Marital fertility has remained pretty stable! A lot of the fertility decline is explained by the decline of marriage and the decline of unmarried childbearing
“ Since 2008, about half of the decline in fertility can be attributed to changes in marital composition. In other words, even if we’d had the age-and-status-chained changes in birth rates that we have actually experienced if people had just continued to get and stay married at about the rates they did in 2008, American Community Survey-measured 2016 total fertility would have been 2.0 lifetime-births per women, instead of 1.85. That’s a difference of 0.15 births per woman, or, put another way, that’s about equivalent to a very big, expensive, and successful pro-natal policy campaign”
A greater share of births are from unmarried woman because marriage is becoming rarer, but TFR for unmarried women is much lower than for married women. It’s a compositional effect.
That statista graph is excellent. But it doesn't show that unmarried childbearing is soaring in recent years. Instead, it shows a very stable trend. You might want to have a second look at it.
Implicit - and occasionally explicit - in the "How to improve TFR" discussions is how to have not just a greater population, but a greater population of productive citizens.
Increasing births for poor mothers on welfare would indeed increase TFR, but it's not something most folks addressing this problem are trying to do, because they perceive (and I agee with them) that it's not a particularly helpful solution.
Great article and I agree with the sentiment. The one problem I see is one of approach. We tend to provide a lot of information, hoping young women and men will make rational decisions about children.
The women in the workplace argument had an emotional approach (empowerment) and worked. It seems that a strong motherhood/fatherhood emotional appeal would be more successful.
Great post. I think there’s an unhealthy trend among 20-something-year-olds who don’t believe that they should bring children into a “world like ours”. I have no way of measuring this trend, but I hear about it around colleges and universities and from young professionals.
If you have all your kids by 30, by the time you hit forty you won’t have to worry about bathing kids or finding babysitters or all the other super hands on, high presence aspects of young kids. Your kids can spend way more hours of the day independently. You’ll have *more* time to focus on your career in your late thirties and forties.
Many careers in fact require considerable time investment and flexibility upfront. Much harder to move up the corporate ladder starting as a 35 year old than a 25 year old. And professional careers like law, medicine, academia, etc. filter out anyone who's not willing to invest the time early.
One more item for your list: having children is a GREAT way to build a social network and lasting friendships with other parents! Many 20-somethings buy into the whole "I'm going to enjoy life and see the world in my 20s" narrative, move away from home, then struggle to build relationships and friendships in the workplace, gym, and travels. When you have young children, you almost have to actively TRY not to meet and spend time with lots of other parents, many of whom are eager to spend time with you and your children.
Our society prioritizes too many things above natalism. Feminism and supporting the whims and lifestyles of the old come to mind.
We will need to deprioritize these things before any policy changes will have an appreciable result... and this is a much heavier lift. Women and older people seem to be especially entitled (on average), having developed in a permissive and self-indulgent society which has granted both of them immense social bonuses. They won't surrender them easily.
Religions emphasize marriage and childbearing, so the correlation with religion has a causal explanation.
Chastity is correlated with early marriage and low divorce. The obvious casual reason would be that if you need to get married to have sex, you are going to get married younger then if you can have sex without getting married.
I don’t always agree with forum, but you’re of course both kinda right here.
He is indeed correct with his numbers and I have no doubt the causation runs as he suggests.
In terms of what to do about TFR and address people who are not already religious, I at least mostly sympathize with your point. And in particular it is not at all obvious that forum’s method would be the most efficient or fruitful (pun intended!) one.
That's an oversimplification. Those two groups are not the same. We say "the population (which includes set A and set B ) has low fertility. How do we increase it?"
You say" let's move people from set A to set B." That's a non-sequiter.
Woman tend to want to have kids in stable marriages. If you’re not religious and you’re fucking around you tend not to end up in a stable marriage at 24!
Think about young woman that says “I want to get married and have kids, what should I do”. The advise I would give her is to find a church young adult group and date a man serious about the same thing.
> The way to get college educated women to marry early is to get them to be religious and not sleep around.
Honestly, if I were you, I'd focus on the other higher fertility cluster you identified, because it's a much easier sell.
"The way to have kids is to party and sleep around in college, then dial it back after you graduate, marry somebody with a good career, and pop out some kids."
This is the default PMC path right now, so it's a much easier sell, isn't it? We just need to sell it to some SES bands a little lower than PMC, and convert some of them to this pattern instead of the Freewheeler pattern you identify.
I agree it'd be IDEAL to marry earlier and have kids younger, because prospectively we'll get more children overall with that path, but in terms of what people will actually adopt, it seems like a stronger pitch?
I mean the entire point of the statistics in the link is that the PMC method doesn’t work. It leads to you getting married in your 30s and having few kids.
People don’t turn “party” or “materialism” on and off the moment they get a degree. It’s a habit and belief system. high body counts really do change girls psychology. And “good careers” take until the 30s to really solidify. Before that it’s mere potential.
So if your goal is to”sometime before I hit the wall I’ll marry and have max two kids” then your going to have a few people with two kids, a few with none, and a few with 0. All that adds up to where we are today.
I think we just reward young people that are doing the right things (getting married and having kids) and then more people will respond to the new incentive structure.
> I mean the entire point of the statistics in the link is that the PMC method doesn’t work. It leads to you getting married in your 30s and having few kids.
Yeah, I'm just thinking from a pure outcomes perspective - if we convince a few who would have had zero to now have 1/2, that's the biggest segment you need to convince. Like if you look at all the super low fertility countries like Singapore or Japan or Korea, the problem is the proportion having zero kids:
> I think we just reward young people that are doing the right things (getting married and having kids) and then more people will respond to the new incentive structure.
How were you proposing to reward them? Didn't see any suggestion for that in your comment or post.
Because if it's consensus status, the only status games everyone plays are anti-natal "education" and "career" status games, and we can't really move that, no country has been able to deliberately change their culture in intended ways. If it's money, how are you going to reward the *right* people for marriage? And how will you prevent serial marriage-divorce-remarriage to game the reward?
A certain percentage of people are always going to end up with lower than desired fertility (life happens). So if your desired fertility is (max two, late in life) then you’re going to end up below replacement.
You just give tax incentives to people who have kids. Double if you’re married. You could probably increase it for people under 30. I would just do a straight x% of payroll earnings (box 3 on your w2) per kid.
I was right with you til the straight percentage. Which isn’t horrible.
But the point of this piece and this discussion is that the biggest impact is for the first kid. And then making it bigger for younger married people even better.
Ok this is going to sound a bit strange...but here is what's going on with me..ill try to be short..lol..so I was a long distance runner since before puberty, so my body fat was so low I didn't get my period till I was 14 and only had it like 4 xs before vanishing until I was 22 and got on birth control( I was only on BC for 4 months) I was running and racing so my body fat and weight was too low to menstrate normally.I honestly was very very thin but I kept myself very very healthy by eating healthy, taking lots of vitamins nutrients, yoga and weight lifting. I also had no sex drive, desire to reproduce etc. Well I stopped racing and running miles miles about age 36. My periods started to return slowly and actually became very regular for the first time( age 37)..I then started to notice something else I've never felt before.. .a strong sex drive! Then it quickly turned into this powerful contraction type feeling around my ovulation day, I can't really explain it. For the first time I started to touch my belly and felt the urge to grow a baby. Well I naturally got pregnant at age 45 ,had healthy pregnancy and very healthy baby. I was hooked ..the moment I gave birth I wanted to be pregnant again. Well I have been wanting more and my desire to so so strong..im not talking to actually "have a baby" but more so JUST TO MAKE THEM! My boyfriend and I are trying but we think he may have some fertility issues. Im so sad:'( Sometimes my desire.is so strong i think about living with a couple who can't have babies and have them for them..allowing the woman to be right there with me so she can experience it ..in a way.I'm already 49 and my period still regular and more normal then ever...I wonder if i.somehow pro!onged my fertility all those years..anyone else experience this?
Ok this is going to sound a bit strange...but here is what's going on with me..ill try to be short..lol..so I was a long distance runner since before puberty, so my body fat was so low I didn't get my period till I was 14 and only had it like 4 xs before vanishing until I was 22 and got on birth control( I was only on BC for 4 months) I was running and racing so my body fat and weight was too low to menstrate normally.I honestly was very very thin but I kept myself very very healthy by eating healthy, taking lots of vitamins nutrients, yoga and weight lifting. I also had no sex drive, desire to reproduce etc. Well I stopped racing and running miles miles about age 36. My periods started to return slowly and actually became very regular for the first time( age 37)..I then started to notice something else I've never felt before.. .a strong sex drive! Then it quickly turned into this powerful contraction type feeling around my ovulation day, I can't really explain it. For the first time I started to touch my belly and felt the urge to grow a baby. Well I naturally got pregnant at age 45 ,had healthy pregnancy and very healthy baby. I was hooked ..the moment I gave birth I wanted to be pregnant again. Well I have been wanting more and my desire to so so strong..im not talking to actually "have a baby" but more so JUST TO MAKE THEM! My boyfriend and I are trying but we think he may have some fertility issues. Im so sad:'( Sometimes my desire.is so strong i think about living with a couple who can't have babies and have them for them..allowing the woman to be right there with me so she can experience it ..in a way.I'm already 49 and my period still regular and more normal then ever...I wonder if i.somehow pro!onged my fertility all those years..anyone else experience this?
After consulting with two doctors, I have been assured that women do have more time regarding their fertility than one might initially think. There seems to be a general consensus that fertility does not really become a problem until a woman is in her mid 30's. If you want young people to have a balanced perspective, perhaps we don't need to be scaring them about the decline of fertility a decade in advance.
Also, it's difficult to encourage people to have children until we address the dating/marriage problem between young men and women first.
Let me throw out a top of my head idea on how we might implement it.
Beyond whatever other child subsidies we offer in the tax code (which imo should be some combination of credits and deductions), we offer an additional larger deduction for married filing jointly couples for their first child only that is based on the age of the mother. The largest at 21, phasing out at say 27 or 28.
But said deduction is not just for the first year, it stays at the same level throughout the upbringing of that child.
As a deduction rather than a credit, it doesn’t provide bad incentives for poor people to have children before they can afford to raise them.
Of course the tax code is not the only way we need to address societal TFR issues. But it is one way.
P.S. as with all things TFR, this suggestion is likely even more valuable outside the U.S. where TFR issues are even worse.
One idea that doesn't get much ink, is the cost of families. Taxes are everywhere, at all levels and are way too much and needless. People would feel much better and more receptive to larger families if more of their money were left in their pockets.
In the US, hasn't fertility among women over 24 been pretty stable for decades?
If that's the case, then those women are presumably having the numbers of children they want, rather than responding to social messages of recent vintage.
If the decline in fertility turns out to be primarily accounted for by women under 24 having fewer children — that's actually fantastic news, and the claim that "people are waiting to have kids because they're told to" highlights an example of social messaging which has been wildly successful, and should be celebrated.
This is correct! But to move first births earlier, you also need to nudge marriages earlier.
No, you don't. You can have children without being married (or even married to other than the partner-parent)! Raise them, too!
Millions of people do this every year.
That said, earlier marriages MIGHT help. OR, slow things down.
Marital fertility has remained pretty stable! A lot of the fertility decline is explained by the decline of marriage and the decline of unmarried childbearing
Maybe my information is wrong, but it's my impression that unmarried childbearing is soaring. Mostly in pursuit of welfare benefits.
Marriage has less to do with childbearing than ever before.
Check out Lyman here: https://ifstudies.org/blog/no-ring-no-baby
“ Since 2008, about half of the decline in fertility can be attributed to changes in marital composition. In other words, even if we’d had the age-and-status-chained changes in birth rates that we have actually experienced if people had just continued to get and stay married at about the rates they did in 2008, American Community Survey-measured 2016 total fertility would have been 2.0 lifetime-births per women, instead of 1.85. That’s a difference of 0.15 births per woman, or, put another way, that’s about equivalent to a very big, expensive, and successful pro-natal policy campaign”
A greater share of births are from unmarried woman because marriage is becoming rarer, but TFR for unmarried women is much lower than for married women. It’s a compositional effect.
That's an outstanding analytic contribution to this discussion.
Your information is wrong.
It's been steady around 40% of US births since 2009. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-births-to-unmarried-women/
It rose steadily from 1980 to 2009.
Births cause marriages, not the other way around (my father-in-law brought a shotgun to my wedding).
That statista graph is excellent. But it doesn't show that unmarried childbearing is soaring in recent years. Instead, it shows a very stable trend. You might want to have a second look at it.
I know they fare worse.
Respectfully:
Implicit - and occasionally explicit - in the "How to improve TFR" discussions is how to have not just a greater population, but a greater population of productive citizens.
Increasing births for poor mothers on welfare would indeed increase TFR, but it's not something most folks addressing this problem are trying to do, because they perceive (and I agee with them) that it's not a particularly helpful solution.
Great article and I agree with the sentiment. The one problem I see is one of approach. We tend to provide a lot of information, hoping young women and men will make rational decisions about children.
The women in the workplace argument had an emotional approach (empowerment) and worked. It seems that a strong motherhood/fatherhood emotional appeal would be more successful.
Great post. I think there’s an unhealthy trend among 20-something-year-olds who don’t believe that they should bring children into a “world like ours”. I have no way of measuring this trend, but I hear about it around colleges and universities and from young professionals.
One other major benefit:
The sooner you start, the sooner you’re done!
If you have all your kids by 30, by the time you hit forty you won’t have to worry about bathing kids or finding babysitters or all the other super hands on, high presence aspects of young kids. Your kids can spend way more hours of the day independently. You’ll have *more* time to focus on your career in your late thirties and forties.
On the other hand, it could be beneficial to have more career advancement when you're younger, for various reasons.
Many careers in fact require considerable time investment and flexibility upfront. Much harder to move up the corporate ladder starting as a 35 year old than a 25 year old. And professional careers like law, medicine, academia, etc. filter out anyone who's not willing to invest the time early.
One more item for your list: having children is a GREAT way to build a social network and lasting friendships with other parents! Many 20-somethings buy into the whole "I'm going to enjoy life and see the world in my 20s" narrative, move away from home, then struggle to build relationships and friendships in the workplace, gym, and travels. When you have young children, you almost have to actively TRY not to meet and spend time with lots of other parents, many of whom are eager to spend time with you and your children.
Our society prioritizes too many things above natalism. Feminism and supporting the whims and lifestyles of the old come to mind.
We will need to deprioritize these things before any policy changes will have an appreciable result... and this is a much heavier lift. Women and older people seem to be especially entitled (on average), having developed in a permissive and self-indulgent society which has granted both of them immense social bonuses. They won't surrender them easily.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/vassal-of-the-boomer-regime?r=1neg52
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154620106
The way to get college educated women to marry early is to get them to be religious and not sleep around.
If they do those things they have an average marriage age of 24 and a replacement level TFR.
If they don't do those things they will marry in their 30s and have like a 1.2 TFR.
Cow, milk, free and all that.
Correlation != causation
OK, but it bears explaining.
Religions emphasize marriage and childbearing, so the correlation with religion has a causal explanation.
Chastity is correlated with early marriage and low divorce. The obvious casual reason would be that if you need to get married to have sex, you are going to get married younger then if you can have sex without getting married.
Buddhism doesn't seem to boost fertility nearly as much as Abrahamic religions.
“Correlation != causation”
I don’t always agree with forum, but you’re of course both kinda right here.
He is indeed correct with his numbers and I have no doubt the causation runs as he suggests.
In terms of what to do about TFR and address people who are not already religious, I at least mostly sympathize with your point. And in particular it is not at all obvious that forum’s method would be the most efficient or fruitful (pun intended!) one.
That's an oversimplification. Those two groups are not the same. We say "the population (which includes set A and set B ) has low fertility. How do we increase it?"
You say" let's move people from set A to set B." That's a non-sequiter.
It is NEITHER a non-sequitur NOR something easily accomplished.
But I agree with you that it’s an oversimplification in terms of solutions.
Being religious and being chaste are choices people can make. They can in fact move from Set A to Set B by simply exercising free will.
Well, yeah, sure. But now yours is the non-sequitur.
Because people - well, women, anyway - can decide to have more kids by simply exercising free will, without moving from one Set to the other.
Woman tend to want to have kids in stable marriages. If you’re not religious and you’re fucking around you tend not to end up in a stable marriage at 24!
Think about young woman that says “I want to get married and have kids, what should I do”. The advise I would give her is to find a church young adult group and date a man serious about the same thing.
> The way to get college educated women to marry early is to get them to be religious and not sleep around.
Honestly, if I were you, I'd focus on the other higher fertility cluster you identified, because it's a much easier sell.
"The way to have kids is to party and sleep around in college, then dial it back after you graduate, marry somebody with a good career, and pop out some kids."
This is the default PMC path right now, so it's a much easier sell, isn't it? We just need to sell it to some SES bands a little lower than PMC, and convert some of them to this pattern instead of the Freewheeler pattern you identify.
I agree it'd be IDEAL to marry earlier and have kids younger, because prospectively we'll get more children overall with that path, but in terms of what people will actually adopt, it seems like a stronger pitch?
I mean the entire point of the statistics in the link is that the PMC method doesn’t work. It leads to you getting married in your 30s and having few kids.
People don’t turn “party” or “materialism” on and off the moment they get a degree. It’s a habit and belief system. high body counts really do change girls psychology. And “good careers” take until the 30s to really solidify. Before that it’s mere potential.
So if your goal is to”sometime before I hit the wall I’ll marry and have max two kids” then your going to have a few people with two kids, a few with none, and a few with 0. All that adds up to where we are today.
I think we just reward young people that are doing the right things (getting married and having kids) and then more people will respond to the new incentive structure.
> I mean the entire point of the statistics in the link is that the PMC method doesn’t work. It leads to you getting married in your 30s and having few kids.
Yeah, I'm just thinking from a pure outcomes perspective - if we convince a few who would have had zero to now have 1/2, that's the biggest segment you need to convince. Like if you look at all the super low fertility countries like Singapore or Japan or Korea, the problem is the proportion having zero kids:
https://imgur.com/a/fCc8plj
> I think we just reward young people that are doing the right things (getting married and having kids) and then more people will respond to the new incentive structure.
How were you proposing to reward them? Didn't see any suggestion for that in your comment or post.
Because if it's consensus status, the only status games everyone plays are anti-natal "education" and "career" status games, and we can't really move that, no country has been able to deliberately change their culture in intended ways. If it's money, how are you going to reward the *right* people for marriage? And how will you prevent serial marriage-divorce-remarriage to game the reward?
A certain percentage of people are always going to end up with lower than desired fertility (life happens). So if your desired fertility is (max two, late in life) then you’re going to end up below replacement.
You just give tax incentives to people who have kids. Double if you’re married. You could probably increase it for people under 30. I would just do a straight x% of payroll earnings (box 3 on your w2) per kid.
I was right with you til the straight percentage. Which isn’t horrible.
But the point of this piece and this discussion is that the biggest impact is for the first kid. And then making it bigger for younger married people even better.
Ok this is going to sound a bit strange...but here is what's going on with me..ill try to be short..lol..so I was a long distance runner since before puberty, so my body fat was so low I didn't get my period till I was 14 and only had it like 4 xs before vanishing until I was 22 and got on birth control( I was only on BC for 4 months) I was running and racing so my body fat and weight was too low to menstrate normally.I honestly was very very thin but I kept myself very very healthy by eating healthy, taking lots of vitamins nutrients, yoga and weight lifting. I also had no sex drive, desire to reproduce etc. Well I stopped racing and running miles miles about age 36. My periods started to return slowly and actually became very regular for the first time( age 37)..I then started to notice something else I've never felt before.. .a strong sex drive! Then it quickly turned into this powerful contraction type feeling around my ovulation day, I can't really explain it. For the first time I started to touch my belly and felt the urge to grow a baby. Well I naturally got pregnant at age 45 ,had healthy pregnancy and very healthy baby. I was hooked ..the moment I gave birth I wanted to be pregnant again. Well I have been wanting more and my desire to so so strong..im not talking to actually "have a baby" but more so JUST TO MAKE THEM! My boyfriend and I are trying but we think he may have some fertility issues. Im so sad:'( Sometimes my desire.is so strong i think about living with a couple who can't have babies and have them for them..allowing the woman to be right there with me so she can experience it ..in a way.I'm already 49 and my period still regular and more normal then ever...I wonder if i.somehow pro!onged my fertility all those years..anyone else experience this?
Ok this is going to sound a bit strange...but here is what's going on with me..ill try to be short..lol..so I was a long distance runner since before puberty, so my body fat was so low I didn't get my period till I was 14 and only had it like 4 xs before vanishing until I was 22 and got on birth control( I was only on BC for 4 months) I was running and racing so my body fat and weight was too low to menstrate normally.I honestly was very very thin but I kept myself very very healthy by eating healthy, taking lots of vitamins nutrients, yoga and weight lifting. I also had no sex drive, desire to reproduce etc. Well I stopped racing and running miles miles about age 36. My periods started to return slowly and actually became very regular for the first time( age 37)..I then started to notice something else I've never felt before.. .a strong sex drive! Then it quickly turned into this powerful contraction type feeling around my ovulation day, I can't really explain it. For the first time I started to touch my belly and felt the urge to grow a baby. Well I naturally got pregnant at age 45 ,had healthy pregnancy and very healthy baby. I was hooked ..the moment I gave birth I wanted to be pregnant again. Well I have been wanting more and my desire to so so strong..im not talking to actually "have a baby" but more so JUST TO MAKE THEM! My boyfriend and I are trying but we think he may have some fertility issues. Im so sad:'( Sometimes my desire.is so strong i think about living with a couple who can't have babies and have them for them..allowing the woman to be right there with me so she can experience it ..in a way.I'm already 49 and my period still regular and more normal then ever...I wonder if i.somehow pro!onged my fertility all those years..anyone else experience this?
After consulting with two doctors, I have been assured that women do have more time regarding their fertility than one might initially think. There seems to be a general consensus that fertility does not really become a problem until a woman is in her mid 30's. If you want young people to have a balanced perspective, perhaps we don't need to be scaring them about the decline of fertility a decade in advance.
Also, it's difficult to encourage people to have children until we address the dating/marriage problem between young men and women first.
PhDs, COVID, and then job instability delayed us. Definitely wishing we would have targeted a few more years before now.
What a great idea!
Let me throw out a top of my head idea on how we might implement it.
Beyond whatever other child subsidies we offer in the tax code (which imo should be some combination of credits and deductions), we offer an additional larger deduction for married filing jointly couples for their first child only that is based on the age of the mother. The largest at 21, phasing out at say 27 or 28.
But said deduction is not just for the first year, it stays at the same level throughout the upbringing of that child.
As a deduction rather than a credit, it doesn’t provide bad incentives for poor people to have children before they can afford to raise them.
Of course the tax code is not the only way we need to address societal TFR issues. But it is one way.
P.S. as with all things TFR, this suggestion is likely even more valuable outside the U.S. where TFR issues are even worse.
Nitpick: Age at first birth in 1970 for American mothers was 22.43 years.
Source: https://www.humanfertility.org/File/GetDocument/Files/USA/20250130/USAmabRRbo.txt
"parenthood before they’re ready"
Which is, of course, the reason they'd say they're waiting
One idea that doesn't get much ink, is the cost of families. Taxes are everywhere, at all levels and are way too much and needless. People would feel much better and more receptive to larger families if more of their money were left in their pockets.
In the US, hasn't fertility among women over 24 been pretty stable for decades?
If that's the case, then those women are presumably having the numbers of children they want, rather than responding to social messages of recent vintage.
If the decline in fertility turns out to be primarily accounted for by women under 24 having fewer children — that's actually fantastic news, and the claim that "people are waiting to have kids because they're told to" highlights an example of social messaging which has been wildly successful, and should be celebrated.
Go see the age at first birth stats.
Whether cause or effect is a different question, but the point is that the delay in having kids is a huge factor in the TFR.
Your claim of “wildly successful” could be true only for those who want a steadily declining population.
It is certainly true that virtually all leftists wanted this until recently, and most leftists still do.
Because they are Malthusians who worship Mother Gaia and believe humans are destroying the planet.
But this discussion is primarily about how to raise TFR to - or at least close to - 2.1 or higher.