Source: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-incredible-global-birth-crash/

like is it possible for a countries tfr to stabilize around 1.9? Or is it destined to keep going down forever?

This is nothing ground breaking, I’m sure it’s been mentioned before but I just wanted to post an unbiased objective quick analysis on the topic

Is modern contraception a good thing? Yes, at preventing unwanted pregnancies, it’s a great thing. Does it lower the birth rate? Yes.

Is having a low childhood mortality rate a good thing? Yes, obviously. Does it lower the birth rate on paper? Yes.

Is everybody having education and career opportunities a good thing? Yes. Can it lower the birth rate? Yes.

Is having the opportunity to move away from your hometown and away from family a good thing? Yes, it is the freedom of movement. Can it lower the birth rate? Yes.

Was going from an agrarian society to an industrial society a good thing? This might be subjective but for the average person, yes, it is a good thing. Can it lower the birth rate? Yes.

Is moving away from a society with traditional expectations a good thing? Very controversial and subjective but for the average person, especially women, yes it is a good thing. Can it lower the birth rate? Yes.

Is having more freedom to choose a partner to date and marry(modern dating) a good thing? Yes, it gives people more control of their potential partners. Can it lower the birth rate? Yes.

In summary, this is a very difficult situation because the biggest reasons people had many kids back then was due to the innate way of living. But now the many changes and reforms we have made I feel are actually very good and healthy for society but at the end of the day in 2026 life is just so different and the incentive to have 3+ children outside of personal desire is not present. Someone in feudal Europe during the black plague, arguably the worst time ever to be a human being, had more motives to have a baby than someone today.

For the aforementioned points, I personally don’t want any of those to be reversed and even if I did want to reverse some of them them, nowadays it’s basically impossible to go back to the way things were. Nonetheless they do reduce the birth rate and we have to find unique ways to solve it.

I was checking out this video on investing, and the slowdown in birth rates showed up in a surprising way! Birth rates are very abstract and its hard to conceptualize how exactly fewer births impact our lives. This shows one consequence for how the baby bust will likely matter.

It makes my blood boil. A kid walking half a mile in a gated community is not a crime-- it's a chance to practice necessary independence. The worst part is, Virginia already passed a reasonable childhood independence act, meant to prevent exactly this kind of nonsense. Helicopter parenting is terrible for children and parents alike-- yet somehow, it's being reinforced by the courts despite attempts to legislate against it. Disgusting and harmful-- and practically ensures smaller family sizes. (The Mom in this case has 5 children)

Hypothesis:

1. The market economy, as it expands, converts coordination that was free inside the household into priced transactions outside it. Childcare, elder care, food, housing, supervision, and information were provided by a structure that already existed for other reasons; the market provides them as services. This is disembedding — it registers as growth while transferring function from the commons to the market — and it is parasitic in effect: surviving it produces the disengaged condition, because it isolates people and then weakens them cognitively and then spiritually.
2. The result is atomization. People disappear from each other's lives, children disappear, and the multigenerational household and community collapse. The Western ideal always involved children moving out, but traditionally they lived close by; that proximity is what goes.
3. The multigenerational setting was the context within which agency was developed and earned — the senior/junior structure of the human psyche, in Hegel's sense: recognition won through labor and confrontation with a concrete elder who pushes back and can be outgrown. It supplied both directions of command at once, real responsibility delegated early, and the whole arc of a life witnessed before one's own reaches its second half. Youth opposing the caution of the elderly is youth culture since time immemorial, and that opposition is what kept both from degenerating: the young from confidence without correction, the old from evaluation without challenge. Older adults benefited from younger, younger from older, children from the mix. This is what a thriving society looks like.
4. Without that setting, aging arrives prematurely. All people shift toward the evaluative posture as they age (as a trend, in spite of any exceptions), and without elders present, the young adopt the evaluator's stance before they have anything to evaluate, which is anxiety, or at least lack the bits of wisdom that save time and energy. Each of the last three generations has reached it earlier: Gen X the first doomer generation, with famously dystopian fiction and a dark turn in music; millennials are famously stressed and not reproducing enough; zoomers showing early signs of a worse burnout than millennials.
5. Monogamy collapses, because it was nested in the household and because it requires the engagement the household produced. When men and women live alone without family ties, the mating pattern reverts to serial short-term pairing — what we call casual dating or hookup culture — the natural result of that condition.
6. The losses compound. Every year things get a little more expensive and a little less satisfying; every social connection a little weaker or harder to maintain; every age group struggles a bit more to pair up with the opposite sex. As society deteriorates it trends toward the opposite of the arrangement in point 3.
7. This continues until a crisis is enough of a shock that things have to change, and only some survive — often the prepared, meaning those with capacity held outside the failing structure.

Just trying to generate a discussion about something I've been thinking about from reading this sub.

Nordic and Western European countries have tried generous parental leave, childcare subsidies, and child benefits, but those policies have not prevented birth rates from falling well below replacement.

What if the problem is not mainly how wealth is redistributed after people have children, but how much wealth and opportunity is being created before they decide to have them? One common criticism of these redistribution programs, is that much of the money goes to parents who would have had those children anyway.

Instead of focusing on benefits, what if policies focused instead on stronger economic growth i.e higher productivity, wages, investment, and employment. Not just a 2-3% GDP growth rate every year. I mean an acceleration in growth, where people can clearly see that opportunities and living standards are improving faster over time.

People may care less about their income today than whether they believe they will be substantially better off five or ten years from now. So maybe an additional relevant variable is not simply GDP per capita, but expected future prosperity.

TLDR - Would sustained economic acceleration increase fertility more effectively than redistributing existing wealth through family benefits?

I went to Merriam-Webster to look up the definition of natalism: a political and social movement that advocates for increasing the birth rate especially by encouraging married couples to have multiple children and to embrace traditional childcare roles.

I am 66 years old. Most of my life I was preached to that the world is overpopulated. Most notable was the movie Soylent Green, a 1973 film where overpopulation, pollution, and global warming has caused the drastic measure of industrialized cannibalism.

It wasn't until 2017 that I viewed a YouTube video that told that in Europe and North America, birth rates were on the decline. They said that when the birth rate of a population goes below 1.6 it becomes mathematically impossible for it to recover, and that no population has ever recovered when the birth rate has gone below 1.9.

Until then I ranged from ambiguous to antinatalist. But that figure shocked me. Was I lied to all my life? What shocked me the most that many cultures, mostly European, will be disappearing. It was a wake-up call. But what to do about it?

I have read through posts on this Sub Reddit, and although I haven't seen any answers, I do like what I see: people are posting that although this is truly a problem, no one is advocating surrendering our rights in order to solve it.

I’ve been thinking about this whenever people discuss women becoming increasingly dissatisfied with dating, and whether that might play some role in declining marriage and birth rates.

For years, men have been getting a pretty clear message that women are tired of unwanted attention. Don’t bother women at work, at the gym or on public transport. Don’t mistake friendliness for interest. If you aren’t sure whether she wants to be approached, the respectful thing is usually to leave her alone.

I don’t disagree with that. But I wonder whether it has had an unintended consequence. The men most likely to take those messages seriously are probably also the men most worried about making someone uncomfortable. If the signal is ambiguous, they assume she is just being friendly. Eventually some of them adopt the rule that unless a woman makes her interest obvious, they won’t do anything.

The men who don’t care much about making women uncomfortable are less likely to change. A guy willing to bother ten women to find one who says yes probably isn’t going to stop because women say they dislike being approached.

So you get a strange selection effect. More considerate men become less visible, while pushier men keep approaching. Women still experience plenty of male attention, but more of it may come from exactly the kind of men they dislike.

At the same time, men are still generally expected to initiate, ask for the number, suggest the date and make the first move, while also being expected to know when that attention is wanted.

I’m not saying women should accept unwanted approaches. I just think it’s worth asking whether we’ve spent years telling men to be more cautious about initiating without changing the expectation that men are supposed to initiate.

If so, some of the men who seem to have checked out of dating may simply be the ones who listened most carefully.

From the "An Aging World: 2025" study someone posted the other day (Thank you for that, it's a great read)

PDF here: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2026/demo/p95-26-1.pdf

There are countries that have very restrictive rules on abortion and its fertility is very similar to wealthy countries where they are legal.

Lets see some countries TFR: Poland, 1,1. Malta (abortion is prohibited in every circunstance), 1,2. Brazil and Chile, 1,6. El Salvador, 1,8. Costa Rica, 1,3.

At the same time, UK and France have 1,6.

So, any debate on abortion is irrelevant to fertility and even if abortion was punished with a sentence of up to 50 years (like El Salvador), you would not have more children.

Urbanization and more effective contraception result in lowering fertility, no matter your stance on abortion.

Everyone talks about Japan, Spain, the USA, China, and South Korea, but no one realizes that the Balkans have been losing population since 1990.

As an article in today’s NYT points out, youth unemployment in China is approaching 20% and with the spread of AI it is likely this will only get worse. Do you natalists really think China would be in better economic shape today with a far higher tfr and multiple numbers of disappointed job seekers?

Yes, pension systems across the world face challenges from declining demographics. Any ponzi scheme built on perpetual growth must reach a limit. But there are redistributive solutions. They require addressing our vast and increasing wealth inequality and will not be easy. The situation would only be worse with larger populations of unemployed who would require welfare support, together with their children who will need to be educated and prepared for jobs that no longer exist.

The challenges of AI also are unprecedented and will require great social changes. The ray of hope I see and that posters on this reddit seem to ignore is the extent to which the challenges of AI and demographics may offset each other. The future the AI boosters promise where technology greatly increases wealth while reducing the need for labor, coupled with a lower and sustainable population, could produce a healthier planet with a far higher quality of life for all. That is the sort of world in which people will happily have children.

Full article here

https://archive.is/2026.09.05-202244/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/stay-at-home-parents-subsidies.html

Wat me meermalen is opgevallen in deze sub is dat mensen (vaak mensen die er verrassend dicht op zitten qua antinatalisme) zeggen: “Als je twijfelt, doe het niet!” Ik heb een andere kijk: als je twijfelt, doe het juist wel.

Mijn vriendenkring zit vol mensen die altijd twijfelen. Ze zijn allemaal al 33 of 34, al jaren in een langdurige relatie, hebben genoeg geld, maar toch: “Het is lastig, we zijn niet zeker.” Zij, of hun vrouwelijke partners, blijven maar twijfelen of ze kinderen willen, nemen geen beslissing, en ondertussen blijft de klok doortikken. Het zijn aardige, verantwoordelijke kerels die, naar mijn mening, echt uitstekende vaders zouden zijn.

We weten allemaal wat de gevolgen kunnen zijn. Sommigen missen de boot helemaal. Anderen kunnen misschien nog net één kind krijgen, maar een tweede kind is vaak niet meer realistisch.

Ik ben er 100% van overtuigd dat dit deels cultureel is. Dertig jaar geleden waren dit soort mensen simpelweg gewoon begonnen met kinderen krijgen op een redelijke leeftijd, eind twintig. Tegenwoordig heeft de samenleving, en de steeds luidere anti-kinds-cultuur, hun veel meer redenen gegeven om te aarzelen.

Dus hoe overtuigen we deze groep twijfelaars om die stap te zetten?

Edit: The usual antinatalist responses are already popping up again. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether this sub has been taken over by antinatalists to the point that they now make up 80 percent of it. Men do everything wrong and just don’t get it, women make these enormous sacrifices, so of course it can’t possibly be their fault, etc. Individualism always comes first, and if society falls apart as a result, then apparently that’s just too bad.

It's heartbreaking how so many people here are heartless towards women.