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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I'm not so sure this is true. Stephen Shaw put out a documentary about falling birth rates called Birthgap, and he was interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently (it was a good interview, you can get it by podcast as well, but I know most people don't have the time for that).

The most interesting thing he's talking about, that I hadn't heard before, is that according to him something like 5% of women report that they never want to have kids, yet right now something like 30% of women never have any kids. Which comes out to something like 80% of women who never have kids having wanted them. This is a real source of suffering that has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Shaw, interestingly enough, never gives an explanation of what's causing this. He has ideas, but every time he looked at the data the ideas just didn't make sense. He described his documentary as him asking all these experts why fertility rates are falling, even while most women still want to have kids, and finding that every explanation he was given kinda made sense but didn't match the data. Really, the interview is great and I'd recommend listening to it.

So while it makes sense intellectually that "most people will choose not to have kids" for the vast majority of women, at least, who never have kids it wasn't a choice. They meant to have kids, but it did not work out for them. No doubt for most of them it was due to other choices they made, but they never meant to be childless. So when we see falling fertility we can't round it off as "More people are choosing not to have kids." That doesn't seem to match the data (again, among women).

Another interesting bit of data I learned from the interview: Shaw claims that only children are not a major driver of lower fertility, and says that having only one kid is still very rare. The people who are having any kids at all are choosing to have more than one kid, and only child rates have remained about the same over the last 70 years or so.

EDIT:

Just wanted to add a quote from Shaw, from a different podcast he did:

"Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe women don't want their children. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we have to accept that. And that's the society where now, you know, we set ourselves up for and we just accept consequences. Well, it turns out from studies and from my documentary talking to people in 24 countries, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who don't have children, and I'm estimating 80% and it might be higher, had planned to have children. They had assumed there would be a moment in time after education, after careers when it would be the right time. But the right time never came. And, you know, if you were to watch a part two of the documentary, I almost suggest you don't watch it alone because there's some very emotional scenes with people in their 40s, men and women who get deeply emotional about what went wrong in life that they had planned to have children."

I think it's better to judge people based on their actions not words. You can easily have children while having a career on first world country. Problems with having kids in 40s are well known. Women just choose what they want more in theit youth and maybe they committing a mistake because they don't think long term but this is their cross to bear.

Problems with having kids in 40s are well known.

You know, I don't think they are. At least, not among the population of women who want to have kids but never have them.

I think our society used to be built around an cultural expectation that you marry young and have kids, and the 1970s blew up that cultural expectation because it restricted people's freedom. And a lot of women since never got told that they better have kids young or it probably won't happen. Pop culture didn't tell them, their parents didn't tell them, school didn't tell them, and their peers didn't tell them. This isn't true of all women, but of a lot. They were told they could have it all.