Why the Rich World is Dying and How to Save It 

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I'm from Uzbekistan, we don't have any problems regarding reproduction. People get married early and have kids. The problem is that parents don't really consider or think about future of the kids like education or housing. Our parents' retirement plan is us, meaning kids. I myself came to South korea to study but I had to quit cuz of financial difficulties. There you go, rich people have 1 child, educated and provided. Poor people have 5 broke-ass kids and they will work for rich kids.

the cost of property is a major factor. the idea of having a family where 1 parent looks after the children full time seems lavish today.

“Rich” countries are dying because we can’t afford a house, let alone an extra room to put a baby in

As a dutchy (almost 30 now) I'm well educated (university) and when the issue of children comes up the number 1 thing I always hear is that they would if they could own a house. If pressed on the matter, it's about the monthly expenses and space availability. Rent is just crushingly high, owning a house would be cheaper. Plus most rentals are tiny, raising children in them is unappealing. My parents are sitting on a large house, and they want to sell, but new tiny appartments cost the same as what they (think) they can sell their current home form, so they do not sell, and thus teh next generation can't get a nice big house. Housing seems to me to be an absolute factor, we have treated it like investment property and to make sure the price keeps going up, we stopped building nearly enough nice houses.

Lol. Every time an economist asks me that question I return the question back at them. “ why aren’t you and your spouse having 3-4-5 kids? “. 😂

Damn, this is dedication: having a baby, living with them for some years and then making a video about fertility rates. I'm joking, excellent video as usual!

The issue is that kids take time and a secure home, the same things young people struggle to find for themselves. Unless we give young people more time (e.g. 4 day work week, longer parental leaves, easier access to childcare, etc.) and a secure nest (an affordable home, job security, decent salary, etc.) these societies are simply going to destroy themselves. No matter how many immigrants you want to bring to a country with a failing social model... because, if they properly integrate, they'll just have a similar birthrate after 1-2 generations. And if they don't integrate and continue having too many kids... then you have big social problems that make people *not* have kids.

In Australia we used to have a "baby bonus" where the government would pay the mother $5000 per child. This ended on 1st July 2013 and in the days leading up to this policy cancellation doctors were inducing labour in the mothers to give birth to the child before this date, less the mothers miss out on the $5000 baby bonus. It was quite appalling really, but really showed how desperate parents/mother's are for money. I've got 1 child, and i can confidently say that we cannot afford another if we want to maintain that both parents have good and fulfilling careers, and simply more time to enjoy our lives. Daycare/childcare availability and affordability are also an issue here

Another social norm in many Mexican families is that the grandparents help out with childcare. My grandparents (and their siblings) took care of me and my cousins after school when we were little. Which kept our parents from having to pay for child care until we started getting hobbies. Social norms extend beyond just the immediate family in some cultures.

Child on a poor farm for centuries: An investment that will start to pay off as soon as halfway grown up, save retirement plan Child in a modern urban society: A liability that costs money, time and nerves

When traveling in the Austrian Alps I noticed how three generations live in a single farmstead. Grandparents would raise the grandchildren, where the parents would work. This seems to be a hybrid between the poor economy / rich economy model explained in this video. Personally I am rather charmed by this model, although it will probably not survive modern developments.

Interesting. Doesn't seem to explain Norway, though. We have very affordable and available child care, free education, scoring high on home labour sharing, strong worker rights and low unemployment. Yet, birth rate is about 1.5.

Condoms and birth control changed everything. I don't think people necessarily wanted to have a lot of kids in the past. It was just a lot harder to prevent. People got horny, had sex, and accidents happened. Now it's much easier to prevent unplanned children.

As an Indian I have seen this happen first hand. My great grandfather had 13 children, my grandfather has 5 and am the only child of my parents. As India as gotten richer the number of children families have has drastically reduced.

I’m turning 30 this year, and I’m still wondering how I can afford to have children. Both my partner and I are middle-class income earners. Our student loan debt accounts for 10% of our total wages, 40% goes towards mortgage and auto loans. Grocery prices have increased by 20%. It may seem like we have 30% left, but unfortunately, we always need to pay for unexpected expenses like car repairs and house maintenance. I’m living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, and i don’t want my children to experience the same financial situation as we’re currently facing.

I live in the Southeastern US. My paternal grandma had 8 kids. My dad, aunts, and uncles from that side of the family each had between 3-5 kids each. I have three siblings. My older brother has 3 kids and my younger siblings are childless. In my culture, your extended family is your immediate family. My aunts, older cousins, and grandmother would take turn watching all of the kids in the family. At one point we lived in the same house or in the same neighborhood. My husband's family is large as well and has a similar dynamic. I'm pregnant with our first child. I would like to have 4 children. There are at least 10 different family members who will babysit for me once I return to work after maternity leave. I used to also babysit my nephew amd nieces if my mom or aunts were unavailable. I'm grateful and fortunate to have a large close-knit family. If I have grandkids, I will help my children out with childcare the same way my elders have helped me out. Gotta get our clan going and connected.

Living in japan for quite a while as a european i can tell you their approach to this problem is - non existing. Its a fricking nursery home and having even birth is extremely expensive let alone all the expenses down the road. Zero support from government they are busy making sure everything is great for corporate and elderly - since elderly are their voter base. Everywhere. Atrocious, really. No work/life balance also doesn't help. They are dying out and they did it to themselves.

I live in a poor region in Italy where the fertility rate per woman is close to 0 While I believe this can be attributed also to the mentality of some people who simply do not wish to raise a child, the main issue is that here young people simply can't find a job neither afford an house for themselves. I know people who already in their 50's are still paying the loan for the house they live in and generally young people still live with their parents in their 30's or just move abroad. Yesterday I was talking to a friend that suggested building more houses could make them more affordable as their price would decrease but I am not totally convinced, especially because with the extreme levels of bureaucracy and taxation there is very little incentive for entrepreneurship.

Your grandmother def worked on that farm though.... Working class women have been working throughout history, esp those on farms. It's for a very short period during the mid 1900s that true housewifes existed anywhere else than in the high class.

Would love to hear about aging population’s impact on elderly care. Thank you!!

I'm Spanish and I can say that most people here don't have kids due to economical reasons. Housing unavailability and not being able to keep a home with one income are the main ones. You just can't expect youngsters living in a room to start building families.

This may be a US-only perspective, or just something within my own friend group. But when it comes to childcare, I notice a difference in generations from my own experience. When I was growing up, my parents relied on my grandparents for childcare. Both sets. Full stop. What I have noticed now is that for those in my age group who are having kids, grandparents aren't as available. The grandparents are still working, or they are busy with their own lives. So that free resource isn't there anymore.

My largest issue with this topic is why it's even considered a problem in the first place. The human population can't grow exponentially forever, it's an inevitability that we'd decrease in population at some point in time. Increasing forever without end is unsustainable, this is just the natural course of things taking route.

Decline in population is not a problem at all as we automate and increase our productivity without more people. Its only a problem for the ruling class having less people to rule over, thus less power.

Cost of life is the real issue. As a Canadian about to enter the job market I have no clue how I'm expected to ever be able to afford a house and two whole children, even if I get married and split costs.

I think a strong reason why East Asian and Southern European countries don't invest as much in childcare facilities is because they tend to have some of the highest life expectancies in the world, leading to elder care facilities being a more pressing matter. Also the social norms of these two cultures expect grandparents to play a MUCH more active role in childcare. Higher life expectancy means more healthy grandparents, which means less demand for institutional childcare programs, which means less government investment in such programs.

Very informative and interesting topic, thank you!

I am almost 30 years old and am single nearly all my life. All this discussion is interesting but useless when I don't even have a partner to plan having children with. And no, I won't marry a woman only to have children. I want to have a loving relationship with her and establish our life together before raising a family. Interestingly, the reason why I broke up with my only love had to do with careers. Our career plans were diverging after college. Unless one of us gave up on theirs, we had to split to avoid our friendship becoming sour. Now that I have a job, aging parents and well established social circle, it's almost impossible for me to engage in social activities that encourages meeting with unknown people and, maybe, finding someone I love and loves me, because that would require me to slack on my professional, family or social responsibilities. And I don't want to lose the credibility I earned for more than ten years.

In America at one point, one man’s income was enough to provide for a family of 4. Now it’s one man with 2 jobs and a woman with one full time job to provide for a family of 4.

A point to note is that India's fertility rate is 2.1 which is barely at the replacement level. And it is expected to go even further down as people have stopped marrying and having kids. The population of India will continue to rise as fewer people are dying due to an increase in life expectancy but after some decades India will witness a colossal decline in population once the boomers, Generation X, and millennials begin to die. For example - I am a single child to my parents and I am still unmarried (30M) and I have no plans to get married and have kids in the future.

Infinately more wise to compassionately deny a child existence than subject them to a brutal existence of uncertainty and instability. Not having kids is a no-brainer when one knows they are a job loss away from foodstamps, eviction, are crushed with student and consumer debt. Moreover the government subsidizes broke people to have children and men tend to want to mitigate this risk with women who don't desire a family.

Maginifico video sin duda. Muy claro y bien explicado, y agradezco los subtitulos para aquellos de otros idiomas y esos que estamos aprendiendo otras lenguas Me hubiera gustado que hubiesen tocado un poco de la situación en los paises mas pobres como los africanos o los de Asia central. Ademas de que en latam, la taza de crecimiento de numero de hijos y fertilidad empieza a declinar, sobretodo en los jovenes y las nuevas generaciones. Hubiera sido interesante ver el punto de vista y las razones de eso desde su punto de vista, pero aun asi, no le quita calidad ni la información tan trabajada y buena del video que nos expreso. De verdad le agradezco. Muchas gracias y ojala podamos ver mas videos asi de buenas. Good work, follow like that👍👍

Portugal made all kindergartners/day care centres free recently. I'm no parent, but I think that, while it's a good step, it's not enough. Wages are incredibly low in Portugal. It doesn't really matter much if you get that specific cost reduced if you still can't afford the extra food costs, books, clothes, etc. that a child needs.

The differences in Europe are not just about social policies but social attitudes: I live in France where it is considered normal for professional women to have 2 - 3 children AND to hold down their jobs thanks to generous and generalised child and after school care; I have close friends in Germany and have noticed the opposite: if you have children there seems to be more of an expectation that you be at home and raise them and not 'outsource' the task. Guess who has the higher birth rate?

Thank you for demystifying this topic, best video on the subject that I've seen so far.

First problem is beleiving any system can have infinite growth in a finite world. The second is beleiving that anyone wants to have kids when their incomes don't even take care of them when they are single. The third problem is lack of affordable starter housing, minimum 2 bedroom homes, are not being built in favor of bigger home size ventures and without adequate space people feel trapped and more stressed and no one wants to have a child while renting an apartment. Then we have the lack of time which means parents are constantly working and they have to put off having children or a parent has to willingly give up their career which most wont do because more money = more freedom of choice. Its why women dont want to go back to 1950's because having to beg your husband for money to buy groceries or hair dye or a nail job is degrading, and being forcefully tied to someone financially and can't escape when they are beating you behind closed doors is simply a no go. Fun fact the happiest demographic for women is single and childless and tend to live longer then their married counterparts, while men who are single tend to die earlier then their married counterparts.

I am the father of two children. My wife would like a third. In my heart of hearts, I would too. But that is NOT going to happen. Why? We can barely afford to live. Basic expenses are too high. We don't earn enough on two incomes. School is expensive. And childcare is extortion. We're in the US, and to expect the "government" or private enterprise to do anything productive about it in the near future is futile.

It almost seems like you could simplify the theory to simply the opportunity costs for the women of having a child. Poor countries don't have much in opportunity costs because there's not much opportunity in the first place. Rich countries generally have more opportunities including future career opportunities, so there's more to lose by having kids. Thus those with more available childcare (whether institutional or shared social) can lower those costs and hence see better fertility rates.

I live in Hong Kong. Had dinner with my girl friends in our 30s last night. The one with 2 kids said kindergarten alone for one kid already costs US13000/year. Rent costs US3000/month. This is why our birth rate is 0.8 which is the lowest in the world.

My take is that breeding aged people have fewer kids if we're _feeling_ poorer because every generation is getting poorer. It now takes two incomes to afford a house whereas generations ago it took only one. While productivity has increased and the pie is now larger it doesn't matter for the average young adult since the boomers and a few extremely wealthy people are scoffing down most of it. 'Poorer' countries are feeling richer every generation and this hope gives them motivation to have kids since their kids will be better off than they are.

You're map needs to include Greece, Taiwan and Poland. They have a birth rate lower than mainland China. Tbf a lot of Western countries would probably be even lower if it wasn't for immigration.

You didn't mention infant / child mortality. This was only conquered by vaccination and antibiotics in the 1950s. Prior to that the loss of one or more kids to disease was very common - in my own extended family two kids died in early childhood between 1930 and 1950 of what became preventable diseases before I was born.

Thank you for your presentation , I watched all of it .

Universe 25 comes to mind when I hear about population collapse. It's about priorities. I don't buy the idea that kids on the farm are necessarily a positive. It takes years to raise a kid to an age that he/she is able to effectively help on the farm. While that is happening the kid is sucking up money. Having kids takes sacrifice. You have to choose either you give money to kids or put it in yourself. Most people will not sacrifice their standard of living. Population collapse could lead to a lot of chaos and pain. As population gets older the health care most likely will become more expensive. Industries will suffer because of lower workforce and lower demand. As population collapses national debt will increase and it will be spread among less people. Some coutries will collapse under financial burden and with today's interconnected world it will ripple across the world. For example War in Ukraine had the possibility to create food shortages in many countries. Now imagine many countries collapsing at once. Also, there is a MIT program that predicts civilization collapse by about 2040 and apparently we are ahead of schedule.

An issue I think about often is inflation. My grandma worked 8hrs a day as a single parent and raised 7 kids. My parents both worked my dad 8 hrs and my mom 12 as a nurse to raise 3 of us. The potatoes my grandma used to feed her family only required 8hrs a day as a single parent. But the potatoes to raise me and my siblings require 20hrs (would be 40hrs for 6 kids). The potatoes haven't changed but the cost to acquire them has, drastically. Which is weird because we're more advanced in farming and technology now which was supposed to reduce costs and increase yields through economies of scale, but the opposite has happened. Let's ditch the technology and go back to the old affordable ways. The majority of us are not benefiting from the new ways. What is inflation and who benefits from it? Where is it located exactly and why are we all so accepting of it. A practical discussion is required not textbook justifications, we don't live in textbooks.

I think another factor that I almost never see discussed is _actual_ desire to have lots of children. As in, remove all the practical barriers and imagine everyone can have as many children as they might theoretically want - how many kids _do_ people want, on average? In the developed world at least, I imagine the average comes out between 2-3. I can't really imagine myself or anyone I know _wanting_ 4+ kids. Take that 2-3 and add in biological constraints and even in a world devoid of socio-economic troubles, you are still going to struggle to keep the _average_ children per woman above 2.1. Practically, to maintain an average above 2.1 you need quite a lot of people choosing to have large families.

Educated populations in developed countries know that having babies is a cost, not a benefit. The problem, in addition to the mental issues like stress in many developed countries, is that incomes are shrinking, and time is too. It is simply a burden to many people to have children. Most educated people don't want to have kids unless they own a house large enough, and are enough at peace in their lives. Like you said in the video, the time when 99% of people were farmers were different, because kids were basically an investment into labor. Medieval Europeans up until the modern age pumped as many kids as possible out, because that meant kids on farms or working in mines or factories and additional income for the household. Many died early in the process. Today the world has completely changed, and having many children is insanity unless you are rich. And what rich kids do is sickening. You see rich/upper class kids in every Western countries, all they do is conspicuous consumption, partying, having fun spending money of their parents and sharing it on tiktok. It's highly unlikely most will propagate their parents wealth. Simply put, most people aren't in a smart situation to have kids. You do have poor families, mostly uneducated, pumping out 5-10 kids in poor social conditions, but they are highly uneducated, socially backwards, and their lifestyles isn't anything someone wishes for. Immigrants from third world do the same. It's common to see African or Arab families in europe living in studio or 2 room flats with 5-10 kids. No normal European family wants that.

phenomenal video, incredibly comprehensive and informative.

0:23: 🌍 The population of rich countries is declining due to low fertility rates, threatening their economies and retirement systems. 4:24: 📚 As a society becomes wealthier, the cost of raising children increases, leading parents to have fewer children. 7:30: 📚 The compromise between quantity and quality of fertility is influenced by women's ability to balance family and career. 11:45: 📚 The difficulty for women in low fertility countries in Asia and Southern Europe to combine a career with a large family is attributed to the availability and cost of childcare, social norms regarding gender roles, and the time commitment required for parenting. 14:42: 💡 The low fertility rate in rich countries can be explained by a combination of insufficient social policies, restrictive social norms, and precarious labor markets. 18:27: 🌍 The world can be saved by implementing policies that support work-family balance and address the barriers to having more children. Recap by Tammy AI

What amazes me is not that people are having fewer children, to me that seems quite logical and not a bad thing, but that a lot of people seem to be opting out of having children entirely - which was something that was very rare in my parents (baby boomer) generation. I know loads of people in their 30s who simply are choosing not to have kids or will not because they didn’t have the right partner at the right time or they just thought they’d think about it later in life once they have a home and stable career.

A very good addition to this topic. I have been following and fascinated by the low fertility rate in rich countries for many years. Thank you for very helpful video.

Very insightful video! A lot of the arguments I had heard before but they always felt too vague tbh. Germany certainly has that problem with inaccessible child care, every place is chronically understaffed and the workers are underpaid and there seems to be very little appreciation. It only gets better later on with pretty solid secondary schools, paid vocational training (although there are also issues of course) and tuition-free university education and government assistance but yeah, fertility is super low and it doesn't feel like the Merkel governments cared at all. The current Scholz government is at least trying something, but the green family minister is being blocked by the liberal finance minister. I would have loved a tiny little side note though, that calling children in poor countries "low quality, high quantity" and those in rich ones "low quantity, high quality" is a pretty fucked up way to describe actual human people. You explained the intended interpretation but it seems like a particularly unfortunate choice of words nonetheless.

Property markets, urbanisation, and the dating arena must surely not be forgotten

Most surprising thing in this video is that US dads are one of the most active in their children in the world. Not that I believed we are absent in our kids lives, but fathers from other countries aren't that active at all.

Here's a reason that nobody has thought of: • in Westernized societies, the association of reproduction has been separated from sexual activity, whereas in much of the world, sexual proliferation is still associated with propagating offspring. In the West, you can have sex for fun, premarital sex, extramarital sex, or even self-gratification (i.e. solo masturbation with or without pornography), all which can be done without the intent to reproduce (this is quite contrary to the biological understanding of sex: to propagate life). These acts are still considered taboo in the rest of the world. And its common culture in the West, a social norm to have multiple premarital non-reproductive sexual encounters. In non-Westernized societies, such sexual proliferation is not only taboo but discouraged or illegal (in most Islamic countries, doing it openly can get you in trouble with the authorities). So in these countries, if you want to relieve your instinctual sexual desires, you do it with the intent of producing children in marriage. And that drives people to get married very early when fertility and fecundity is high. Best analogies are: we in the West are very productive, but our produce is seedless watermelons (i.e. sex without viable fruit), or "tilling barren lands".

In the US, nothing will change as long as our politicians and their donors are doing well. There are extremely strong forces in this country working against any kind of social policies that would benefit average people. We pay the most of any country in the developed world for the worst healthcare. Childcare is so expensive, you actually save money by not working and watching the child yourself. Our nutrition is obscenely bad, our streets are dangerous for anyone outside a car, we have more guns than people leading to crazy amounts of shootings, we allow train companies to derail trains and poison communities, minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years and corporations have bought the government to make sure nothing improves. The USA is a hellhole, and if we want people to have kids then things need to improve.

People who grew up poor don't want to bring kids into an even poorer world than the one they grew up in. I watched the American Dream wither and die on the vine as the stable middle-class family my grandfather built crumbled into a ruined diaspora of lost people.

this could be a hard to swallow pill about why economic inequality is a factor in national security

Such an extraordinary video !!! Thank you so much for this !!!!!!!

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In a world where both parents work, childcare is absolutely essential. Here in bulgaria the government has for 14 years not provided new kindergartens in the capital city, its absolutely untenable.

My main issue with the "women working lowers fertility" hypothesis is both its metahistoric context and modern statistics. The "working women have less children" idea was created when both Feminism was at its peak and the idea that overpopulation was a threat to global food supply was mainstream, meaning that it was thought of as an idea to give praise to a movement that specifically wanted women to work more. The idea that "women work less in poor countries" is often false, in fact we have statistics from countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, Mali, Etc. in Tanzania fertility rates are lower than in Niger despite women working considerably less there. In fact, many high fertility countries have higher female labour force participation, including full time, than countries like those U.S.A. and here in the Netherlands. I'm not saying that it's not a factor, I just doubt that it's as big of a factor as many claim. Urbanisation basically explains way more than the female labour force participation hypothesis.

Why is the Western Union the Western world now claiming to be worried about brith rate when why had spent so much years becoming O'mo and the disruption of the family life. And are now telling Africa that they need to be the same Gate men

They have less kids, but of more higher quality. One reason for lower baby counts is woman finding most men unattractive and men finding no good reason to date a woman if they are seen as fodder and provide with nothing of value in return.

Another very important issue is housing. For larger families you need bigger houses and not many can afford it.

I am surprised you did not mention inequality. Back in the 60's you was able to raise a family on 1 working class fulltime job. Today doing so on 2 working class fulltime jobs is not or only barely possible in many countries. When we look at studies from the US on why young women wait with having children, the one point that come up again and again is cost.

Doesnt matter how rich your country is if you can't find peace of mind. The only folks who can afford kids are highly paid laborers like doctors/engineers/coders. Otherwise you exist for your employer and scrape by while never building wealth or seeing your child.

thanks, good explaination

One thing that must be taken into account when looking at the US's highest fertility rates is the impact of immigration and inequality. The US manages to maintain a rate of 1.62 on average, but this average hides that while Latinos, Middle Easterners and Asians, poor, have 3-4 children on average, a middle class white American will have similar birth rates. from Japan and Korea. That is, immigration hides the very low birth rate of the natives, and this applies to France and several other rich countries that have adopted immigration as a method of combating the lack of manpower.

I am from Spain and I am very shocked how this topic is never really discussed on political debates. Also my friends, who are most of them well above 30 and only one third of them have kids, don't seem to care. It's very discouraging.

There is nothing wrong with a shrinking population. Given that inflation will not be a problem, states can increase pension credits without worry.

The first thing that jumps out to me is… “countries”, don’t have children, “people” don’t have children. Women have children. Nobody ever seems to ask women. Or at least study them. Which suggests, at least to me, that you already know the answer, but are trying to see if you can get around it somehow. Oh well, no sweat off my back, as they say.

One of the overlooked factor in deciding fertility is the people are not willing to lower their lifestyle to start a family.

As someone who moved to America a long time ago, I can clearly see that more and more people are unmarried even at the age of 30 and above, both men and women. This is even true in deeply religious states like Alabama where I currently reside. Literally everyone in my social circle is hardcore Christians, yet they are all unmarried. Economic reasons aren't the main cause here, its more to do with social and cultural factors.

India also has areas where birth rate is 1.6 . India is a diverse country so data varies here from place to place and ethnicity wise also

The cost of living is too high to even have 1 kid. That's the main reason why birth rates are declining. Make living affordable for the working class and you'll see birth rates skyrocket.

I live in a developing country, my grandparents had 8 kids, my fathers had 4 children and now that im 35 years old i have decided not to have any kids at all, my reasons: the world is fcked up, racism, inequality, intolerance and hate are here to stay

because there is a decline in living standards, in developed countries, many people do not commit to marriage for financial reasons, instead of fixing solutions to lower living standards in developed countries, developed country governments instead import cheap labor from poor and developing countries.

The Netherlands has given up on creating policies for having families. Childcare is so expensive here it makes it almost impossible for someone to have children. Financially speaking that is. Or you need to have parents who live 5-10 minutes round the corner who can look after the child for a while. Childcare is crazy expensive for 2 kids and a reasonable amount of time per month you are easily paying 1200 euro. (Thats just childcare and excludes everything else that goes with that) (Bruto kosten: 66 uur x €9,12 = €601.92 x 2 kinderen = €1.203,84) This is just insane. Factor in inflation. Crazy rents. Crazy house prices. Stagnant wages. Increasing insurance costs. Increasing taxes etc etc and the Netherlands has succeeded in making having children a luxury... how do they fill that gap? Flood the country with new immigrants. No problem with other nationalities at all but NL is a small country. 200,000 new people every year now in a country with only 17 million people is mad. We have a severe housing shortage - in Utrecht where I live some students are homeless living in tents. Young individuals can't afford to leave home. People in their late 20s & 30s still living at home. Netherlands has succeeded in breaking its society in my eyes.

The problem is that while our countries are rich its citizens are not and the job are more and more demanding and time consuming there is not even time to have a partner and less to raise a good child.

*Hot take:* For countries like my own, (Canada) rising the immigration rate doesn't help. It is only contributing to the housing crisis and cost of living crisis. We are importing 1 million people per year, with nowhere to house these people, let alone housing Canadians. If they want more Canadian's (and other G7 nations) to rise the birth rate, we need infrastructure, housing, and to address better supports for young people owning homes and child benefits. Reduce the barrier to entry on owning a home, and increasing the supply of homes. Canada has a lot of land to which we can expand our city limits. Another problem is how independent our culture and mindset is here. Canadian's are generally polite, but very flakey people when it comes to dating and romance. It comes with historically being such a large nation land-wise, but most provinces being isolated. This makes it hard to meet people in general, and creates unique sub-cultures and politics within each province. I don't have a solution for this one in particular, as hook-up culture is a phenomenon that exists globally, but effects the west to a greater extent. The biggest elephant in the room is we need. More. Affordable. Housing. The Bank of Canada keeps raising mortgage rates and new houses aren't being built to sustain Canadians and/or the mass influx of immigrants we have coming into our country. The Trudeau Government keeps pushing for this with no plan to help these newcomers into our country. We need to reduce the land taxes and interest rates. The Government can only blame climate change for so long before one realizes that a carbon tax only harms the middle and lower classes as it raises gasoline and cost of living. The massive corporations can pay these no problem, or just invest or move elsewhere. Not to mention the insane income tax rates we have in Canada which make it impossible to invest securely. There should also be more investment into housing in cities that aren't Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. This way, the housing markets in these cities won't be so insane, and provide growth in other cities provinces. TLDR: Make childcare cheap and accessible, accessible and plentiful affordable housing, less taxes.

In the U.S. there is a lot of “informal” childcare like relatives and grandparents helping out, a “friend” watching a bunch of kids, or shady-ass daycares that are cheap. Also some parents just let their kids run wild and nobody watching them and you have these feral kids running around who don’t know right from wrong and commit disproportionate amount of crimes.

How is it that this is even a question? It's now taking 3 incomes to manage a home in the rich world. Its financially unsustainable to make a three or more kids.

I think this concept of "rich country" is misleading as it usually considers gross wealth, but we should also consider wealth inequality. Are these countries really just "rich countries," or rather capitalist countries.

People simply cannot afford it. You don't need to research for something that simple

Something that was not mentioned is young unemployment. E.g., Spain is very high. This for, the Spanish leave parent homes after their 30, while biologicalfertility for women falls sharplyafter 35. This leaves women with a very small time window.

Attitudes have also changed. A housewife and a full time mother is no longer valued in urban areas. Hence women who are professionals find themselves losing out on career if they take time to have and raise children. If men participate equally and not just with monetary help, there would be more children.

Another aspect is how we become more mobile as economies grow. In cultures where people move away from family to other cities or countries for opportunities, we see that as a good economic move, with people earning more and raising the country's GDP. But that comes with the cost of losing family support from grandparents on starting a family.

Something you really missed on for the US is that our high replacement rate isn't really driven out by dads being more helpful around the home but it also still provides a decent case study for your previous mentioning of socioeconomic status as a big indicator for reproductive rate. Most fertility in the US is driven by immigrants either directly replacing dying people or immigrant families having more children on average than citizen (or if we want to get more granular, it's broken up by race typically) where latin american families as a whole tend to have more kids than white families. It's expected that with time this will taper off as they further become integrated into the fabric of our society.

I knew what the punchline of the video would be as I think the cost of childcare is the obvious fix, but I still enjoyed the journey of you delving into this problem space. The question I have is: How do we get a government to incentivize policy that only has an ROI decades into the future when all of the people who need to implement such policies won't be around to "take credit." Forget that most of congress in the US won't be alive, even "younger" politicians don't think in such long view strategy.

What do I want kids for? No law saying we need to have them. Work a full time, stable job and I can barely afford to pay rent and put food on the table.

No discussion on immigration? That's a big one. South Korea and Japan have a strict immigration policy. USA and France have a very liberal policy and this affects the overall population growth

Scariest thing is this data is outdated. Even a behemoth like India has fallen below replacement rate. Things are looking dire.

Ignorant question: why are declining fertility rates and populations a problem? I remember a time not that long ago when doomsayers were warning that the increasing human population would soon be unsustainable, there weren't enough resources on the planet to feed/house/clothe etc. a burgeoning population, etc. Fewer people means more resources per capita and in theory a better life for each person. Supporting freeloading retired people (e.g. me) does present a greater burden for those still working, but couldn't some of the added burden be compensated for by greater productivity?

I think that the issue here is not the economy, but the development of medicine. If previously, in order for at least 2 children to survive, it was necessary to give birth to 7-10 children, now it is enough to give birth to two, and both will survive. As a result, people's views on what to do in their lives have changed; constantly giving birth to children has ceased to be a tradition and a social requirement. In more conservative societies, regardless of the wealth of their population, this tradition is somehow preserved, but still no one gives birth to 10 children anywhere. And the second point: I don’t think that the decline in the birth rate is a problem. About 70-80 years ago everyone was talking about the problem of the coming overpopulation of the planet, and that there will not be enough resources for everyone. And now this problem is being eliminated by itself, but many are again unhappy.

Its really simple. Birth rate is declining because the living condition is getting worse for whatever reason. Don't forget that we are part of animal too and instinct will tell that having a child is pointless since it will only suffer or worse in a harsh environment.

Great video, great analysis. I think it makes sense. I live in the one of the southern european countries with ultra low fertility and what you said fits whats going on. There are a non-neglectable number of companies that have a toxic work culture of "number of hours worked > quality of the output" that leads to a lot of overtime. In addition to this, when you quit your job you have to give a whooping 2 months to the company after your notice. This means that there are a lot of people with very little time to raise children (due to the overtime) and it's difficult to change jobs to a better offer due to the 2 months period. I've had international job opportunities go down the drain when they learn they'd have to be waiting 2 months for me.

1: To the economy you are nothing but fuel. You are there to be put on the conveyor belt and sent into the furnace. 2: The wealthy demand a surplus of cheap labour, and thus it would like an ever-increasing pool of workers as doing so increases competition between job applicants and drives down wages. 3: The wealthy demand constant and increasing productivity. This results in a population that effectively undergoes mechanistic dehumanisation as a means of beating the competition. Workers therefore must become increasigly robotic in order to survive. Conclusion: The wealthy view you as nothing more than a mechanised log on a conveyor belt heading into a furnace. You exist to fuel the economic machinery and replicate enough times for your offspring to subsequently be fed into the furnace, so that they can get richer. The only way out is to starve the furnace.

I'm still not convinced the solution is just "Increasing birthrate". I think we need to accept that ever increasing population isn't an indefinitely sustainable solution. At some point we need to fix our economics so it works with a stable or slowly declining population by taking advantage of more longevity by getting some productivity out of people living longer. Indexing retirement age to longevity in an actuarially sound manner is going to be critical in a better run society. We can't just assume that we can kick the can of retirement costs to the next generation and expect future generations to bail us out. While people think it is hard hearted to raise the retirement age, it is not any more hard hearted than forcing the next generation into wage slavery to support the retired generation.