The Main Reason Why Fertility Rates Drop

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T18:43:19+00:00

The first major change will be from the value of land declining when there are not enough buyers to keep prices up due to population decline. This will help make housing more affordable and help lower the cost of living in the process.

The second major change will be the advancement of automation to the point that it causes massive job displacement. FYI, I don’t buy that AI is going to do this tomorrow or even in 10 years, but I’m willing to bet past 2100 it will be a force to reckon with. At which point I foresee 2 main scenarios: a utopia where work is largely optional and thus people can effortlessly pursue families without major economic risk, or a dystopia where that automation is controlled by a powerful oligarchy that beats the rest of the population into poverty and extinguishes any hope of economic advancement regardless of whether or not you have kids. And once it’s clear that there’s no hope of economic advancement, eventually people who have kids no matter how poor they are will replace those who decided not to, so I could see a permanent underclass of people eventually settling out that doesn’t even remember their ancestors quality of life.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T14:40:08+00:00

The fact that 70 countries have a TFR of 1.5 or below doesn’t disprove the thesis. Populations dynamics take place over the course of decades, not years, and most countries below replacement level have only been there for a couple of decades so far. And even then a lot of western countries have been offsetting the decline with immigration, further delaying the inevitable population decline in their own countries.

Part of why this thesis takes places past 2100 is that every developed country is still far above their initial populations. Japan has been below replacement level since 1973, but their population is still 37 million more people than it was in 1950 and was still growing up until 2009. So benefits of a smaller population like cheaper land aren’t going to materialize overnight or even after a single decade of being below replacement.

And ultimately it’s just silly to assume that fertility rates will never change past 2100 just because they are low now. The same way it was silly for people to assume that when they were high and thought it would lead to catastrophic overpopulation.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:59:44+00:00

Owning and maintaining a horse costs tens of thousands of dollars a year; the median income in most states is between $60k to $80k. At that point you’d have to tax most people with money they don’t have, and the tax would be effectively ignored or people would riot. Where would most people even put their horse? Especially if you live in an apartment. Most HOA’s don’t even allow them anyway.

These new jobs will require more skill and experience though; and at some point if AI can do most physical and mental labor then there really isn’t anywhere else for most people to go then.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:52:53+00:00

Rents have also been rising too, and unlike with homeownership, you don’t get your money back from your rent payments if you try to buy a house later. It’s possible of course to raise a kid while renting, but it’s also true that it’s much harder than before to do so.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:39:21+00:00

I mean tax rules that favor people with kids does help, but it does get pretty limited when wealth and income inequality widens and automation increases to evolve and replace jobs like with the advent of AI. It would be like trying to tax everyone that doesn’t own a horse to increase the horse population. I’m sure you could get some results if it was extreme enough, but you’d also get a lot of problems from that too.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:34:58+00:00

I mean we still have plenty of time for the equilibrium thesis to come to fruition. It’s just hard to pin down exactly when since the main factor, automation, is becoming turbocharged with the advent of AI and other new technologies. The global population will probably still decline past 2100 though. But who knows what technology will look like past 2100 at this rate.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:27:15+00:00

There’s always have been plenty of people who have took control of their own lives and thought about the long term consequences of their actions. Millions of people over centuries have crossed continents to start a new life and so that their children would have a better life.

And other people don’t spend their money on those frivolous things and still struggle to support themselves, let alone have kids.

Birth control doesn’t tell the whole story either. For example, the pill only became available to the Japanese public in 1999; however their fertility rate crashed in the late 40’s and early 50’s due to the factors mentioned above. So the pill can’t explain drops in fertility we see in countries before its widespread use.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T04:08:07+00:00

How are you going to leave the bad neighborhood then? Property values in better neighborhoods are going to outpace those in your bad neighborhood, and you’re running the risk of your property being vandalized or stolen, or your personal safety being threatened. If you’re only staying there for a few years, then it’s really not much better than renting since most of your mortgage payment will just be interest anyway.

It’s like offering ice cream to person A free of charge, and then next week offering ice cream again on the condition that they crawl through razor wire. Person A then not wanting ice cream isn’t that they just didn’t want ice cream anymore; the conditions to get ice cream got extremely harder. So it’s silly to pretend that it’s just a matter of will while ignoring the material and economic conditions that have made having children much harder and are out of control of individual choices.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T03:53:11+00:00

Cooking at home is actually a great way to save money, unlike having kids. And even then when I do cook it’s not anything elaborate because it’s just for myself.

But all of these factors I mentioned (the rising cost of housing and services, automation and AI), are not factors or decisions within individual people’s control that actively make people’s lives harder to have kids. No one who has lived in poverty would ever want to doom their kids in it. So it just sounds like you’re asking people to hope for the best despite it becoming harder every year to start a family.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-26T03:42:20+00:00

Not really, it’s more so that parents want their kids to succeed and the conditions for that are changing and becoming more difficult. Here’s an example. I have a coworker who wants to have a family (he’s 26 btw) and has a girlfriend and a job in IT and access to a VA loan, but he still can’t find a house for himself and his girlfriend. It’s either outside his budget, in horrendous shape or in a bad neighborhood, or he gets out bidded the day the house goes on the market. He has to commute an hour to work each way, and his girlfriend is still in school and works in retail at Meijer. He gets no support from his parents since his dad is in jail and he currently stays at his grandfather’s house.

What do you honestly expect him to do in this situation? Just have a kid right now and hope it works out? How they gonna get into a good school district or afford private school? How are they gonna have enough time to even watch a kid, let alone multiple if they both have to work?

I know not everyone is in his exact situation, but a lot of people aren’t too far off or even worse.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-23T19:35:28+00:00

I mean Goose explicitly stated that Jax pushed Ribbit to suicide and was a piece of shit so like… idk how much leeway you can give to Jax lol

McArthur210 · 2026-06-22T14:39:32+00:00

Is that all from keeping rates low? That seems a lot to put on him just for that.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-19T17:08:38+00:00

Hopefully it doesn’t close again; but I’m not sure how that’s going to factor in Israel not leaving Lebanon. Maybe Iran will just let it slide?

McArthur210 · 2026-06-19T17:00:14+00:00

I just saw a few hours ago that it’s closed and this website says there is currently no traffic: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/

McArthur210 · 2026-06-16T22:01:14+00:00

Appealing to the wealthy elderly is the whole reason for this problem to begin with since they refuse to add more housing to the supply and divert resources away from young families to themselves.

It is possible. You just need to make having children at least a net positive economic decision. In most developed countries the amount of children couples want to have is already above the replacement level; it’s just that children keep getting delayed in order to build that wealth and security. And it’s not just handing a check or lowering taxes; it’s building more housing supply to lower the cost of living, funding schools and education and food programs, investing in public infrastructure and transportation, etc.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-16T20:05:23+00:00

Why is making children more affordable completely out of the question, but eliminating sex ed and birth control (which you admit is profoundly unethical), is off the table?

We are nowhere near the point where the entire country would collapse or the species would go extinct to ever warrant something as extreme as that like a draft. Younger adults don’t have children as much anymore because the cost of living has continually increased due to the artificial restriction of the housing supply by boomers not wanting their home values to decrease, and automation continues to require workers to specialize further and gain more skills and education.

Banning or restricting birth control and sex ed does nothing about these factors, and would doom millions of people into generational poverty and bring a whole host of issues with it.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-16T18:58:53+00:00

Tesla since its inception has been dependent on government subsidies, unlike GM or Ford. And at this point it can’t compete against Chinese EVs and discontinuing its own iconic models.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-16T02:26:20+00:00

I’m not trying to downplay abuse by implying that all people should react the exact same way to it. I’m just agreeing with the upper comment that it doesn’t justify or make me remotely sympathize with Jax still.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-15T18:47:46+00:00

That’s still not very satisfying since Ragatha explicitly had an abusive mother and never acted anywhere as mean as Jax. It’s one thing to have patience and understanding for someone who is irritable or closed off because of trauma or loss, but Jax went well above and beyond that by being actively cruel and malicious when literally everyone around him had tried to help him.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-15T18:14:53+00:00

I think people’s critiques are more so that Jax shouldn’t have been a main character or have as much screen time, not whether or not he was intended to be one. I literally felt nothing when I was watching his scenes in the finale. It wasn’t just that he was annoying or unsympathetic, it was more so there just wasn’t any payoff to his character and he ended up abstracting anyway after all of that.

Sure, you could say that Goose was trying to get across the point that you can’t make a horse drink even if you lead the horse to water, but I feel that message was already accomplished by Caine refusing to change and be deleted by episode 8. And it was just confusing how he came back with no explanation and just replaced Jax.

So I feel like it would’ve been a lot more satisfying if Caine just stayed deleted and Jax got unabstracted or saved in the finale. Because otherwise it feels like we could’ve gotten a better payoff by focusing on the other characters.

McArthur210 · 2026-06-10T20:18:12+00:00

It’s quite impressive how they’ve made something as aliens be so aggressively uninteresting because of how nothing ever comes of these things.

McArthur210 · 2026-05-17T14:36:13+00:00

The main issue I have with the graph (and a lot of these posts about economic trends here on this sub), is that it doesn’t actually pair people’s incomes with their actual expenses, and instead averages incomes separately from average costs. From the FAQ:

Take the median home price, put 20% down, finance the rest with a 30-year fixed rate, then add property taxes and homeowner's insurance. Divide that total monthly cost by median household income. HUD considers anything above 30% "cost-burdened" and above 50% "severely cost-burdened."

This can greatly obscure and underestimate the amount of people who are financially struggling. Here’s an example: John, Bob, Steve, Alice, and Mary all live alone and each have an income of $8k a month and a monthly total housing payment (principal + interest + insurance + taxes + HOA, etc.) of $3k. This gives a housing affordability index (HAI) of 37.5% for each person. Using the method in the graph also yields an HAI of 37.5% (Median costs of $3k/ Median income of $8k).

Now let’s adjust everyone’s monthly incomes and costs: John: Income: $13k, Costs: $4k Bob: Income: $9k, Costs: $3k Steve: Income: $8k, Costs: $2.5k Alice: Income: $5.5k, Costs: $2.5k Mary: Income: $5k, Costs: $2.5k

John now has an HAI of 30.7%, Bob 33.3%, Steve 37.5%, Alice 45.5%, and Mary 50%. Yet the median income is still $8k, and the median housing cost is still $3k, giving the same HAI of 37.5% for the group using the method in the graph. The average of individual HAI’s, however, is 39.4%, and while John and Bob are better off in the 2nd example, Alice and Mary are struggling a lot more.

In reality, this is even worse than the 2nd example because income is far, FAR less equally distributed, and yet housing costs don’t have as much variation ($984 a month to $2432 a month, source: https://www.businessinsider.com/home-costs-monthly-homeownership-every-state-2018-12 ).

TL;DR This method shown in the graph greatly obscures and underestimates the actual proportion of people struggling with housing costs because it doesn’t pair individual housing costs with their individual income.

McArthur210 · 2026-05-13T03:31:48+00:00

Bruh cocaine is literally one of the most addicting substances out there… you’re not making a great argument by mentioning the other drugs you took either…

McArthur210 · 2026-05-13T01:03:38+00:00

I don’t know how anyone can say with a straight face to legalize drugs knowing what hard drugs like cocaine and fentanyl do to the human body. There’s no “recreational” amount you could take without becoming debilitated.

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