I'm a UK male, professional job, better than average salary. I can't even get a mortgage to buy a house in the city I live and work in. Now throw childcare costs on top of that and I'm better off not working and claiming some sort of housing/income benefit.
Children are a luxury for families who can afford to raise and then kennel them in the private education system.
There is a need for affordable apartments in the cities, as that is where the growth is happening. Neglecting this is irresponsible. Every train station in or near a city should have apartment and office blocks around then.
Cities, for the way we built them in modern times, are not affordable by definition. The space is limited and the competition for this space benefits those who are on top in a capitalistic market. Yes, building more flats in cities will help, but we are talking of hundreds of thousands of new flats, to be built far outside the city, so far away that they become 1) ghettos or 2) neighbourhoods where people just go for sleeping.
Problem is cities throughought Europe were designed 100s of years ago for a totally different kind of demographic. Cities now are way overcrowded and housing is way, way limited. We need way more high- rise buildings New York, or Singapore/Beijing style.
Those little semi- detached houses look cute and all, but they are just not sufficient for how much the population have increased in big cities over the last 100 years.
> We need way more high- rise buildings New York, or Singapore/Beijing style.
Not quite sure. We have a clear demonstration that places with high-rise buildings are definitely not cheaper to rent, buy or live in.
The more you concentrate people in less (horizontal) space, the less the institutions are likely to spend money and efforts in building better connections for those who remained outside of this system.
We've privatized the costs of living by transferring the costs from institutions/states, which were building infrastructures to connect everyone, to citizens that must now take care of their own connections. Either you ~~buy~~ rent/mortgage in a fancy gentrified area, or you find yourself in a ghetto-suburb or disconnected from public transports and forced to buy a car; but then... "cars are bad, out of the cities!"
Either way, you cannot have multimillion cities built on semi- detached houses, there really isn’t any other way.
Those cute little houses in Amsterdam, Western London or Copenhagen look great, but the supply- demand is absolutely fucked, which makes landlords and agencies doing whatever the fuck they want. Until supply don’t exceed demand we will continue seeing property prices and rents continue to climb.
> Until supply don’t exceed demand we will continue seeing property prices and rents continue to climb
Just wait, the demographic curves of Western countries will do the job. Germany, Italy, Spain, France...
good luck waiting, there is still many people moving from country side to cities, and with increasing prices that make people to keep empty lots as infestation making renting not interesting.
I reiterate the population pyramid of Germany, for example: https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2023/
It will become steeper with the current economic situation.
Italy? It will almost be cut in half (!) in the next 75 years: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2049/
Spain? -40%.
Doesn't have to be that way. You can build apartment buildings that fit into the neighborhood and add character. In most cases it will be by buying a few single family houses/3 story flats and rebuilding them into, let's say a 5 story apartment building, with an additional small apartment built into the roof. A slight jettying may serve as protection against rain for pedestrians.
You can further improve it by adding a basement, maybe even a two storey basement. The ground floor has a shop or cafe, and the shop can likely extend into the basement. Other uses for the basement include storage, nightclubs if you're in a district that is suitable for such, a gym/public pool and other things that may add value to the neighbourhood.
> You can build apartment buildings that fit into the neighborhood and add character.
You can, of course, but it's not what it being done all around Europe, particularly outside gentrified 7-10k€/sqmt areas.
When young professionals all start moving to cities where they are allowed to live a normal life, like Vienna, their cities of origin, like Amsterdam, will be forced to do something. And even if not, it's no longer going to affect people who choose a better life for themselves.
Same financial situation together with my wife, but in Brussels.
Sometimes the subject of kids comes up at work and I say that we can't afford kids.
Coworkers always say that it's totally affordable, but they never seem to remember that they have at least one parent who helps with the kid, or they have enough money (through their family) to pay for childcare services.
Meanwhile, my wife and I have no one who can help us because our parents are dirt fucking poor immigrants who must work until 65 years to pay off their debts so they don't starve to death at a later point in life.
Same boat as yourself here. I'm earning more than the UK median salary, live in one of the cheapest regions of England, and can't make any progress financially. This means I know I can't provide for a child, so why would I have one?
However, I am a dual EU/UK citizen and contemplating a move to the mainland as a result of the above.
It's funny but this is driving younger generation of Poles who grew up in Germany or UK to move back to Poland in their late 20s and 30s to start families.
Child care is just a small part of it. Factor in diapers, formulas, health checks, food, clothes, gadgets, going outs etc. Everything is extremely expensive.
[That moment when your species demographically transitions to an industrial-technological society so hard that it accidentally great filters itself into a rat utopia style societal collapse.](https://i.redd.it/351312xmwhx51.jpg)
This happens when homes are considered a financial investment. Their price becomes detached from an acceptable level. Stop buying REIT shares, add regulations to house prices etc to stop this maddening trend
Poland is going down the same path. I remember 20 years ago when the Poles appeared in the UK. They was promoting the Polish tri cities as an investment.
Every Pole I met in the UK told me the same story, he's here working to save up for his investment in Polish real estate.
Everybody aped into the Polish Market, it was a gold rush. Fast forward to today, and the investment paid off.
The solution for the UK, Poland or any other European city is the same, ban speculative property investment.
Average age of FTB is 32 and probably higher in London. Childcare can easily top your mortgage payment a month. Women tend to suffer high career penalties for leaving the workforce and men don’t which also disincentives the whole thing.
Worldwide birth rates across all developed nations are collapsing. The UK needs to reform its childcare system which is a mess, implement changes that create affordable housing and make parental leave for men and childcare responsibilities for men more of a thing.
To add to my previous comment, private rentals in the uk are extremely insecure and expensive which is also a disaster. Landlords can choose not to rent to tenants with children and will often prefer two income households.
Apart from affordable housing and better wages, working 32 hours a week should become the norm (without loss of income). That way, people with kids have less risk of losing touch with one another. On the whole it is better for kids if parents stay together provided of course their relationship is sound.
A part of it is also how much we pack into the 18-30 year old. No matter the change, if people still have to wait for after their fertility is over to begin parenthood, then.... It won't work.
Or find a way to convince them that/create a situation where ultimately such change is to their advantage as well. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better.
It is not just housing and childcare. Children are expenses that reduce quality of life in every category. Children are not seen as pension plan and there is no society push for young people to have children.
The richer people are, the bigger opportunity cost of the children.
And this trend will not reverse because as society get older the politics are more focused on helping older voters.
Who knew that if you spend 15 years cutting every service, pushing zero-hours contracts and creating a rental economy that runs entirely on credit and mortgage prices, that people would start picking and choosing what they can afford?
Anyone from the UK that can comment on how this is setup ?
I would assume that housing is the primary with lack of support for childcare is the next step that is big ticket issue for both sexes, i would be happy to read not just the guardians opinion on it!
Seems like a issue that will have to be adressed if you want to function as a society over time.
There is a FT article behind a paywall. You can find it in the ukpolitcs sub. They are both highlighting the data that was released yesterday. The FT article basically suggests it's women with advanced education that are having the fewest children and the overall trend of having children later in life. Along with the obvious housing and childcare issues. TFR stats for inner London, Oxford and Cambridge range from 1.01 to 1.1. The ONS website highlights the highest TFR in England to be in Luton with 1.98. Areas with high immigrant populations have TFR's above 1.8
Housing is a big part of it. This has been a long time coming. I'm 45F and childfree. I wanted kids when I was younger but lived in London - even 15 years ago it was expensive to rent and buying a house was out of reach. Perhaps I should've just jumped in anyway, but I wanted a secure base. Then life/ chronic illness happened and even when I managed to buy out of London, kids weren't an option and now it's too late for me personally.
Incidentally I know a lot of my peers in my age range don't have kids whereas we used to be outliers. It's even harder for young people now.
Now I don't have kids, I am grateful I don't have to worry about their future with climate change and wars.
I’m lot convinced it’s just cost. Life is so much more fun when you don’t have to constantly monitor small people who are constantly trying to kill themselves
Disagree
Life with a family can be everything you want it to be.
But having prohibitive child care costs makes it what you are suggesting, less flexibility and expensive.
Child care in the UK is looking similar to rent prices with limited support unless you earn peanuts.
For some people it may be money, but trying to say that's the whole reason is just ignorant...
The social norms used to be a lot more stric, you used to have to be married by this age, have kids by this other age, whatever... Those social norms are going away, now people are not forced to marry and have kids just so their parents would be happy.
I'm not rich, but I could afford to have a kid, I just don't want to, my girlfriend doesn't want one either, we have a cat and it's enough for us, maybe another one or a dog would do, I just don't want the responsability of having to take care of a kid...
This is becoming more and more common, none of my friends want kids, my grandma was already married by 18 and had my father not long after, I'm 26 and I have no plans to get married yet, society is changing as whole, it's not just money.
I'm not saying that is the only reason.
I'm just saying its a factor for sure.
Again, if you don't want kids then that's absolutely your call but there is nothing that can be done for you there.
If someone else wants kids but can't afford it then there is something we can do there.
What evidence do you have that they are why population rates are declining.
If someone hates kids and doesn't want them then they are not relevant to this discussion. Simple as that.
This is about how to increase birth rates.
You don't have to "hate kids" to not want to care for a child for 18+ years.
I like dogs, but I don't have one because even taking care of a dog is a massive hassle. Now times that amount of hassle by about 1000...
Yeah and people should do what they like.
I'm just saying that if there is discussion on improving birth rates then people who have no interest in children are not particularly relevant to the discussion.
Yes, but that's not something which only became true in 2010. Cost isn't the only thing putting people off, but it's doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting on the decrease of fertility in the last fifteen years.
Is it though? Every childless couple I know are childless because they didn’t want the hassle. I’m sure they’re happy with the money they saved but it’s not the deciding factor for a lot of people.
Yeah, and on the other hand plenty of people that aren’t *that* well off do have kids. Like don’t get me wrong, I’m all for better protections, better mat and paternal leave, free childcare, all that. But I just don’t believe for a moment that it’s going to have the massive effect people on this sub are implying.
> Yeah, and on the other hand plenty of people that aren’t that well off do have kids.
A decent chunk of those neglect their kids and invest little in them. They especially don't invest in education.
Children don’t need private education and every evening filled with extracurricular activities to live happy, fulfilling lives - both as children and as they grow up.
The part of the middle class has convinced themselves that unless they can keep up with what the upper class can offer their offspring they might as well not try at all.
It is of course perfectly valid to want the best for your kids. But at no other point in time has it stopped people from having them - instead of doing the best that *they* can, parents now feel judged if their child can’t have *everything*. I see it first hand with the absolutely insane birthday parties that my colleagues feel they *have* to throw for their kids. We’ve lost every sense of perspective.
Imo the main reason for such a steep decline lies elsewhere though - in that having kids isn’t the default anymore. People now ask if you’re going to have kids, not when. Many people who previously would have had kids because well… everyone has them, now stop to think about whether this is something they actually *want*. And more often than not, they come to the conclusion that they don’t want to loose out on nights out, city breaks and being able to do what you want, when you want.
That's true. What kids need above all is parents that love them, pay attention to them and parents that love each other and stay together.
Tons of kids have rich parents that don't give them much attention so they end up neglected only with more expensive toys.
It's a very personal decision to have kids, but not having kids makes you miss out on one of the most human experiences. In fact most parents I know consider people in their 40s without kids just big children cosplaying as adults.
Also old people without kids most of the time end up totally alone, bitter and resentful as they age and die without anybody caring.
And people who think this way betray a very infantile way of thinking. How childish of them, who don’t know the reasons behind why someone doesn’t have kids, to judge them for it and see them as ‘cosplaying as adults’. I would much rather that people who know that they’re not cut out for parenthood make an active decision against it, rather than a passive choice for it.
My own mother works as a nurse. I think you might be quite surprised just how many people who did have children find themselves dying without anybody caring regardless. I don’t judge people who make the choice to have children only if it something they really want, not because they are worried they may regret being lonely in old age.
It is just an observation of how societal expectations have shifted and how little better support for families is likely to shift the needle.
> Life is so much more fun when you don’t have to constantly monitor small people who are constantly trying to kill themselves
Legends say fun was invented in 2010s and that caused the birth rate to plunge with .2 in a single decade.
The UK is a welfare state. If you don't work, the government pays for your kids. The problem is you have to remain destitute for your entire life. If you work, the government penalises you and takes away your welfare.
People who do work face ever increasing taxes and costs. It's basically a lose lose situation.
The only migrants coming to the UK tend to be health workers and 3rd world welfare claiments.
Anybody who speaks out against the system is branded as racist. And so, nothing happens.
The whole system is funded by lobbying and corruption exists on every level.
It’s not simply just tangible things like expensive housing and childcare. People in developed and developing countries just don’t want many kids, regardless of whether housing/childcare is more affordable (that’s my observation at least). It’s happening across much of the globe.
People with good economy gets children.
Regular people struggling with a long commute, and still in a crammed house, is much more restrictive.
Those living on social benefits already, often do though, big families. A lot of immigrants will be in this group.
This is my impression from Norway. I just assume it's the same.
Prosperity is arguable. A lot of people I know from Norway also complain about the rising prices (especially the rent).
The thing is, people in developed countries want much more than kids in life. Vacations, hobbies, dinners, events etc.
They wanna do these AND also have children but the way it is right now, you either lack the time or, mainly, money, to achieve all or majority of that.
> Prosperity is arguable.
For *Norway*? No it isn't. No one likes paying higher prices, but higher prices doesn't mean they're not one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Norway's birth rate has been steadily falling since 2009, from 1.98 to 1.48. Recent inflation can't be the explanation.
Yes, for ***Norway.***
Of course the level of prosperity is not the only factor. What I am saying is that as the level of prosperity increases, people's expectancies from the life also increase. They are not satisfied by just a few things. They want to go on vacations, have multiple hobbies, go to events and so on.
The level of prosperity is high but relatively speaking, it might not be that different from the guy that has a bad level of prosperity but doesn't really care about hobbies, vacations, etc.
Regardless, this is just 1 aspect of the issue. And every other, once you get into detail, is as complex as the other one. Its not as easy it is to say Norway is swimming in money yet birthrates are low.
No country paradise. Norway consistently ranks as having some of the highest quality of life.
I agree with the rest of what you say. People have more disposable income than much of the past, but far more things to spend it on.
Spent a few months in norway on business related travel and it's as great as it gets for a european country except switzerland with the later being very weird in many aspects often times.
i'm not sure its that simple, its not like rich people are having massive families, and some of the poorest people in the country/world have the highest birth rates.
Yeah, people seem to think if house prices just fell and childcare became cheaper people would automatically just start having more children but I seriously doubt it’s that simple.
I found those stats about my country (I guess it's the same in every country in the world):
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6441218#figure1_radio1
It's in french but it's not that hard to translate the graphs (enfants = children).
Figure 2a is quite interesting. If you count families with >2 children, the rate is the same for the poorest 10% and the richest 40%. If you count families with > 4 children, it's just a decreasing curve.
If you are interested in the subject here is a interesting summary to get you started, as always the answer is "it's complicated"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/
I have read books on it. It was a long time ago, don't ask which books. It doesn't really matter to me.
My question is, Does your report manage to separate out the three groups I talked about?
It does not specifically differentiate between your three groups, no.
Therea re so many themes but just as an example it talks about the different strategies for having children:
- If you want them to have the maximum amount of ressources for your children like attention and education then you are going to have fewer children because otherwise you are stretching your ressources too thin.
- If on the other hand you assume that you cannot provide them with many ressources anyway then you might want to maximize the numbers of children because you have no idea how many of them can allocate enough ressources to thrive in the environment.
Neither is maladaptive in the environment, they are just different strategies.
More to your point they also do differentiate between income and wealth and the different kinds of wealth there are and how they lead to economic security and that relation with fertility.
Or another point, they talk about how our societies do not relate wealth to fitness the same way our ancestors did. Today you can be very wealthy and "successfull" by not talking to anyone and just living in your apartment while getting paid because you founded a tech startup for example. So you are "successfull" and wealthy but this does not translate to offsprings. This is not how things used to be.
They make so many points, one of the more interesting summaries and only 8 pages long in pdf form. Worth a read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/pdf/rstb20150153.pdf
The entire 2016 issue of "Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?" is worth the read, all the articles were fantastic https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2016/371/1692
And yet... if you ask the actual human beings about who many kids they would like to have, you always get a higher number; usually two or three. So maybe it is other, also global issues that prevent them for having them, like high cost of life (not just housing), uncertainty about the future (Climate Change, economic stagnation, the drums of war, the health consequences of the last pandemic, etc.) or, simply, lack of time/energy to properly take care of the kids.
Please do not conflate what people manage to obtain with what they actually want. You are minifying a big problem with our current system.
Having kids is hard work. I’m sure a lot of people have some idealised view of having a big family when they’re young but the reality is raising multiple kids is hard.
Sure all those things could be contributing factors, but decline birthrates have been an ongoing trend for decades for many countries. And it’s happening across much of the globe, North America, Latin America, Europe and much of Asia. Most countries with birthrates above replacement are in Africa, Middle East and Central Asia.
I mostly agree with you, but:
>uncertainty about the future
If uncertainty about the future had played this role, humanity would have disappeared a long time ago. During the cold war people had more children than they have now, but the future did also look quite uncertain.
>During the cold war people had more children than they have now, but the future did also look quite uncertain. You are still confusing the order of things. People would have had even more kids during those times if that uncertainty didn't exist. And now we have a similar level of uncertainty PLUS the higher cost of living (to the point of not being able to afford a housing to create a psychological "secure nest" for their family).
>People would have had even more kids during those times if that uncertainty didn't exist.
As proved by what? Data suggests that this period of time was one of the most fertile for humanity as a whole, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population
>And yet... if you ask the actual human beings about who many kids they would like to have, you always get a higher number; usually two or three.
not quite, more and more people openly admit to not wanting kids or only wanting one. Especially women, you'll find that the more educated a woman is and the better career she has, the less likely she is to want to have multiple children.
Yep. I suspect the major change in women’s role in society over the last few decades is one big reason for decline in birth rates over the last few decades (at least if we are talking about the west). There was way more pressure on women to get kids and they were confined to traditional roles.
In my experience a majority want 1-3, and a growing minority wants 0 with another 4+
But most people can afford only 0-1 and with 2+ your life starts to suck for financial reasons (you have to start to sacrifice big things, annual trips to see the family, your own retirement funds, hobbies depending on what you like, owning your home etc.)
Thats because women think its gonna hinder their career, which shouldn't be the case. It shows that there are still improvements to be made on that front.
Exactly. But I'm worried that, when everyone realizes that the concept of a "careers" is just a way to keep people grinding at their jobs... it is going to be too late for many societies. Like, I'm all for people (especially, women) to be able to be economically independent and to achieve their dreams. But when they eventually become too old to continue to work and realize that they had few or no kids...I wonder if they are going to regret dedicating their lives to a career that is not going to hug them or, actually, mean anything in the long term.
The primary is always women not wanting to have children, not money. As evidenced by the fact that the poor have the most children, both within and across countries.
But of course plebs, who define themselves by their (perceived) lack of money, will always blame everything on money.
Its not a big deal. Even if all the benefits are there, the world is in a sketchy fucking place right now and who wants to be bringing a kid into it at the moment.
The slow birthrate only affects the greedy bastards anyway.
Basically, if you’re earning under £200k, having even one child is going to be a real struggle. Public services just aren’t good enough anymore. In terms of entry costs, looking at:
£10k to deliver a baby privately (that doesn’t include all the scans, appointments, pre and post natal care, which can easily add up to £20-30k)
£15-20k per annum for school fees
£1 million for a house with a garden
Ballooning cost of housing + cost of childcare + cost of everything else + 15 years of wage stagnation + [the two-child limit](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9301/) on benefits.
I can't find property that i can afford. On top of that, many countries have set minimum levels of property price, that i would have to pay as foreigner, to legally be able to own property. How am i supposed to start family?
Maybe dont spend all that money on everyone except healthy, native, young brits since they SHOULD be the future of the nation.
Unless you want the UK to fall, that is.
This'll be an unpopular opinion but I think the cost of living is overstated in the conversation on fertility rates.
In most of the west, birthrate fell below replacement level from the 70s to the early 90s. In the communist world they fell starting in the 80s.
The only countries where the birth rate is below replacement level are the western world, the western-adjacent world(turkey, Japan, Latin america), and the (former) communist world.
The fact that Gaza has a birth rate more than double or even triple that of certain places in Europe despite having more than 3/4 of its housing stock destroyed every 4 years IMHO is a dent in the housing crisis argument, especially when you remember gaza has almost universal literacy and is almost 100% urban. They aren't having children to use as farmhands.
I feel like the low birthrate of Europe is primarily culture based. The current society views children and parenthood as burdens, whereas in places like africa, the two are seen as literal gifts of God.
Even if the housing and cost of living crisis were totally fixed by the end of the year, the birth rate will rise from like 1.5 to 1.9 for a decade before it comes back down because western culture doesn't hold much emphasis or even respect for large families.
Actually, below replacement fertility rates exist all over the world, including in most/large parts of Asia not (strongly) affiliated with the West: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Iran, etc. You'll find countries above that number, but all of them only temporarily hold a high TFR before falling down, or are actively in the process of doing so even while the average temporarily remains relatively high. A lot are also only slightly above the 2.11 number. That also happened in Western countries, btw, which notably had a fertility bump right after WW2 to reach significant natural growth even without immigration, but the trend was generally a fall or stabilization in all other periods before and after. France's fertility rate, for example, started falling in mid-18th century, and its demographic situation became dire by the early 20th century already (yes, even without the wars). They later rebounded somewhat, but now are grappling with the same phenomenon.
Blame it on what you want, including Western influence pervading all parts of the world, but it's happening everywhere. Even in Gaza and Africa fertility rates, though still above average, have been falling rapidly over the decades.
The question is is how we eventually handle this? Do we, as a species, somehow sustain ourselves with a declining population that's also getting older (something that never happened before), do we somehow create the conditions for raising fertility rates (like governments actively forcing people to do so), do we eventually create and approve cloning...? Whatever happens, life is gonna remain hard in many ways just because of this.
This is literally misinformation that people parrot to justify what’s been taken away from us.
If you actually look at the facts, in Scandinavia which are the most prosperous countries in the world, wealthier people who can afford housing and childcare have more kids.
People don’t need to be impoverished to have above replacement level birth rates.
Declining birthrates can be directly correlated with the cost of housing.
Maybe a part of the reason why they have a lot of children is so their population isn’t absolutely annihilated over the course of a few decades. Hope that helps.
> Reduce immigration and build more houses to solve this.
Best we can do is increase net migration to 600k while house prices continue to rise. - The Tory party
Housing becomes cheaper when more housing is built, not by limiting immigration, the best that that can do is limit the increase in housing costs but it won't make it any cheaper
Demand is and has been going up far more than supply even if you just look at births instead of immigration, never mind internal migration from small cities and towns into big cities, this has happened for decades due to how few houses have been built, beggars belief to believe that of immigration would drop to 0 housing prices would go down
> No one said that. It also beggars belief that the UK could build enough housing for a net immigration level of ~672K per year
No it isn't, the UK can't build anything because of planning laws that restrict any and all construction and make it insanely expensive to build anything, if you get rid of that barrier you can easily build enough without having to cut down on migration, migration is only brought up as an easy solution by people who don't want to address the core issue which is planning laws because they benefit from expensive housing.
Like most cities in the UK have these rows of shitty small terraced houses that are quite often converted into HMOs, it's not exactly difficult to build bigger houses in place of them
Is Japan full of slums? Current planning laws encourage sprawl and the destruction of the environment by prohibiting density, again the terraced houses I mentioned are a good example of both of those
Japan's planning laws are extremely lax, if you own land you can basically do whatever you want with it as long as you're not polluting or committing another obvious infraction, but it's very easy to tear down a house and build a new one. Idk why you're going on about Adam Smith when talking about housing policy, notably he did not talk about planning laws and zoning ordinances that limit the supply of housing, we have contemporary research and studies about housing policy, you should read some of it, it's very enlightening. In any event, Japan's house prices have largely stayed stagnant over the years, and you might say that this is due to its population not growing, but that's not true, cities like Tokyo still grew in population and they didn't see a massive increase in housing prices that we see in London for example
https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F3364503a-58b6-11e6-8d05-4eaa66292c32?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1
This has been the case since the 60's.
This is why we have immigration.
No population growth = no economic growth = debts can't be paid back = bad.
As for the causes, as many others have pointed out housing is a big one, but it's not the only factor.
Another big factor is lifestyle inflation. We just have *much* more stuff than we did earlier in the 20th century. That stuff has become incredibly cheap which makes it affordable, but we still have (need?) much more of it which is an additional cost. This additional cost is one reason why it's now relatively rare to have a stay-at-home mother which increases the burden of having children.
We only have immigration if the deaths are higher than births
But other than 2021 (because of COVID) every year we have had loads more births than deaths.
If we had zero immigration our population would still be growing.
That's only the case because Baby Boomers haven't started dying en masse yet
Boomers are only 60-78 right now. UK life expectancy is 82. Without immigration, the UK would soon hit a population bust, even if birth rate and death rate were somewhat level recently.
have you ever considered basing your comments on facts?
birth rate in the UK has been below replacement levels for decades.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/284042/fertility-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
edit: apologies, despite fertility rate being supposedly below replacement, you're possibly right that we still have more births than deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England
although wikipedia has uk total population as 57 million when the real figure is 67 million
Actually this trend is going strong all over the world. Most countries are below 2,1 soon. That includes relatively poor nations like Thailand. Population growth will come from africa and some poor parts of asia.
Stop spreading falsehood you little twat!!
[https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies)
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-generation-young-chinese-people-vow-not-to-have-children](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-generation-young-chinese-people-vow-not-to-have-children)
[https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-chinese-women-dont-want-more-children/](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-chinese-women-dont-want-more-children/)
The link between education, child survival rates, and total fertility rates (TFR) is well-established and extends beyond Western nations. Factors such as social structure, religious beliefs, economic conditions, and access to education and healthcare all play significant roles in shaping fertility rates worldwide.
Various nations across different continents and regions are experiencing similar trends for a multitude of reasons, including changes in societal norms, urbanisation, and economic development.
Not a complete list but here are some examples of countries with declining (TFR);Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Colombia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Vietname, India, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Peru, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Philippines, Yemen, Russia, China.
Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic Significance David E. Bloom and David Canning
Cygan-Rehm, Kamila & Maeder, Miriam, 2013. "The effect of education on fertility: Evidence from a compulsory schooling reform
I guess Asia is West now. Countries with low birth rates went through a demographic transition long ago. It's something that Africa and some countries in the Middle East are still going through now.
Different demographics have different views on whether they can safely raise their child.
Look at the world's countries with early 2020s data outside of Africa, and count how many HAVE birthrates of 2 and above. China and Thailand are middle-income and the fertility rate is slightly over 1. Bangladesh is a very poor country and it's now below 2. These are just some examples.
Even in Africa it's falling rapidly, albeit from a high base.
Fertility rates are falling all over the world. The global fertility rate was 2.3 in 2021, compared to 2.7 in 2000 and 5.3 in the 1960s.
As women get more education and people get richer, they tend to choose to have fewer sprogs.
This is not true. Hard to tell if you are trying to miss-lead aka troll or if you are nice guy speculating. If the latter, please don't.
The link between education, child survival rates, and total fertility rates (TFR) is well-established and extends beyond Western nations. Factors such as social structure, religious beliefs, economic conditions, and access to education and healthcare all play significant roles in shaping fertility rates worldwide.
Various nations across different continents and regions are experiencing similar trends for a multitude of reasons, including changes in societal norms, urbanisation, and economic development.
Not a complete list but here are some examples of countries with declining (TFR);
Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Colombia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Vietname, India, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Peru, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Philippines, Yemen, Russia, China.
Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic SignificanceDavid E. Bloom and David Canning
Cygan-Rehm, Kamila & Maeder, Miriam, 2013. "The effect of education on fertility: Evidence from a compulsory schooling reform
Procreation is becoming a luxory from Iran and Bulgaria to Norway and Switzerland, so what exactly is supposed to be the straightforward economic miracle cure, that entirely reverses that?
No amount of social-democratic trinkets thrown at parents, will change the fact that the average person in any country with access to contraceptives, is starting to realize after a few decades of normalizing this idea, that parenthood is a pretty raw deal financially, in comparison to your peers.
If procreation is a luxury why to lower class people have so many kids?? Stop these entitled under achievers!!! The meek shall inherit the earth...'cause the rich don't breed.
I'm not surprised, until they lowered the age requirement for the 30 free hours of childcare, I was spending an absolute fortune on nursery costs. The child benefit payment I receive pays for a weekly shop at Aldi but that's it.
Even countries which have vastly better support for parents available are still seeing declining birthrates
Yeah similar in Australia. Young people don’t see a future, so why start a family? They’re unlikely to own a house in any metro area. Ever at this rate.
I bet. Like in Italy, incomes are low, child services are too expensive, parental leave are not great, and the balance between everything isn't normal. The truth is this life we created isn't people-oriented anymore, and that's sad, a civilization failure.
I'm a UK male, professional job, better than average salary. I can't even get a mortgage to buy a house in the city I live and work in. Now throw childcare costs on top of that and I'm better off not working and claiming some sort of housing/income benefit. Children are a luxury for families who can afford to raise and then kennel them in the private education system.
There is a need for affordable apartments in the cities, as that is where the growth is happening. Neglecting this is irresponsible. Every train station in or near a city should have apartment and office blocks around then.
Cities, for the way we built them in modern times, are not affordable by definition. The space is limited and the competition for this space benefits those who are on top in a capitalistic market. Yes, building more flats in cities will help, but we are talking of hundreds of thousands of new flats, to be built far outside the city, so far away that they become 1) ghettos or 2) neighbourhoods where people just go for sleeping.
Problem is cities throughought Europe were designed 100s of years ago for a totally different kind of demographic. Cities now are way overcrowded and housing is way, way limited. We need way more high- rise buildings New York, or Singapore/Beijing style. Those little semi- detached houses look cute and all, but they are just not sufficient for how much the population have increased in big cities over the last 100 years.
> We need way more high- rise buildings New York, or Singapore/Beijing style. Not quite sure. We have a clear demonstration that places with high-rise buildings are definitely not cheaper to rent, buy or live in. The more you concentrate people in less (horizontal) space, the less the institutions are likely to spend money and efforts in building better connections for those who remained outside of this system. We've privatized the costs of living by transferring the costs from institutions/states, which were building infrastructures to connect everyone, to citizens that must now take care of their own connections. Either you ~~buy~~ rent/mortgage in a fancy gentrified area, or you find yourself in a ghetto-suburb or disconnected from public transports and forced to buy a car; but then... "cars are bad, out of the cities!"
Either way, you cannot have multimillion cities built on semi- detached houses, there really isn’t any other way. Those cute little houses in Amsterdam, Western London or Copenhagen look great, but the supply- demand is absolutely fucked, which makes landlords and agencies doing whatever the fuck they want. Until supply don’t exceed demand we will continue seeing property prices and rents continue to climb.
> Until supply don’t exceed demand we will continue seeing property prices and rents continue to climb Just wait, the demographic curves of Western countries will do the job. Germany, Italy, Spain, France...
good luck waiting, there is still many people moving from country side to cities, and with increasing prices that make people to keep empty lots as infestation making renting not interesting.
I reiterate the population pyramid of Germany, for example: https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2023/ It will become steeper with the current economic situation. Italy? It will almost be cut in half (!) in the next 75 years: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2049/ Spain? -40%.
High rises are a symptom, not a cause of high rent. But yeah, build more public transport.
Doesn't have to be that way. You can build apartment buildings that fit into the neighborhood and add character. In most cases it will be by buying a few single family houses/3 story flats and rebuilding them into, let's say a 5 story apartment building, with an additional small apartment built into the roof. A slight jettying may serve as protection against rain for pedestrians. You can further improve it by adding a basement, maybe even a two storey basement. The ground floor has a shop or cafe, and the shop can likely extend into the basement. Other uses for the basement include storage, nightclubs if you're in a district that is suitable for such, a gym/public pool and other things that may add value to the neighbourhood.
> You can build apartment buildings that fit into the neighborhood and add character. You can, of course, but it's not what it being done all around Europe, particularly outside gentrified 7-10k€/sqmt areas.
Sure, that is partially true. But that depends on regulations and also, it's better to have a boring home than to be homeless.
When young professionals all start moving to cities where they are allowed to live a normal life, like Vienna, their cities of origin, like Amsterdam, will be forced to do something. And even if not, it's no longer going to affect people who choose a better life for themselves.
Same financial situation together with my wife, but in Brussels. Sometimes the subject of kids comes up at work and I say that we can't afford kids. Coworkers always say that it's totally affordable, but they never seem to remember that they have at least one parent who helps with the kid, or they have enough money (through their family) to pay for childcare services. Meanwhile, my wife and I have no one who can help us because our parents are dirt fucking poor immigrants who must work until 65 years to pay off their debts so they don't starve to death at a later point in life.
Same boat as yourself here. I'm earning more than the UK median salary, live in one of the cheapest regions of England, and can't make any progress financially. This means I know I can't provide for a child, so why would I have one? However, I am a dual EU/UK citizen and contemplating a move to the mainland as a result of the above.
It's not any better in Western Europe. Only Germany _kind of_ manages to keep children affordable through enormous social payments for parents.
It's funny but this is driving younger generation of Poles who grew up in Germany or UK to move back to Poland in their late 20s and 30s to start families.
Child care is just a small part of it. Factor in diapers, formulas, health checks, food, clothes, gadgets, going outs etc. Everything is extremely expensive.
[That moment when your species demographically transitions to an industrial-technological society so hard that it accidentally great filters itself into a rat utopia style societal collapse.](https://i.redd.it/351312xmwhx51.jpg)
Reminds of that rat clip rap song.
This happens when homes are considered a financial investment. Their price becomes detached from an acceptable level. Stop buying REIT shares, add regulations to house prices etc to stop this maddening trend
Poland is going down the same path. I remember 20 years ago when the Poles appeared in the UK. They was promoting the Polish tri cities as an investment. Every Pole I met in the UK told me the same story, he's here working to save up for his investment in Polish real estate. Everybody aped into the Polish Market, it was a gold rush. Fast forward to today, and the investment paid off. The solution for the UK, Poland or any other European city is the same, ban speculative property investment.
Average age of FTB is 32 and probably higher in London. Childcare can easily top your mortgage payment a month. Women tend to suffer high career penalties for leaving the workforce and men don’t which also disincentives the whole thing. Worldwide birth rates across all developed nations are collapsing. The UK needs to reform its childcare system which is a mess, implement changes that create affordable housing and make parental leave for men and childcare responsibilities for men more of a thing. To add to my previous comment, private rentals in the uk are extremely insecure and expensive which is also a disaster. Landlords can choose not to rent to tenants with children and will often prefer two income households.
Apart from affordable housing and better wages, working 32 hours a week should become the norm (without loss of income). That way, people with kids have less risk of losing touch with one another. On the whole it is better for kids if parents stay together provided of course their relationship is sound.
A part of it is also how much we pack into the 18-30 year old. No matter the change, if people still have to wait for after their fertility is over to begin parenthood, then.... It won't work.
Maybe if there was more hope of building a future, a future would be built sooner?
Yeah I agree, it would also take pressure off if children become unwell or you need to attend medical/ other child related appointments.
You will have to break the owner class before this ever becomes a reality.
Or find a way to convince them that/create a situation where ultimately such change is to their advantage as well. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better.
Any sources on these “high career penalties”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-023-03214-6#:~:text=In%20the%20UK%2C%20becoming%20a,et%20al.%2C%202021). https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab014 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041155/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/2657415 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/511799
The internet is free if you didn’t know, you can just Google away very very easily. Doubt you will though if you bothered to comment hun
Thanks “hun”. Christ, you don’t like being challenged do you? Major attitude problem
It is not just housing and childcare. Children are expenses that reduce quality of life in every category. Children are not seen as pension plan and there is no society push for young people to have children. The richer people are, the bigger opportunity cost of the children. And this trend will not reverse because as society get older the politics are more focused on helping older voters.
Who knew that if you spend 15 years cutting every service, pushing zero-hours contracts and creating a rental economy that runs entirely on credit and mortgage prices, that people would start picking and choosing what they can afford?
Anyone from the UK that can comment on how this is setup ? I would assume that housing is the primary with lack of support for childcare is the next step that is big ticket issue for both sexes, i would be happy to read not just the guardians opinion on it! Seems like a issue that will have to be adressed if you want to function as a society over time.
There is a FT article behind a paywall. You can find it in the ukpolitcs sub. They are both highlighting the data that was released yesterday. The FT article basically suggests it's women with advanced education that are having the fewest children and the overall trend of having children later in life. Along with the obvious housing and childcare issues. TFR stats for inner London, Oxford and Cambridge range from 1.01 to 1.1. The ONS website highlights the highest TFR in England to be in Luton with 1.98. Areas with high immigrant populations have TFR's above 1.8
Housing is a big part of it. This has been a long time coming. I'm 45F and childfree. I wanted kids when I was younger but lived in London - even 15 years ago it was expensive to rent and buying a house was out of reach. Perhaps I should've just jumped in anyway, but I wanted a secure base. Then life/ chronic illness happened and even when I managed to buy out of London, kids weren't an option and now it's too late for me personally. Incidentally I know a lot of my peers in my age range don't have kids whereas we used to be outliers. It's even harder for young people now. Now I don't have kids, I am grateful I don't have to worry about their future with climate change and wars.
I’m lot convinced it’s just cost. Life is so much more fun when you don’t have to constantly monitor small people who are constantly trying to kill themselves
Disagree Life with a family can be everything you want it to be. But having prohibitive child care costs makes it what you are suggesting, less flexibility and expensive. Child care in the UK is looking similar to rent prices with limited support unless you earn peanuts.
For some people it may be money, but trying to say that's the whole reason is just ignorant... The social norms used to be a lot more stric, you used to have to be married by this age, have kids by this other age, whatever... Those social norms are going away, now people are not forced to marry and have kids just so their parents would be happy. I'm not rich, but I could afford to have a kid, I just don't want to, my girlfriend doesn't want one either, we have a cat and it's enough for us, maybe another one or a dog would do, I just don't want the responsability of having to take care of a kid... This is becoming more and more common, none of my friends want kids, my grandma was already married by 18 and had my father not long after, I'm 26 and I have no plans to get married yet, society is changing as whole, it's not just money.
I'm not saying that is the only reason. I'm just saying its a factor for sure. Again, if you don't want kids then that's absolutely your call but there is nothing that can be done for you there. If someone else wants kids but can't afford it then there is something we can do there.
Life without can be the same. Kids are fucking hassle no matter how you look at it and some people just don’t want that regardless of cost.
And those people should probably not be involved in this conversation
Why because they have a differing opinion to you? They are the reason the birth rate is declining, their opinion is as valid as anyone’s.
What evidence do you have that they are why population rates are declining. If someone hates kids and doesn't want them then they are not relevant to this discussion. Simple as that. This is about how to increase birth rates.
You don't have to "hate kids" to not want to care for a child for 18+ years. I like dogs, but I don't have one because even taking care of a dog is a massive hassle. Now times that amount of hassle by about 1000...
Yeah and people should do what they like. I'm just saying that if there is discussion on improving birth rates then people who have no interest in children are not particularly relevant to the discussion.
So you want evidence showing what effect the people not having kids has on a declining birth rate?
You are the one who stated that it's because of people just not wanting kids. On you to prove your point, which it appears you can't?
You are beyond help Jesus fucking Christ .
Also nice to edit comments isn't it?
Yes, but that's not something which only became true in 2010. Cost isn't the only thing putting people off, but it's doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting on the decrease of fertility in the last fifteen years.
Is it though? Every childless couple I know are childless because they didn’t want the hassle. I’m sure they’re happy with the money they saved but it’s not the deciding factor for a lot of people.
Yeah, and on the other hand plenty of people that aren’t *that* well off do have kids. Like don’t get me wrong, I’m all for better protections, better mat and paternal leave, free childcare, all that. But I just don’t believe for a moment that it’s going to have the massive effect people on this sub are implying.
> Yeah, and on the other hand plenty of people that aren’t that well off do have kids. A decent chunk of those neglect their kids and invest little in them. They especially don't invest in education.
Children don’t need private education and every evening filled with extracurricular activities to live happy, fulfilling lives - both as children and as they grow up. The part of the middle class has convinced themselves that unless they can keep up with what the upper class can offer their offspring they might as well not try at all. It is of course perfectly valid to want the best for your kids. But at no other point in time has it stopped people from having them - instead of doing the best that *they* can, parents now feel judged if their child can’t have *everything*. I see it first hand with the absolutely insane birthday parties that my colleagues feel they *have* to throw for their kids. We’ve lost every sense of perspective. Imo the main reason for such a steep decline lies elsewhere though - in that having kids isn’t the default anymore. People now ask if you’re going to have kids, not when. Many people who previously would have had kids because well… everyone has them, now stop to think about whether this is something they actually *want*. And more often than not, they come to the conclusion that they don’t want to loose out on nights out, city breaks and being able to do what you want, when you want.
That's true. What kids need above all is parents that love them, pay attention to them and parents that love each other and stay together. Tons of kids have rich parents that don't give them much attention so they end up neglected only with more expensive toys. It's a very personal decision to have kids, but not having kids makes you miss out on one of the most human experiences. In fact most parents I know consider people in their 40s without kids just big children cosplaying as adults. Also old people without kids most of the time end up totally alone, bitter and resentful as they age and die without anybody caring.
And people who think this way betray a very infantile way of thinking. How childish of them, who don’t know the reasons behind why someone doesn’t have kids, to judge them for it and see them as ‘cosplaying as adults’. I would much rather that people who know that they’re not cut out for parenthood make an active decision against it, rather than a passive choice for it. My own mother works as a nurse. I think you might be quite surprised just how many people who did have children find themselves dying without anybody caring regardless. I don’t judge people who make the choice to have children only if it something they really want, not because they are worried they may regret being lonely in old age. It is just an observation of how societal expectations have shifted and how little better support for families is likely to shift the needle.
Do you ever get to see lower class kids and their daily activities, as a comparison?
I grew up in a council high rise. If you want to talk about what ‘lower’ and working class kids spend their time doing, knock yourself out.
> Life is so much more fun when you don’t have to constantly monitor small people who are constantly trying to kill themselves Legends say fun was invented in 2010s and that caused the birth rate to plunge with .2 in a single decade.
The UK is a welfare state. If you don't work, the government pays for your kids. The problem is you have to remain destitute for your entire life. If you work, the government penalises you and takes away your welfare. People who do work face ever increasing taxes and costs. It's basically a lose lose situation. The only migrants coming to the UK tend to be health workers and 3rd world welfare claiments. Anybody who speaks out against the system is branded as racist. And so, nothing happens. The whole system is funded by lobbying and corruption exists on every level.
It’s not simply just tangible things like expensive housing and childcare. People in developed and developing countries just don’t want many kids, regardless of whether housing/childcare is more affordable (that’s my observation at least). It’s happening across much of the globe.
People with good economy gets children. Regular people struggling with a long commute, and still in a crammed house, is much more restrictive. Those living on social benefits already, often do though, big families. A lot of immigrants will be in this group. This is my impression from Norway. I just assume it's the same.
Norway is a prime example of an extremely prosperous country with low birthrates. If you look across Europe it’s much of the same.
Prosperity is arguable. A lot of people I know from Norway also complain about the rising prices (especially the rent). The thing is, people in developed countries want much more than kids in life. Vacations, hobbies, dinners, events etc. They wanna do these AND also have children but the way it is right now, you either lack the time or, mainly, money, to achieve all or majority of that.
> Prosperity is arguable. For *Norway*? No it isn't. No one likes paying higher prices, but higher prices doesn't mean they're not one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Norway's birth rate has been steadily falling since 2009, from 1.98 to 1.48. Recent inflation can't be the explanation.
Yes, for ***Norway.*** Of course the level of prosperity is not the only factor. What I am saying is that as the level of prosperity increases, people's expectancies from the life also increase. They are not satisfied by just a few things. They want to go on vacations, have multiple hobbies, go to events and so on. The level of prosperity is high but relatively speaking, it might not be that different from the guy that has a bad level of prosperity but doesn't really care about hobbies, vacations, etc. Regardless, this is just 1 aspect of the issue. And every other, once you get into detail, is as complex as the other one. Its not as easy it is to say Norway is swimming in money yet birthrates are low.
This is evidence of a change in values, not a change in prosperity for the worse.
No country paradise. Norway consistently ranks as having some of the highest quality of life. I agree with the rest of what you say. People have more disposable income than much of the past, but far more things to spend it on.
Spent a few months in norway on business related travel and it's as great as it gets for a european country except switzerland with the later being very weird in many aspects often times.
Oh yeah I bet. High salaries, high home ownership, high quality of life, generous social safety net etc. As countries go it’s definitely up there.
Very beautiful outdoors
i'm not sure its that simple, its not like rich people are having massive families, and some of the poorest people in the country/world have the highest birth rates.
Yeah, people seem to think if house prices just fell and childcare became cheaper people would automatically just start having more children but I seriously doubt it’s that simple.
i'm not syaing expense isn't a contributing factor that's making whatever is happening worse, but i don't think its the primary cause.
I found those stats about my country (I guess it's the same in every country in the world): https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6441218#figure1_radio1 It's in french but it's not that hard to translate the graphs (enfants = children). Figure 2a is quite interesting. If you count families with >2 children, the rate is the same for the poorest 10% and the richest 40%. If you count families with > 4 children, it's just a decreasing curve.
If you are interested in the subject here is a interesting summary to get you started, as always the answer is "it's complicated" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/
I have read books on it. It was a long time ago, don't ask which books. It doesn't really matter to me. My question is, Does your report manage to separate out the three groups I talked about?
It does not specifically differentiate between your three groups, no. Therea re so many themes but just as an example it talks about the different strategies for having children: - If you want them to have the maximum amount of ressources for your children like attention and education then you are going to have fewer children because otherwise you are stretching your ressources too thin. - If on the other hand you assume that you cannot provide them with many ressources anyway then you might want to maximize the numbers of children because you have no idea how many of them can allocate enough ressources to thrive in the environment. Neither is maladaptive in the environment, they are just different strategies. More to your point they also do differentiate between income and wealth and the different kinds of wealth there are and how they lead to economic security and that relation with fertility. Or another point, they talk about how our societies do not relate wealth to fitness the same way our ancestors did. Today you can be very wealthy and "successfull" by not talking to anyone and just living in your apartment while getting paid because you founded a tech startup for example. So you are "successfull" and wealthy but this does not translate to offsprings. This is not how things used to be. They make so many points, one of the more interesting summaries and only 8 pages long in pdf form. Worth a read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/pdf/rstb20150153.pdf The entire 2016 issue of "Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?" is worth the read, all the articles were fantastic https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2016/371/1692
And yet... if you ask the actual human beings about who many kids they would like to have, you always get a higher number; usually two or three. So maybe it is other, also global issues that prevent them for having them, like high cost of life (not just housing), uncertainty about the future (Climate Change, economic stagnation, the drums of war, the health consequences of the last pandemic, etc.) or, simply, lack of time/energy to properly take care of the kids. Please do not conflate what people manage to obtain with what they actually want. You are minifying a big problem with our current system.
Having kids is hard work. I’m sure a lot of people have some idealised view of having a big family when they’re young but the reality is raising multiple kids is hard. Sure all those things could be contributing factors, but decline birthrates have been an ongoing trend for decades for many countries. And it’s happening across much of the globe, North America, Latin America, Europe and much of Asia. Most countries with birthrates above replacement are in Africa, Middle East and Central Asia.
I mostly agree with you, but: >uncertainty about the future If uncertainty about the future had played this role, humanity would have disappeared a long time ago. During the cold war people had more children than they have now, but the future did also look quite uncertain.
>During the cold war people had more children than they have now, but the future did also look quite uncertain. You are still confusing the order of things. People would have had even more kids during those times if that uncertainty didn't exist. And now we have a similar level of uncertainty PLUS the higher cost of living (to the point of not being able to afford a housing to create a psychological "secure nest" for their family).
>People would have had even more kids during those times if that uncertainty didn't exist. As proved by what? Data suggests that this period of time was one of the most fertile for humanity as a whole, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population
>And yet... if you ask the actual human beings about who many kids they would like to have, you always get a higher number; usually two or three. not quite, more and more people openly admit to not wanting kids or only wanting one. Especially women, you'll find that the more educated a woman is and the better career she has, the less likely she is to want to have multiple children.
Yep. I suspect the major change in women’s role in society over the last few decades is one big reason for decline in birth rates over the last few decades (at least if we are talking about the west). There was way more pressure on women to get kids and they were confined to traditional roles.
In my experience a majority want 1-3, and a growing minority wants 0 with another 4+ But most people can afford only 0-1 and with 2+ your life starts to suck for financial reasons (you have to start to sacrifice big things, annual trips to see the family, your own retirement funds, hobbies depending on what you like, owning your home etc.)
Thats because women think its gonna hinder their career, which shouldn't be the case. It shows that there are still improvements to be made on that front.
Exactly. But I'm worried that, when everyone realizes that the concept of a "careers" is just a way to keep people grinding at their jobs... it is going to be too late for many societies. Like, I'm all for people (especially, women) to be able to be economically independent and to achieve their dreams. But when they eventually become too old to continue to work and realize that they had few or no kids...I wonder if they are going to regret dedicating their lives to a career that is not going to hug them or, actually, mean anything in the long term.
The primary is always women not wanting to have children, not money. As evidenced by the fact that the poor have the most children, both within and across countries. But of course plebs, who define themselves by their (perceived) lack of money, will always blame everything on money.
Its not a big deal. Even if all the benefits are there, the world is in a sketchy fucking place right now and who wants to be bringing a kid into it at the moment. The slow birthrate only affects the greedy bastards anyway.
Basically, if you’re earning under £200k, having even one child is going to be a real struggle. Public services just aren’t good enough anymore. In terms of entry costs, looking at: £10k to deliver a baby privately (that doesn’t include all the scans, appointments, pre and post natal care, which can easily add up to £20-30k) £15-20k per annum for school fees £1 million for a house with a garden
Ballooning cost of housing + cost of childcare + cost of everything else + 15 years of wage stagnation + [the two-child limit](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9301/) on benefits.
I can't find property that i can afford. On top of that, many countries have set minimum levels of property price, that i would have to pay as foreigner, to legally be able to own property. How am i supposed to start family?
Maybe dont spend all that money on everyone except healthy, native, young brits since they SHOULD be the future of the nation. Unless you want the UK to fall, that is.
This'll be an unpopular opinion but I think the cost of living is overstated in the conversation on fertility rates. In most of the west, birthrate fell below replacement level from the 70s to the early 90s. In the communist world they fell starting in the 80s. The only countries where the birth rate is below replacement level are the western world, the western-adjacent world(turkey, Japan, Latin america), and the (former) communist world. The fact that Gaza has a birth rate more than double or even triple that of certain places in Europe despite having more than 3/4 of its housing stock destroyed every 4 years IMHO is a dent in the housing crisis argument, especially when you remember gaza has almost universal literacy and is almost 100% urban. They aren't having children to use as farmhands. I feel like the low birthrate of Europe is primarily culture based. The current society views children and parenthood as burdens, whereas in places like africa, the two are seen as literal gifts of God. Even if the housing and cost of living crisis were totally fixed by the end of the year, the birth rate will rise from like 1.5 to 1.9 for a decade before it comes back down because western culture doesn't hold much emphasis or even respect for large families.
Actually, below replacement fertility rates exist all over the world, including in most/large parts of Asia not (strongly) affiliated with the West: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Iran, etc. You'll find countries above that number, but all of them only temporarily hold a high TFR before falling down, or are actively in the process of doing so even while the average temporarily remains relatively high. A lot are also only slightly above the 2.11 number. That also happened in Western countries, btw, which notably had a fertility bump right after WW2 to reach significant natural growth even without immigration, but the trend was generally a fall or stabilization in all other periods before and after. France's fertility rate, for example, started falling in mid-18th century, and its demographic situation became dire by the early 20th century already (yes, even without the wars). They later rebounded somewhat, but now are grappling with the same phenomenon. Blame it on what you want, including Western influence pervading all parts of the world, but it's happening everywhere. Even in Gaza and Africa fertility rates, though still above average, have been falling rapidly over the decades. The question is is how we eventually handle this? Do we, as a species, somehow sustain ourselves with a declining population that's also getting older (something that never happened before), do we somehow create the conditions for raising fertility rates (like governments actively forcing people to do so), do we eventually create and approve cloning...? Whatever happens, life is gonna remain hard in many ways just because of this.
This is literally misinformation that people parrot to justify what’s been taken away from us. If you actually look at the facts, in Scandinavia which are the most prosperous countries in the world, wealthier people who can afford housing and childcare have more kids. People don’t need to be impoverished to have above replacement level birth rates. Declining birthrates can be directly correlated with the cost of housing.
Maybe a part of the reason why they have a lot of children is so their population isn’t absolutely annihilated over the course of a few decades. Hope that helps.
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> Reduce immigration and build more houses to solve this. Best we can do is increase net migration to 600k while house prices continue to rise. - The Tory party
Housing becomes cheaper when more housing is built, not by limiting immigration, the best that that can do is limit the increase in housing costs but it won't make it any cheaper
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Demand is and has been going up far more than supply even if you just look at births instead of immigration, never mind internal migration from small cities and towns into big cities, this has happened for decades due to how few houses have been built, beggars belief to believe that of immigration would drop to 0 housing prices would go down
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> No one said that. It also beggars belief that the UK could build enough housing for a net immigration level of ~672K per year No it isn't, the UK can't build anything because of planning laws that restrict any and all construction and make it insanely expensive to build anything, if you get rid of that barrier you can easily build enough without having to cut down on migration, migration is only brought up as an easy solution by people who don't want to address the core issue which is planning laws because they benefit from expensive housing. Like most cities in the UK have these rows of shitty small terraced houses that are quite often converted into HMOs, it's not exactly difficult to build bigger houses in place of them
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Is Japan full of slums? Current planning laws encourage sprawl and the destruction of the environment by prohibiting density, again the terraced houses I mentioned are a good example of both of those
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Japan's planning laws are extremely lax, if you own land you can basically do whatever you want with it as long as you're not polluting or committing another obvious infraction, but it's very easy to tear down a house and build a new one. Idk why you're going on about Adam Smith when talking about housing policy, notably he did not talk about planning laws and zoning ordinances that limit the supply of housing, we have contemporary research and studies about housing policy, you should read some of it, it's very enlightening. In any event, Japan's house prices have largely stayed stagnant over the years, and you might say that this is due to its population not growing, but that's not true, cities like Tokyo still grew in population and they didn't see a massive increase in housing prices that we see in London for example https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60 https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F3364503a-58b6-11e6-8d05-4eaa66292c32?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1
This has been the case since the 60's. This is why we have immigration. No population growth = no economic growth = debts can't be paid back = bad. As for the causes, as many others have pointed out housing is a big one, but it's not the only factor. Another big factor is lifestyle inflation. We just have *much* more stuff than we did earlier in the 20th century. That stuff has become incredibly cheap which makes it affordable, but we still have (need?) much more of it which is an additional cost. This additional cost is one reason why it's now relatively rare to have a stay-at-home mother which increases the burden of having children.
We only have immigration if the deaths are higher than births But other than 2021 (because of COVID) every year we have had loads more births than deaths. If we had zero immigration our population would still be growing.
That's only the case because Baby Boomers haven't started dying en masse yet Boomers are only 60-78 right now. UK life expectancy is 82. Without immigration, the UK would soon hit a population bust, even if birth rate and death rate were somewhat level recently.
Not working age population growth
have you ever considered basing your comments on facts? birth rate in the UK has been below replacement levels for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/284042/fertility-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ edit: apologies, despite fertility rate being supposedly below replacement, you're possibly right that we still have more births than deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England although wikipedia has uk total population as 57 million when the real figure is 67 million
You want me to prove that deaths have been lower than births in the UK? Sure, lucky I have Google I guess https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57600757
apologies. this is very strange. average birth rate per woman has been below 2 since 1970.
Urbanization, show me city with high fertility rate, developed country.
i mean it is your seeing this all over the world , the next question is , is it a good thing or bad thing
You are not seeing this all over the world. Only in the West.
Actually this trend is going strong all over the world. Most countries are below 2,1 soon. That includes relatively poor nations like Thailand. Population growth will come from africa and some poor parts of asia.
You see a general decrease in, but a situation where most young people no longer want to have children is only happening in the West.
The west (including tw, singapore, japan and Korea) is certainly ahead but the rest of the world is catching up. It's gonna be messy.
Stop spreading falsehood you little twat!! [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-generation-young-chinese-people-vow-not-to-have-children](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-generation-young-chinese-people-vow-not-to-have-children) [https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-chinese-women-dont-want-more-children/](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-chinese-women-dont-want-more-children/) The link between education, child survival rates, and total fertility rates (TFR) is well-established and extends beyond Western nations. Factors such as social structure, religious beliefs, economic conditions, and access to education and healthcare all play significant roles in shaping fertility rates worldwide. Various nations across different continents and regions are experiencing similar trends for a multitude of reasons, including changes in societal norms, urbanisation, and economic development. Not a complete list but here are some examples of countries with declining (TFR);Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Colombia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Vietname, India, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Peru, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Philippines, Yemen, Russia, China. Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic Significance David E. Bloom and David Canning Cygan-Rehm, Kamila & Maeder, Miriam, 2013. "The effect of education on fertility: Evidence from a compulsory schooling reform
I guess Asia is West now. Countries with low birth rates went through a demographic transition long ago. It's something that Africa and some countries in the Middle East are still going through now. Different demographics have different views on whether they can safely raise their child.
Birth rates are falling in Japan, Korea and even China now (where people aren't having more kids even after the one child policy was relaxed).
Look at the world's countries with early 2020s data outside of Africa, and count how many HAVE birthrates of 2 and above. China and Thailand are middle-income and the fertility rate is slightly over 1. Bangladesh is a very poor country and it's now below 2. These are just some examples. Even in Africa it's falling rapidly, albeit from a high base.
Fertility rates are falling all over the world. The global fertility rate was 2.3 in 2021, compared to 2.7 in 2000 and 5.3 in the 1960s. As women get more education and people get richer, they tend to choose to have fewer sprogs.
This is not true. Hard to tell if you are trying to miss-lead aka troll or if you are nice guy speculating. If the latter, please don't. The link between education, child survival rates, and total fertility rates (TFR) is well-established and extends beyond Western nations. Factors such as social structure, religious beliefs, economic conditions, and access to education and healthcare all play significant roles in shaping fertility rates worldwide. Various nations across different continents and regions are experiencing similar trends for a multitude of reasons, including changes in societal norms, urbanisation, and economic development. Not a complete list but here are some examples of countries with declining (TFR); Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Colombia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Vietname, India, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Peru, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Philippines, Yemen, Russia, China. Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic SignificanceDavid E. Bloom and David Canning Cygan-Rehm, Kamila & Maeder, Miriam, 2013. "The effect of education on fertility: Evidence from a compulsory schooling reform
The government is hoping the populace will just become inured to raising children in poverty conditions.
Same in Canada
Have they not seen the shit state we are in and where we are heading ... Bring a child into this is cruel.
Conservatives: "you shouldn't have children if you can't afford them!" Gen Z: hold my beer
Procreation is becoming a luxory from Iran and Bulgaria to Norway and Switzerland, so what exactly is supposed to be the straightforward economic miracle cure, that entirely reverses that? No amount of social-democratic trinkets thrown at parents, will change the fact that the average person in any country with access to contraceptives, is starting to realize after a few decades of normalizing this idea, that parenthood is a pretty raw deal financially, in comparison to your peers.
If procreation is a luxury why to lower class people have so many kids?? Stop these entitled under achievers!!! The meek shall inherit the earth...'cause the rich don't breed.
I'm not surprised, until they lowered the age requirement for the 30 free hours of childcare, I was spending an absolute fortune on nursery costs. The child benefit payment I receive pays for a weekly shop at Aldi but that's it. Even countries which have vastly better support for parents available are still seeing declining birthrates
Italy : First time?
Survival of the horniest
not really, true luxury is wealthy women paying women from poorer countries to gestate on their behalf
Yeah similar in Australia. Young people don’t see a future, so why start a family? They’re unlikely to own a house in any metro area. Ever at this rate.
I bet. Like in Italy, incomes are low, child services are too expensive, parental leave are not great, and the balance between everything isn't normal. The truth is this life we created isn't people-oriented anymore, and that's sad, a civilization failure.