European company makes a 3-across and 4-across car seat, but it's illegal in the US by accident.
jjav
> Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car.
The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.
subscribed
Kinder eggs are illegal in the USA.
Lead in the drinking water is okay. Last resort human antibiotics in the farmed animals are OK.
Seems like school shootings are OK.
I wouldn't use "illegal in the US" as something necessarily negative.
CalRobert
The idea is that you used to be able to throw five kids on a bench seat but now having a third kid requires a car with more interior space (ironic since cars are much bigger now than they used to be).
You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
morepedantic
>You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
Only in the last few years, and they require a full size sedan.
ReptileMan
It is impossible to fit more than 2 car seats in a normal car. So having more than two kids complicates the logistics quite a bit.
morepork
Difficult, but not impossible. We fit 3 across the back seat of our Mitubishi Lancer for a few years. You do need to be selective in which car seats you get, and I wish it was easier.
throwaway924
Its only a problem if each child has a separate car seat. There are companies that produce seats for up to 4 children that fit in the back of the car.
Example from a Google search (don't know if they are good)
mostlyincorrect
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the climate factor, both in terms of actual climate and "living climate" (as in, the world we live in and the conditions we get to live in).
A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime.
Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
ASalazarMX
> Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
This was one of our motives to not have children. My wife and I agreed on not having children three decades ago, since even then the alarms of overpopulation, pollution, and global warming were being sound, and the world had only 5 billion people then.
I can't understand why governments push for more births, our civilization is clearly overpopulated. Let it slowly scale down, plan for it instead. Humanity needs less humans living healthier, both in mind and body.
ndjeosibfb
[flagged]
Spartan-S63
This is myopic. 100,000 years ago, humans didn't understand the basic rules of how things worked. They would have no idea if and when the next ice age would happen. We've learned a lot as a species and as such, our biological need to reproduce is balanced by the logical realization of the impact we have on the planet and the impact the planet can have on us. We have higher-level thinking and more information to leverage second-order thinking. So no, that's not a joke.
chneu
How is caring about the environment(and therefore every living creature) a selfish, lazy materialist act?
Going without children against a ton of social pressure takes a lot of fortitude.
Modern consumer society is dead set on using every last scrap of natural repossible possible while telling you it's not only okay but your right because you have $$$. Bucking that trend and minimizing ones impact is selfish, lazy, and materialistic how?
ndjeosibfb
>actually not having kids is way harder than having kids
its all a bunch of cope and mental gymnastics to avoid the hard work of doing the primary thing humans were programmed to do
bdangubic
imagine if humans 100k years ago decided to stop reproducing because they were worried about the next ice age lmao
they probably would if they had condoms and formal education :)
cosmicgadget
> "Calling this a crisis, saying it's real. That's a shift I think," says demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe
What's the crisis?
irrational
That there will be nobody to care for the great mass of old people, nobody to work jobs to make 401ks worth anything, nobody to prop up social security, nobody to buy old people’s houses so they can use that money to pay for nursing homes So… all the old people will suddenly find they can’t retire and are forced to work till death. They will consider it a crisis. The current retirees are probably the final retirees in our lifetime.
AlecSchueler
But wasn't the idea that technology increased our productivity so that with few people we could do the work of many?
The amount of wealth an individual can generate and the amount of productivity one can activate on the world has ballooned unimaginably over the past 100 years yet we are still expected to produce 2.4 children to support us in the future.
Something doesn't add up and it feels clearer and clearer that the issue is wealth inequality. Regular people are being asked to breed like cattle to support the lifestyles of the ultra rich. We have enough to cover pensions but it's all being horded.
In 2024 this might have seemed acceptable but with the collapse of credibility in the Western world the clock has begun ticking.
subscribed
Almost all the productivity gain got reaped by the 0.1%
morepedantic
If the burden is too high, there's a risk that future generations will simply decline to care for the elderly who contributed to the problem (childlessness), but then expect the children to care for them in retirement.
alexey-salmin
That's almost a "positive" scenario in my view, I would prefer people who are left to care about themselves and their kids rather than the elderly who screwed them up.
The alternative is, more and more resources will be allocated towards the elderly and by consequence less towards kids, making the problem worse with every generation. Not clear though how to break out of this spiral by democratic means if elderly are the majority.
cosmicgadget
Honestly self-inflicted economic problems seem mild compared to overpopulation and overconsumption. I am sure there is a happy steady state somewhere but I don't think we have the collective will to find it.
cryptonector
The fertility decreases are very steep.
cosmicgadget
Are we headed toward negative population or something?
mdeeks
In some places, yes. South Korea is expected to shrink by 15M in the next 50 years, and to cut in half by 2100. Even with immediate drastic improvements in birth rate, it is expected to shrink significantly.
cryptonector
Negative population, no. The minimum is zero.
Population declines, absolutely -- those are baked into the pie now, and they will be quite steep.
Afforess
Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though.
There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
lmm
> Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though.
Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
AngryData
Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so. They don't make enough money to send them all to childcare all the time, but quitting their job to take care of the kids will cut their income in half and make saving any reasonable amount of money for retirement near impossible.
lmm
> Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so.
Then I put it to you that their desire isn't above the replacement rate. People with no money manage to have plenty of children.
coffeebeqn
They also can’t buy a house that would house 2-3 more people and their stuff
morepedantic
Perhaps they simply have unrealistic material expectations not in line with individual productivity. In fact, if your expectations are a function of your childless consumption levels, then it will always exceed what you can achieve with the same income spread over more people.
mym1990
Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way. Some also have the desire but have trouble conceiving, or don't have the means to support a child. The gap is definitely there.
lmm
> Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way.
I'd say in that case they don't have the desire. They may want children all else being equal, but they don't want to put in what it would cost them to have children. Otherwise they would.
unstablediffusi
the deciding metric here is how old are they when they start wanting children. naturally, that factor is ignored, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it for a number of reasons.
a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties. it's a harsh truth, but burying one's head in the sand doesn't really help.
littlestymaar
Why do you think this is “evident”? I don't know worldwide but in France at least, French women would like to have more kids than they have.
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silisili
Quasi related, I thought immediately of this experiment.
It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head.
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AngryData
I don't see how I can view this any other way than the culminating results of rampant capitalism. When everything is reduced to pure profit motives there is no room left for people to be people. Time off, dating, family, stability, and more, all take a back seat to increasing profits. And as business and corporations get bigger and bigger they only gained more power and control over peoples lives and push us farther down the self-destructive path of pure profit motivations and working endless hours.
morepedantic
I suppose the high child mortality rates of all the other economic systems tried thus far are preferable.
The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
AngryData
Are you trying to claim that without unfettered capitalism all medical progress and technological improvement would never happen? Capitalism didn't reduce child mortality, technology and knowledge did, and we have been progressing technologically for atleast 40,000 years, if not significantly more.
mordae
It did help make the time saving devices widely available and thus boosted our productive capacity. It e.g. allowed many women to enter the workforce since they no longer had to spend all their time washing, cleaning, cooking, shopping etc..
It no longer does that, though. Now it just seeks rent, sells luxuries to rich and manipulates masses into overconsumption.
mordae
Sigh. Capitalism aligned with our needs (cheap goods) up until about 1990. Colonization of former USSR pushed it to 2010 or so, but now it just keep declining and won't stop. It needs growth in productivity that just isn't possible without replacing human labour at above inflation rate.
I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one.
Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly.
And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators.
At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
cornhole
if it’s not the social issues, it’ll be the microplastics
morepedantic
First one, then the other.
200 years ago you would have ten children, a few would survive until adulthood, and you needed to have children or nobody would look after you in old age, help you out when they're grown or take over your farm when you became infirm - and besides, everyone else has children, so if you don't you're the odd one out.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.