Birthrate of 1.2 held over time is roughly
100 grandparents
60 children
36 grandchildren
100 grandparents
60 children
36 grandchildren
The Political Consequences of Low Birthrates
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@thett3
Do you think this is the reason New York decided citizenship was optional for voting?
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@Greyparrot
No, pretty much only online weirdos think about this stuff. They did that because the leftist zeitgeist is slowly coming around to supporting fully open borders
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@thett3
Yes but is that why you think they want open borders? for replenishment of the population?
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@Greyparrot
The confluence of businesses wanting cheaper labor, midwit bureaucratic types who think people are just fungible cogs in a machine, and people motivated by resentment to the majority population are the factors that motivate the intense support of immigration from the left. Only the middle portion has anything to do with birthrates…their position is by far the most defensible, though
Immigration won’t solve anything long term since this is happening almost everywhere
Immigration won’t solve anything long term since this is happening almost everywhere
2021 TFR's of countries that have sent lots of immigrants to the US over the past half century
Mexico: 1.7
China: ~1.1 (the official numbers are LIES!)
India: 2.1
All dropping like a stone. All of Central America also dropping like a rock...in most of these places it has dropped so rapidly that the numbers you get on Google, derived from statistics a few years ago, are no longer accurate.
Birth rates in North Africa and the Middle East, which have sent lots of immigrants to Europe, have also totally crashed. The last bastion of pre-fertility transition birth rates is sub-Saharan Africa and even there they are dropping. I know it seems totally crazy right now with the US going through a massive border crisis, Belarus using refugees as a weapon against the EU etc, but in a few decades there just aren't going to be that many places left to source immigrants from, especially as the rest of the world develops. It aint 1990 anymore. Even if you see no cultural or economic issue with immigration it isn't going to fix things, these countries are still going to depopulate
The numbers from China came out: births were down 12% from 2020 to 10.6 million. People are estimating that the TFR has fallen to around 1.15. This is lower than Japan was at its lowest. Also new marriages, which are strongly correlated with births in a country like China, fell 5% so it’ll probably decline even further next year. I’ve heard that property in many parts of China, relative to income, is even more expensive than the Bay Area in the US, so if that’s true it makes sense
It’s crazy that China is so gigantic that even with a record low birth rates there were still more Chinese babies born in a single year than the entire population of a country like Sweden
10.6 million.
That's not really a lot more than the USA 4 million which is more than enough to replace even the USA COVID deaths and then some.
We could always make immigration easier if we're concerned with not having enough people to live or work here. The irony (against the Republican argument that Dems want more immigration for votes) is that most immigrants are socially conservative and hostile to socialism.
Hasidic Jews are going to be around 35-40% of children in Brooklyn in the next decade, and will reach majority status very quickly if trends don't change.
I could see that. There are more Jews here than in Tel Aviv. More than one in four Brooklyn residents is Jewish. Most are Orthodox which tend to vote Republican. An interesting trend indeed.
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@Danielle
We could always make immigration easier if we're concerned with not having enough people to live or work here. The irony (against the Republican argument that Dems want more immigration for votes) is that most immigrants are socially conservative and hostile to socialism.
That's an option right now, although for how much longer I don't know. One thing I've noticed in my research into this stuff is that the conventional wisdom is about a decade or more behind usually. There was a large fall in fertility throughout most of the world after 2010 that accelerated rapidly after 2015 for some reason. These days a lot of Latin America has birth rates not that far off European countries, China has totally crashed, India is at replacement level, the Arab world is starting to crack, etc. And the long term trend all over the world is development and places getting richer which lowers the incentive to migrate. Its possible birth rates go back up but it seems doubtful since this is a trend happening literally everywhere and over a very long period of time.
I think 20-30 years from now countries will be competing for productive immigrants, and they increasingly just won't be there. If that actually happens it's going to be very interesting because I don't think we've seen an environment like that ever
I could see that. There are more Jews here than in Tel Aviv. More than one in four Brooklyn residents is Jewish. Most are Orthodox which tend to vote Republican. An interesting trend indeed.
Do you happen to have any idea how they manage to have so many kids in such a high cost of living area? Do they pool a lot of resources, or stack bunk beds in their apartments?
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@thett3
The numbers from China came out: births were down 12% from 2020 to 10.6 million. People are estimating that the TFR has fallen to around 1.15. This is lower than Japan was at its lowest. Also new marriages, which are strongly correlated with births in a country like China, fell 5% so it’ll probably decline even further next year. I’ve heard that property in many parts of China, relative to income, is even more expensive than the Bay Area in the US, so if that’s true it makes senseIt’s crazy that China is so gigantic that even with a record low birth rates there were still more Chinese babies born in a single year than the entire population of a country like Sweden
Talking to Chinese friends of mine, it's interesting to see how social norms established during the one child policy days are keeping the birthrate low. With one child per couple, both families absolutely poured resources into that child. Instrument lessons, best schools, huge pressure to succeed, huge investment in that child starting a family. Now it's seen as shameful to not offer that level of support, and this makes people less likely to have kids because they can't afford it. For example, they've said about American families with four or five kids that it was incredibly selfish to have that many kids because you can't afford to provide for them, which these Chinese people define as paying the downpayment for their first house, or outright buying the house. They've essentially gotten into a rut of extreme k-strategy breeding patterns.
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@ResurgetExFavilla
With one child per couple, both families absolutely poured resources into that child. Instrument lessons, best schools, huge pressure to succeed, huge investment in that child starting a family. Now it's seen as shameful to not offer that level of support, and this makes people less likely to have kids because they can't afford it.
You hit the nail on the head. This is my exact theory for why birth rates have fallen to such an extent. Once people decouple sex from children and it becomes purely a choice there is little reason to have more than two kids because of the large amount of work and time and money required to raise them and the fact that the children themselves benefit from a concentration of resources. China did make a huge mistake with the one child policy, while their birth rate would’ve steeply fallen anyway maybe it would’ve been more like Japan which is around 1.4. 1.1 is just apocalyptic. The only saving grace for China as a power is that it isn’t a democracy so they can throw their masses of old people under the bus 30 years from now because they have no recourse
American expectations about child rearing aren’t quite as extreme as Chinas but it’s definitely an expectation in middle class circles that each kid has their own room. Don’t really know why. I grew up in a pretty small house and I was only ever in my room to sleep.
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@thett3
I think 20-30 years from now countries will be competing for productive immigrants, and they increasingly just won't be there. If that actually happens it's going to be very interesting because I don't think we've seen an environment like that ever
That is an interesting thought. I can't even imagine how dramatically different the world is going to be in general in like 5 decades.
Do you happen to have any idea how they manage to have so many kids in such a high cost of living area? Do they pool a lot of resources, or stack bunk beds in their apartments?
They are very insular and help each other to a degree, but a lot of them are actually on welfare. It's unclear how much of the welfare is really needed. A lot of people suspect they are just exploiting government services which could be antisemitism... ya know, the whole "Jews are super cheap" trope... but there is also evidence of it. They have been caught in a lot of scams. My guess is a good deal that live in Brooklyn are actually pretty wealthy. Those with less money move to upstate New York, or somewhere like Lakewood, NJ which now has a pretty big orthodox Jewish population.
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@Danielle
That is an interesting thought. I can't even imagine how dramatically different the world is going to be in general in like 5 decades.
Yeah I don't either. But I think that's why I like this subject so much, as dry and strange as it is, because it is kind of like peering into a crystal ball. I don't know exactly what the future holds, but I do know that there are gonna be some serious problems if countries with super low fertility if they don't get control of this very soon. China's TFR right now is 1.1. Assuming they dont practice sex selective abortion (and they do...) that is roughly
100 grandparents
55 children
30 grandchildren
South Korea is .92
100 grandparents
46 children
21 grandchildren
That's just collapse. They are gonna have to find some way to pull those numbers up but no one has figured it out yet. Whereas western societies outside of Spain and Italy have mostly settled on 1.5-1.8ish where it's a more graceful and slow population decline and you actually can plug at least a few holes with immigration.
They are very insular and help each other to a degree, but a lot of them are actually on welfare. It's unclear how much of the welfare is really needed. A lot of people suspect they are just exploiting government services which could be antisemitism... ya know, the whole "Jews are super cheap" trope... but there is also evidence of it.
I've heard this too, which is part of what makes me a little skeptical of the "breeder cults will overtake us all" narrative I have heard in some places. They all seem to be taking advantage of cracks in the system, welfare, or the Amish moving in on rapidly depopulating rural areas, and of course all of them being protected by a military superpower that only stays on top because it DOESNT practice their traditional lifestyle. It just isn't the kind of thing that scales (in my opinion) so all of these groups are gonna hit a wall eventually, but the question is when and how many of them there will be when that happens
26 days later
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@bmdrocks21
Here is a 2017 study that found that higher income was strongly correlated with having fewer children. In fact, it was a straight decline from the highest birth rates in the under $10k category to the lowest birthrates in the over $200k income category, with one exception ($10-15k was lower than surrounding) https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/
Sorry to bump such an old post but I ran into something you'll be interested in...some good news on this. I wouldn't really consider the numbers here to be representative of the true situation. If you download the source they used for raw data (you need to register a free account) it's from the US government so the numbers are pretty good...but it has an *incredibly* generous and unrealistic definition of "child bearing age"...it goes up to age 50. Since income is so positively correlated with age I would imagine tons of women move into higher income brackets from say age 35, when they could reasonably have kid #3, and age 50 where that's not possible. A lot of higher income households are also probably people who made a conscious decision to pursue career over family, I would have to see how male income correlates with fertility. This gives me a lot more hope that we can make at least some difference with policy, I can't imagine that giving people more money or benefits to have another kid wouldn't make it more likely that they would have another kid
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@thett3
Yeah, I think you make a very good point. I don't think any source splits it up this way, but I wonder how a graph would look if it split it by income within 5-year age brackets. I'm assuming that it would still show the same trend of people making more having less children, just because that anecdotally has seemed to be the case. Using male income would be a much better indicator, seeing how household income would include the wife and working women with high-paying jobs likely won't be having many kids.
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@thett3
And this study finds just that: higher fertility for men with more income and more "child bearing unions" (I'm assuming that means they get remarried/new relationship and having more kids). Also finds lower fertility the more money women make
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@bmdrocks21
And this study finds just that: higher fertility for men with more income and more "child bearing unions" (I'm assuming that means they get remarried/new relationship and having more kids). Also finds lower fertility the more money women make
Makes sense. The family unit of a biological mother and father where the father works and the mother raises the family is increasingly hard to attain but seems to be the ideal situation for most people. Another situation I suspect has high fertility are marriages where the husband works and the wife can make a significant amount of money working part time. Nursing is great for this, a nurse can make like $30k a year working 1 to 2 days a week which is a pretty good balance between being a stay at home mom and working full time
It really is crazy how education changes peoples expectations so much. I don’t blame women for not wanting to become a house wife at 25 after spending a ton of time and money pursuing a career just to give it up after a few years. I don’t blame women for not wanting to marry a man who makes less money than they do either. But at the same time the biological clock is very real, and with women doing better in school and early careers now than men the amount of suitable men out there dwindles very quickly. In high school I was mostly friends with the striver set of people and I really do not see them having a lot of kids. Most of them are scattered across the country with few social connections, don’t really have that much money despite having impressive jobs because they spend so much on high cost of living and expensive education, are going back to school like 10 years after high school for a masters…I just don’t see it ending well. A lot of these people aren’t gonna have kids at all and it will probably be to societies detriment even if it helps me politically
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@bmdrocks21
I'm assuming that it would still show the same trend of people making more having less children, just because that anecdotally has seemed to be the case.
I think the modern system certainly selects for low fertility among high income earners in our age bracket. The more willing you are to move across the country, work jobs that require extremely long hours and are mentally taxing, and constantly put in extra time to keep learning skills, get more education and credentials the higher income you’re likely to have. Which obviously results in extremely low fertility relative to normal people in their mid 20s. But few people stick with that lifestyle past their mid-20s, and a lot of those people by 30 have transitioned to cushy six figure sinecures. I think prestigious career = higher fertility for men, lower for women is probably accurate
255 days later
Been meaning to make a follow up poast to this one and maybe will, but if you look at the latest poll crosstabs in the few that ask the question and Republicans have opened up a substantial lead among parents with children under 18. This isn’t too big of a surprise to me but I’ll be interested to see if it holds up
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@thett3
Anyway I don't really have a point of this post. I was actually just jotting stuff down for my own purposes and thought maybe someone on this forum would find it interesting. I don't know what the future holds, but it's certainly interesting! If you're currently on the fence, you should have a kid.
Oh boy, here’s another gem. You are so right , we really have been missing your great content on the politics forum.
And wtf is with your use of the moniker “poast”
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@thett3
They did that because the leftist zeitgeist is slowly coming around to supporting fully open borders
Oh the brain power.
Btw, The measure, which was passed by the City Council in December 2021, would have allowed more than 800,000 permanent legal residents and people with authorization to work in the United States to vote for only local offices such as mayor and City Council.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Oh boy, here’s another gem. You are so right , we really have been missing your great content on the politics forum.
Thanks! The OP is not quite as interesting or rigorous as deranged rants about magatards or wanting to starve seniors to death for living under a governor you don’t like but the compliment is appreciated
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@thett3
the compliment is appreciated
I’m sure you appreciate it. Now you have something to show your mother what you did today
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I just did, she is very proud of mommy’s special little boy
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@thett3
I just did, she is very proud of mommy’s special little boy
Ok weirdo
Posted in another thread but an extreme example of how much this can change a population over a not that long period of time:
An example of what Yassine is talking about:
My wife’s grandfather and mine were born in the exact same year almost a century ago. Hers was a devoutly religious Catholic who had ten children and mine was your average pretty secular, urban dweller. Hers currently has over 60 living descendants, over 10x as many as mine.
Their parents were born about the same time in the 1890s. My grandfather was an only child so my great grandparents have the same number of descendants as he does. My wife’s great grandparents had five kids who all had five or more children each except for one who became a priest. Idk how many total descendants they have but it’s probably close to 150-200. Of course not all of them are Catholic or religious at all or conservative but that sort of trend still represents a massive genetic change