Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline | Hacker News Reader

Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

nature.com

61 pointspaulpauper153 comments

Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet.

It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.

Okay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!

The environment is doomed either way without action. Is the issue that some demographics will become more dominant?

Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).

We can't also assume that your offspring will have the same values as you.

You shouldn't be OK with them having any random values, either.

If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life, and what's good and what's bad, and you want to see it to continue.

That some of them will inevitable change over time is not the same as you preactively having no preference and guidance for your offspring whatsoever, and thinking "no problem, anything goes".

> If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life,

Do you?

Your 'civilization' doesn't run on some kind of command economy five-year-cultural plan. Its values and views of what's good and bad are just some (often dystopian) local maximum it's stuck in.

Not to mention the obvious - what if you strongly disagree with your civilization's values?

Sure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here.

I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background.

Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another.

So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.

A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.

The "power" of a country, however you define it, lags the population growth. China was the biggest country for decades, its power only really started exploding some 10 or 15 years ago.

And now its power is declining rapidly.

Peter Zeihan "Don't be Surprised by China's Collapse":

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

That's an incredibly short sighted way of looking at countries. The US was never the country with highest population growth, and right now is also heading into a demographic collapse.

To hell with the group. I won't feel sorry for my children and the state of the world they'll need to live in.

That's why people shouldn't take life advice from cartoons and celebrities

I mean, I probably saw this when I was 4 or so, and I don't have any children now. I can't really blame my four year old self for being impressionable. I'd say this is probably more of an example of why people should be cautious of the kind of content they put in front of their kids.

Sure, that's why Smokey the Bear is such a bad idea. Ignore the fact that pushing propaganda starts young, (the population in general, but especially) children are impressionable, and (echoing sibling) that we should probably consider the impacts of media on children.

Lots of cartoons are wholesome, and it can be a powerful tool for setting social norms. More to the point, it's going to happen anyways - so let's do what we can to make sure it's a message we agree with

…and knowing is half the battle.

GI Joe theme plays in the background

Well, at least they aren't re-re-making that... yet.

Likewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle.

There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.

There's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties.

Doubly so when it blames children's television for its ills, instead of the obvious suspects of nuclear families (who have no free adult time for child care), dying rural areas (which push young adults to move away from their parents), a fucked up and unaffordable healthcare system, an ever-growing chasm between haves and have-nots, and the expectation that children should not be left unsupervised for even a moment (by either their parents, who presumably have to work for a living, or by a paid babysitter, who the have-not parents are somehow supposed to afford) until their teens. Oh, and in more recent years, the redder regions of it have also been waging and winning a war against women's reproductive health. Not to mention the war against the 'wrong'[1] kind of immigrant.

No, it's clearly television that's at fault.

---

[1] The definition of 'wrong' changes every fucking week, suddenly and without warning. You'd have to be insane to have a child when you or your partner can lose your/their status, and be arrested and deported at the whim of the tweeter-in-chief. The amount of work the 'family values' party has been putting into tearing families apart is really something.

> There's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties.

From a biological perspective, the ideal age range for reproduction is late teens to early 30s[0]. Beyond that there's greatly decreased chances, and a sharp increase in potential complications. When it comes to the human condition, biology comes first, and then the rest follows. Otherwise you have population problems.

[0] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...

Here's an organically written summary of the paper.

This is a plain vanilla regression analysis on the US GSS, which is a large poll of Americans done every year since the 1970s. Being a study of demographics it defines fertility to mean the number of children a couple has or doesn't have for any reason, a number which is driven primarily by people's decisions and not biological ability.

It shows only two things:

• The correlation between politics and fertility changes over time. It becomes really pronounced in the 1980s-1990s but during the baby boom years there is no link.

• It only applies to white Americans. Black Americans show no such correlation. However the study cites a paper claiming that black Americans don't understand the terms liberal and conservative well, and suggests that may be the cause of the divergence (a data quality issue not a real difference in fertility).

N.B. the title of the paper is deceptive. It claims a causal link but the paper itself admits the study is correlational and cannot establish causality. Misleading titles or abstracts are normal in academic social studies, unfortunately.

They cite other papers showing the same correlation holds in Europe. Rest of the world isn't considered.

It's surprising this paper got any attention and I'm not sure it'll get published in the end (it's early access). Regressions on US GSS are easy to do and many of them have been done before, there is nothing really new here.

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?

You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?

You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).

Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.

To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!

don’t non-US countries already do this?

Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women.

We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.

…or stop educating women!

I’m joking. But some religious types say it unironically.

That is sadly also true, hence my "or devolve as a society". Educating girls, and young women, results in fewer children, but it also yield richer and honestly better societies. You'd struggle to find a rich, first world country, where women don't receive proper education, but it's almost universally true for poor and dysfunctional countries.

The economics is a sizeable part of the issue. Fix - or preferably replace - the economy so that it's super affordable+rewarding to have and raise children. And make it more acceptable socially to start a family from late teen years (when fertility is just about already at peak).

It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.

thats the problem, it should be at the top of the list (all the way at the top) and nothing else should be close 100th

It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.

Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!

No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.

Actually, they do admit it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republicans-mad-teen-pre...

Much of the party seems to be obsessed with children's genitals and fertility. Why can't they leave all this on their little island?

Is it so weird to think about the future of humanity? I want my children, and my children's childrens to have a good life as well.

They dont care about humanity. You can see that pretty clearly.

And conservatives were the punishing ones toward pregnant teens - the conservative answer to teenage pregnancy was to make her suffer as much as possible.

That is why it is especially appealing. The political groups that blamed pregnant teenagers and tried to ensure pregnancy destroyes their lives are complaining we dont have enough pregnant teenagers. And you can bet on them being cruel to pregnant teenagers again if that goes up again.

I don't know why this topic would be surprising for people. The elephant in the room is that right leaning people tend to be more religious (or have experienced a religious uprising).

Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.

My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.

My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.

Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.

Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?

Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.

>> fewer and fewer people providing goods and services

Many of them are not needed anyway. Close half of the fast food joints. Or fire half of the IT people. Go back to levels we had in 2006!

But who'd pay the pensions then?

> halving every 40 years

Sounds like a road to species extinction.

Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.

The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.

A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.

no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.

Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.

Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.

Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.

Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...

I was commenting on

> A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such.

And not anything political. United States is so fucked beyond repair when even commenting on birth rates turns into “being on the left politically”

Well, you proposed fertility treatments in a discussion on an article entitled "Falling fertility on the left as a key driver of US birth decline" so I had wrongly assumed you were engaging with that conversation.

We're taking two different approaches to the same problem. I suggested something that will change attitudes (though I will concede it would be only a first step, not sufficient on its own) whereas you suggested making medical intervention for fertility cheaper for patients.

Hence, my final line was a bit of a tongue in cheek remark on which of the two approaches was more likely to have an impact on the article's thesis.

Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids

What about freedom?

If the government can charge me a higher rate of tax because I am not a useless turd with no marketable skills then charging people more for failing to keep population at or above replacement is also not an infringement of freedom. While we are talking about freedom, have you looked at what happens to societies when population growth rates collapse? They tend to not stay societies for very many generations after that. They tend to get invaded and added to an empire that still has a positive population growth rate, or they collapse internally due to the weight of unfullfillable promises and infighting over the shrinking pie and get picked off at the edges. In that regard, policy to preserve the birth rate is a freedom enhancing choice if you think our current society is free. I personally think it's not that great but everything else is pretty bad, so it's the best of a bad situation choice, which makes it worth preserving.

Sound like a totalitarian regime to me. Look at which countries already tried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness These were all communist countries with at least an intention/policy of providing social services for those children: free health, free education, guaranteed job after that, afordable or even free housing, etc.

USA has none of those. The rich will have a choice; the poor won't. And we already know that children of the poor tend to stay poor and the more children the are, the poorer they'll be. It will be a generation of poor with no hope of escape.

Then there's the slippery slope: What stops the government from increasing the tax to severe punishment levels or levels completely unafordable by anyone?

The taxation scheme on not being a useless turd is closer to a totalitarian regime than taxing people for not having kids is.

Whataboutism and not true.

sigh Very much true and very much not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes. If you like progressive taxation then the onus is on you to justify your claims that applying the exact same regime to another characteristic (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement) Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not (you've failed to do this btw because you can't because they are either both totalitarian or both not because they are the exact same premise).

Also, you fail to appreciate what tax penalties look like. This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file. It was said partially in jest, but it is actually a good policy if you can price it low enough that it doesn't cause migration but high enough that it does cause more kids.

I'm going to split your arguments into parts, because they don't make much sense clumped together. I have a hard time understanding it.

> not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes.

But this isn't a taxation regime. It's a penalty for choosing a way of life. It's as if the non-parent is responsible for the far future income of the state, especially in a state (USA) with no state-provided pensions; a state that doen't contribute anything back to the future non-parent compared to a future parent.

> the onus is on you to justify your claims

I already demonstrated that the only states that implemented it were totalitarian states. Are you in disagreement with this? Proportional taxation (fixed % of income) and even progressive taxation (higher % of income for higher income) is used everywhere, totalitarian state or otherwise. I'm not going to argue why that type of taxation is a good thing. Ask a LLM.

> (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement)

Not my job. Not _a_ job. Not unless you consider that women should stay at home, cook and take care of children. BTW, do you?

> applying the exact same regime to another characteristic [...] Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not

Sorry? Should that be the other way around to be comparable? More children, more tax? The state spends money on children, even in USA.

> This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file.

The rich have more disposable income. They won't feel 10%. A poor person is already at their limit. 10% will break them, so they'll have more kids and they'll be poor too. They will not contribute to future taxes. "useless turds" as you said - be careful what you wish for.

> the first almost 32k of household income is tax free

Oh, so they're exempt from childless tax too? That's moving goalposts.

What is and isn't a taxation regime isn't up to you, it depends on whether your tax rate is modulated by some choice, which is clearly the case here. Lets flip to the counter example. I can just as easily say "Choosing not be a useless turd and therefore paying more taxes per dollar earned is not a taxation regime, it's a penalty for choosing a way of life." It's literally the exact same statement swapped for what is being taxed and it is just as untrue as your statement.

>I already demonstrated...

Saying totalitarian states are the only people to have tried this is actual what aboutism.There's no valid reason to expect outcomes to be the same when all the other parts of society and economy are so radically different. This is not justification of anything.

>Not my job. Incorrect. Having a birth rate at or above replacement is one of the foundational requirements of having a society. If you are in the society it is definitely your responsibility, it has just never been an issue before because we previously did not have birth control or many women out of the home. No, I don't think that. If I thought that, I wouldn't need a taxation regime to get this outcome, I could just stop educating women and keep them in the home, it would be far simpler and far worse than taxing people who don't do their job and maintain the future society.

>Sorry? Should that be the other way around to be comparable?...

Yes maybe, if we ever get back to the situation where the average women is having 5+ kids. That's not the situation we are in and even if we get there it will take along time to be an actual problem, so there's not really a point in fleshing that out at all.

>The rich have more disposable income. They won't feel 10%...

Yes they will because it's a much larger amount of money and rich people tend to be pretty rational. There is also a complex basket of goals and desires going into the children choice so you don't need to force the entire decision, just tip the balance towards popping out that extra kid or two. If everyone below rich person isn't contributing enough to pay for the government/services that's a bigger discussion than this that requires different policies and likely massive cuts in spending unless the rich guys footing the bill are actually happy with what the money is being spent on.

>Oh, so they're exempt from childless tax too? That's moving goalposts. No,that's presenting an idea on hacker news instead of through a research paper. I didn't rigorously lay out the argument over 30 pages with 100 citations and I'm not going to.

> What is and isn't a taxation regime isn't up to you, it depends on whether your tax rate is modulated by some choice

What are you saying? If the tax is fixed for everyone independent of any choince they make, then it's not a tax? Explain that again.

> Choosing not be a useless turd

Except, for most people (possibly all people), that's not a choice they made. Somebody else made the choice for them. Lack of good parents and good education, role models, or maybe bad genes or birth hipoxia, etc. makes them who they are. No child will spontaneusly want to read boring history, rote learn multiplication tables when there's a calculator in the drawer, or write useless essays about something they're not interested in - in order to not be a useless turd. Someone else makes useful adults out of children that are universally born as useless turds.

> Saying totalitarian states are the only people to have tried this is actual what aboutism.

Or maybe it's because democratic states would never consider it??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Having a birth rate at or above replacement is one of the foundational requirements of having a society.

No, you can have a society exclusively maintained by immigration from other societies. Might be a bad society, but still a society.

> If you are in the society it is definitely your responsibility,

Unfortunately, a person alive today has little choice in the matter. We're not allowed to not be part of a society (aka. "must pay taxes to at least one government"). And this is one more reason to not contribute to the society one hates being part of (or enslaved by, depending on view).

I'm saying by the very definition of taxation regime they are both taxation regimes. You choose a variable and you vary the tax rate along the possible values for the variable. I'm also saying, yes, obviously it's a penalty for choosing a way of life, that's what all taxation regimes are that aren't a flat tax or a use tax. Choosing to work hard and succeed so you have higher income and pay a higher tax rate is also a life choice. It's not a worthy argument for or against anything.

>Except, for most people (possibly all people), that's not a choice they made.

Yes, since you are clearly pretty left wing you would believe that, despite it being so simple as to be untrue. The complex version is there is friction in moving between success levels that modulates the outcome of your personal choices. It's a separate issue to what we are talking about here that I am amenable to addressing (Go look at my previous posts, I'm a huge fan of actually using antitrust law again and breaking up most of the fortune 500 and many private companies). Your personal choices still move you into higher tax brackets, The friction is not so bad that your personal choices don't affect what tax bracket you are in each year and, even if it was, it's a separate problem to be addressed, not an argument that is valid here.

>Or maybe it's because democratic states would never consider it?? That is one unsupported hypothesis about what is going on. I can make those too: Or maybe democratic states held onto more religion longer, and had a better economic starting point in freer markets so they are running into this below replacement birthrate fiasco later on?

>No, you can have a society exclusively maintained by immigration from other societies. Might be a bad society, but still a society.

That is historically untrue, at least on civilization timescales. it can works for decades, not permanently. That ends in weakness and losing the country to invasion or takeover from within because the people that immigrated didn't assimilate and instead grew to be a big enough population that they took over from within. It's not a situation you want to end up in.

> this is one more reason to not contribute to the society one hates being part of And that's another reason to implement the tax regime I suggested. Do your job or pay someone else to do your job. Either way, the job needs to be done.

25 is an odd choice, you incentivise them to have children but you're also making it more difficult for them to do so, and not enough will have children before 25. 30 or even 35 would make more sense.

Fertility treatments have a small impact.

For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.

The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place. This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.

I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.

I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.

Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.

We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography

In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability

In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.

From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates

It's obvious but not useful:

1. It's been tried and doesn't work.

2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.

Far less need for fertility treatment for those trying in their more fertile years (late teens to early 30s); that's when for the most part things "just work".

It seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.

Yes, but that is the common terminology.

That's fair, it just really hinders the conversation amongst laymen.

seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)

Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?

> it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals

It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics).

Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure.

It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it.

¹ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-cha...

² https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pop...

³ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths...

I feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)

I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.

> while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)

Not true. Right idea of family valuea is not about empathy and does not have much elements of empathy. It is more about establishing hierarchy and punishing you if you step put of it.

It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.

Inward focus of the right is toward the members of they political and social group.

> left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet)

Left do cares more about planet, but also toward close ones that need help. A lot of leftist activism is motivated by personal experiences and experiences of close ones.

> It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.

From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach. Anything that reduces - chances at - reproduction or makes the population less fit is an issue that makes said population tend toward extinction.

> From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach.

I believe the science disagrees on this point. In the case of humans, adaptations that contributed most to our success as a species are a constellation of pro-social traits that enabled us to cooperate in organized fashion in relatively large numbers (which empathy plays a major role in mediating).

Evolutionary fitness is not always meaningful at the level of the individual, particularly in social animals. IIRC, there are a number of species in which individually-disadvantageous (i.e. purely altruistic) behaviors are conserved, despite their apparent adverse effects on individual fitness.

Humans being social animals doesn't detract from the point at all. Here, it's particularly regarding the small subsets that aren't "fit" from a Darwinian perspective. For example a homosexual is unfit because they will almost never reproduce to pass on their genes (adoption doesn't count), and so it would be disadvantageous to the group (again, from a Darwinian perspective) to "waste" any resources (even empathy) on any unfit individuals. Conversely a serial rapist would be very fit as they aggressively seek to pass on their genes.

And we see it playing out globally: as groups become more socially conscious (aka "woke"), their TFR decreases. Just look at a world map showing TFR, and overlay that on one showing "wokeness" by nation. European nations are generally the most woke in the world, and have a generally low TFR. African nations are generally the least woke in the world, and have a comparatively high TFR.

With academic social studies you can usually assume they've controlled for the basics like that, especially if the conclusions are unfortunate for the left which always means rigor gets ramped up significantly. They're working from large scale surveys and controlling for simple confounders is easy.

Sure enough:

> Arpino & Mogi explored mechanisms behind this reproductive pattern, finding that extreme right individuals were 4–5 percentage points more likely than centrists to intend having a child within three years. This effect persisted after controlling for religiosity, education, and income

You can just grep papers for "control" to check this sort of thing, as terminology is quite consistent.

There are big differences between left and right in fertility (=how many children you choose to have, in demographic discussions) and this isn't at all a controversial claim in social studies. The question is not does it exist or is it confounded but why does it occur - or if you really want, what underlying factors strongly correlated with leftism are the true cause. You can think of that as confounders if you like.

I don't know if I'd call this an "unfortunate" result or not. it's neither good nor bad, just a thing.

Arpino & Mogi are different authors that wrote a different paper that I didn't read. _This_ paper does not appear to have controlled for much at all in its primary contribution of analysis of US GSS data, and all the conclusions reached appear to me to be purely observational.

Another nuance is that since their analysis consists of filtering to people already over 40, and then asking about political leaning, there is no way to infer anything about causal association of left - vs - right ideology and fertility. For example, "having children makes you more right wing" is an equally plausible explanation for this data as "being right wing causes you to have more children" (or maybe neither of these statements are true at all, and it's caused by a variety of other confounding factors).

One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.

And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.

Pshaw! There are plenty of non-heterosexual people who end up with children! A (drunken) poke here, a (drugged) poke, a wild moment, etc there really adds up.

Many gay people I know have children.

I’ve also noticed fertility is high among certain immigrant demographic groups. Near me, it’s refugee groups (asylum applicants) where families very typically have 4 or more kids. In a couple decades I can see the demographics being very different in America, but especially Europe. It’ll probably look more brown, more Islamic relative to today.

What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.

My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation.

If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.

The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.

I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.

I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.

It's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.

What other aspects do you have in mind, then?

Providing a childhood that's as good as their own should be easy given the general increase in wealth, improvements in medical care and other technology, fall in violent crime and so on. Being better than your own childhood is the default even if you aren't more successful in a relative sense than your parents.

There was no general increase in wealth except among wealthiest.

Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.

As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.

It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.

Where are you and what percentage of your neighbors go to church and similar.

Ha none. We are not "conservative" in the least bit, or even politically performative.

Where are you?

After putting it off for many years, many millenials are finally settling down and starting the families that perhaps more traditionally we began 15 years earlier - but outside ones with fertility issues, we are getting on with it. Im in the same boat as you, left leaning with left leaning friends, mostly late 30s and we're all getting on with having or raising young kids at this point - so n=2 from real life observations

You might be interested in the link I provided in a sibling post.

A larger percentage of births are to older women, but total number of births are still dropping accross all ages.

Just a thought, based on my own experience. If you have children, or is about to have a baby, you start being around more parents or "parents to be". Either as part of parenting groups, in conjunction with daycare, schools or parents of your children's friends. Because this centers around your child, the children around you tends to be roughly the same age, plus or minus a few months.

I agree with you, but this is not the case. It is very much a trend with people in their mid 30s right now. The overlap is there yes, we have friends who have children, but for instance my wife announced her pregnancy and had 4 friends announce shortly there after. We certainly did not conspire with them on conception :)

It is an odd time for everyone to be really into kids but perhaps that is a species trigger for all we know

> Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom.

That somehow evaded fertility statistics?

This still runs contrary to national statistics, which would include these births unless there is a wave of children/births unregisted with the state. There is good public data on this, for example here:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-3.pdf

That said, I think there is a perspective issue at play. It may seem like lots of people are having kids. A lot of our friends are too. However, I dint live through the 70s or 40's to have a comparison for what that seemed like when the fertility rate was higher.

This report is from 2.5 years ago. I am talking about within the past year to 2 years. So this might actual lend credit to my theory of a stealth baby boom happening. Perhaps I should have clarified "happening right now"

It would have to be very stealth because the US CDC says numbers have only gone down since (including 2026).

I'm not in the US but it's been years since I had a coworker with more than 2 kids (or they're so many departments apart I simply don't know). None of my closer friends has more than one kid (ok, that might be a bit of an exception). None of the families in my huge apartment building has more than 2 kids. I'm actually hard pressed right now to name 5 people I know who have 3 or more kids or 2 siblings (and the kids/siblings being younger than 30). (and I am including all my US acquantainces (sorry, no real friends over there for me))

I just don't understood what this has to do with "online".

Makes sense. Family creation and maintenance is a core philosophy of the right (see the various concerns surrounding family planning, education, queers, etc). There is a sort of Darwinian thing happening as a side effect of the held philosophies.

I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter.

It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.

No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.

Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.

Again, it's a weird little sub domain.

> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions.

I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do.

Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation

By the 23rd century, sexual reproduction will be vastly transformed by technology. The discussions we're having now will be unrecognizable.

I think it will make less of a difference than you think.

Do you think people who have 0-2 kids would be signing up to have 10+ if only we could grow babies in vats? I doubt it. By contrast, >10 kids is actually quite common in communities like Kiryas Joel.

Most of the expense of children isn't the physical burden of pregnancy, it is the time and effort and expense in raising them. Making pregnancy easier won't make a huge difference to the birth rate, because for most women the burden of raising the child weighs much more heavily on her mind than the pregnancy itself does. Babies in vats would be an enticing option for wannabe single dads, gay male couples, women with medical issues – but the actual increase in "births" from those groups taking up that option is likely to be relatively modest. And natural biological reproduction is extremely cost efficient, due to millions of years of evolution optimising it – even after growing babies in vats becomes technically feasible, it is going to take a lot longer before it can compete on price with doing it the natural way.

Of course, you could outsource the raising of your kids to AI robot nannies – but, that raises serious concerns about how well-adjusted they'd be, about the ethics – and apart from that, who would want to? Most people want to have kids because they actually want the emotional relationship of being their parent – absent religious conviction pushing them to do otherwise, they'd rather have a few they can invest in as individuals, than a large number with most of the actual work of parenting outsourced to AI.

I also follow this space but can't agree with the claim that "No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions". There are pretty strong theories and ideas about the root causes, and those also lead to solutions. However they are anathema to the left so depending on what exact subspace you follow you may never see them (they'd be censored immediately).

For the same reason you won't get much of that kind of discussion here on Hacker News.

Oh great, Idiocracy as a scientific paper.

Isn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children.

Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.

This effect is present when controlling for income.

Just like there's a natural selection to those with religious beliefs (and active killing of those without) there's probably active selection to those with conservative beliefs like raiding a family, a desire to teach their values to their children, producing as many children as possible - values that correlate with conservatives.

I think the atheist experiment of the last century or so is starting to yield clear evidence of what is and isn't "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Exactly as you are saying.

Atheists have existed for basically forever. I think you're referring to the 'not murdering, ostracizing and repressing them' experiment. If, like some in this thread, you think that violence, ignorance and removal of freedoms are acceptable means to getting an outcome some find preferable (or "fit", or "natural"), please state so directly.

I think atheism works great as a minority view. It seems to not work well as the dominant philosophy-as per the article.

I didn't read the full paper only the abstract, but bc the political spectrum is correlated with education level or urban vs rural or multiple other factors that deeply impact what it is like to have kids. Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Or does the opportunity cost on careers plus the high cost of childcare plus the cost of living space impact conservatives and progressives alike? And among rural people without a college degree, do progressives still have fewer kids than their conservative neighbors?

When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing

> Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives?

Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a constitutional law professor then federal appeals court judge, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic.

I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.

Yes they do. Just grep the paper for the word "control" and you can quickly find the answers to these questions. This isn't a new finding and they've controlled for all the obvious factors.

I did grep through the paper, and ... no not really.

"Urban" and "rural" never appear. Among uses of "control", for their own work they have controlled for sex and race. Their Table 2 and Figure 2 are the same data displayed different ways and from the same analysis. In their mentions of other work they note related work on Europe that controlled for religiosity, education and income, and socioeconomic and attitudinal factors.

Their table 1 actually shows that the p-value for religious attendance, education, two race variables , and birth year, were all tied with the politics variable, and showed that education, and both race variables had larger-magnitude estimates and z-values.

After reading some of the paper, while I still think there's a relationship between political beliefs and number of kids, I don't see that their methods are convincing that this is more important than other such correlations.

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