I can't remember how much of the Baby Boom's fertility boost was associated with higher marriage rates (as opposed to higher married TFR), but IIRC it's a lot of it. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened at a time when marriage rates were spiking and that its end coincided with divorce rates soaring in the 1970s.
So I think a good part of the conformity has to do with marriage itself. Which honestly aligns more with my lived experience. A lot of people just don't look much outside their own family unit to decide if they should have one more kid. They're much more focused on thinking about their own lives and what another kid means to them. But single culture is very real; if everyone you know is married by their mid-20s, then being single is that much lonelier and you're prepared to compromise more in your choice of mate (plus everyone is trying to set you up and marry you off). If a lot of people around you are single into their 30s, then being single throughout your 20s is not so bad, no hurry.
Even if you eventually get married either way, you're likely to end up with more kids the earlier you marry. A longtime friend of my mother's is a case in point: she has 3 kids, born when she was 24, 26, and 36. Maybe the last was an accident, or maybe she just felt a last twinge of baby fever with both kids becoming more independent, I don't know. But it's a good bet that if she had started at 34 instead of 24, she'd have ended up with 2 kids at most.
Bingo, you also see this affect with remarriages. In my experience women tend to have at least one kid per spouse after the initial child hence often a rainbow brood. Marriages tend to lead children hence the more marriages, even if accompanied by more divorces, more children.
BTW one thing I've always wondered but never looked into is how TFR accounts for that. When I hear numbers like 2.5 is replacement as "both parents and a spare" I feel that skews if one woman, multiple men. If hypothetically only eleven people existed on earth and those ten guys each had one kid with the remaining woman, you get a TFR or 10 which sounds great until you realize it's still a population decline. I think this same error scales up skewing the replacement level though by how much, I don't know.
I'm skeptical that divorce + remarriage on average results in a fertility increase for a woman as opposed to staying married to a single man. Though I'm sure it does in some cases, especially if she was content to have only one child in her first marriage. And after the divorce is a fait accompli, remarriage is of course more likely to yield more children than never remarrying.
Possibly, it's definitely something I love to see a paper on as would be interesting, at least to me, to see the data on that. Definitely anecdotal but my lived experience I feel remarriages result in an increased total fertility, i.e. she might have only wanted 1-3 kids but the next husband does to hence you see broods like (ages) 21, 19, 18, 5, and 3. Or serial marriagers (yes not a real word) 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 18 four different last names. Seen a lot of the former in middle class families, lot of the latter in poor families IME.
I'll admit I've never known a woman married thrice who had children in all three marriages. Though I don't think I've even known a woman who was married thrice in her fertile years.
A friend of mine once employed a woman who had 4 children by 4 men (and still young enough to have more) -- she was, of course, never married to any of them, which is the norm for the lower classes in the US. The situation you describe, of 4+ children by 4 husbands, has to be extraordinarily rare.
So I think the core question is which tends to result in more children: two husbands before age 40, or one? And yeah, someone surely has access to data to figure that out, but a quick search didn't yield anything.
I'll add that in either case, divorce is still generally a negative for fertility, since a lot of women don't get remarried (many fewer women than men, in fact), and if they do, it might be outside her fertility window, or at least towards the end of it. Plus many second marriages don't last long.
But that error can't scale up, because no one is making it. It's an error that only exists in your mind.
You compare children per woman to the female share of the population. There are no populations that are 91% male. But if there were, you'd still compare children per woman to the female share of the population. (In your example, 10 children per woman does not balance the woman's 9% share of the population. 10 x 9.09% tells you that the next generation will be 91% of the size of this one.)
Two children per woman is just the inverse of women being half the population. It has nothing to do with how many parents each child has.
(The replacement level does skew because of losses; not all children reproduce. So replacement is usually taken as 2.2 or so. But note that while the failure of some people in the _next_ generation to reproduce does affect the replacement rate, the failure of some people in the _current_ generation does not.)
Fair, as I said I never looked into how they derived the math and a quick wiki prior to that post wasn't clear on it either. While I understand how they figured out TFR that didn't really explain how they figured out replacement rate. Still not clear on that TBH.
Well, I can give you some highly stylized examples. The replacement rate is defined as the average rate that leads to the population staying constant over time. Assume everyone bears children between the ages of 15 and 40 and then dies at the age of 80. Assume exactly half of people are female.
If you have a population composed entirely of 20 year olds, the replacement rate as defined above looks weird. If those people have any number of children, 30 years later the population will be larger, because some children were added but nobody has reached the age of 80 and died. (But if they have a total of zero children, then 30 years later the population will be the same -- everyone's still alive -- but at that point they've all lost the ability to bear children and 40 years after that the population will be zero.) So we want to think about the replacement rate in terms of a society where the age structure is stable, too. In the all-20-year-olds example, the replacement rate is 2, but the population hasn't yet reached equilibrium.
With that out of the way, if everyone dies at the age of 80, it's greater than the maximum childbearing age of 40, and so the replacement rate is exactly two. If women were instead a third of all people, the replacement rate would be three children per woman or 1.5 per man.
But, in reality sometimes people die before they reach 80. This affects our ability to measure the fertility rate -- if you survey everyone when they reach 12, the fertility rate will be zero because it's impossible to have children before the age of 15. If you survey everyone at 20, the fertility rate will be positive, but low, because that's only 5 years in to a 25-year fertility period. If you survey everyone on a regular schedule, say every 10 years, the fertility rate will be a composite of people matching the age structure of society, and while it is possible to work with that figure, it is undesirable for many reasons.
So we like to measure the "completed fertility rate", which is established by surveying menopausal women. If you survey people when they're 50, you get a good picture of how many children they will produce over the course of their life, because it's impossible for them to produce children in the future. (In reality, outside the examples, this is only impossible for women, which is one good reason we measure female fertility instead of male. The other is that women are much more likely to be aware of all of their children.)
But by surveying menopausal women, we lose information about women who died before menopause. Those women would have been counted in the fertility rate of the previous generation, but they don't contribute to the following generation. (Sometimes they do! Maybe someone had a child at 16 and died at 17. This is a complicated adjustment that needs to be made.)
Suppose half of women die at the age of 10, and the other half die at 80. (And half of births continue to be female.) Now we know that the replacement rate is 4 children per woman: for the population to remain stable, every woman who reaches childbearing age at all must on average bear four children, one to die fruitlessly and three to reproduce. And if we have such a population, and we survey the 50-year-old women, we will in fact find that they have borne an average of four children each.
Arguably, FFR is what matters - female fertility rate. The population of women is stable if you have something like 1.05 girls per woman. So, if 11 people exist on earth - 10 of them men - then you have 1 woman. If half of the 10 kids are girls, you have an FFR of 5, which is rockin'. As for the 5 boys, they can compete to be the one who fathers 10 children with each of the 5 girls, I guess.
I started at 34, had my 4th at 45 ( all healthy. Ignore the silly statistics about a minute increase in chance of chromosomal issues. That has more to do with genetics than age of the mother). If the woman is very healthy and wants kids, it’s not the terrible thing people think it is.
It is relevant. I live in a high TFR community. Sure, I am on the small end of family size here, but I am still in child-bearing range. I could have had another 2 if my husband had wanted to. Men looking for large families, but are no longer under 25, need not limit their search to a certain age bracket. Fertility health is a much more important factor to family size than an age range that cuts off half of the population of fertile women. Since most women- including myself- are not interested in kids first/ education and career second, we should include women on the older end of the spectrum in our efforts to improve TFR. Many people of both genders deal with lifestyle related infertility. The ones who regret not having kids, pretty much prove that older women still want children. If they are encouraged to live a healthier lifestyle, it’s possible. As an aside, I will mention I never used ABC in my life, and I suspect that has something to do with the rise in infertility.
Both condoms and The Pill aren't that important in my opinion. The pull-out method works very well in practice, despite all the claims to the contrary on the Internet - and that's been known to humans for hundreds of years.
I realize this was not the main point of the article, but the graph of fertility in the US looks like the base rate explains almost everything. For whatever reason the depression disrupted fertility, then WW2 did for perhaps more obvious reasons, then you most get people catching up to deferred fertility. The interesting part is that there does look to be more than can be explained by a temporal shift. It’s that unexplained part that could be part of the conformity story.
In the last 2 centuries, infant mortality decreased a lot and the developed world went from a model where the average incremental cost of a child in a rural village was very low, and the benefit was to provide for old age, to one where the nanny-State will take care of you if you don't have kids, while there's a tuition fee arms race that increases the cost of educating children.
The economic incentives changed for the middle class after 1945, and people only adapted to it after a generation in 1968.
No, he really didn't. He established only something like a) people do value having young to take care of and b) they are willing to give up some things to get that value. However, pets are now a socially acceptable partial substitute for child-raising; inferior, yes, but satisfying many of the same basic needs - and if you don't believe that, sit in a small animal vet's waiting room and listen. As for the fact that people today can "afford" children, in an absolute sense, more than in the past, that's not the right economic criterion. As Bryan knows well, when making decisions, "cost" is opportunity cost, that is, what else could you have instead? In poor societies, there aren't many attractive "instead" opportunities; in rich ones, there are lots.
In that case, incremental cost of a child was low, survivorship uncertain would explain how we go from 5 kids to 2 kids, but indeed, to 0 is a social choice more than an economic calculus.
I wonder if the reason that the poverty of the Great Depression caused a reduction in births, while poverty in other times and places did not, was that people still remembered the Roaring 20s and expected that something like them would come again someday. It makes sense to delay having the children for a few years if you expect conditions will be better soon. By contrast, if you expect to be poor the rest of your life, you might as well go ahead and have them now.
Remember that people in the Great Depression didn't know that was what it was when they were living through it. For all people in 1934 knew, the economy would get better in 1935. So perhaps they delayed one year, then delayed another, not realizing how long the delay would be. Maybe the reason the Baby Boom was so huge was that people who had put off children far longer than they expected to were finally ready to have them.
Condoms make sex significantly less enjoyable, so its not equivalent to the pill (which doesn't alter the sexual experience at all).
Fertility is still associated with being conservative and religious, who are conformists they just conform to something different. That might be non-conformist in Fairfax County UMC government contractors, but it's not non-conformist in a more general sense. Your average "non-comformist" is probably a leftist with low TFR, and the women joggers probably consider themselves non-conformist.
I think the likely outcome of all this is that fertility just keeps falling. In addition to peer pressure it's increasingly going to be the case that the young are crushed under fiscal obligations to the old. Old people can collect benefits even if they did nothing to create the children to pay for them, its natural people will respond to this by having less kids over time.
I don't see a way out of that without big time changes at the societal level, but I don't think there exists a political constituency to get it (the median voter is 55 years old and getting older).
P.S. My own thought on Israel is that it's a martial ethno-state, which is kind of a religion (a pagan would certainly understand it. Nazi Germany also had an increase in birth rate with its quasi pagan ethnonationalism.
Ironically, I think the constant threat the Arabs present to Israel helps with its birthrate. If they really wanted to reduce the number of Jews, they should just leave them alone so their TFR falls to diaspora levels.
Agree that there is no natural end in sight of the fertility collapse.
A realization recently occurred to me -- emigration is going to be the only option available to the young in many countries trying to escape the consequences of gerontocracy, and as a result, some countries are going to spiral as emigration makes the problems of gerontocracy worse, triggering yet more emigration.
Puerto Rico is one early example of what a place looks like where emigration has caused a spiral that has made the economy unsustainable, complete with its own pension and government debt problem. Projections now have PR emptying out with emigrants for the remainder of the century, even as TFR stands at 0.9.
In the EU, where emigration is easy, the effects are going to be stark. Some countries will start to have PR-style demographics and effectively become perpetually impoverished retirement communities. The rich countries of the EU, with pension challenges of their own, will have to decide whether to bail out those countries' failing pensions, and the math won't make it quite so easy as the US bailing out PR. Otherwise people in those poorer EU countries will just have to hope their adult children, working in rich countries, will send home remittances, which is one way to naturally resolve the problem you describe of the old collecting benefits regardless of whether they produced children.
S. Korea is going to be an interesting case, because emigration from there isn't quite so easy, but the aging problem is going to be most stark. IIRC, around 2050, there will be more S. Koreans older than 70 than those younger than 45. Will the young all find their way to the US (or perhaps Australia, or Japan)? Or will they stick around and bear through the population collapse?
One natural temptation will be for all the remaining young in aging countries to congregate in the capital city, which will make the fertility problem even worse as capital cities tend to have the worst fertility in the whole nation due to socially liberal values and cramped high-rise real estate. Note that, while Japan and SK's populations have both been declining in recent years, Tokyo and Seoul's populations continue to increase.
I doubt there's the political will to do something so drastic in the West, not to mention the limitations imposed by the EU. In East Asia, it's easier to imagine. In China's case, a tougher crackdown on emigration may be inevitable.
There's one other big way in which condoms differ from the pill, especially in a community with nonmonogamous norms - it's the woman who's left to carry the baby, and so she is much more incentivised to avoid an unwanted pregnancy than the man is.
In an era where paternity can be easily proven and child support (from the man or the government) is enforced there are many women that want a baby more then the man involved in the act.
It's not that uncommon for women to say they are on the pill but lie about it.
If women, especially single but sexually active women, aren't on the pill, then it's probably not because they want a baby (who wants to be a single mother?) It's likely because the side-effects of the pill can be bloody awful.
Incidentally, around the time the pill was developed, scientists also created a male equivalent, which also had some crappy side-effects. Men refused to take this pill but women were just expected to quietly endure.
Alex, you might also mention that, crappy side effects or not, there aren't any male pills that work reliably; and that if similarly crappy side effects resulted from the female pill, women would also refuse to use it - in fact the pharma companies wouldn't seek approval for it, as I believe was the case for all the male pills so far.
"Ironically, I think the constant threat the Arabs present to Israel helps with its birthrate. If they really wanted to reduce the number of Jews, they should just leave them alone so their TFR falls to diaspora levels."
The problem is that the settler movement would still be slowly displacing them and kicking them out of their homes.
Isn't the most obvious theory that the revealed preferences of people show that in the abscence of a pro-natalist conformism" culture like durign the baby boom, most people simply don't want to get kids at all or more than 2?
On the meta level, conformism just seems like a poor explanation for any sort of macroscopic change in human behaviour. "People used to conform to high-fertility norms, now they conform to low-fertility norms" - like, okay sure, humans are very conformist so this checks out; but why did the norms change?
I wonder if part might be female reproductive suppression, where females seek to limit their rivals’ fertility. Women tell each another to delay marriage and children until they are “ready”.
I can't remember how much of the Baby Boom's fertility boost was associated with higher marriage rates (as opposed to higher married TFR), but IIRC it's a lot of it. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened at a time when marriage rates were spiking and that its end coincided with divorce rates soaring in the 1970s.
So I think a good part of the conformity has to do with marriage itself. Which honestly aligns more with my lived experience. A lot of people just don't look much outside their own family unit to decide if they should have one more kid. They're much more focused on thinking about their own lives and what another kid means to them. But single culture is very real; if everyone you know is married by their mid-20s, then being single is that much lonelier and you're prepared to compromise more in your choice of mate (plus everyone is trying to set you up and marry you off). If a lot of people around you are single into their 30s, then being single throughout your 20s is not so bad, no hurry.
Even if you eventually get married either way, you're likely to end up with more kids the earlier you marry. A longtime friend of my mother's is a case in point: she has 3 kids, born when she was 24, 26, and 36. Maybe the last was an accident, or maybe she just felt a last twinge of baby fever with both kids becoming more independent, I don't know. But it's a good bet that if she had started at 34 instead of 24, she'd have ended up with 2 kids at most.
Bingo, you also see this affect with remarriages. In my experience women tend to have at least one kid per spouse after the initial child hence often a rainbow brood. Marriages tend to lead children hence the more marriages, even if accompanied by more divorces, more children.
BTW one thing I've always wondered but never looked into is how TFR accounts for that. When I hear numbers like 2.5 is replacement as "both parents and a spare" I feel that skews if one woman, multiple men. If hypothetically only eleven people existed on earth and those ten guys each had one kid with the remaining woman, you get a TFR or 10 which sounds great until you realize it's still a population decline. I think this same error scales up skewing the replacement level though by how much, I don't know.
I'm skeptical that divorce + remarriage on average results in a fertility increase for a woman as opposed to staying married to a single man. Though I'm sure it does in some cases, especially if she was content to have only one child in her first marriage. And after the divorce is a fait accompli, remarriage is of course more likely to yield more children than never remarrying.
Possibly, it's definitely something I love to see a paper on as would be interesting, at least to me, to see the data on that. Definitely anecdotal but my lived experience I feel remarriages result in an increased total fertility, i.e. she might have only wanted 1-3 kids but the next husband does to hence you see broods like (ages) 21, 19, 18, 5, and 3. Or serial marriagers (yes not a real word) 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 18 four different last names. Seen a lot of the former in middle class families, lot of the latter in poor families IME.
I'll admit I've never known a woman married thrice who had children in all three marriages. Though I don't think I've even known a woman who was married thrice in her fertile years.
A friend of mine once employed a woman who had 4 children by 4 men (and still young enough to have more) -- she was, of course, never married to any of them, which is the norm for the lower classes in the US. The situation you describe, of 4+ children by 4 husbands, has to be extraordinarily rare.
So I think the core question is which tends to result in more children: two husbands before age 40, or one? And yeah, someone surely has access to data to figure that out, but a quick search didn't yield anything.
I'll add that in either case, divorce is still generally a negative for fertility, since a lot of women don't get remarried (many fewer women than men, in fact), and if they do, it might be outside her fertility window, or at least towards the end of it. Plus many second marriages don't last long.
But that error can't scale up, because no one is making it. It's an error that only exists in your mind.
You compare children per woman to the female share of the population. There are no populations that are 91% male. But if there were, you'd still compare children per woman to the female share of the population. (In your example, 10 children per woman does not balance the woman's 9% share of the population. 10 x 9.09% tells you that the next generation will be 91% of the size of this one.)
Two children per woman is just the inverse of women being half the population. It has nothing to do with how many parents each child has.
(The replacement level does skew because of losses; not all children reproduce. So replacement is usually taken as 2.2 or so. But note that while the failure of some people in the _next_ generation to reproduce does affect the replacement rate, the failure of some people in the _current_ generation does not.)
Fair, as I said I never looked into how they derived the math and a quick wiki prior to that post wasn't clear on it either. While I understand how they figured out TFR that didn't really explain how they figured out replacement rate. Still not clear on that TBH.
Well, I can give you some highly stylized examples. The replacement rate is defined as the average rate that leads to the population staying constant over time. Assume everyone bears children between the ages of 15 and 40 and then dies at the age of 80. Assume exactly half of people are female.
If you have a population composed entirely of 20 year olds, the replacement rate as defined above looks weird. If those people have any number of children, 30 years later the population will be larger, because some children were added but nobody has reached the age of 80 and died. (But if they have a total of zero children, then 30 years later the population will be the same -- everyone's still alive -- but at that point they've all lost the ability to bear children and 40 years after that the population will be zero.) So we want to think about the replacement rate in terms of a society where the age structure is stable, too. In the all-20-year-olds example, the replacement rate is 2, but the population hasn't yet reached equilibrium.
With that out of the way, if everyone dies at the age of 80, it's greater than the maximum childbearing age of 40, and so the replacement rate is exactly two. If women were instead a third of all people, the replacement rate would be three children per woman or 1.5 per man.
But, in reality sometimes people die before they reach 80. This affects our ability to measure the fertility rate -- if you survey everyone when they reach 12, the fertility rate will be zero because it's impossible to have children before the age of 15. If you survey everyone at 20, the fertility rate will be positive, but low, because that's only 5 years in to a 25-year fertility period. If you survey everyone on a regular schedule, say every 10 years, the fertility rate will be a composite of people matching the age structure of society, and while it is possible to work with that figure, it is undesirable for many reasons.
So we like to measure the "completed fertility rate", which is established by surveying menopausal women. If you survey people when they're 50, you get a good picture of how many children they will produce over the course of their life, because it's impossible for them to produce children in the future. (In reality, outside the examples, this is only impossible for women, which is one good reason we measure female fertility instead of male. The other is that women are much more likely to be aware of all of their children.)
But by surveying menopausal women, we lose information about women who died before menopause. Those women would have been counted in the fertility rate of the previous generation, but they don't contribute to the following generation. (Sometimes they do! Maybe someone had a child at 16 and died at 17. This is a complicated adjustment that needs to be made.)
Suppose half of women die at the age of 10, and the other half die at 80. (And half of births continue to be female.) Now we know that the replacement rate is 4 children per woman: for the population to remain stable, every woman who reaches childbearing age at all must on average bear four children, one to die fruitlessly and three to reproduce. And if we have such a population, and we survey the 50-year-old women, we will in fact find that they have borne an average of four children each.
Arguably, FFR is what matters - female fertility rate. The population of women is stable if you have something like 1.05 girls per woman. So, if 11 people exist on earth - 10 of them men - then you have 1 woman. If half of the 10 kids are girls, you have an FFR of 5, which is rockin'. As for the 5 boys, they can compete to be the one who fathers 10 children with each of the 5 girls, I guess.
I started at 34, had my 4th at 45 ( all healthy. Ignore the silly statistics about a minute increase in chance of chromosomal issues. That has more to do with genetics than age of the mother). If the woman is very healthy and wants kids, it’s not the terrible thing people think it is.
Valid enough as individual advice but my comment was focused on macro explanations, and your fertility history is a far outlier.
It is relevant. I live in a high TFR community. Sure, I am on the small end of family size here, but I am still in child-bearing range. I could have had another 2 if my husband had wanted to. Men looking for large families, but are no longer under 25, need not limit their search to a certain age bracket. Fertility health is a much more important factor to family size than an age range that cuts off half of the population of fertile women. Since most women- including myself- are not interested in kids first/ education and career second, we should include women on the older end of the spectrum in our efforts to improve TFR. Many people of both genders deal with lifestyle related infertility. The ones who regret not having kids, pretty much prove that older women still want children. If they are encouraged to live a healthier lifestyle, it’s possible. As an aside, I will mention I never used ABC in my life, and I suspect that has something to do with the rise in infertility.
Judgy joggers in Reston, VA. That tracks.
Both condoms and The Pill aren't that important in my opinion. The pull-out method works very well in practice, despite all the claims to the contrary on the Internet - and that's been known to humans for hundreds of years.
"The pull-out method" depends for its success on a man being able to control himself when near orgasm.
If you can do that reliably, more power to you, but most men can't.
I realize this was not the main point of the article, but the graph of fertility in the US looks like the base rate explains almost everything. For whatever reason the depression disrupted fertility, then WW2 did for perhaps more obvious reasons, then you most get people catching up to deferred fertility. The interesting part is that there does look to be more than can be explained by a temporal shift. It’s that unexplained part that could be part of the conformity story.
In the last 2 centuries, infant mortality decreased a lot and the developed world went from a model where the average incremental cost of a child in a rural village was very low, and the benefit was to provide for old age, to one where the nanny-State will take care of you if you don't have kids, while there's a tuition fee arms race that increases the cost of educating children.
The economic incentives changed for the middle class after 1945, and people only adapted to it after a generation in 1968.
Bryan explained why that logic was wrong long ago:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/was_having_kids.html
It should also be obvious that in other species the young never pay back the old.
No, he really didn't. He established only something like a) people do value having young to take care of and b) they are willing to give up some things to get that value. However, pets are now a socially acceptable partial substitute for child-raising; inferior, yes, but satisfying many of the same basic needs - and if you don't believe that, sit in a small animal vet's waiting room and listen. As for the fact that people today can "afford" children, in an absolute sense, more than in the past, that's not the right economic criterion. As Bryan knows well, when making decisions, "cost" is opportunity cost, that is, what else could you have instead? In poor societies, there aren't many attractive "instead" opportunities; in rich ones, there are lots.
In that case, incremental cost of a child was low, survivorship uncertain would explain how we go from 5 kids to 2 kids, but indeed, to 0 is a social choice more than an economic calculus.
I wonder if the reason that the poverty of the Great Depression caused a reduction in births, while poverty in other times and places did not, was that people still remembered the Roaring 20s and expected that something like them would come again someday. It makes sense to delay having the children for a few years if you expect conditions will be better soon. By contrast, if you expect to be poor the rest of your life, you might as well go ahead and have them now.
Remember that people in the Great Depression didn't know that was what it was when they were living through it. For all people in 1934 knew, the economy would get better in 1935. So perhaps they delayed one year, then delayed another, not realizing how long the delay would be. Maybe the reason the Baby Boom was so huge was that people who had put off children far longer than they expected to were finally ready to have them.
Condoms make sex significantly less enjoyable, so its not equivalent to the pill (which doesn't alter the sexual experience at all).
Fertility is still associated with being conservative and religious, who are conformists they just conform to something different. That might be non-conformist in Fairfax County UMC government contractors, but it's not non-conformist in a more general sense. Your average "non-comformist" is probably a leftist with low TFR, and the women joggers probably consider themselves non-conformist.
I think the likely outcome of all this is that fertility just keeps falling. In addition to peer pressure it's increasingly going to be the case that the young are crushed under fiscal obligations to the old. Old people can collect benefits even if they did nothing to create the children to pay for them, its natural people will respond to this by having less kids over time.
I don't see a way out of that without big time changes at the societal level, but I don't think there exists a political constituency to get it (the median voter is 55 years old and getting older).
P.S. My own thought on Israel is that it's a martial ethno-state, which is kind of a religion (a pagan would certainly understand it. Nazi Germany also had an increase in birth rate with its quasi pagan ethnonationalism.
Ironically, I think the constant threat the Arabs present to Israel helps with its birthrate. If they really wanted to reduce the number of Jews, they should just leave them alone so their TFR falls to diaspora levels.
Agree that there is no natural end in sight of the fertility collapse.
A realization recently occurred to me -- emigration is going to be the only option available to the young in many countries trying to escape the consequences of gerontocracy, and as a result, some countries are going to spiral as emigration makes the problems of gerontocracy worse, triggering yet more emigration.
Puerto Rico is one early example of what a place looks like where emigration has caused a spiral that has made the economy unsustainable, complete with its own pension and government debt problem. Projections now have PR emptying out with emigrants for the remainder of the century, even as TFR stands at 0.9.
In the EU, where emigration is easy, the effects are going to be stark. Some countries will start to have PR-style demographics and effectively become perpetually impoverished retirement communities. The rich countries of the EU, with pension challenges of their own, will have to decide whether to bail out those countries' failing pensions, and the math won't make it quite so easy as the US bailing out PR. Otherwise people in those poorer EU countries will just have to hope their adult children, working in rich countries, will send home remittances, which is one way to naturally resolve the problem you describe of the old collecting benefits regardless of whether they produced children.
S. Korea is going to be an interesting case, because emigration from there isn't quite so easy, but the aging problem is going to be most stark. IIRC, around 2050, there will be more S. Koreans older than 70 than those younger than 45. Will the young all find their way to the US (or perhaps Australia, or Japan)? Or will they stick around and bear through the population collapse?
One natural temptation will be for all the remaining young in aging countries to congregate in the capital city, which will make the fertility problem even worse as capital cities tend to have the worst fertility in the whole nation due to socially liberal values and cramped high-rise real estate. Note that, while Japan and SK's populations have both been declining in recent years, Tokyo and Seoul's populations continue to increase.
One could see governments disallowing emigration, much like the Berlin Wall.
I doubt there's the political will to do something so drastic in the West, not to mention the limitations imposed by the EU. In East Asia, it's easier to imagine. In China's case, a tougher crackdown on emigration may be inevitable.
That is my assessment. I just find it horrifying.
There's one other big way in which condoms differ from the pill, especially in a community with nonmonogamous norms - it's the woman who's left to carry the baby, and so she is much more incentivised to avoid an unwanted pregnancy than the man is.
Might be a bit naive, there, Alex. For any man with a decent income, that world hasn't existed for decades.
Imagine thinking that paying child support is actually harder than being a single mother.
In an era where paternity can be easily proven and child support (from the man or the government) is enforced there are many women that want a baby more then the man involved in the act.
It's not that uncommon for women to say they are on the pill but lie about it.
If women, especially single but sexually active women, aren't on the pill, then it's probably not because they want a baby (who wants to be a single mother?) It's likely because the side-effects of the pill can be bloody awful.
Incidentally, around the time the pill was developed, scientists also created a male equivalent, which also had some crappy side-effects. Men refused to take this pill but women were just expected to quietly endure.
Alex, you might also mention that, crappy side effects or not, there aren't any male pills that work reliably; and that if similarly crappy side effects resulted from the female pill, women would also refuse to use it - in fact the pharma companies wouldn't seek approval for it, as I believe was the case for all the male pills so far.
I think the fact that they were being issued to GIs rather than women may be more important than WHAT was being issued.
"Ironically, I think the constant threat the Arabs present to Israel helps with its birthrate. If they really wanted to reduce the number of Jews, they should just leave them alone so their TFR falls to diaspora levels."
The problem is that the settler movement would still be slowly displacing them and kicking them out of their homes.
Isn't the most obvious theory that the revealed preferences of people show that in the abscence of a pro-natalist conformism" culture like durign the baby boom, most people simply don't want to get kids at all or more than 2?
On the meta level, conformism just seems like a poor explanation for any sort of macroscopic change in human behaviour. "People used to conform to high-fertility norms, now they conform to low-fertility norms" - like, okay sure, humans are very conformist so this checks out; but why did the norms change?
I wonder if part might be female reproductive suppression, where females seek to limit their rivals’ fertility. Women tell each another to delay marriage and children until they are “ready”.