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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.
I, for one, welcome our new sexless, soulless, joyless Feminist overlords.
pay us. Births are dropping because Americans are becoming less religious (so no opposition to birth control, not even the token opposition you get from most Catholics).
To be honest the solution right now isn't to pay us more, it's to bring in more labor from overseas. It's hard to argue with that since it's working. It just sucks if you're a member of the working class.
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If you want to send the kid to college to be a part of the future, else you're all but assuring them knee-capped employment possibilities. There's a higher expectation overall for parenting, especially for middle income Americans that plan this out. Uneducated folk in the lower income brackets however will still reproduce irresponsibly though.
I don't read AC
20 years ago "omg we have to reduce the teen pregnancy rate!"
Today "omg where's all the babies at?"
I thought the age range used for their statistics was odd:
The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44
Since it's generally illegal to have sex with a person under 18.
It’s legal if they’re both under 18 and no more than 2 years age difference.
It depends strongly on the state. In Kentucky, the minimum age was effectively raised to 16. Marriage below that age is not explicitly forbidden, but requires a judge's consent.
http://www.wdrb.com/story/3765...
Wellcome to 2008!
BTW, the original article has been edited to correct the date yo 1987.
There are already too many people on the world. Having less would be a good thing.
Naw brohamley, feminists just love having sex. Kinda like Quakers love to drink, environmentalists love pollution, and Orthodox Jews just can't get enough pork.
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
Unless your having little green men you shouldn't be having kids.
[($)]
Feminists normally like to have sex, just on their terms, not when/how men tell them to. I can't say that I blame them.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Covenant?
Why should anyone need to get the permission of a justice of the peace or some shaman in a funny robe just to be able to have sex? Marriage, no marriage, cohabitation, let people do what they want.
Personally, I think marriage protects kids, and is thus best saved for after conception... marriage without kids is just a form of antiquated ritual.
Since the lowest birth rate is amongst the educated white establishment, you're 100% correct.
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?
Feminism is a weapon of memetic warfare. All these NGOs with endless millions to spend on Feminist propaganda... just where do they get all that money?
America funds Falun Gong to weaken Chinese culture. China funds Feminism to weaken American culture. Sounds plausible, at least.
No worries, they are already working on disallowing rape victims to abort pregnancies. Once they get that through everything will be back to normal in good 'ol 'murrica.
Thanos would be pleased.
A decline in population is a good thing every once in a while. It would solve a vast number of the worlds problems.
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.
And how bad it is, we already know that and this is a sensitive subject here (well, at least it used to be)
five... four... three...
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
you sound bitter towards women, whats caused the problem?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Since wealth of a society is pretty much defined by women being powerful enough to decide by then selves on their reproduction, you're pretty much spot on.
Future societies will most likely pay women to be mothers. .. if society in general recognizes children as something valuable that is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In what sense is this woman a "non-feminist?"
I do have to admit, blaming the Chinese for feminism is at least one I haven't heard before.
You are exaggerating Japan's problems very much
There isn't much proof that intelligence has a racial component. Remember, all of the things being said about current immigrants were also said about Italians, East Europeans, Irish, etc, etc in the 1800s and 1900s. OMG, "those people" are ruining American kultshah.
The world is getting overpopulated so any drop in the birthrate is a good thing.
You know what else is a good thing to drop birthrates? Nuking from orbit. That's the only way to be sure. That, or Godzilla.
#DeleteFacebook
Births are dropping because Americans are becoming less religious
Might be a portion of it but I doubt that is the primary reason. The US is still quite religious compared to other peer countries. The most effective form of birth control is educating and raising the standard of living for women. As women get more education they choose to have fewer children and have them later. As their standard of living and participation in the labor force goes up the number of children they have goes down. And to your point as they get the right to control their bodies and reproduction they tend to have fewer children or have them later.
To be honest the solution right now isn't to pay us more, it's to bring in more labor from overseas. It's hard to argue with that since it's working. It just sucks if you're a member of the working class.
We've always been a nation of immigrants. We just have too many folks who are in denial about that fact and think that because they got here first it somehow makes them special and entitles them to be xenophobic.
So, in other words, our population would fall somewhat if we stopped importing people. (Why are we still doing that again? Empty prairies we still need to tame? Plentiful menial jobs? No? Then why?)
We'd have less crowding, pollution, and cheaper real estate.
As quality of life ticked up, birth rate likely would too. Almost like most processes are self-balancing and not runaway.
Not seeing the immediate problem.
One that is sustainable.
Sustainable can mean a lot of things. Clarify the conditions you consider to be sustainable ones.
I don't know the exact number, but I'm pretty sure we're at least an order of magnitude too high right now.
You should have put the period in that sentence after "I don't know". You have no objective basis for your claim that that the global population should be 700 million people instead of the ~7 billion it currently is. Furthermore there is no evidence that our current population is unsustainable. Some of our activities probably are unsustainable but that is a separate issue and not contingent on the population size for the most part.
Solar is still insignificant on a global scale, especially where it concerns transportation fuels.
What's your point? Yes it's a small percentage today but it is also rising very quickly. Nobody (rational) is under the illusion that solar dominate within a decade.
Tesla is only producing a few thousand fully electric cars in a week, while we have a billion cars driving around using fossil fuels.
Tesla is just the tip of the spear and other companies actually sell more EVs and hybrids. Nobody is arguing that ICEs are going to disappear and time soon. Just that they are going to gradually lose marketshare as electrification happens.
It's going to take more than 'the next few' years to catch up.
Depends on where you set the goal posts and exactly what sort of time scale you are talking about. I don't think saying "next few years" is out of line if you think big picture. You'll (probably) see widespread and increasing electrification of cars (EVs and hybrids) over the next 2 decades with a reasonable approximation of full electrification happening in key markets in probably 40-60 years. Possible it could happen quicker but I doubt it. If you think big picture that's a pretty short time scale. Similar with grid scale solar and wind. They will likely steadily increase as a portion of our power portfolio over the next several decades probably peaking somewhere between 20-40%. I could see them getting higher but that would take a coordinated government policy to get distributed storage (prob batteries) for it to really work and it's unclear that the political will will be there for that.
The poor, undereducated, disadvantaged will still have kids at the same old rate. So we shift our population towards failure.
If that were actually a valid argument then no country could ever improve its standard of living. It doesn't actually work like that as long as there is a reasonable amount of social mobility. Disadvantaged people don't have to remain so forever and as the saying goes a rising tide lifts all boats.
> The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. ...and yet the US population is still rising year on year.
http://www.multpl.com/united-s...
so? this looks good. young kids aren't getting pregnant like hey had been in the past.
all of the categories other than 15-24 year old show that there had been an increase. The ages that declined, at least in my opinion, set you up for a rough life when you have a kid that young.
you need to look at the data in the doc... there was a huge drop in 15-18 year olds... thats probably good. 18-24 year olds dropped too, though not by much... that is probably good also. All other age groups increased.
First of all, it doesn't matter if they were "really" communist or not, you left them out. They were certainly atheists, so maybe you should have called them "organized atheism".
Second, we could play the same "Are they really X?" game with religion. The people who did the worst atrocities in the Crusades, as with Islam extremists today, often clearly violated the teaching of the leaders in whose name they claim to be acting. So either those people don't count as "organized religion", because they weren't "really" Christians / Muslims / whatever; or, Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao do count as "communists" (and "atheists"), because whatever Marx would have thought of them, they did see themselves as trying to follow his teaching.
You can't have it both ways: You can't tar me with the Crusades without accepting the black mark of the Killing Fields.
So you're saying that Pol Pot committed his atrocities in the name of atheism?
If not, I don't see what your point is. Its like saying that the Okhlahoma Bridge collapsed because it's designer didn't collect stamps.
Also, by definition all Buddhists are atheists, as Buddhism has no gods. Cambodia was and is, to this day, devoutly Buddhist even if Pol Pot plundered the Angkor temples to fund his state. You need to stop treating "Atheism" like some kind of organisation.
Also it is a huge misnomer (closer to a bald faced lie) to say that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were atheist states because they were secular states. Both had a great deal of religious people, even amongst the leadership, some of whom thought that gassing Jews was gods work (to which I do not blame the catholic church for, I'm capable of splitting out a nutter from the mainstream). Russia was mainly Russian Orthadox, Stalin ran to the Russian Orthadox church for support when the Nazis invaded and Nazi Germany, they were 54% prodestant, 40% catholic, 3.5% "gottglÃubig" (literally "believers in god", what is called Agnostic in modern parlance) and 1.5% atheist.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
but I'm in a Red (got dragged here by my parents when I was young and been stuck here ever since) and I'm paying $11k/yr for the first two and then it goes up to $16k/yr for the last at my kids State college. I get a few thousand in grants and a few in tuition waivers (and you lose the tuition waivers if you have to take a break, which if your GPA is
Also, add a car to that. Colleges don't have everything on one campus anymore. At least my Kid's doesn't. Classes are a two hour bus ride apart and you don't get to pick your schedule. If you don't have a card you're not going to school. They'll kick you out in favor of a kid who does.
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they do it in the American South all the time. Do away with Sex Education, ban or make birth control unobtainable. Hammer into kid's skulls that masturbating is a crime (or like they did in Texas make it literally a crime for girls) and blamo, problem solved. Well, except for all the kids people can't afford. But you can take care of that with brutal oppression and a bit 'o the old "Opiate of the Masses" like we and every other civilization's done for centuries
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don't feed them. They bring the whole discourse down.
Also, "Progressive Capitalist"? I suppose it's possible but the folks who sold us out are anything but. Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren would be Progressive Capitalists. Guys like Tim Cook & Bill Gates not so much (and no, donating a tiny fraction of your money to whitewash all the bad things you did does not make you "Progressive" Bill).
Sorry, had to vent. I hate seeing the word Progressive misapplied. I don't think you mean anything by it, but it's easy to pick up negative connotations on the word because there's a constant hum of anti-worker sentiment in this country and Progressives are the pro-worker wing of most parties, so we're always under attack.
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> The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. ...and yet the US population is still rising year on year.
http://www.multpl.com/united-s...
Amazing. How could that be? It's almost like we are importing huge numbers of people.
Of course. Are you suggesting that is worse than breeding the numbers up?
Its not about money with me, maybe I'm pessimistic, but I am ashamed of what society has become, what my generation has failed to do to improve the global community and the lack of political will to correct the wrongs of our generation. While I'd love that kid and strive to do the very best for him, every single day I look at him I would ask him to forgive me for bringing him into this world. I think the responsible, conscious adult chooses not to have a child for many reasons, and I think economics probably is a big factor, but for me it's my child's future and what his generation will be left to face.
I think the more modern a country is, the more the citizens are connected and the more messaging they are subject to and influenced by. We are inundated every day with hate, disaster, climate calamity, politics, etc. Someone living in a place disconnected from global affairs will have an entirely different outlook on the future - their world won't know about the big trash area in the pacific, or the growing CO2 issue, or trashing the rain forests, war in Afghanistan, nuke bombs in north korea, NAFTA, gas prices, how you need crippling debt to afford a quality education that everyone must get etc.etc.. It'd be interesting to know what the birthrate in rural america is vs. urban america.
What responsible human being would subject an innocent child to the dystopian world we're living in today?
A rapidly spreading virus seems a better way. And first vaccinate everybody you really want to keep.
Naw brohamley, feminists just love having sex. Kinda like Quakers love to drink, environmentalists love pollution, and Orthodox Jews just can't get enough pork.
Feminists love having sex. Just not with you.
So according to you, non-feminist women are incapable of saying no to sex where only the superior 3rd wave feminists can???
Does your wife help construct your strawmen, or is that something you do all on your own?
The modern nuclear family is just that: modern, and kind of a western affectation. It arose as an artifact of religious control in Europe around the industrial revolution.
Kids certainly do benefit from having more than one adult care giver. More than two, as well. There's research that shows kids who are raised by a variety of adults (e.g. a village) are better off in every way measured.
The US is going through some big structural/societal changes. It's not some, "I don't want to bring a child into this horrible world" thing -- it's the fact that more people have choices or feel they have choices than they did in the past.
- Fewer women are voluntarily deciding to spend their entire work life raising children. They are better educated overall and the workforce is more open to them. When you go this route, you just can't in good conscience have a huge number of kids because something has to give between work and family. Most good parents I know would rather err on the side of family, but they also know they have a responsibility to work.
- People are less religious: I grew up in a very Catholic area of the city, and I'm not shocked that so many priests and bishops got away with crimes against kids. Back in the day, priests were likely the only people in the neighborhood who went to college, and many people felt they were the representative of God and the Pope, and totally beyond question. Birth control is not allowed in Catholic doctrine and Catholic families used to be HUGE as a result. I know people who have 9 siblings...and I think a lot of it is due to people adhering strictly to their religion's rules.
- Women as a whole aren't just looking to find a husband and take the first situation that comes their way, so they're starting to have kids later in life. And even if they do get married early on, they're way more likely to delay having kids until they're more financially secure.
The interesting thing is whether the expected replacement rate is still too high. We need fewer people, not less, if we want to keep the whole employment cycle going. The thing that will probably keep this from becoming a catastrophe is the US' diversity. For every hard-charging single-by-choice female executive that's 110% dedicated to their career, there's a traditional, religious woman who gets married when they're 21 and has a kid every 2 years until they're 35. This is different in places like Japan where they have almost no immigration and a very homogeneous society...in their case the birth rate is too low and they're going to have to have some huge shifts in the next few decades to deal with it.
We have 2 kids, we both work and that's way more than enough for us. We've done our evolutionary duty IMO and would rather concentrate on turning the kids into people who will contribute something to society. You can't do that when your attention is spread between 2 jobs, your living situation and 5 kids.
I guess I'm an old-timer at 42, but I work in a place that skews older. Because it's IT (yes, seriously,) we have lots of men who are divorced or on their 2nd/3rd wife. I think the MGTOW thing is mainly because so many of them got taken to the cleaners by their wives' divorce attorneys. And, I think a lot of them just picked the best-looking woman they could find with zero regard to long-term compatibility. So, they're telling everyone who will listen that all women are manipulative fill-in-the-blanks who do nothing but take all your money. Some are, and I've heard lots of examples that make me shake my head...but it's not a universal truth like they'd have you believe.
It sounds incredibly corny, but I got very lucky in the spouse department. What does the MGTOW crowd think is going to happen if they marry someone who is rock-stupid, has nothing in common with them, and is often equally unhappy about their situation? My wife is very smart, independent and there's nothing keeping her trapped in our relationship; she could kick me out at any time and be just fine. My opinion is that you shouldn't get married "just because" --because you'll just end up divorced and bitter in the end.
The USA during the 19th century EAGERLY recruited immigrants. The homestead act of 1862 allowed immigrants, former slaves and single women to apply.
Next generation struggling to afford kids will be bad for pensions but good for the environment. The UK is also doing their best to make conditions difficult for parents.
Continual population replenishment means nothing if they have no jobs to keep pumping money.
And there will be no jobs if there aren't young people earning money and spending it.
While I approve of checks on population through people making the choice to have fewer children, there are definite economic effects of a greying society. Having a larger percentage of society in a non-working/retired role can lead to economic drag as savings are spent and services are used, but without those people contributing to the workforce. The opposite is also true, with a growing society of work-active young people spending and investing. The Aging of Japan is an interesting look at a 1st-world society that has rather quickly had its average age rise, as the Japanese live longer, and had low fertility rates. To counteract those economic declines, Japan is considering relaxing restrictions on immigration to keep the population higher, as well as raising the retirement age to keep people in the active work force. They've already raised the age at which you can start withdrawing pension funds just to deal with labor shortages.
You must have been looking in the mirror when you posted that.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Less little bastards running around yelling and screaming! Kids annoy the hell out of me.
Pay is low. Rent is high. Medical costs are high. More people work longer hours. Many people have big student debts. A lot of people just can't afford to have kids. So they don't. This is neo-liberal economucs' natural outcome. It was all predicted decades ago.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Ha ... makes me laugh to think of anyone on slashdot reproducing.
... let alone kids.
The basement dwellers here can't live with themselves
Please tell me you are joking.
You know what is growing unsustainably? Government !!
Rock stupid people are often the happiest. Socrates noted this.
The misery of the modern condition is being crushed by one's own plans, ideas, and cerebral shackles.
This is the setting one hears the very, very quiet inner divine whisper: "do not lean on your own understanding".
The problem with scaling this understanding is that you cannot go any faster than one person hearing this voice at a time. And it has to be allowed from within. There is no chance of coerced understanding when it comes to happiness. Not in this life.
The day will come when clarity will be compelled on people, but here people are condemned to be free, thus saith Jean Paul Sartre. (Here is a strange case of a Sunday school teacher appealing to a 19th century athiest, but in his defense he was in many ways very foolish -running from visions of lobsters etc).
Oops ... 20th century