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US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1978, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 -- "down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years," the CDC said. The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 -- a 3 percent drop from 2016, the CDC said in its tally of provisional data for the year. The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. "The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971," according to the report from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. "The decline in the rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year decline since 2010," the CDC said. The 2017 numbers also represent a 10-year fall from 2007, when the U.S. finally broke its post-World War baby boom record, with more than 4.3 million births.
In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.
That even today's relatively poor people have more goods and better health care than the rich did a hundred years ago is irrelevant: the reptile layers of our brain translate our collective worry and disconnection into less offspring.
This is positive news, because the birth rate should rise if conditions improve. I ascribe the declining prosperity of recent decades to declining energy returned for energy invested in the extraction of fossil fuels, an effect ameliorated somewhat by automation's productivity increases. Things will continue to get worse until the exponential increase in cheap solar and wind energy overwhelms the decrease in the value of fossil energy; which should happen in the next few years. Once this happens, everyone will start getting wealthier fast, as increasing energy and automation will improve people's lifestyles in tandem.
Cheapening energy means financial security for the young, which leads to affordable housing, health care, food security, reduced conflict and increased social cohesion. Under these conditions, the birth rate will rise.
// DevsVult: The Machines Will It
Millennia of human experience, not to mention science, tells us that some patterns of human behavior turn out better over the long term than others. You seem to disregard that.
New Report: Majority of U.S. Teens Don’t Live in Intact Families
You're right that marriage protects kids. But "Marriage after conception" . . . better than not at all, but both backwards and suboptimal for producing good marriages that last.
Related: How shacking up leads to divorce
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Just import people, import an insane amount of people, just keep importing people over and over and over, hundreds and hundreds of thousands a year.
Increase your population by over 1% a year, we do! It's fantastic.
Well, it's fantastic for employers and people in government, road toll and public transit operators.
I mean the roads are packed, houses have maintained insanely high prices for over a decade, wages are suppressed super low and employers have their pick when it comes to choices to hire. The government is raking in fantastic money from the high visa fees, more tax payers and the GDP is going up which makes them look great on paper! (But don't discuss GDP per capita, oh no no no, shhh that doesn't exist)
It's the Aussie model, just import import import, prop up a housing bubble, forget about sustainability or quality of living for the people living here now, fuck em! More money folks.
So, open those floodgates, what could go wrong?
Are there more people in the US, Japan, Italy, the UK, Germany, etc than there were 100 years ago?
Yep.
After this population decline will there still be more people?
Yep.
Was the US, Japan, Italy, the UK, Germany under populated 100 years ago?
Nope.
so... Problem?
Constantly we get "because there are too many people the EARTH is going to die"... then we get this stupid shit with "Because there are fewer babies freak out."
Which is it? Seems like the newsies just want to turn anything into a story. Numbers go up and the world will eat itself to death... numbers go down and the world will empty of all people.
Both narratives are stupid.
There is no under population or over population issue in the industrialized Western world. We have HOUSING shortages... stressed schools... stressed water and power infrastructure. So... under population? Not really possible.
The story out of Japan is that they have a big problem with low birth rate. Have you seen Japan? Does it "look" under populated? And here you might say "but in 30 years it will be"... no it won't. The trend would have to continue for several generations to actually cause a problem. And whilst it is fun to just take a trend line from a statistic and project it out 500 years a projected statistic gets increasingly less reliable the farther you project it.
Populations are going to go up and down in the future as our societies, our economies, our cultures change.
I mean, who wants to be packed into a coffin apartment in Mega City 1? I don't. Fuck that noise. I want a lawn and a dog. I want a garden where I can putter around in my old age growing tomatoes or something just for fun. If you want to die in a tiny apartment, that's great. Everyone should have what they want. But I think a lot of people want a little space.
I want to spread out a bit. Big concentrations of population have all sorts of statistical problems. The worst schools, the worst crime, the worst corruption, the least political agency, the highest stress... there are reasons to not want it. There are also good things. The best hospitals, the best schools, the most economic opportunities, wonderful museums, concerts, plays, wonderful shops, etc.
Just let what is going to happen happen.
We have a lot of stuff that has changed in our society. The entry of women into pretty much every profession. The changing notion of when you have a family. The changing notion of what it means to be married in the first place. All of that. How could it not have an impact on birth rates? Of course it will.
And this is just going to play out. Probably the most aggressive career seeking women that spend the least energy on trying to get a family will statistically have fewer children. That will play out in time in the population. With the cultural tropes that push that below replacement rate becoming less and less common such that AT LEAST there is replacement. Who thinks that when we made all those changes we got everything 100% right? Of course we didn't. This is an experiment.
We'll see what happens. But there's no population problem up or down in the modern industrialized West. We're fine. And that's before even talking about immigration which is its own little shit show.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A lot of people have children they cannot afford to have. We see it every day. That's why poverty is so rampant. The urge to procreate is unstoppable.
Back before I had children I was talking to my mother about how my wife and I could afford to have a child. My mother told me that if they had waited until they could have afforded to have me, I wouldn't be here yet.
Sometimes you have to have faith and take the plunge. It was a struggle for a few years and some sacrifices in lifestyle were made, but I was surprised at how easy it was to raise two children and give them what they needed. Once you have little ones depending on you, you come to understand what in life is important and what you can live without.
Skip the five dollar coffee and designer clothes. Don't be selfish. Get with it and have a family.
Yep. Reasonable working hours, parental leave, sick/personal days, vaca time, so people actually have TIME to care for their families.
Here in Norway we have all that in abundance and we still are below reproduction rates. The primary reason is that we start having children later, in the last 30 years the average age of first motherhood has risen from 25 to 29 years old. It's got nothing to do with teaching kids about condoms and such, teen pregnancies haven't been statistically significant in ages. Through the pill and legalized abortion women generally have children when they want to have children and no sooner, the change is intentional.
One of the reasons is modern day equality, apart from some immigrants no Norwegian woman thinks housewife is a career or want to settle for less than men but pregnancy and the first months of a child's life can't be split 50-50. So most women want to be done with their education and have an established job before they start a family. And with their economic independence it's not about "catching" a man and rushing to get the ring on his finger and pop out a kid so he's stuck and even then divorce and finding a new partner is not the scandal it used to be.
The effect of this is that even established couples are living out their responsibility-free lives for years until the woman is approaching thirty and the biological clock starts ticking, because once it starts it's diapers, babysitters and wailing toddlers for the next five years. And most typically stop at two, some have three but almost never four or more because you start running into either time or money constraints. Like if the woman is going back to work as most do then three is a bundle on top of two working parents, if she (sorry, it's usually she) does part time or stay-at-home then the money runs short.
Not like the kids go hungry or freezing short, but like "we can't afford to let you participate in the things other kids do" short. It's hard not unintentionally acting like a dick when it's loose change for your two high income, one kid family while to a single income, three kid family it's an expense they can't afford on a really tight budget. And admitting you're poor well that's still a taboo, we've gotten rid of a lot of other social taboos but that one still hurts. And if you get like five kids, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up there these days.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm not confusing anything. Since the Suffragettes, feminism was always about power. The "equal opportunity" of second-wave feminism was only a (dishonest) selling pitch, not the goal. You say that "true feminist" won't mind "chivalry". OK, but what men will get in return for being chivalrous? What men will get in return for protecting and constantly helping women?
I don't know if you are a man who is virtue signaling in order to get sex or one of those "feminazi", but I find it very revealing that you completely missed my message. I talked about me. I talked about me who should have been pressured into marriage and the traditional husband role, even if my freedom looked more appealing. Yet, you immediately changed the subject to make it about women. Why?
Of course, I certainly acknowledge that any social duties imposed on men should be reciprocated with social duties imposed on women, so I do acknowledge that women too should be pressured to play their traditional roles, but it doesn't change that you think only about women and completely ignore men. What does that say about you?
Anyway, your idea that women can still have a "partner" is dying. I live in Quebec, where feminism is very strong, and as a result most men are now like me. The synthetic marriage rate (the number of women who will marry at least once before the age of 50) has fallen to 30% for women and 27% for men. Only 30% of women will find a husband, and considering that the divorce rate is about 50%, it means not a lot of women will be able to find a stable partner.
You said women should get things on their own terms. Well, in my case, when one of my clients wants to get things on his own terms, what I do is to tell him to find someone else.
We lucked out in the US because the men who founded the country believed in something radical - that Government exists to serve men, not the other way around. Our rights are extra-Governmental, and the individual is the unit of value - not the community. We'd be well-served to remember that, but alas it's been slipping for 100 years...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We are no where close to maxing out our planet. Most of that nonsense is based on 1940s research where they saw ever increasing population growth & that our planet had limits. They figured by now we would be at 10 billion or some nonsense. But today, we do a ton of inefficient things and waste a ton of resources because we live in relative abundance. People around the world do not starve based on maxing out resources but do so for political & cultural reasons.
We also haven't been in "exponential growth" for a few decades. 50 years ago, we had much of the world's population below developing nations. Now most of the world's population live in developing nations and there are very few below that category. Most of the developed nations are not seeing a local population growth. So as the world develops and gets better, the world population growth will falter further.
Some of us are probably going to leave for space in the next two to three centuries because of curiosity rather than a need from over population. But till then, we have a solution for barely growing populations... its call automation. That will carry us for centuries.
Maybe the ecahhhhnamy needs to be restructured so it can function even without continuous growth, sprawl, and environmental depredation.
It's not the economy that's the problem, it's our approach to aging and retirement. Because the working population supports the retirees, we need to maintain the ratio of workers to retirees above one, preferably well above.
If we can stave this problem off for two or three decades, I think automation will solve it. Or, rather, automation will produce a different problem, where we need very few workers. Total production will be massively higher (and can continue growing unboundedly) so we'll have plenty, we'll just need to distribute it differently.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is natural.
Maybe so, but "natural" is not the same as "good" or "desirable". The issue isn't solely one of immigrants not wanting to integrate; it becomes a much larger issue when a society no longer encourages them to do so.
As for the US, the first batch of adult immigrants struggle to survive here. Everything is unfamiliar and different from what they adapted to over a lifetime. ... So they collect and congregate and identify. ... But the locally born children or grandchildren of the immigrants end up totally integrating.
And this isn't inherently true either. My parents immigrated with me when I was a child. From day one they took to the new life and integrated into the community. Meanwhile we had relatives who had moved to the country 15 years earlier and had children my age who were born here; their children spoke English almost as poorly as I did because they had been completely isolated in an immigrant community and raised to speak "our language". I also had friends growing up who, despite being born here, mainly sought out friends and business relationships with people of the same ancestry, and were far more passionate about "the old country" than I was, or than their parents were.
We've also seen - repeatedly - cases of Islamic terrorists who were born in a western countries to well integrated moderate parents, and then self-segragated themselves later on in life.
It's complicated.