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Notes -
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:
education
female education
female workplace participation
feminism
urbanization
modernity
excessive parental investment
immigration
irreligiosity
birth control
high house prices/ cost of living generally
quality of available entertainment
socialized pensions
Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.
Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).
A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.
In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.
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