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No, the real problem is that it's not economically viable to get married at 20 (the fact the modern elite has successfully memed that one shouldn't want that is a separate problem, and certainly one they financially benefit from as net beneficiaries of the education-managerial complex). For a woman to get married at 20 you need to have economic conditions that allow 25 year old men to become attractive to them (read: economically established), and the ability of a single income to sustain that for a while.
The age of family formation closely follows those economic conditions.
When economic conditions are good and you can get a career straight out of high school, that age goes down and families form rapidly (though the market of existing potential buyers has to clear first). As that happens, the population goes up and economic opportunity per capita goes down, so this only lasts until the slack in the economy is taken up.
When economic conditions are bad- let's say housing prices outrun the ability to afford one on a single income (pick your favorite reason why)- that age goes up. If it goes high enough, you've priced them out of the market, families don't form, and children are not born. However, as that happens, the population goes down and economic opportunity per capita goes up, so it's self-correcting... unless steps are taken to stop that from happening, like mass immigration.
A society in economic equilibrium has a TFR of 2.0.
Uh, aren't most early twenties women actually in cohabiting relationships- which our ancestors would readily recognize as concubinage? The difference between a wife and a frill wasn't the husband's economic prospects; it was social pressure on him to actually marry her, either from the Christian church or from her family's social status.
Cohabiting makes your cost of living go down, having children makes your cost of living go up.
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I'm skeptical of economic explanations from simply looking at how much poorer the west was when it was fertile, how poorer countries are more fertile, or even how poorer people in the west tend to have more children.
I could see some economics-mediated social cause, like having children making people go down a few steps on the social ladder. Another theory I heard was that it used to be possible to have a relatively dignified life while being poor, while nowadays this will inevetibly send you to some high-crime spot. It's easier to imagine going down a few steps when it's juat about having a smaller house/flat and fewer consoomer goods, it's another thing when it will get you stabbed or your kids abducted by a rape gang.
Finally I feel like that data on relationshiplessness of zoomers contradicts the "purely economic factors" explanation.
You're never going to find a single Golden Ticket solution to the TFR question(because, ultimately, there is no single golden ticket solution to TFR), but economic conditions allowing for succesful, established men relatively early in life so they can support a family is atleast a very strong factor in play here.
The hidden question here that few people ask; If men as a whole were richer and more established, would women quietly choose to be stay-at-home-moms or instead go for the go-girl-business-boss path? We really don't know.
On the other hand, we should still probably want for successful, established men early in life, because even if a good chunk of women still go for the go-girl-business-boss path, the stay-at-home-moms may very well make up for the slack if they're churning out 3 to 4 kids at a time.
I can't see how you reach this conclusion. If anything, going by current economic conditions, it blatantly supports it.
Pairing up is an economic advantage. You can split your rent by two incomes, and it's a lot more comfortable / enjoyable than co-renting with friends, let alone randos from classifieds ads. You can say you're not ready for kids, and just live together without having them for years. Economically it's an obvious boost. These kind of pseudomarriages were the default mode for every millenial I knew.
Ah! I see what you're referring to. I've heard that argument before, and while it works on paper(and certainly sounds nice), it seems as if most current relationships nowadays rely on men being successful and bringing in value before they can occur.
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As FiveHourMarathon said, "If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant." It's unreasonable to expect men to be successful and established before forming a family, and it's ahistorical too. They may have to be on a path to success, but that still is quite possible.
Or historically, for middle-class men, long engagements were the rule. Some careers wouldn't allow you to marry, or put impediments in the way of marriage: can't bring your wife (if you have one) out to India with you, can't marry locals, have to wait ten years to get leave back to Britain and then marry a suitable woman there:
Others involved lack of economic advancement for the man, e.g. the stock figure of the poor curate waiting for a living of his own before he could marry, see the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the long engagement.
And other men simply did not wish to marry 'early' (before the age of thirty*); there's a fair amount of fiction where a forty year old man ends up marrying an eighteen to twenty year old woman simply because now at last he's found 'the one'/he's ready to settle down since it's time he was married and had an heir or her family consider it an advantageous match where he's financially established, and it's nothing to do with emotional attraction.
*From a collection of ghost stories published in 1927, where the tale is set in 1905, so clearly this kind of attitude was socially acceptable since neither the narrator nor the audience feel the need for him to justify why he's not married beyond "I wasn't ready":
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I don't disagree. If anything, I feel that this developed habit of women 'waiting at the finish line' is contributing to some of the bitterness men are feeling toward woman who demonstrate this.
Sadly, I have no utter clue as to how one could even go about correcting this, so I can only focus on the one element that could be fixed - IE, making men more successful, earlier.
I don't think anything can be done until the wisdom of "there aren't gonna be enough unattached successful men at the finish line for all of us" forms anew for women.
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There are plenty of historical societies where girls could expect to be married to an established man in their teens. Those were age gap relationships but calling them 'ahistorical' is a stretch, they were very common. They're out of style now, I suspect because most women do not actually like double digit age gaps.
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This is all a just-so story. Family formation and TFR were dropping at precipitous rates when housing prices were low. It is still true that 25-year-old men can be economically established; that they aren't attractive to 20-year-old women is for other reasons. It's fashionable to blame everything on housing (because it provides a reason for housing socialism, i.e. taking houses from everyone older than Gen Z and putting the previous occupants on an ice floe), but while housing is bad, it's not the reason for drops in TFR or household formation.
Mostly housing prices are high now because Millennials are doing catch-up homebuying, while Gen X is staying put and Boomers are stubbornly refusing to die. So demand is high. Supply is low for various reasons, but the biggest and intractable one is there's only so much land in desirable areas; back when housing prices were lower, many cities were utter shitholes and both jobs and population had moved further out. You can densify, but that gets you mostly rental pods and not homes. On top of that there's urban planners and their opposition to sprawl, and unwillingness to develop greenfields after the disaster of the GFC left many uncompleted exurban developments to rot.
Some of this will be solved; the boomers will die. The rest, probably not, so any relief will be quite limited. Unless the housing socialists get their way, and then housing will be like health care and higher ed, permanently.
And yet, there was a baby boom when economic success per capita in the US was at an all-time high, with TFR far higher at that time than at any time after the US became an industrialized country.
It's not just the rent, though that is a part of it. Countries that don't have the housing problem (and aren't clearly being sabotaged for the purpose of pumping up rent; and the US in particular still manages the highest TFR in the developed world despite that sabotage) still have a population contraction problem, anyway, and the market for family formation is (like all markets) irrational, dependent on limited information, and as life-alternatives get better the clearing price for forming one goes up anyway (the "stop educating women/ban porn and birth control" memes are pointing at symptoms of the root cause).
No it doesn't, Israel has the highest fertility in the developed world(or for that matter anywhere outside of Africa or Central Asia).
The baby boom was caused by a massive increase in male wages without a corresponding increase in female wages combined with conservative social norms. We're uh, not going to replicate that. Especially not on purpose. It wasn't just a generalized increase in prosperity, people just consume more when that happens. It specifically made marriage more attractive to both men and women and had the social norms to ensure marriage=babies.
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Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.
Housing isn't going to make a dent. It's putting the cart before the horse anyway; the Levittowns and later suburbs were built because there were young families looking for houses; young families didn't form because there were now suburbs available.
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