Stephan: Almost all of the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, which is to say most of the developed world, do not have a sustainable birthrate - 2.1 children per woman. This is producing very significant social changes.
To cite two examples of the impact from low birthrates consider: When you don't have a sustainable birthrate over time you don't have enough workers; you don't have enough people paying into your social safety network programs, Social Security or Medicare in the U.S., to cover those who are drawing out from it. Robots may handle the first problem, but not the second or third.
Japan is the case study, because their population has been declining since 2014. And now the U.S. is becoming a one child per family country. In China this has played out very badly because in China the one child policy that began in 1979 had an unanticipated corollary: the Chinese culture favored boys. Now, four decades later, the gender distribution is badly skewed, and many men will never marry, and there will be unintended consequences from that.
In the U.S. where births are occurring later, and there are fewer children, even as social media becomes an increasingly dominant aspect of American culture other trends are also developing. Do you know what an Incel is? No? It means an involuntarily celibate person, mostly straight White males, but that lacks nuance. Incels are mostly bitter resentful White straight men who have never been able to find a romantic relationship and are condemned to what they call inceldom. Collectively they constitute one of the most dangerous cohorts on the web.
Credit: The Washington Post
They rush up to him sometimes after a poetry reading, wanting to talk — not just because Billy Collins is a beloved former U.S. poet laureate, but because he is a poet who once began his autobiographical poem “Only Child” with the simple declaration: I never wished for a sibling, boy or girl.
“I come across a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, I was an only child,’ or, ‘I have an only child,’ and they’re concerned about this,” Collins says. “There are certain anxieties that parents have about the only child being deprived of social abilities.”
Even the term itself feels tinged with melancholy, some undercurrent of not-quite-enoughness, but the various alternatives — “singletons,” “onelings,” “one-offspring” — never stuck, and so we are left to ponder the only child. And more American parents are pondering the only child, because more American parents are raising them: The proportion of mothers who had one child at the end of their childbearing years doubled from 11 percent in 1976 to […]
This is a complex social phenomena with many nuances not addressed in the article. The rationals documented are a result of decades of economic and policy decisions made without forethought of the consequences along with an unarticulated pessimism of what the future holds for the young. I believe those who consciously decide to have more children will hold a world view of survival long beyond the time frames of those quoted for this piece. This will have demographic implications totally untouched here, but well worth exploring.
Maybe a good immigration system would make up the difference and allow more immigrants to become citizens and improve the situation of tax income for the government. With Climate Change being such a big problem, I can see why a family would want to have a smaller number of children, also because of the cost of living being so high and constantly increasing. I see this as a good thing, not a bad one.