Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States
54 comments
·November 8, 2025nsoonhui
adverbly
I sort of agree with you.
To get some sober second thought though, you could watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s
It tears down the strawman case of demographic collapse, but I'm with you that its still pretty scary looking and quite unprecedented.
Arainach
> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth
Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'
"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.
Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.
zeroonetwothree
US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently.
I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
thijson
A lot of country's population pyramid doesn't look like a pyramid. It's more like a rhombus.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/
I noticed some middle eastern countries have a very skewed male female ratio among people born roughly 30 years ago.
whatsupdog
The ME countries you are talking about are UAE, Qatar etc. where a lot of labourers are brought in from South Asian countries for construction etc. That's why you see so many 20-40 males.
bentcorner
Interestingly enough if you change the filter to "US" and rewind the data to 1950 (it looks like that's how far this graph goes), if you advance up by 5 years you can see the "bulge" of baby boomers age up into retirement where they are right now.
zeroonetwothree
Very nice. There’s also a second bulge starting around 1990.
piperswe
Not super surprising given the baby boom that many of those older adults were born during - it was an anomalous spike in birth rates after all.
elzbardico
Things are far worse in China. That's the only reason I am bullish in the US as world's top dog for the foreseable future.
SlightlyLeftPad
I wouldn’t believe any estimates you see from China first of all. China also has a unique history and the ability to turn things around very quickly. That said, what’s the point of comparing other than to confirm your own belief that this is the single most important aspect of a thriving country?
elzbardico
Yeah, but the US have this perennial luck too. I am generation X, I was raised first with the idea that japan would overcome the US, then it was the EU. and yet, the US always reinvented itself/got lucky/played dirty.
Empires are fucking resilient creations. The news of US hegemony demise are vastly exagerated.
bayarearefugee
Nobody can afford anything.
It makes no sense to have kids when you can't afford your own existence.
Tax the fucking rich.
raspasov
Some of the highest birth rates are in relatively quite poor countries. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rat...
bayarearefugee
We still have (for now, though even this is under threat) good access to contraception, good sexual education, relatively low child mortality rates, etc here in the US.
Comparing the affordability crisis for the middle class in the US to that of historically poor developing countries as it relates to birth rates is not a very good argument.
It might be somewhat comparable a decade or so from now if we keep letting wealth inequality run away at current rates, but it isn't right now.
zeroonetwothree
How did people afford existence in 1950 when they made 3x less?
SailingCactus33
Rally cry of a parasite! Only those who have kids are invested in the future of humanity and contributing to the success of humanity.
magicstefanos
Do people really talk like this?
SlightlyLeftPad
Online, yes. Anywhere else, I doubt it.
raspasov
“Talk”, no, but a scary number very much think like this. It’s an easy pseudo-intellectual high ground to take.
jmclnx
> Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Maine, Vermont, and Florida
West Virginia is a surprise to me, I can only guess that is because of young people moving out. Same could probably be said for Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont.
Spooky23
This isn’t a surprise — it’s been projected since the 80s at least. K-12 is in a trough for the next decade.
BenFranklin100
High housing costs is a key factor.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/31/nx-s1-5551108/housing-costs-b...
The Boomer generation has perpetuated and intensified restrictive zoning. The lack of new homes where well-payong jobs are located has caused housing prices to soar.
The Boomer generation has also led the de-growth movement. I guess they are going to get their way by making it too expensive for their grandkids to have children and cause the population to plummet.
elzbardico
I was born in a Third World country where people sometimes didn't have money to buy food, and yet they reproduced like rabbits. And this is over from what people tell me.
It is cultural. Having kids is low status in the modern world. And it fucking makes a lot of sense. I only like kids because I have kids, my wife wanted to have kids, and I was kind of forced into it. Now, I love having kids, but because I already have them.
beeflet
women have lower standards in the third world
elzbardico
Depends on what you call the third world. Eastern europe? Brasil? Argentina? Nigeria? it is not the same as Peru, Benin or Ethiopia.
Aurornis
You cited an article about people in 2025 talking about whether or not they might have kids in the future.
This census investigation is talking about people under the age of 18, meaning it includes people who were conceived almost two decades ago.
Several states on the list also have significantly above average housing affordability (home price to income ratios) like West Virginia or Pennsylvania.
derektank
I don't understand why the Baby Boomers are the ones that get blamed for restrictive zoning. The oldest were in their early 30s and the youngest couldn't even vote during the peak of single family zoning activity in the 1970s
SoftTalker
They voted to perpetuate it since then in the face of many proposals for more relaxed rules.
CSSer
Being responsible for the peak of something and having the power to undo it but choosing to do nothing produce the same result.
pfannkuchen
So I guess it’s the desegregation advocates who are technically at fault? Like that’s when people started using sneaky tricks to maintain segregation. At least before that it was above board and didn’t distort all these other basically unrelated areas (like zoning, and school district “preferences”, etc).
lazyasciiart
Because they’re the ones who’ve been fighting to keep it. I don’t give a shit what happened in the 70s before I was born. I’ve been watching boomers fight for low density zoning since the 90s.
jgalt212
The greatest generation may have been good at ridding the world of fascism, but not so good at raising responsible and civic-minded adults.
carabiner
"If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it."
theturtle
[dead]
more_corn
Bringing a child into this world would be utter madness.
derektank
More crazy than the Cold War? The World Wars? The great flu pandemic? The Chinese Civil Wars? The European Wars of Religion? The Black Death? The Mongol Invasions?
I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)
spiderice
Every ancestor of yours since single cell organisms has reproduced. If they could all do it, you can to. Especially given that you live a more cushy life than 99.9999% of them.
sQL_inject
To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.
We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.
In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.
generativenoise
The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.
It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.
Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
deadbolt
Alright, so why are so many adults not having children, and what do you think should be done to address it?
I have my own ideas, but I'd love to hear your opinion.
roenxi
There seems to be a fairly strong correlation between wealth and childlessness, so the obvious guess is that the world is getting wealthier. Exactly why that stops people having kids is a bit unclear to me though. Maybe being a parent is one of those things that is a harder sacrifice to make the more alternative comforts have to be given up.
logicchains
Economics has a simple answer: public pensions are a classic tragedy of the commons. If the pension system didn't exist, then people would be incentivised to have more children to support them in old age, instead of a free rider problem where everyone relies on everyone else having children.
lazyasciiart
The demographic crisis of refusing to allow young people and families into the country? You want people to have kids so that we can keep America white?
pfannkuchen
America has a more liberal immigration policy than practically anywhere else on the planet, as evidenced by the massive change in demographics over a mere half century. You would like it to go faster?
Please go advocate for the Chinese to take immigrants from everywhere on earth at the same time, which they currently do not at all. Or do you not care about that for some reason?
beeflet
Why not? It's not like every country in the world can rely on immigration and brain drain. Don't you think it is alarming that the country can't produce enough people to maintain a stable-state population and instead has to rely on a parasitic strategy?
whatsupdog
90% of those crossing the border illegally are men. Watch any video on YouTube documenting illegal crossings and you'll see
I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countries and Europe, but still, the trend is unmistakable -- modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth.
All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.