Posted on 03/18/2021 9:20:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
What really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.
The world’s richest countries typically have the world’s lowest birth rates. The highest-income people in those wealthy countries on average have the smallest family sizes.
Those two facts conflict with the broad perception, especially among lawmakers, that Americans aren’t having babies because they’re worried about how expensive kids are. So may the results of a new study out today, which finds that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines.
“Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly associated with lower birth rates in wealthy countries,” authors Laurie DeRose and Lyman Stone write in the Institute for Family Studies paper. Later, they observe, “placing a high degree of value on work can dampen fertility desires and make them less likely to be realized.”
This all suggests, the authors say, that specific societal and individual values strongly influence birth rates in wealthy countries, not necessarily income or welfare availability.
Many demographers have argued that societal values that flatten the differences between the sexes would help boost fertility — for example, if husbands did more childcare and household chores and women had more earning power. Yet this study finds that people with so-called “egalitarian” values are less fertile than those who embrace differences between men and women.
The differences were especially pronounced among those who both expressed feminist values and prioritized work over family. Beliefs about sex roles affected fertility the least among those for whom family was their highest priority.
“Men and women who place a high value on work and expect a high degree of gender equality have the lowest fertility, whereas gender equality expectations are less predictive of fertility among men and women who see work as a less important element of life,” the authors find.
“Women who valued family over work had the most children,” the study says. In addition, the higher fertility among non-feminists “was more pronounced for women than for men: the fertility differential associated with gender role attitudes was more than twice as large among women in every category.”
Another contradiction to the argument that encouraging the same life script for men and women would increase fertility, the authors found, was that countries with some of the highest reported egalitarian values experienced a significant fertility decline, just like peer nations. These same countries with high support for so-called gender equality also offer numerous government subsidies to those who have children.
So countries with high birth welfare and very egalitarian attitudes still saw fertility drops, again contradicting common narratives about potential solutions to low fertility. Rather than government childbearing subsidies and other expensive taxpayer-subsidized incentives such as extensive mandatory paid leave, or shifts towards more feminist attitudes, what really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.
“In recent years, fertility rates have fallen sharply in many countries formerly believed immune to very low fertility,” DeRose and Stone write. “Egalitarian values and generous social welfare states had been credited with protecting the Nordic countries in particular from very low fertility rates, yet since 2008, birth rates in those countries have nonetheless plummeted.”
The authors conclude from this that “Efforts to achieve full private sphere gender equality between partners are not likely to yield large fertility recoveries, especially if they are achieved in a way that raises the salience of career-mindedness even more.”
So countries’ efforts to increase birth rates by, for example, providing taxpayer-sponsored daycare, mandating affirmative action for women on company and nonprofit boards, and other policies that attach childbearing-age women to work may actually reduce fertility by reinforcing an anti-fertility careerist mindset, the study suggests.
Sometimes politicians attempt to get around this problem by suggesting instead that governments simply hand parents cash unattached to work, such as with an expanded child tax credit or a universal basic income for parents akin to the one Democrats stuck into their latest government spend-a-thon. The IFS report also suggests this.
Yet subsidizing child production with no or a low expectation that the people who created the children stay together to parent and provide for them seems likely to have devastating consequences, such as increasing rates of criminality, self-harm, depression, and dependency. All of those are far higher among the children of unmarried parents, and so are many other social ills and private wounds. As long as Democrats would refuse to require marriage of subsidy recipients — and to suggest it is immediately to realize that would have a snowball’s chance in Hades — such programs would only increase societal misery.
Instead, the most politically useful takeaway from the report is that those who care about the nation’s ability to sustain itself demographically need to encourage pro-family attitudes, teach the young to look forward to parenthood, emphasize the value and happiness of raising a family, and oppose subsidies that work to separate mothers (and fathers) from children.
The authors used global datasets from the World Values Survey/European Values Survey. These surveys use self-reported values from survey respondents about how high they rate the importance of work and the importance of family.
Low birth rates fuel future fiscal crises for countries, like the United States, that redistribute huge amounts of money from younger working people to older, non-working people. Low birth rates also create many other national problems besides financial ones.
Aging countries are less culturally dynamic and resilient. They also face greater pressure to do things that may be not in the national interest, such as importing foreigners with low job skills and far less likelihood of assimilation.
The United States hit a record-low birth rate in 2019, and research since the lockdowns suggests 2020 and 2021’s birth rates will drop even further. Countries need women to have an average of 2.1 children each to keep their population even. In 2019, the U.S. birth rate was 1.7.
So where are all the gender benders going to get babies to adopt?
We will die eventually but lifespan will be greatly extended. Essentially aging is a disease and we will find a cure.
Americans don’t want to raise their kids in Mexico 2.0 and that’s what we quickly turning into. Plus endless homosexual and tranny propaganda....it’s just not a good environment for families
You know what? Your freeper name fit’s you perfectly.
And America is exporting this crap to the rest of the world.
...Nearly 1 in 3 kids or teens in the U.S. are overweight or obese, nearly three times the number in 1963... source
“The United States hit a record-low birth rate in 2019, and research since the lockdowns suggests 2020 and 2021’s birth rates will drop even further.”
Not to worry. With the democrats open borders policy we’ll have as many people as China in a couple of years.
“Taxes and inflation have destroyed the value of our earnings.”
Ain’t that the truth. Rather than inflation though I’d say more like pandemic price gouging and democrats squashing our energy industries.
I'm entertaining retirement on Dec 31, 2022. I'll be 66 1/2 at that point. SS at max and 31 years at my current employer. Hopefully my 401k is still in good shape at that point.
There’s no cure for aging, or for death. We’ve already solved most of the issues that led to shortened lifespans like malnutrition and such, and we are already living longer than our brains are designed to last. We’re not going to be pushing it farther than that, and even if we could, we’d just be drooling vegetables in a body, so it wouldn’t be worth it.
50’s were as good as it will ever get. Somehow I felt much more at ease with Ike as president than say ...oh I don’t know..Obama, Biden. In those days you barely noticed the existence of the federal government. Now the sonsofbitches are meddling in and bollixing up everything.
And here I was thinking the birth rate had collapsed because no one in their right mind would want to bring up a child in the bankrupt, rigged-election, totalitarian, communist, gender dysphoric, crime ridden, anti-meritocratic, upside down, third-world crap hole that used to be the USA.
Lower taxes so one income can support a family and you’ll see larger families.
of course, this is well known.
That’s certainly part of it. The other part is men who think marrying someone who pulls in a paycheck is the only option. Lots of young men out there think a wife who’s a homemaker is on welfare.
For the wives of said men having children is a burden. These guys think child care is women’s work.
Inflation.
My allowance in 1967 was $.25 per week.
That is $1.97 today.
That is 687.5% inflation since 1967.
And here I was thinking the birth rate had collapsed because no one in their right mind would want to bring up a child in the bankrupt, rigged-election, totalitarian, communist, gender dysphoric, crime ridden, anti-meritocratic, upside down, third-world crap hole that used to be the USA.
My experience is young women are brainwashed to validate themselves with career
Then biology comes along early 30s and usually upends that
All that college money wasted.....
At least in the south
Does anyone here know what percentage of married docs still practice a forty hour week after babies start
It’s a I think about 28%
Think of all those men who lost a slot to her....through social engineering quotas
Now on the other hand..the lower socioeconomic classes aren’t encumbered by such lofty notions and have babies like rabbits damn the consequences and usually in mid teens
Even though black women also abort at rates even alpha career women can’t emulate
Women. In general have been destroyed by culture....some fight back but they are so screwed up
It’s pitiful
Lexapro is now your best friend....hell I’d hate to have to navigate all the crap culture has had them swallow
Foisted upon them by non breeders who never went to prom and nobody asked out and who’s only reproductive option was once frowned upon
Those women pushed their own neurosis and unhappiness on the rest....and with damming consequence for all of us
Next lesson is Wardaddys opine on how women today live in a false construct of security that allows this hysteria to manifest
Women are preoccupied with safety and security and self....fear
We don’t accommodate that like we used to
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