We Should Really Be Having More Kids

Submitted by Jack Raines via Young Money,

In 27 BC, Caesar Augustus was crowned the first Roman emperor. Widely considered one of Rome’s greatest leaders, Augustus’s reign marked the beginning of the 200-year Pax Romana.

One reason that the Roman Empire flourished during this time was its first-class transportation and sewage infrastructure that supported densely-populated cities, with Rome itself boasting an estimated one million residents at its peak.

However, these population centers were also susceptible to epidemics, disease, and lead poisoning (lead was commonly used in pipes, eating utensils, and even food and drinks), yielding high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies (maximum ~33 years).

Low life expectancy + expansive territories meant that the Roman Empire needed high birth rates to maintain enough soldiers to defend its borders, and Rome struggled to keep its birth rates above the population replacement rate. This issue was so important that Augustus offered tax breaks for large families and cracked down on abortion and adultery because he believed that “too many men spent their energy with prostitutes and concubines and had nothing for their wives, causing population declines.

But government efforts never succeeded in meaningfully increasing birth rates.

At the conclusion of the Pax Romana, low birth rates, combined with plague and war, wreaked havoc on Rome’s population, and the power structure of the empire shifted to the newer Constantinople. Rome never recovered, with the city’s population dwindling from a peak of 1,000,000 residents in the late second century to ~30,000 by 600 AD.

We humans draw parallels and analogies across time and space because they help us better understand the world around us, and no two Western civilizations have attracted more comparisons than the Roman Empire and the United States of America.

Both nations experienced explosions of wealth and eras of unprecedented peace, both nations were the dominant global powers of their respective eras, and today, the US faces the same issue that plagued Rome 2,000 years ago: declining birth rates.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway penned this now timeless exchange:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

We worry about global warfare and pandemics because they’re big and scary and sudden and could wipe us out with a sudden BANG! But the real existential threat, declining birth rates, will progress like Mike’s bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly.

Allow me to demonstrate through some basic arithmetic.

~2.1 children per woman is the typical population replacement rate in a developed country, and the US currently has a total fertility rate (which measures the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to a given fertility rate at each age): of 1.84. This means that (assuming this rate holds constant) every 100 parents will yield 92 children and ~85 grandchildren. And keep in mind, rates have been on a steady decline for years.

It’s a bear market for babies.

This isn’t just a US problem. We’re seeing these trends of sub-replacement fertility rates occurring all over the developed world:

  • South Korea: 1.11
  • Spain: 1.29
  • Japan: 1.39
  • China: 1.45
  • Austria: 1.51
  • Canada: 1.57
  • Germany: 1.58
  • United Kingdom: 1.63
  • Sweden: 1.67

So now you might be thinking, “Okay, declining birth rates ‘sound’ scary, but who cares? Like, why does it matter?

At the individual level, it doesn’t matter. You have every right to think, “It’s no one else’s business if I don’t have kids!” But once a critical mass of individuals decides not to have kids, there are societal consequences.

In her recent piece, Everything’s a Pyramid Scheme, Katie Gatti Tassin highlighted a logical fallacy in the “retire early” movement:

I’ve long pointed out the fact that financial independence and early retirement cannot exist at scale, because our economic system would cease functioning. If every young person in their thirties or forties achieved financial independence and quit working, the workforce would be limited to those under the age of 35, effectively removing roughly 66% of the current labor force, or the equivalent of about 44 million people…

Of course, there’s a funny redundancy in the system: If 44 million working-age people retired en masse and ceased most discretionary spending…corporate profits would drop, the stock market would stutter to a halt, and the returns required to support early retirement would vanish, driving everyone back to work.

Katie Gatti Tassin

Basically, retiring early works for individuals, but it could never work at scale because our economy would collapse without enough workers to keep it functioning smoothly. The Financially Independent, Retire Early (FIRE) movement only works as long as the majority of society fails to FIRE.

Now, back to the babies.

One big reason that our advanced and wealthy societies have become so advanced and wealthy is that growing populations created a growing labor force which, coupled with technological advancements, powered growing economies and widespread wealth creation.

And now, our advanced, wealthy societies have devised systems that allow folks to retire and live their golden years in relative ease and decadence thanks to a combination of personal savings/investments and social safety nets.

These social safety nets are supported by taxes, which are funded by taxpayers, aka workers. And our number of workers has been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution.

But now people are having fewer kids, meaning that down the road, we’ll have fewer workers. And when life expectancies are higher than ever while birth rates are lower than ever and everyone still wants to retire on time… well, you see where I’m going with this? The math doesn’t add up.

(Katie actually made this same observation to highlight the absurdity of individualism).

So not to be a complete doomer here, but it feels a lot like we’re climbing the initial ascent on a rollercoaster, and we’re about to hit the apex.

What does the descent look like? I don’t really know, because we haven’t actually seen a large-scale population decline in the modern era, but I imagine it would go something like this:

  • Social programs that we take for granted will no longer be feasible.
  • People will have to work longer (you’re already seeing protests about this in France after the pension reform).
  • Stock and real estate markets will decline as lower populations reduce consumer demand, hurting corporate profits and property values.

So after considering why declining birth rates matter, I had another question: Why, given the risks associated with birth rate declines, are we still experiencing said declines in developed countries?

Like, this problem is pretty obvious, so why aren’t we making more babies?

I have a few hypotheses:

1) Kids are expensive (both in perception and reality).

The US Department of Health & Human Services estimates that the average family with infants would need to pay $16,000 per year to cover the true cost of childcare, and half of US households make less than $70,000 per year. That’s a big chunk of cash going to raising a kid each year.

Besides the real costs, the perceived costs of childcare scale exponentially with one’s social group. Say you’re a high earner, and you and your spouse take home $200k+ per year.

Do you want your kid to attend a private middle school to improve their chances of gaining acceptance to an elite boarding school to ensure they secure a seat in an Ivy League university which will help them land a coveted job on Wall Street?

Are they going to play travel sports and take music lessons and eat organic foods and drive a nice car?

That’s going to cost a lot more than $16,000 per year.

Even high-earners are hesitant to have children because they don’t know if they can afford their desired lifestyle for their kids.

2) Widespread contraceptives.

Thousands of years before Planned Parenthood, the ancient Greeks and Romans discovered this cool plant called Silphium. Silphium had a number of medical uses, but it was most popular for its role as a contraceptive: ingesting a chick-pea-sized dose of Silphium prevented pregnancy.

There was just one problem with Silphium: it could only be grown in a narrow strip of fertile land in present-day eastern Libya. The Romans loved Silphium so much that they overused the wonder plant, eventually driving it extinct.

After the disappearance of Silphium, the world didn’t have an effective, safe contraceptive that could be ingested until 1950, when the birth control pill hit the market.

For the first time in 2,000 years, women controlled when and if they wanted to have children. When we have a high degree of control over the childbirth process, the number of unplanned pregnancies will decline, which means the number of total pregnancies will likely decline too.

3) Everyone, regardless of their sex, is focused on their careers.

100 years ago, it was normal for husbands to go to work while their wives took care of the house and/or raised the children. But now? Everyone works. And kids really throw a wrench in climbing the corporate ladder.

Ambitious women don’t want children to derail their careers, and ambitious men don’t want to step off the fast track to partner to spend a few years as stay-at-home dads. So both sexes delay having kids until they have achieved some threshold of success in their professional lives. But the clock doesn’t stop ticking, and every year spent chasing paper is one year not spent chasing two-year-olds around the house.

4) The Bored Parent Hypothesis.

I have this half-baked idea that one’s number of children is inversely related to their availability of fun/interesting alternative activities. If you are a 20-something living on a few dollars a day in an undeveloped country, you don’t really have many things to do (excluding work) besides creating an army of your own miniature genetic replicas.

But if you live in a developed, first-world country in the Year of Our Lord 2023, you have a lot of ways to spend your time that does not involve making babies. You can enjoy a luxury previously unknown to most of our ancestors: chill with your friends. You can travel for fun, ski, engage in this weird modern phenomenon known as “hobbies,” create art, and learn a foreign language.

You have options.

Subconsciously, we know that children mark the end of this period of vast optionality by introducing a really, really big responsibility. This is the first-world problem of all first-world problems, but I do think that some young people in developed countries today are hesitant to have kids because there’s just a ton of fun stuff to do when you don’t have kids.

Of course, I’m speaking as a young dude in a developed country who thinks there’s a ton of fun stuff that doesn’t involve having kids.

5) There are literally too many potential partners.

While birth rates have been steadily declining, the average age of first marriage has been steadily increasing. These two numbers are related: if you get married later, you literally have less time to have kids.

Something, something, biological clock.

So why are people getting married later? One reason is that the internet has given us a damn-near-infinite number of potential partners.

Historically, guy likes girl, girl likes guy (or the parents arrange the marriage without consulting the kids at all), and then guy and girl get married and have kids.

But now, guy likes girl, girl likes guy, guy refuses to show how much he likes girl while girl plays hard-to-get to keep guy interested, and guy and girl enter a 4-month relationship-adjacent purgatory where they go on dates and sleep together but don’t acknowledge the relationship itself until one party inevitably stops talking to the other party to see what else is out there, and then the whole cycle repeats.

“Dating” looks the way it does today because everyone is replaceable when the dating pool has millions of options. Instead of working through a road bump in one’s relationship, you can treat every minor inconvenience as an opportunity to look for someone “better.”

This weird dating carousel can last for years as we take longer and longer to commit, giving us less and less time to have kids.

 

The irony of this whole thing is that it was our very economic prosperity that created the conditions that could unwind the whole thing:

  • The desire for everyone to “get ahead” has made it really expensive for your kids to get ahead
  • Medical advancements have allowed us to be tactical with our pregnancies
  • Previously unavailable career opportunities have led many folks to put off having children to pursue those opportunities
  • Our abundance of wealth has provided us with near-limitless entertainment and activities that don’t involve having kids
  • And the internet turned the whole world into a potential dating pool, making commitment next to impossible

And now we face this really weird Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Any individual person can delay having children to enjoy our abundance of everything, and their world will function just fine. But if every individual person neglects to have kids any time soon, the whole system grinds to a halt. The only way to ensure that everyone wins is by everyone having more kids.

Maybe society really is just one big pyramid scheme.

So I guess we should probably start having more kids. Or at least y’all should, anyway. I don’t really want to be part of the solution anytime soon, respectfully.

– Jack

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ursel doran
ursel doran

Sir Admin, A very fresh note from Neil Howe in here on the Fourth Turning.
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/pivot-to-the-fourth-turning

A cruel accountant
A cruel accountant

You want more babies?

Ban birth control!

Warren

It.isn’t population decline that is going to make the US go the way of Roman Empire. It’s currency collapse, debased coinage, massive un sustainable deficits that will result in the collapse of central government autority, a massive influx of foreign invaders at a rate that can’t be assimilated for decades or generations, a break down of infrastructure because what value exists in the currency is being wasted on foreign military adventures and paying.welfare (tribute) to the foreign invaders so they won’t riot (sack the cities). And to pay the tribute taxing the few people who are actually working into poverty so that they are better off not working.but joining the Free Shit Army FSA. This is what happened to Rome and is happening in the US. But unlike Rome the US is overly dependent upon technologies and sourcing goods and food from long distances. So our collapse will be much faster and far reaching.

I’m reminded of the fate of the province of Roman Dacia. The eastern Goths would look across the Danube river to the prosperous lives of the Romans from their impoverished lands, and eventually when Rome weakened the Goths started to cross the Danube and finally over ran Roman Dacia, the Romans pulled out Dacia collapsed, and the Goths destroyed the very thing that they sought. And that’s what the onslaught of “refugees” is going to do to the US

I’m not saying that the argument is wrong, what I mean is that such a decline is over the horizon, and that the problems which are here and now will destroy the US and western civilization, and eastern civilization as well long before the population decline reaches the critical mass needed to take us down.

JohnSmith
JohnSmith

The collapse in moral values and what used to be known as “virtue”, especially in the upper classes, precedes the rest.

Jdog
Jdog

That the world is overpopulated is not debatable. We are grossly overpopulated and the effects are a lower living standard for the majority, so that the wealthy can maintain obsene wealth by the growth of the population and the inflation in assets that causes.
The wealthy keep us all scrambling and overpaying for goods and services because the needs of a growing population always outpace production, and supply lags behind the demand.
Population like most things is not linear. It is cyclical. When overpopulation occurs, the negative effects suppress reproduction. When the supply of resources and the standards of living support it, then birth rates increase. At least among the most intelligent of us….

Anonymous
Anonymous

Infinite growth meets finite resources or the can being kicked down the road has finally slammed into the wall.
Enjoy the show.

m
m

Julian L. Simon demonstrated 30 years ago, that the earth could feed a world population of 20 billion – and that was obviously without GMOs, or any such shit.

Llpoh
Llpoh

And who the fuck would want to live in a world with 20 billion people? What about supplying energy? What about other resources?

Jdog is right.

Anonymous
Anonymous

The world could probably support more than 20 billion.

The issue is not the amount of people, so much as it is the distribution or resources and level of consumption.

20 billion living a first-world lifestyle? Not sustainable.

20 billion living a very basic, essentials only lifestyle? Plenty to go around.

~5% of the people on the planet use ~25% of the resources. Spread the resources evenly and Earth can support many more.

But do you want to give up your outsized consumption? Nope, me either.

So we can have high standards of living and low population, OR, lower standards of living and more people. Trouble is as a species, we will try to have high standards of living and no population control to speak of.

i forget
i forget

ya’ll only hold “all else equal” in your spoon-fed & memorized “equation.”

TPTB that actually *do* make sure that all else equal holds ~ status quo stasis cartels & monopolies ~do all they can to make sure they remain in control of the lifestyle levels.

progress verbotten. the congress has been boughten.

Anonymous
Anonymous

There is no such thing as world overpopulation. FULL STOP. That is a lie pushed by abortion activists and depopulation radicals. The entire world population could EASILY live in the state of Texas with large family lots with room to spare, and the rest of the planet used to grow food. The entire world’s population coult stand inside the city limits of St. Petersburg, Florida. Even China has massive regions that are virtually empty, with the greatest portion of their population living on the east coast. The (very liberal) Harvard Center for Population Studies reported that our planet could sustain 40 billion people. You may be intelligent, but you certainly are also brainwashed. And you seem strangely eager to share that with the world.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Bullshit! Any moron can take a trip anywhere in the world and see that most of the land is empty.

i forget
i forget

vox populi, vox dei.

overpopulated? or undercapitalized (so to speak)? that’s rhetorical. that’s not an argument, all ye pragmatic utilitarian eugenicists, for “picking” winners/losers – or subsidies for “either,” either.

nothing is unmitigated. every loaf is leavened with more or less sawdust.

that recent pic of the depression-era family with too many kids.

“good night, John-boy.”

if you’re on Walton’s Mountain, & can keep ahead of the tax, among all the other machinators out to get what you have, good.

but ratio-wise, walton’s mountain – incl even the walmart moutain bastards – can (latter case should) – very quickly become masada.

ASIG
ASIG

“If you are a 20-something living on a few dollars a day in an undeveloped country, you don’t really have many things to do (excluding work) besides creating an army of your own miniature genetic replicas.”

True – In my visits to the Philippines while driving thru the poorest of the poor slum areas, the horrible living conditions were quite striking but what was most notable was how many children there were. The poor are good at pumping out lots of children.

Anthony Aaron
Anthony Aaron

… and they even come to the United States to share that with US taxpayers …

goat
goat

Maybe is because guys don’t want to become some gal’s side hustle slave for the next 18 to 20 plus years? Not one mention of the liability the system has created for men to have children (with women of course).

MathMan
MathMan

Exactly, women what to “live their best life” during their prime fertility years, just so they can get dug-out by Chad and Tyron. Only to finally come to the realization, after they’ve had “500 hundred miles of mister right ran through her”, I need a SIMP to marry me and have a baby with. To then later take his kinds and everything else.

Guest
Guest

Seems we’re still avoiding the great amount of evidence that these natural trends were heightened to a great extent by directed propaganda. Probably because the ordinary writer doesn’t want to consider the who and why part.

Caitlyn Jenner's testicles
Caitlyn Jenner's testicles

Man, if I could find the right woman, and we could sign an NDA involving all parties, including the attorney and it was ironclad, and, she could prove that she could financially and responsibly care for any offspring produced and would never seek anything from me, she could have some pureblood juice direct from the source for free.

Anthony Aaron
Anthony Aaron

A true romantic … the last of a dying breed …

Caitlyn Jenner's testicles
Caitlyn Jenner's testicles

That I was.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Bill Gates wants to kill of three quarters of the Earth population.

Anthony Aaron
Anthony Aaron

More like 94% … remember the 1st ‘commandment’ of the Georgia Guidestones … global population of 500 million or less …

MathMan
MathMan

“dating carousel”. More like “the cock carousel”.

The Central Scrutinizer
The Central Scrutinizer

” More of me? They don’t even know what to do with one of me!” – Riddick

OSCAR

I appreciated the article, at least when I set out to read it, because I’ve done much study on the topic, and the author seemed to take falling birth rates seriously. Then came the conclusion, where he mocked his own premise and informed us he wasn’t going to take his own advice. Our nation’s demographic death spiral is not a joke, but an existential threat to our survival as a nation, not to mention the survival of the human race.

Are all the writers here TBP that cynical and sarcastic about a subject they want US to take seriously? Do they all start out with apparent sincerely and then end their essays mocking their own claims and their own readers? Wow.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Yippee! Let’s bring more slave to the farm!!!

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