Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that.
Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).
I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative inversion exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.
Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.
I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.
Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.
Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]
Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.
Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.
> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
My intent: "it's universal" means the correlation between girls being low-value and child marriages is universal.
Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.
My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.
Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.
There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.
I'm glad they have the option, but some evidence is needed that slaving away in a 3rd world factory actually makes you better off than having a man provide for you in exchange for child bearing. I suppose maybe it's better to be the slave of some random boss (who maybe also uses sexual assault and other coercion) than the slave of some man you or your family has picked, but who knows.
------ re: throttling "children" -----------
The person I responded to said "young women" not "children."
Well I wouldn't prefer children are slaving in a finger or limb slicing factory nor bearing children, but here we are. I'm guessing in rural Nigeria a 15,16,17 year old is making adult decisions either due to circumstances, being forced, or economics. We can't facially say the factory is the best or better one vs marriage, although I'm sure there are instances where it is.
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
The evidence is plentiful and obvious. Numerous such factories operate in free countries where people have a choice about what they do for a living. The locals willingly choose the factory work in large numbers. A young woman who thinks she would be better off marrying young instead of working in a factory is generally free to do so.
I'm also glad they have the option - and it does seem that many will take up that option. They themselves have judged that factory work is less bad than 'house' work, might be worth listening to them.
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h...
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.
Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?
That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.
I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.
I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.
It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.
Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.
I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.
I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)
When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.
A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.
This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.
My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).
You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.
Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.
The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.(Or fatherhood for that matter).
> not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them)
What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.
High in absolute terms, but lowered significantly by monthly child support payments and heavily subsidised nursery costs. As such, the total cost relative to the also relatively high incomes are better than in most developed countries.
Your right it doesn't offset opportunity cost. The point is that even providing assistance a high multiple of most other countries has been insufficient to get above replacement.
I'm sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway, and even scaling for cost of living differences very few countries are near Norwegian child benefit levels, so it seems likely it will be exceedingly expensive.
> sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway
There are three cost buckets: cost of birth, opportunity cost of birth, cost of child rearing and opportunity cost of parenting.
Norway is solving the first and probably the second while subsidizing the third. That leaves the opportunity costs untouched and direct costs, still, a net negative. Norway would need raise its annual payment to parents to completely cover the actual cost of raising a child, and then something for the career hit. I don’t know what those numbers are, but given it would directly increase the tax base, it’s almost precisely what one should borrow for.
So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
The issue is how many places can afford that. Norway can afford what it does now in large part because of an enormous sovereign wealth fund that owns more than a percent of all publicly listed companies by market cap worldwide, on top of other assets. Despite that, Norway also has some of the higher tax levels.
Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve an extremely sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.
Unless we find other means of driving up the fertility rate, it's not clear most places will stomach the financial adjustments it will take.
Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.
If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.
A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.
Or like the US solves it, through immigration. In the US, the fertility rate is at roughly 1.6 children per woman (which is below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population), and yet the US population is steadily increasing thanks to immigration. One can talk all day about pros and cons of immigration, but it is ultimately the only solution we have to a falling fertility rate (other than trying to increase it, of course).
Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.
What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.
But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.
It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.
Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.
Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
This subthread has people using "improve" to mean "increase" and "improve" to mean "decrease". Maybe you guys should stop talking past each other and converge on replacement rate?
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
If men/boys truly understand the current situation, they wouldn't want to marry nor have children at all. Legal system is essentially rigged against them. Paternal scams, alimony/divorce laws all are essentially designed to protect women at all times with no regard to the concerns of males.
This is misleading. Education is not the panacea. I am saying it's a "whole of family" approach. Governments need to also provide more support to families. This is clear to any parent.
> Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated.
There is no evidence of this being true. This is certainly a narrative peddled by many ideologues.
> Both genders need education and child support programs.
Poorest of poor and illiterate people happen to have more children than the rest.
> Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child.
If men are educated on responsibilities of alimony and child support, with almost no rights, they would neither marry nor have legitimate children.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
This maybe your personal dream and that's fine. But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
> Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
Family-planning is euphemism for reducing children per woman. There's no benefit of having less children -> leading to less economic activity in the future. The family support you keep touting about is moot point. Government does not have their own money. People pay taxes which are used by government.
> An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
Agreed on this point. The definition of benefits are subjective but overall, it is agreed that it is a net positive.
More educated men have fewer children on average, but it's less of a difference than with women. It could even just be because they're marrying educated women.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
> These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good
Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.
"Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body."
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
So, the solution is to... not provide education? The logic doesn't make sense. You say this yourself: "I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be"
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
What if you're wrong? What if, all else being as it is but with "lotsa child support programs and credits" and education, on average people who could give birth decide they're not keen and we do not hit replacement reproduction rates?
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If the population halves each generation the biggest problem is total societal collapse. The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age and the infrastructure cannot be maintained by a dramatically dropping population: even with AI and robots, roads don't fix themselves and train tracks don't get fixed by robots. We will not even have enough doctors and nurses to care for the seniors and no economy to make retirement possible (money will be worth their value in paper as there will be no people to provide services and goods for it).
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
> The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age
No, the children are fine in this scenario, there are even proportionally fewer than now and so there are any number of available carers.
The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?
> If someone things the population on the planet is too big,
This isn't a centrally planned thing, it's just an exaggeration of the observable reality. On the whole humans who could carry a baby to term but understand exactly what's involved are not keen and if they're willing to do it once or twice draw the line there. The assumption that we're just not compensating them financially enough to reproduce more is let's say, not well supported by available evidence.
I think we should choose to be entirely OK with that until there's risk of a real population bottleneck, e.g. 1000x fewer people -- in the expectation that conditions change and it might sort itself out without action.
Remember, these elderly will be most of us. IIRC many 20 and 30-somethings today will be still alive by the time shit hits this specific fan. How old are you?
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
Yeah but in poor/developing countries raising birth rates are not something they're looking for but the opposite, (the most important thing is reducing teenage pregnancy). I lived in Colombia and they had programs where they have free antibcoceptives, free antibcoceptives implants that last a few years, like a lot of effort is spent in preventing birth rates, since a lot of people without the resources have a lot of kids. I don't think the problem of birth rates is related to financial reasons when in poor countries you see people with multiple kids without being able to afford It. I know personally people that have 10kids.
They've tried this in several countries, and it's never resulted in birth rate near replacement. And it'd be even lower if they didn't have immigrants from more family-oriented countries.
Care to give some examples where women's "empowerment" led to stable birth rates? Pushing people too far away from their biological baseline is wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries. And nobody seems to be happy with their new found freedoms as indicated by mental health indicators.
> wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries.
This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.
A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.
Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.
Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyways, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
> Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce.
Yes, but not to infinitely grow. Any animal population with unchecked growth will eventually be culled by their own outgrown presence if their environment cannot support them. Humans have deemed current society cannot support their children in the ways they deem important.
Thus we've culled ourselves, not by over-grazing, but by using our own reasoning.
In this case, Humans are capable of supporting as large or small population as we'd like. The planet would support it. What the greater challenge is, is resource allocation. We've collectively decided society-by-combat is the most efficient way to allocate resources and because of that, some people have checked out and used what power they have to not continue that game.
The people deciding not to have children will be the same that suffer in their old age. That is their vote.
This is a fundamental issue with current economic system which borrows from future generations to keep going, often with dire consequences as we are seeing these days. Infinite growth is literally the core concept of modern economics. We need drastic changes to our economic models if we need to change any of these. But even then, you need above replacement rate to sustain a stable society which is unlikely to happen with current narratives around gender and social matters.
Birthrates at or below replacement rate are ultimately a good thing as we improve automation and AI. Infinite population growth is not a realistic model. We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
> We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"
Well, there is a general trend: higher education, fewer kids. It's not a 1:1 correlation as many other factors contribute (in particular the higher cost of living; that's an even more important factor if you look at the oddities in South Korea or Japan, and even now in mainland China). Obviously the latter is not "child marriage", but I point at the number of offspring in general.
Unsurprising. If you have nothing else to do with yourself, marriage is kind of the natural thing to look toward. (Besides, for poor families, it reduces the number of mouths you have to feed, though school doesn't make that cheaper, so it isn't the primary cause.) School occupies your time and produces a rationale for not marrying.
In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)
Roger Freeman, then advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1970, said "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat" [7], leading to Reagan unwinding the free college of the UC system and this was a progenitor to the current student debt crisis.
But beyond college education, there's also an attack on education at K-12 levels. Homeschooling and a lack of sex education contribute to perpetuating abuse and trapping children (primarily girls) in this cycle.
Something that was really grotesque was some responses to statistics around teen pregnancies. Basically, some pundits were arguing that the drastic drop of teen pregnancy due to education was a bad thing.
A very high portion of teenage pregnancies resulted from sexual abuse from an older adult.
People are out there quite literally arguing that the sexual abuse of essentially children is good for society, to enable the population pyramid scheme.
Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that.
Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).
Non-obvious for this guy me!
I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative inversion exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.
Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?
> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.
Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
They nailed the plastics thing.
Can offer one read:
> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”
(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)
I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...
The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.
Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...
I completely agree, but there's a decent chunk of people out there who don't.
Smaller families, better education level of the next gen, ...
But yeah, if you are afraid of a war you want your group to be big, uneducated, easy to manipulate and expendable.
Reminds me of a uni project I did.
Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]
Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.
Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.
[0] TL;DR for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...
> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
Yes - it's correlation from the factors you mentioned.
not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
Yes this is the classical correlation vs causation situation.
> Am I misunderstanding ...
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
Cant you still marry a child in some american states? Isn't this a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.
In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...
Pretty much "yes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
See garciasn's sibling comment to yours.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
My intent: "it's universal" means the correlation between girls being low-value and child marriages is universal.
Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.
My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.
Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.
There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.
it also stops them from having children when they get older too
I'm glad they have the option, but some evidence is needed that slaving away in a 3rd world factory actually makes you better off than having a man provide for you in exchange for child bearing. I suppose maybe it's better to be the slave of some random boss (who maybe also uses sexual assault and other coercion) than the slave of some man you or your family has picked, but who knows.
------ re: throttling "children" -----------
The person I responded to said "young women" not "children."
Well I wouldn't prefer children are slaving in a finger or limb slicing factory nor bearing children, but here we are. I'm guessing in rural Nigeria a 15,16,17 year old is making adult decisions either due to circumstances, being forced, or economics. We can't facially say the factory is the best or better one vs marriage, although I'm sure there are instances where it is.
Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h...
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
We're talking about children.
The evidence is plentiful and obvious. Numerous such factories operate in free countries where people have a choice about what they do for a living. The locals willingly choose the factory work in large numbers. A young woman who thinks she would be better off marrying young instead of working in a factory is generally free to do so.
I'm also glad they have the option - and it does seem that many will take up that option. They themselves have judged that factory work is less bad than 'house' work, might be worth listening to them.
Childhood pregnancy is the leading cause of death in teenage girls.
We can say the factory is better.
Don't be obtuse. You can quit a boss and never see them again.
As a child factory slave?
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h... “Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
This is appalling. Delete it.
is this saying like "we were happier with some nuts and occasional games, discovering fire was a mistake"
Africa is a continent
This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.
¹ https://www.gapminder.org/
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?
That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8
[0a] (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8.pdf
I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.
I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.
It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.
Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.
I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.
I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)
When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.
[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...
A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.
This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.
My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.
A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).
You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.
Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.
The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
I agree with everything you've written.
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger
People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.(Or fatherhood for that matter).
> not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them)
What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.
High in absolute terms, but lowered significantly by monthly child support payments and heavily subsidised nursery costs. As such, the total cost relative to the also relatively high incomes are better than in most developed countries.
Your right it doesn't offset opportunity cost. The point is that even providing assistance a high multiple of most other countries has been insufficient to get above replacement.
I'm sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway, and even scaling for cost of living differences very few countries are near Norwegian child benefit levels, so it seems likely it will be exceedingly expensive.
> sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway
There are three cost buckets: cost of birth, opportunity cost of birth, cost of child rearing and opportunity cost of parenting.
Norway is solving the first and probably the second while subsidizing the third. That leaves the opportunity costs untouched and direct costs, still, a net negative. Norway would need raise its annual payment to parents to completely cover the actual cost of raising a child, and then something for the career hit. I don’t know what those numbers are, but given it would directly increase the tax base, it’s almost precisely what one should borrow for.
Yes, but again, the point is to illustrate just how high a multiple of current benefits elsewhere you can reach without it being sufficient.
So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
The issue is how many places can afford that. Norway can afford what it does now in large part because of an enormous sovereign wealth fund that owns more than a percent of all publicly listed companies by market cap worldwide, on top of other assets. Despite that, Norway also has some of the higher tax levels.
Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve an extremely sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.
Unless we find other means of driving up the fertility rate, it's not clear most places will stomach the financial adjustments it will take.
> Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve a very sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.
The answer is wealth redistribution. The rich simply hoard too much for society to keep working.
Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.
If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.
A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.
They don't need the population to increase, just stay the same or not decrease too fast.
Or like the US solves it, through immigration. In the US, the fertility rate is at roughly 1.6 children per woman (which is below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population), and yet the US population is steadily increasing thanks to immigration. One can talk all day about pros and cons of immigration, but it is ultimately the only solution we have to a falling fertility rate (other than trying to increase it, of course).
Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.
What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.
But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.
You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.
It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.
Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.
Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
This subthread has people using "improve" to mean "increase" and "improve" to mean "decrease". Maybe you guys should stop talking past each other and converge on replacement rate?
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
If men/boys truly understand the current situation, they wouldn't want to marry nor have children at all. Legal system is essentially rigged against them. Paternal scams, alimony/divorce laws all are essentially designed to protect women at all times with no regard to the concerns of males.
This is almost the opposite of what happens.
The more educated/developed a nation, the lesser their birth rate is going to be.
I understand the "shoulds" but that's not what the data suggests.
In essence, we can't have the pie and at the same time eat it.
The most useful thing education does for children is reduce child-mortality rate.[1]
Sources: https://raphael-godefroy.github.io/pdfs/mali_final.pdf
[1] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED503923
This is misleading. Education is not the panacea. I am saying it's a "whole of family" approach. Governments need to also provide more support to families. This is clear to any parent.
Let us take your previous comment as the basis
> Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated.
There is no evidence of this being true. This is certainly a narrative peddled by many ideologues.
> Both genders need education and child support programs.
Poorest of poor and illiterate people happen to have more children than the rest.
> Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child.
If men are educated on responsibilities of alimony and child support, with almost no rights, they would neither marry nor have legitimate children.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
This maybe your personal dream and that's fine. But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
> Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
Family-planning is euphemism for reducing children per woman. There's no benefit of having less children -> leading to less economic activity in the future. The family support you keep touting about is moot point. Government does not have their own money. People pay taxes which are used by government.
> An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
Agreed on this point. The definition of benefits are subjective but overall, it is agreed that it is a net positive.
More educated men have fewer children on average, but it's less of a difference than with women. It could even just be because they're marrying educated women.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
> These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good
Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.
"Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body."
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
So, the solution is to... not provide education? The logic doesn't make sense. You say this yourself: "I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be"
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
You'd be surprised how much people "want" to do something has to do with what they're told or pressured to do growing up.
"That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families."
Please show the evidence for this being true. Birthrates are low even in countries that provide a lot of support.
No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
"No country provides a lot of support."
The evidence suggests this is not true. The rest of your comment points to non-financial issues.
https://www.newsweek.com/norway-birth-rate-fertility-rate-pa...
What if you're wrong? What if, all else being as it is but with "lotsa child support programs and credits" and education, on average people who could give birth decide they're not keen and we do not hit replacement reproduction rates?
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If the population halves each generation the biggest problem is total societal collapse. The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age and the infrastructure cannot be maintained by a dramatically dropping population: even with AI and robots, roads don't fix themselves and train tracks don't get fixed by robots. We will not even have enough doctors and nurses to care for the seniors and no economy to make retirement possible (money will be worth their value in paper as there will be no people to provide services and goods for it).
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
> The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age
No, the children are fine in this scenario, there are even proportionally fewer than now and so there are any number of available carers.
The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?
> If someone things the population on the planet is too big,
This isn't a centrally planned thing, it's just an exaggeration of the observable reality. On the whole humans who could carry a baby to term but understand exactly what's involved are not keen and if they're willing to do it once or twice draw the line there. The assumption that we're just not compensating them financially enough to reproduce more is let's say, not well supported by available evidence.
I think we should choose to be entirely OK with that until there's risk of a real population bottleneck, e.g. 1000x fewer people -- in the expectation that conditions change and it might sort itself out without action.
> The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?
Remember, these elderly will be most of us. IIRC many 20 and 30-somethings today will be still alive by the time shit hits this specific fan. How old are you?
Oh I'm much older than that. I'm definitely screwed, but I don't see why that means this is a bad idea ?
Can you point to any examples of this:
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
Yeah but in poor/developing countries raising birth rates are not something they're looking for but the opposite, (the most important thing is reducing teenage pregnancy). I lived in Colombia and they had programs where they have free antibcoceptives, free antibcoceptives implants that last a few years, like a lot of effort is spent in preventing birth rates, since a lot of people without the resources have a lot of kids. I don't think the problem of birth rates is related to financial reasons when in poor countries you see people with multiple kids without being able to afford It. I know personally people that have 10kids.
They've tried this in several countries, and it's never resulted in birth rate near replacement. And it'd be even lower if they didn't have immigrants from more family-oriented countries.
Care to give some examples where women's "empowerment" led to stable birth rates? Pushing people too far away from their biological baseline is wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries. And nobody seems to be happy with their new found freedoms as indicated by mental health indicators.
> wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries.
This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.
A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.
Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.
Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyways, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
> Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce.
Yes, but not to infinitely grow. Any animal population with unchecked growth will eventually be culled by their own outgrown presence if their environment cannot support them. Humans have deemed current society cannot support their children in the ways they deem important.
Thus we've culled ourselves, not by over-grazing, but by using our own reasoning.
In this case, Humans are capable of supporting as large or small population as we'd like. The planet would support it. What the greater challenge is, is resource allocation. We've collectively decided society-by-combat is the most efficient way to allocate resources and because of that, some people have checked out and used what power they have to not continue that game.
The people deciding not to have children will be the same that suffer in their old age. That is their vote.
This is a fundamental issue with current economic system which borrows from future generations to keep going, often with dire consequences as we are seeing these days. Infinite growth is literally the core concept of modern economics. We need drastic changes to our economic models if we need to change any of these. But even then, you need above replacement rate to sustain a stable society which is unlikely to happen with current narratives around gender and social matters.
Birthrates at or below replacement rate are ultimately a good thing as we improve automation and AI. Infinite population growth is not a realistic model. We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
> We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
If anything every day we prove the current setup is NOT sustainable
Always when I read it, I think in Germany https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...
"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"
Well, there is a general trend: higher education, fewer kids. It's not a 1:1 correlation as many other factors contribute (in particular the higher cost of living; that's an even more important factor if you look at the oddities in South Korea or Japan, and even now in mainland China). Obviously the latter is not "child marriage", but I point at the number of offspring in general.
Unsurprising. If you have nothing else to do with yourself, marriage is kind of the natural thing to look toward. (Besides, for poor families, it reduces the number of mouths you have to feed, though school doesn't make that cheaper, so it isn't the primary cause.) School occupies your time and produces a rationale for not marrying.
In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)
Educated women = death of civilization?
This shouldn't be a surprise, lots of evidence in other countries to support this
Meanwhile in America [1][2][3][4][5][6].
Roger Freeman, then advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1970, said "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat" [7], leading to Reagan unwinding the free college of the UC system and this was a progenitor to the current student debt crisis.
But beyond college education, there's also an attack on education at K-12 levels. Homeschooling and a lack of sex education contribute to perpetuating abuse and trapping children (primarily girls) in this cycle.
[1]: https://calmatters.org/politics/2023/06/child-marriage-calif...
[2]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/married-young-the...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/09/chil...
[4]: https://www.freedomunited.org/u-s-child-mariage-laws-individ...
[5]: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage...
[6]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/child-marriag...
[7]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
Something that was really grotesque was some responses to statistics around teen pregnancies. Basically, some pundits were arguing that the drastic drop of teen pregnancy due to education was a bad thing.
A very high portion of teenage pregnancies resulted from sexual abuse from an older adult.
People are out there quite literally arguing that the sexual abuse of essentially children is good for society, to enable the population pyramid scheme.
> "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat"
That tells you everything you need to know about the Right.
Don't get it twisted, no politician wants an educated populace.
Sounds like a net positive. Go team!
Do you love black people?
They should ban home schools in the US to achieve the same.