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Something else to remember when we're talking about birth rates in the developing world: pregnancy is pretty drat dangerous. Especially if you don't have access to great medical care. Part of the reason why women are choosing for family planning outside the first world is because they don't want to die. If you can get a shot or an IUD that last for months or years, you can dodge the bullet of risky childbirth for awhile. Also, the cost of raising a child has always been expensive. If the difference is between having 1-2 kids or having 5 and being a dirtfarmer, rational people are going to choose the former. A large part of the reason for higher birthrates was that women weren't given any agency, much less control over family size. It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more.
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Dec 6, 2014 15:38
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ChipNDip posted:In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce. This is actually news to me. I thought Europe provided some decent assistance to families to help offset the huge cost of a child, and better insurance situations make for a much safer parenting environment. Am I misunderstanding the situation, or are there other variables at play?
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Dec 7, 2014 00:43
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Amused to Death posted:Kids are hugely expensive, no nation comes close to providing for the full costs of kids. Also, kids cost time and effort as well, like A LOT of time and effort over a very long time. It creates an issue in a modern world where both parents tend to work or at least go back to work eventually. This is true, but in the recent past people still had kids. Or does it fit with my original "as soon as people started being able to effectively family plan, the birth rate went through the floor" point?
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Dec 7, 2014 01:17
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