Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?

Children are expensive and inconvenient for many people. As soon as women in developing countries get a cell phone they can see how everyone else lives. They can see the freedom enjoyed by single people in the West and they want that for themselves.

Something often overlooked is that a lot of people grow up with parents who never should have been parents. This is not an uncommon thing. Back when everybody had kids because you basically had to (boomers and older) you have huge numbers of people becoming parents who were simply not cut out to do the job well. So I think part of the drop in people having children is the understanding by younger generations that they do not want to risk ruining someone's life in the way many of their lives were adversely affected by their parents.

Rich country doesn't mean richer families...... Cost of living , both parents NEED to work. The middle class is now borderline poverty. And children are expensive

Why not a word on how inhospitable late capitalist neoliberal societies are to families and communities? How school systems are underfunded and falling apart while we spend $1 trillion per year on the military? How paying for health care is a constant worry? How employment is often precarious, and housing costs continue to skyrocket?

This misses something obvious, in poor countries children are an economic asset. In rich countries they’re an economic liability.

I have 3 girls and two boys. We were low income, often homeless, carless, and always struggling. Today, only two of my children want and have families; the other three - "no way!" I think this may be because they don't want to struggle so much and bring children into a world which does not support democracy, equal rights, families, education, decent housing, decent jobs, and so forth.

If you’re a single parent you’re pretty much on your own. There is no village to help. Better to stay childless.

Why would people want to bring children into the world when it is in such a bad state and only getting worse? It's actually cruel.

Another reason for the shift in rich countries is that in most rich countries, women have access to those same opportunities. In 3rd world and developing countries, the norms are for women to only stay home and raise children. When given the choice, women want options too.

Easy answer is are we happy ? I mean most people? Do we even want to live or exist in this place ? Do we see a bright future ?… in the past life was by far more miserable but we didn’t have the means to compare our life with others … now the comparison is depressive … you compare yourself to the rich and you feel like you have no chance in life so you just let go

28.04 this is one of the most important parts of this podcast. I often feel like, in discussions of birth rate, no one is speaking to women of childbearing age. And that not enough politicians or policy wonks are talking to mothers. I cannot speak for men, though. It seems to me that the world is a very difficult place for men. I think men appear to be very isolated and very pressured to perform and make money without any semblance of what we call a work-life balance. And by the way, I'm old enough to remember that the phrase work-life balance didn't emerge an American popular culture until a certain number of women had entered the workforce and someone still had to do the grocery shopping and cook dinner. When I talk to young women - women in college and women on the cusp of graduating from high school - I'm met with a group of young people who feel simultaneously pressured to be able to support themselves, and demonized for doing so. When I talk to young women who have ended their relationships, I hear the heartbreaking consequences of our country's decision to not really offer good sex education to young people. Young men's sex education is pornography. And the younger women in my life report being choked, slapped and hit during sex with their partners, and being shocked and terrified by it. Now, this wonderland we call the internet has lifted a Greek chorus of caterwauling voices. Yes, there are the many "men are trash!" posts. But what's more disturbing to me is the sheer volume of young male voices on the internet criticizing girls for their academic achievements and interest in a career. And that same volume of young male voices insisting that a woman's moral obligation, her biological purpose on Earth, boiled down to keeping men fed, clothed, stroked, sexually satisfied, and fed. These are young men who appear to think that women shouldn't have any voice in our civic institutions. I'm of the age where I understand that my father was born into poverty on a tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. He was the youngest of five children, but who knows how many pregnancies his mother lost before she dropped dead of a stroke when my father was only 10 years old? I look back just one generation and see how all of my parents female siblings drastically reduced the number of pregnancies they experienced. And here we have all of these young men deciding that the proper thing to do is to get women pregnant, young, and breed them into misery and uterine prolapse. So I can well imagine why so many women do not want to replace the current social and political system that is treating them as a punching bag.

easy answer that doesn't need an hour of filler: it's expensive and wages are meager. Housing, groceries, utilities, debt payments, car payments, gas, etc. are all through the roof. we can barely afford to be alive and feed our humanity on the side, nevermind create and cultivate an entire human being that'll be totally dependent on us. and our society in general has also become so rigid, vacant, and alienated that it's growing more and more difficult to meet new people and form attachments. We barely have any energy and time between work shifts to be fulfilled as humans, we're often too tired or busy with domestic obligations to go out and meet someone to have a child with. And where would we go, anyhow? the third spaces that would fill those needs are disappearing and so our only options are home, work, and trips to the store where we don't typically want to be social or bothered. Capitalism is killing us.

i can't even afford to keep a dog anymore. kids? you are out of your mind.

Can't we switch this around and ask why would anyone want to have kids? In high income society, having kids is a lot of unpaid work frankly. Kids do not materially contribute to the economic stability of a household. From a practical standpoint, kids are a burden. There are going to be people that enjoy that work so they're okay with that. A lot of people do not enjoy child care or the idea of child care. It's hard just to take care of yourself and deal with the economic uncertainty of yourself. Why would you take on even more uncertainty with a child unless you really wanted to? In the past people didn't think about it. By the time they looked up they already had three kids and a wife. I think now people have the opportunity to mature a little bit and when they actually think about having kids they make the choice that it doesn't make sense.

Not a bad thing. Capitalism is way depressing.

I want kids, but i can barely afford to house myself 😞

Most women don't live on farms where they used to be equated with the livestock.

Why isn't a falling population considered a good thing, at this point -- if not a miraculous blessing? For two decades now, a commonly quoted statistic is that if all 8 billion humans enjoyed Americans' material consumption levels we'd need 4 or 5 more planets to supply the resources. Needless to say, this is not going to happen -- and Indeed, our planetary resource base is rapidly declining, both in quantity and quality, and we are likely polluting our oceans, aquifers, and atmosphere beyond repair. Why not celebrate the falling birthrate and reform our societies to support a smaller global population?

Ezra Klein keeps saying things that make me believe he thinks everyone in America is like him and his friends from graduate school. 13% of Americans have a master's degree. ~3% have a doctorate. Is it possible that not everyone is like him? Is it possible that economic numbers in the US don't accurately represent the level of distribution of income and wealth? Maybe the reason why most people are choosing to have fewer kids is that this amazing prosperity is actually not equally experienced. This is such a fundamental problem with NYT professional opinion-havers. They are a bit myopic. I, myself, have a doctorate in what has turned out to not be a very lucrative profession. I didn't go into it thinking it would make me rich, but I wasn't prepared for this level of precarity. The idea of buying a house, saving for retirement (or just retiring in general), let alone having a kid... These are all wildly unrealistic for me. So even some of us with graduate degrees aren't doing so well.

Because the planet is dying stupid.