Maybe There's a Surprisingly Simple Cure

Here's a cool extract/write-up by Camilla Cavendish from her new book, Generation Maybe: Why We’re Having Fewer Children, and What It Means For Us All... it gives a candidate answer to the fertility crisis I haven't seen before: social contagion.

The acceleration of the birth rate fall since the advent of the smartphone may have less to do with time spent on screens distracting from romance and more to do with negative images of childbirth and positive ones about being single.

The good news about the fertility crisis potentially being a contagion issue is that it can be more easily reversed. (See the trans and gay delusion mysteriously declining recently, #1583964, #1583743)

Research from Sweden in 2010 showed that women working in offices were more likely to have a baby if a colleague of similar seniority did so, with no effect from co-workers at other levels. A separate study of 6,500 German companies similarly found that female employees’ transition rates to first pregnancy roughly doubled after a colleague had a baby, with the effect lasting about two years.

The impact of network effects on birth rates was well documented by a study in Brazil. The gradual introduction of broadcast signal into different regions in the 1980s was accompanied by a cliff-like fall in birth rates. People with signal had become gripped by telenovelas – soap operas – showing urban female protagonists with few or no kids. In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had just over six children. Forty years later it was just over two: a drop almost as rapid as China’s. The impact was strongest on the female viewers who were closest in age to the female characters, with whom they identified most strongly.

Maybe AI just fixes that problem, useless (female-staff) work goes away:

Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that mimetic theory, the cultural influences on human behaviour, is playing an overlooked role in the baby bust. “The increasing rarity of large families could make it harder for humans to choose to return to having them — owing to what scholars call loss of social learning — and prolong low levels of fertility,” he says.

"The German social scientists Daniel Lois and Oliver Arránz Becker have found that couples’ interest in having a child strengthens if friends become parents"

Do it for your friends. (If not, "do it for Denmark")