The fertility obsession continues

...And as I was babysitting a 1.5year-old today (and learned that my cousin is expecting her second baby), I thought it appropriate to read and think about this topic. (#1598672, #1606449, #1591153)

Here's our friend Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, a prolific and interesting economist who just won't stop writing, publishing, tweeting GOOD STUFF.

"The world’s fertility crisis is more severe than is commonly understood."

Last year, humanity’s total fertility level dropped below what demographers call the replacement rate—that is, the average number of children that a woman must have to keep a population constant over the long run. This has never happened before.

In the past, population declines have been due to wars, epidemics, or diseases. Now, it's choices... or more appropriately, how we live (#1612815) and the values we carry in our heads.

A lot of other tropes (=high fertility is a poverty thing) are dead: "Many wealthier people and countries boast higher fertility rates than many poor people and countries."

The best explanation for why people are no longer having babies is that child-rearing at the scale necessary to maintain populations is fundamentally at odds with the structures of modern life and modern societies. Once an economic necessity, children are now an economic luxury. That portends a world in which economic inequality is accentuated by demographic inequality, with widening fissures within countries and among them

TL;DR, Everyone is fucked(!) but America is less fucked than the others. And:

The new dynamics of fertility augur a world in which gaps between the haves and the have-nots grow even wider, as poorer countries and communities endure strains that wealthier countries and communities manage to escape.

1. THE CRASH

UN official statistics still have 2026, in the "medium variant" of the model, above world replacement. (A lot of that is just projection/assumption which will be revised in the future.)

Fertility rates are plunging so fast that they are overturning many assumptions about demography. The steepest fertility declines have occurred in unexpected countries. Consider this test. Pick the state with the highest fertility rate among the following: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Jamaica, Iran, Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and the United States.

ANSWER: The US, wealthiest of them all, has the highest fertility rate (>1.5).

This holds true even when just assessing the fertility rate of mothers born in the United States (immigrant mothers have a slightly higher fertility rate than native mothers). Dozens of other middle-income countries now have fertility levels below that of the United States.
That trend runs against the old explanation for demographic change, which held that fertility invariably falls as a community or society gets richer. That is demonstrably no longer the case.

Stunning:

In 1972, nearly eight times as many children were born in China as in the United States. In 2025, that figure has dropped to 2.2 times as many. China’s total fertility rate in 2025 was 0.93, while the U.S. rate was 1.58. If fertility rates remain at those levels, the United States will overtake China in annual births at some point in the 2080s and in total population by around 2120.

AAAND:

Richer and more educated households in the United States and other advanced economies now tend to have more children than poorer and less educated ones, reversing a pattern that had held for centuries.

No common simple answer (housing costs, demographics, pill, porn, female education, social fabric etc etc) hold up internationally. For the standard one, screens, Prof. Villaverde says:

But fertility rates have been plunging worldwide since the late 1960s, well before smartphones appeared, and there is little evidence of an acceleration in the drop after their introduction. Instead, the device is more likely an accelerator of underlying mechanisms than a cause in itself: by my calculations, smartphones compressed into ten years a change in fertility that would have occurred anyway over 25.

The shrinking and aging of populations will have first-order effects on a country’s economic performance. In research with Gustavo Ventura and Wen Yao, I have documented that nearly all of Japan’s poor economic performance relative to the United States since 1990 can be explained by its worse demographics, not by financial crises or poor economic policy.

2. MODERN LOVE

That's the astonishing thing I took away from Stephan Shaw and The Birthgap documentary (#1598672).

Modernity raises the cost of children and lowers the cost of childlessness. Parents must equip children with formal knowledge and credentials, an endeavor that takes decades of effort and spending. Tight career schedules also conflict with parents’biological clocks. The most productive years for a research economist, for example, are usually between 30 and 45. Those are also the years when one needs to spend the most time with children. No matter how much accommodation a university offers, the day still has only 24 hours

Same basic problem of AI/infinite generation #1449095, #1571294

Also: children aren't necessary for future welfare/free labor on the farm and retirement providers.

Tight-knit religious communities, such as the ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the Amish in the United States, have managed to maintain high fertility rates well above replacement level. But these groups have also stayed apart from much of modern life.

3. The BABY FLEX and the FLIP-FLOP of trends

in 1980, the richer the country, the fewer children the woman had.
In 2000, that started to equalize.
By now, that has basically reversed. Idiocracy no more.

They have become something of a luxury good that richer people can afford more of than poorer people can. In the same way that a richer household owns, on average, a more expensive car than a poorer one, it also has more children—at least since the 1990s. Prosperous parents can hire help at home, order prepared meals, pay for premium grocery delivery or laundry services, and afford tuition and tutoring.

That should vindicate the lefties and the worries about cost, no?

The same phenomenon will occur in sub-Saharan Africa over the next few decades. It is often projected that the continent’s high fertility rates will make up for shortfalls elsewhere—but that will likely not happen.

"Short of an unlikely turn to the social mores of deeply conservative and ideological communities, such as the Amish, only transformations in material circumstances will help raise fertility rates."

Ultralow fertility seems to be caused not by a lack of desire for children but by the absence of the conditions that would make having children easier, or even possible.

Government money (...out of deficits -.-) seems not to have helped absolutely anywhere. Also, lol at this analogy: #1605547

Fertility rates behave like the rates of return on a retirement fund: small yearly differences accumulate into large differences over time. Policies that give people greater material freedom to have children can thus be very consequential in the long term.

Eastern Germany offers a preview. Since reunification, its young people (above all, its young women) have left for western Germany, its towns have emptied and aged, and its voters have turned to the parties at both extremes of the political spectrum. Many countries in the world are about to become eastern Germany, but few of them will have a western Germany to pay the bills

"Demographers often suggest that the world is united by the crash infertility rates. In truth, demographic decline will likely divide the world even further"

archive: worked (https://archive.md/160NH) but it just opened for me (promo/once-a-month-shite)