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I've previously posted on the Motte about the state-funded Swedish Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility. Recently the Committee released its second report more closely detailing the root cause of the decline – which women are not having children anymore? As before here's a link in case you know the Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-2-fran-hoga-till-sjunkande-fruktsamhetstal-hur-ser-situationen-i-sverige-ut/
The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.
Beyond that the report also has a few tidbits of interest here and there. The common narrative of a foreign underclass quickly and decisively outbreeding the native population isn't quite on the mark for example, as the report points out that second-generation immigrants tend to have about as many children as natives (first-generation is another story, and a large part of the very justifiable demographic anxiety in Europe). On the other hand that also means immigration cannot possibly solve the issue long term or even medium term; while many children of immigrants often learn Swedish quite poorly, commit more crimes than average and remain largely unintegrated for vast periods of time, they at least seem to take our individualistic childless culture to heart.
This is less meaty than the previous post on the subject, but I think that's enough to bring some fodder for discussion. What do you think should be done to support our DICKs? Should DINKs be made to pay to make their lives easier? Is the reports take naive on the questions of immigration and demography?
When it comes to high TFR, there are only a handful of successful interventions in the modern period:
These don't seem very applicable in Sweden.
The post-WW2 Baby Boom is perhaps more plausible. But that required a cultural foundation that we don't seem to have, rising prosperity amongst the middle class... The 1950s are nearly as far away as Afghanistan or Imperial Japan.
The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think. And what's even the point? Why are more people needed, from a policy point of view? A child born today will come of age in 2044. Add another 4 years of university, 2048. Is Sweden going to need infantry digging trenches? Is Sweden going to need lusty youths bringing in the harvest? Industrial proletariat in the steel mill? Is Sweden even going to need universities? No, Sweden should and will mechanize all that. Even the production of ideas will likely be mechanized by then.
For all of human history, more children in your state was usually a good thing, there was no substitute for people, especially high-quality people - Swedes have a good history of achievement and ability. I think our logic is fundamentally wrongfooted by modernity here, people will point out the high youth unemployment in China and then the low TFR... how is low TFR a problem if there aren't enough jobs for existing youth? Even if one's not a singularitarian, why are people so unwilling to look at the general trend of a declining number of legitimate jobs? We can just predict the trend will continue, right?
If Sweden really needed more children, wouldn't they have a 'firm handshake and you're in' labour market? But they don't, no Western country does, they all want a bachelor's degree minimum and plenty of interviews. There is huge demand for 140 IQ agentic innovative dynamic agile 10x engineers with great communication skills and a flourishing Linkedin... not so much for 100 IQ Sven I think.
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Not sure if this has been posted yet, but there's a video doing the rounds of a woman who didn't want kids changing her mind after being exposed to a baby. The government may want to consider this type of exposure in any final year sex ed/home economics programs in high school.
Basically the theory is that people (women) don't want kids because they aren't exposed to babies and young children in a childcare environment. They don't really have a trigger for their childbearing instincts. Not sure if the various European governments tried this in their studies.
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Less kids means higher taxes on working aged people to pay for retirements. All one needs to do to properly apportion the costs to those that cause them is to raise taxes and give a tax break to those with kids. If you're footing the bill to bring in someone to pay for your retirement on average then you gotta contribute enough to pay for your own. pretty simple. Someone with a TFR of 0 should be paying roughly twice the redistribution portion of the tax bill(excluding more fixed costs like military spending that don't really figure into the per capita societal upkeep). I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.
Sure, I'll internalize it further by voting to remove funding from Grandma because the boomer's couldn't save a 401k like the rest of the following generations and couldn't not blood-let the economy either.
Sure, that'd reduce the redistributive tax burden and proportional reduce the difference expect from those producing the next generation and they who must contribute in other ways. Still there are many other ways you implicitly free ride on the parents. Even in ancapistan where you've hoarded capital, durable goods and gold for your retirement when it comes to you needing to exchange those things for youthful labor you are depending on someone to have brought that youthful labor into existence. One could probably come up with a fancy financial product to have parents paid now as some kind of royalty for future labor of their offspring by anyone who expects to benefit from it, but that simplifies to a general transfer.
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To misquote Lincoln, you might consider a tail to be a leg, but that don't make it so.
If it's punitive or coercive it's only so in the way all taxes are, and less so because it more fittingly distributes fruits amongst those who planted fruit trees. Society needs a next generation to survive no less than it needs a military to survive. And at war if you're spared the draft you'll still need to pay for the tools our brave soldiers use to maintain your society.
Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like. Still doesn't make it so. You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements (nor even pretending to do so the way FICA does); you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children. Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.
With this one, at least, that problem is self correcting long term, as the children had form the tax base.
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Is military spending punitive and coercive?
These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement. I'm not saying people should subsidize the life choices of people who selfishly want to be parents, I'm saying in your own self interest you need them to be parents, it's a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a demographically collapsed society just like funding the military is a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a conquered society.
I'm not framing this as a Pigouvian tax, but if you insist it is one then to the degree it shrinks the subsidy it is a pareto improvement, not a self defeat.
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DINKs are already made to pay for children. They are just paying in an inefficient manner.
K-12 education costs about $11,800 per child in the USA. My Googling and back-of-the-envelope calculations get $19,000 per child in Sweden, but this surprises me because I thought we Americans were particularly pathological about overspending on education, so possibly I did something wrong.
Those numbers are cost per child in the population, not cost per student, so a per child payment (much bigger than the ones claimed downthread to have had little effect) could be tried and be revenue neutral.
I thought that seemed super inexpensive
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In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.
If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.
I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.
I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.
People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.
Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.
The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.
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This is an excellent point and a specific case of a general form problem. The same could be said about sex. Porn and masturbation can be endlessly optimized, AI, VR, devices like fleshlights. Sex with your wife or girlfriend is more or less the same as it was fifty years ago for most people unless you get into things like strap-ons and such. One is much more constrained by reality and biology, the other is much freer to endlessly optimize and improve. Learning a language or a musical instrument is mostly about as hard as it was fifty years ago (yes, apps like Duolingo and Youtube can improve this somewhat) but video-games are orders of magnitude more entertaining now. I even see it a bit with children vs puppies. We aren't genetically engineering children to be extra cute, extra docile and so forth, but we have actually done that with dogs. It's unsurprising that a certain amount of people would choose to be dog moms. Generally, real life experiences like relationships, children, skills like musical instruments or woodworking, advancement at your job, doesn't really work that differently from in the past and is often limited by real-world constraints. Especially with AI I think this will be a major life problem people have to face
Or if they get into you.
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Day in the life before kids
Day in the life after kids:
The "before" is probably a little tight since you're at six hours of sleep assuming it takes an hour to get dinner. You might have to cut down to an hour or two of vidya every day. Otherwise accurate.
Speedrun some counter service fast casual slop near the office or home to get that number down.
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"Day in the life before kids" rather sounds like the day in the life of an unemployed trust fund kid.
The second item is literally "work"
You can totally do all those things while having an 8 hour per day wageslave job. Of course that's assuming no overtime but there's a ton of jobs that end after 8 hours.
Yea I basically lived that life for a decade:
Woke up @11 Worked 12-815 Video games / reading / movies for 2-3 hours Worked out 11-1 somewhere in there Jerked off Sleep @2-3ish
I changed the schedule up just enough here and there with real human interaction, but 5 days a week this was me.
I can kinda see how Jim Norton jerked himself off enough to marry a tranny. Two years with mostly normal sexual thoughts now.
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Some interesting plums:
So, the usual "women are too educated! going to college defers fertility! careers and work depress fertility!" explanations don't hold there.
So I would ask, what generational cohort is coming of age and getting ready to have kids in 2010? Depending on cut-off points, late Gen X (those born in 1980), early Millennials (born 1981-1985). I'm using an age range of 25-30 here as "ready to marry and have kids", which is my own personal view.
Could it be people in this particular grouping (1980-85 births) have different attitudes to life, career, marriage and children? I think it very possible. Wikipedia article on the Millennials has an entire section about "they're not getting married and having sex as much as their predecessors, this might be why":
2010 is also after the 2008 economic crash, which was more or less severe/prolonged depending what country you lived in, but I imagine it had a large impact on young adults about "get an education to get a good job to ensure you have enough money for a decent life, because circumstances are risky and so you need to put your future first, before dating and marriage and babies".
And again, if you put off having that first child to later or never, you're not going to have second or third children. Also, cohabitation is not leading to marriage (even though it started off as 'trial marriage', that is, make sure you're both compatible before getting married) since it has now become acceptable as its own thing. I think cohabitation also, because it's not marriage even though it's nearly marriage, does put a barrier to having children for a slew of reasons ranging from economic to personal decisions.
So if everyone around you is putting off serious long-term relationships, getting married later or not at all, putting off having children or not at all, and concentrating on economic security and having a good time while at the same time contrasting how much tougher it is for you than your parents' generation, it makes it easier for you to do likewise.
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At least around me, there are four broad classes of people who don't have kids. Some people are in more than one group.
I think all four of those cases have different solutions, and to be honest, I don't know if I know what those solutions are.
For the first case, I think several Eastern European countries have tried fairly generous tax credits to have children. I'm sure there are people here who are far more interested in this topic than I am, but if memory serves, it didn't do too much to move the needle. I vaguely recall it causing people who had two kids to consider a third, but it didn't make people who had zero kids more likely to have one.
For the second case, it's going to take a lot of work. There are a lot of variations on this - I simply used AGC as a simple example that I see a lot. Trump and the fact that every C-level executive in the country seems to be all but publicly pleasuring themselves over the idea of an impending jobpocalypse ushering in a new era of feudalism fit as well. Fundamentally, it's a problem of hope. There are an increasing number of people who have essentially zero hope that tomorrow is going to be better than today. I'm not sure how you fix that when a lot of powerful people seem to have a vested interest in keeping people scared and hopeless.
The third option is difficult. As somebody in this bucket, I hope to adopt one day. Accessible CRISPR or cheap genetic screening would also be nice.
I have no idea about the fourth option.
I think you made the simple mistake of taking those arguments seriously.
I was about to post a version of this.
This is just online dorks. They only vaguely mean it.
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From what I've learned, it makes people have their next children quicker, but doesn't make them have more of them. Basically, it makes people switch from "we want two kids, but we can't really afford two pregnancies in a row, we need a few years of double income to rebuild our savings" to "okay, we can try for the second one".
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I think "I don't like children." is covering a lot of ground between "I dislike being around children generally" and "I yearn to be a parent but am anxious about whether I'd be bad at it and ruin their childhoods so I won't risk it" (with mid-range options being things like "I like children fine, but there's so much more to life and they're such a time-sink - I'd rather be an uncle!").
I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.
I'll admit that the categories are imperfect, but I think they roughly capture what I've seen. For every one aspiring fun uncles, there are at least five people who disdainfully talk about "breeders".
Perhaps, but the way you'd phrased it seemed to be focused on people who are doomers about the world as a whole, whereas I'm talking about people with self-confidence issues/therapy-culture-induced paranoia about their personal ability to do justice by a child.
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I never really believe that money is the factor. Take for example if someone walked up to me and asked me "Hey Daguerrean, why don't you buy a new car?" I suppose I would answer that money was the reason. But let's say they then asked me, "So what car would you want to buy?" Suppose I answered and on-the-spot that person cut me a check for X dollars, X being exactly the price of the car I named. So am I going to go out and buy that car? Of course not! Obviously not! Only if buying a new car is top on my list of priorities of "What I would do if I had X dollars", which presumably it isn't. Maybe I would get some repair done on my house or landscaping. Maybe I would save the X dollars because "Having 10X dollars saved" is a higher priority for me than "Having the new car". In reality, even if the car costs X and money is the reason I don't buy the car, you might have to give me 20*X dollars before I actually go out and buy that new car today. I'm not lying that cost is the reason I don't buy the new car, if the car cost $1 or I had unlimited money I would go buy it today. But it's obviously not the whole story, and a check for $X won't make me buy it.And if buying the car actually were the top of my list of financial priorities I would already have bought it as I routinely make and spend $X.
I think children work the same. I don't think people are lying, and if they had unlimited time and money they probably would have children, but I don't think we can just assume money will fix it. Even if we calculated the cost of raising a child for the first 4 years of life and gave that check to every newly married couple, I imagine the effect would be minimal. It is about the priority of having children. If having children is low priority behind vacations to Europe, new cars, bigger houses, luxury goods and cosmetic surgery then the quantity of money it would take to get them to have children would be absolutely massive. You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.
Not necessarily. If our only option was to cut people a fully fungible check then sure that wouldn't work. But we could either have accounts that you have to spend on child associated costs, like a healthcare spending account, or more straightforwardly and better give them money if and only if they have a kid. That'd be equivalent to making the car cost $0.
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There's definitely a chance that what they say is not what they believe, but I can only report on what they say. It would be interesting to come up with some kind of questioning line that could tease out any discrepancies between their word and their secret heart.
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This is a surprising claim since I've read many studies pointing to reduction of fertility among the parous rather than increased childlessness as the major driver of reduced TFR.
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Not calling them DICKs would be a start.
Bi-Income Trusty Child Havers?
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It's just a fun acronym – lighten up, I don't mean anything by it.
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