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I just saw a tweet and I don’t care if it’s factually true because a it’s definitely directionally true but it seems like Humans overall just hit below replacement fertility. That would seem existential at some point. Shouldn’t we be considering radical policy choices. One big issue is men dropping out of the labor force. One radical thing we could do would be positive male discrimination. Make firms hirer men whenever possible. There are probably a lot more radical policies but more stable male careers would definitely seem to help. Not saying we should do that specifically but it probably should be inside the Overton window.
I think it's well-within the Overton window if you're a conservative or at least "family oriented." The problem is that it's verboten among most blue-tribers, for whom any incentives, no matter how gentle, toward more traditional family structures are equated to regressive coercion. The best they can do is support cheaper/subsidized childcare, which isn't nothing. However, if the Nordic countries where that already exists are any reference, cheaper childcare alone does little to promote additional births.
Things working out relatively fine in the Nordics until sometime in the 2010s. Things only really collapsed in the wake of Corona.
It seems to me that the various family friendly welfare interventions did something if we look at fertility in the wake of their introduction in the ~70s but now there is some different problem(s) driving the collapse in fertility. So while a nation like the US could possibly get some kind of benefit from introducing something similar, it's also extremely unlikely to actually get close to solving things.
Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?
The Nordics, like most countries, saw a collapse in marriage that caused the collapse in fertility. The timing does suggest that smartphones were the cause (although this demographer thinks that the pre-2012 collapse was due to the recession whereas post-2012 is due to dating apps and shortform video). Interventions in the US would probably be more effective because there is a population of religious Americans that already want to marry and have children, so the incentives would be more effective. Whereas in secular Scandinavia paying people more money to have children won't do much if kids interfere with their expressive individualism.
I'm not sure that's accurate for Sweden. While marriage rates have declined, they don't seem to correlate particularly well with fertility over the longer term, and I don't think the Swedish data supports a declining marriage -> declining fertility explanation.
Sweden's fertility rate was 1.68 in 1980, rose to 2.14 in 1990, fell to 1.55 in 2000, and rose again to 1.98 in 2010. What has changed very dramatically is the age of first marriage. For women it went from about 26 in 1980 to around 35 today.
But marriage hasn't really been a prerequisite for having children in Sweden for a long time. By the mid-1970s, first births were already happening earlier on average than first marriages. Long-term cohabitation, usually called a sambo relationship, is completely normalised, including for raising children. Births outside marriage increased from 39.7% in 1980 to 47.0% in 1990, while fertility rose from 1.68 to 2.14 over the same period. That seems pretty hard to reconcile with declining legal marriage itself being the cause of lower fertility.
I'd be cautious about cross-cultural comparisons of marriage rates for this reason. Marriage doesn't have the same cultural valence everywhere, and "unmarried" in Sweden doesn't necessarily mean someone isn't in a stable relationship, unready to have children or that they would be negatively socially affected by having children. It might still be a causal mechanism somewhere else but it doesn't seem to be in Sweden.
There's also a problem with looking at the proportion currently married. If someone has children in their early 30s and divorces at 45, that later divorce lowers the marriage rate without having anything to do with whether those children were born. What we'd really want to know is how many people are in stable relationships at childbearing ages and how likely those couples are to have children.
Interestingly, during Sweden's fertility decline in the 2010s, first-marriage and first-birth rates both fell while entry into cohabiting relationships remained remarkably stable. So people don't seem to have stopped forming relationships. Rather, people already in relationships became less likely to make the transition to either marriage or parenthood. Combined with the earlier information, that suggests that both marriage rates and relationship formation are probably a fairly poor proxies on their own for whatever is actually currently driving the fertility decline, but family formation is definitely being delayed.
Also curious is that the desire to eventually have children seems to have remained fairly stable in the Nordic countries over the last 50 years, with two or three children still being the typical desired number, even as actual fertility has declined substantially.
Something is causing the decline in fertility but I strongly doubt it is lack marriage and even relationship formation, in Sweden at least.
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