I think the US desperately needs a "mommy track" for college that encourages women with young kids to go to school part-time and take 6 to 8 years to complete their degree. I think this would solve a lot of problems.

Waiting too long to have kids can involve problems for both mother and child. (Among other things) An older mom can require fertility treatments to get pregnant at all and there is higher risk of certain birth defects in the child.

Historically, we resolved these conflicts by having women have babies young, but with a financially established husband who was typically older. Now, that is decried as evil patriarchy.

I'm well aware of the downside of having kids young and being a homemaker a long time. I'm divorced after having been a homemaker and full-time mom for a lot of years. But my problems were compounded by various factors.

I'm quite confident that one of the smartest things I did was go to school when I could. I have thought for years that we should foster young moms pursuing their education. But I have no idea at all how to start such a movement, for lack of a better word.

Education: University education is already pricing out many hopefuls. Part-time education is happening because students need to balance income from a job and school responsibilities. Unless we are going to do something drastic about educational costs, this remains a blocker. So I would restate, "The US desperately needs to address education costs."

Historically a "financially established husband" was made capable because wages and costs of living were not at odds as they are today. The modern push for contractor/gig work to avoid the high costs of employee benefits means that nobody in the family unit is going to be financially established, even working two jobs (or more). Adding a child and the necessary leave moves that family into an irrevocable financial situation. So I would rephrase: "Historically we resolved these conflicts with a living wage". The problem statement then is that the current economic environment and lacking protection of workplace security during and after pregnancy needs to be fixed.

Net-net, as a growing trend, we are on a path of reducing American citizens to business growth objects. Maximize recurring income (rent, not buy), reduce expenditures (lower wages, fewer/no benefits), reduce time to market (lower educational standards/on-line degrees/script-driven labor work with minimal training), increased business flexibility (use contracting companies to avoid responsibility of employee welfare and continuity).

There are many others, but if we treat humans as business and are short-sited, you arrive at this scenario--baby-making isn't good business.

Governments have the responsibility for long-term planning and national security, not corporations. I would absolutely argue that birthrates are a matter of national security (security in this case being the security of the dollar). If there isn’t governmental transformation to help with the above, this will only get worse.

Instead we're seeing rising costs of living without substantively rising earnings squeeze the general population as rent seeking and logical (but probably not actual) collusion result in the non-property-owning classes being turned in to modern day serfs who rent everything and have no place they 'own'.

Agreed 100% + add publicly backed financial support. IMO, moms study damn hard, and don't take stuff for granted.

This (mom in longer term educational program) is what well-off people with spouses in college/grad school do today with their own funds. Most universities are already happy to accommodate those people because they are paying. I know this from my own experience.

> Historically, we resolved these conflicts by having women have babies young, but with a financially established husband who was typically older. Now, that is decried as evil patriarchy.

Evil patriarchy is forcing women into such marriages, via repressive social norms and limits to educational and career opportunity for women, instead of allowing them to have their own choice. The choice can't be marriage vs social isolation and/or destitution.

There's nothing wrong with a marriage being partly about providing financial security to someone who doesn't have it, but to make it the only option for that person... that seems evil.

EDIT: wording

That's where you go off the rails.

A girl from an impoverished background, whose only fault is that she is not a mom, has far more need of "publicly backed financial support" of her education than an upper middle class mom. Publicly backed financial support should be either restricted based on need for everyone, or it should be unrestricted and given to everyone as a matter of course. But telling a girl that she has to have a child before she gets access to this particular pot of money sets up the same restrictive environment and lack of "choice" that you decry in the "evil patriarchy".

I never said that financial support should be restricted to moms. There's no reason why we can't help both types of individuals in the situation that they are in. More help for girls before they have kids means they have lower needs later when they have children, and children of financially stable, educated moms are probably not going to have children before getting educated themselves. Financing both is a societal win-win.

If we manage to finance a Navy and an Air Force at the same time, we can figure out how to finance both poor girls' and moms' education.

Endorsing it in the specific context of a “mommy track” without an explicit expabsit does naturally lead to that conclusion.

It doesn't have to be gender specific. It doesn't even have to require one to be a parent per se. It would require that we set up a track that is friendly to people in that exact position, one where going to school part-time was financially feasible without having a well-heeled spouse or parents, in essence.

And I intend for this to be my last comment in this discussion. The uncharitable reading of my remark and the degree to which I am being personally attacked* and dismissed makes it nigh impossible to keep my cool and try to engage in good faith, especially given that I'm simply exhausted at the moment. So I'm just not at my best today.

Please consider the fact that I chose to respond to this comment to be an expression of my personal respect for you. Because otherwise I would likely just downvote it and flag it.

* At least one ugly remark appears to have been deleted. So if you think I'm overreacting, consider the possibility that you haven't seen some of the comments I've seen.

It's a fairly common way people naturally read things; in legal contexts is also one of the canons of statutory interpretation, Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.

I never said that the benefit should be available to upper-middle class moms. It's easy enough to phase out the benefit based on income.

In fact, I gave the example of upper middle class people already having this kind of privilege (attending college paid for by their spouse).

Saying things like this, blindly, is not just incorrect, but actually damaging.

But that being said, there are still plenty of factors working against women in parts of the education system and the workplace.

I'm actually surprised this isn't a thing already - my university certainly allowed part-time students who could still work towards a degree.

That being said, I think financial aid was also tied into being a full-time student so I immediately see the drawbacks of that.

A bigger issue in my mind is the relatively high cost of classes. In places with low college costs for 2 year colleges, the tuition is potentially payable out of pocket.

It would be possible to design systems where we give more welfare benefits if you attend college. As education goes up, women have fewer kids.

I think encouraging welfare moms to get an education would help deter them from having large families, which is one if the things that compounds their problems and keeps them stuck in poverty.

I originally wanted three kids. I ultimately opted to stop at two. The fact that I am educated is likely a factor in that decision.

It would be great to have similar programs for welfare, etc. Instead of the work requirements that that are often onerous, and keep folks in dead-end jobs rather than getting an education that will both help them and eventually, get them to be self-sufficient.

It helps, but the other half isn't as cheap.

While this is undeniably true, deferring childbirth the length of a traditional full-time undergraduate program immediately following high-school doesn't get you anywhere close to the age where that's an issue, so that concern isn't a good argument for a part-time “mommy track”. Conversely, part-time education for re-entering students is already a thing, though not necessarily well-supported by top-tier institutions. (Unfortunately, recently it's also one of the major focus of private for-profit predatory scam institutions, and federal efforts to fight that problem have been parked back under the current administration, so there are problems to address.)

> Historically, we resolved these conflicts by having women have babies young, but with a financially established husband who was typically older. Now, that is decried as evil patriarchy.

No, women choosing for themselves to resolve the balance of concerns that way is not, even by most people who decry the existence of “evil patriarchy”, described as an example of that problem. Women being externally compelled to do so without meaningful options—sometimes at ages where meaningful consent would be unlikely even if the girl had a choice—as has been true in many historical conditions and sometimes true in some places today may be, but that's because of the lack of women's (or girls') agency in the decision, not the outcome.

Unfortunately, that's not how this works. If it were, then the article wouldn't be citing early 30s as the age at which educated women have kids.

How this works is that a poor woman from a bad neighborhood in her teens is happy if the guy doesn't beat her, isn't a substance abuser and has a job at all. Then she gets an education and her expectations change. Of course, he won't be a substance abuse. Of course, he won't beat her. He also should have a professional job, dress well, and have certain other appealing traits. Her expectations go way, way up.

In most cases, she also is unwilling to give up her career. She didn't get a degree to become a homemaker. Two career couples face significant challenges in finding a city where both careers can thrive.

Things get vastly more complicated and it takes time to find the right guy, among other things. Some of these women start trying to arrange for a child in their twenties and don't get one until their late thirties or even their forties.

Julie Numar was quoted as saying she sometimes wished she was brave enough to have an accident. She married a Texas businessman and had her only child in her forties. She was soon divorced and raised the child alone.

There are good things about getting an education and career as a woman. But for most women, it complicates the hell out of the desire to have kids. Those complications can mean it gets put off and put off and put off.

But I think I'm going to walk away from this discussion for now. It's an overwhelmingly male forum. The issues involved in waiting to have kids that so many women find agonizing are being trivialized. I'm being attacked and dismissed. The basis for my knowledge is being attacked as irrelevant. Etc.

Y'all have fun as men hashing out how women ought to view this issue.

It is exactly how this works, which is exactly why that's the finding: more specifically, while education is the explanatory factor, the issue isn't women delaying having kids to finish school, it's certain women (well, families; while they don't discuss it in as much depth, the article points out first time fathers are getting older, too) delaying having kids to have an estsblished career, of which education is a foundation.

A mommy track for college (or, more gender neutrally, as for the population this actually helps, this actually probably applies just as much for the men in the same families, better support for parents as part-time re-entering students generally) doesn't serve that population at all; it does serve the population that's already choosing to have kids before getting a degree, but the problem it could help solve for them isn't the problem of declining fertility and increased risk of birth complications and defects that starts to kick in in the mid-to-late 30s and beyond.

Aside from possible issues of overgeneralization, I don't have much issue with the narrative you present as a path that some women go through in your post—it certainly happens just that way in some cases—but what you fail to do with it is connect it in any way to the solution you've presented.

I'd actually be quite interested in seeing an argument connecting them, but it's impossible to have a productive discussion if you choose to view any challenge to an argument you present as if it were an attack on yourself and your gender.

Thank you for saying so. It helps to hear such things sometimes. It's vastly better to get the occasional atta-girl than just facing a wall of negativity.

Future goal: More meaty engagement on the issues with less overall sense of dismissiveness. ;)

(Also: Waves at the guy from Georgia who went to that other Georgia school.)

My partner and I both want children. We are not yet married and we do not yet have a house. Despite this, I really can't wait too much longer to get pregnant, or else risk fertility issues. And yet, the moment I get pregnant, my job is at risk (even though legally it shouldn't be)

Men really have no idea what it is like to have this struggle. I am both afraid for the career I will undoubtedly lose or the child I might struggle to conceive if I wait much longer. :(

Even though we're well off, it's very expensive living in the US as a family of four on one income, and you're one job termination or healthcare emergency away from poverty. Due to very helpful HN posters, we're looking at me getting a Blue Card [1] so we can move to Germany or Belgium; I'll take a substantial pay cut, but the work culture, employment regulations, and family support services will more than make up for it. I recognize that I'm not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. [2]

America is a terrific place to be a business owner, but a terrible place to be an employee, have kids, or raise a family. You and your partner might consider looking for greener pastures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)

[2] http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/

Careers are ephemeral; when you stop working, they cease to exist or matter. Your children, though, will almost certainly outlast you. And each or your children will be a precious human life that was only possible because you brought it into existence.

My wife and I had our first when we were 30, and luckily, another through IVF, which is far more complicated, painful, emotionally draining and expensive than you'd expect based on how people casually talk. It's unlikely that we can ever have more, even though we could easily take care of them, and we both come from big, happy families.

I was afraid to get married and start a family. It seemed so daunting and I dreaded being a bad father/husband or letting a poor innocent kid down. My parents grew up struggling in Portugal and as poor immigrants to the US and I wanted no part of that. By the time I felt ready I had a few million dollars in investments, owned a large apartment in a nice city without a mortgage and was doing well in a very competitive job (HFT).

And it ended up not mattering a bit. My industry got decimated, just as I'd feared, and I never touched a single dollar of the money I had put away. My kids never starved. My wife still had her job. I work hard and am somewhat clever. I found another that paid more than enough, not finance money, but plenty.

Kids aren't that expensive. Once you have a family you aren't going to fancy restaurants or racking up big bar tabs every few weeks. Clothes can be cheap if you look around. Your kid doesn't need a 50k preschool. As long as you're employable in a middle or upper middle class job, you can take care of a kid. Money and career success aren't even the toughest parts. Being an old dad sucks. Everything is just physically and mentally harder than when I was in my 20s. In retrospect, I wish I were waking up at 3am to change diapers instead of getting in from the club at 26.

It's a cliche but I feel more joy and personal satisfaction watching my sons grow and learn new things than anything else in the world. I've been very fortunate, had a lot of successes and cool experiences, but nothing comes close.

-College alone, except for a select few schools and/or majors, is no longer a strong signal for getting jobs. My wife went to a good state school and studied Philosophy in undergrad, but had trouble finding good work. She ended up at a top law school, starting her career at a big law firm when she was 25. More post-grad education isn't necessarily bad, but it often leads to debt and delays independent adult life milestones.

-Less loyalty from company to employee and vice-versa compared to years ago. Hiring generally bright people and training them up to work for a decade plus is unheard of today at most companies. I was lucky to get my job out of undergrad and move up the ranks. Many of my peers had to hop jobs and cities.

-Geographic bifurcation of haves vs. have nots and tech eating the world. The best jobs are concentrated at fewer companies, mostly in very expensive cities like with high housing costs. Around the smaller city where I grew up, baby boomers in middle management could earn good salaries, but there were few good entry-level jobs. People move away from home for a career. Having kids means expensive childcare or one partner giving up a job/taking less lucrative work. In the "good old days", extended family would help with the kids and it was easier to get by on one salary.

-This will sound controversial, but availability/acceptance of hedonistic pursuits: world travel, casual sex, drinking/drugs/partying, video games, porn, etc. I'm sure the Tinder era makes this even easier. On a more banal level, when I was single, I rarely cooked a meal for myself or even did laundry. Eventually this felt empty but it was a siren song at the time. There's very little social/peer judgment telling you to "grow up." I could still live like this today if I wanted to. I'm not a Ned Flanders type: It was mostly fun, but I do think extended adolescence can extend a bit too long.

Anyway I don't really like to preach to people. Raising a family is hard work, and it's a full-time 100% always-on commitment, even more than that finance, tech or big law job. It might not be for everyone. I will say for the people who want to some day, but want just this one trip to Machu Picchu on their Instagram, one more notch on the headboard, one more Michelin three-star tasting menu, one more good bonus/promotion, etc. etc. to just take the leap.

The decline of organized religion might play a part? These communities provide a purpose beyond the self through volunteering/charity, steer their members to start families, and provide role models/mentors for younger men & women to model.

IMO, the rise of extreme ideologies is telling. Rudderless people are so desperate for a moral code and sense of belonging that even alt-right neo-Nazis look like an attractive option instead of a sad joke. I'm not sure what type of positive community fills this need today. I'm not a religious believer, nor are most of my peers. I volunteer at a food pantry, but the volunteers are kinda transient and it doesn't feel like a cohesive group.

And what kind of kids would your friends have, given that they’re not particularly drawn to or versed in family life and values?

Not trying to be combative I just would be very interested in seeing this unpacked.

I don't think being versed in family life matters. The older I get, the more I realize that the folks in charge are just as confused as I am half the time. Everyone learns as they go. Nobody is born knowing how to raise a kid and every kid is different. If you give them a safe & nurturing place, spend time with them, and try your best, you'll do just fine.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-lon...

It is an option if you can pay for it yourself. It's just not an option for poorer people, who probably need it the most.

A student enrolled at least half-time (which a 6-8 year version of a full time 4-year program would be) is eligible for most of the same kinds of public aid as full-time students, though for some programs (unsubsidized Stafford loans are an exception, IIRC) the aid amount may be reduced, generally roughly proportionately to the courseload compared to full-time status.

This seems like it's stretching the article though, the average age of birth for women with college degrees (currently) is ~30. While that's certainly older than the non-college degrees, it's still well below the 35 cutoff which most people seem to regard as when birth complications becomes a serious risk.

My sister began trying to have kids in her late twenties. She was 36 iirc when she finally had her only child. She has also miscarried multiple times.

She and I are no longer close, but we were at one time. We talked about the possibility of me serving as her surrogate if she couldn't have a child on her own.

Through her, I know quite a lot about fertility issues. I don't think I'm stretching anything. More like giving the nutshell version of many decades of knowledge.

I empathize with your sister, but I think it's wrong to generalize a single data point over the population. On a broad level, birth rates in the US from 25-29 are at 104.3, whereas 30-34 is at 101.5[1]. This is a change, but far less in comparison to the dropoff at 35-39, where birth rates fall off a cliff to 51.8.

If we take the article's premise at face value (college educated women in current times typically give birth at ~30 years old, vs non-college educated women at ~23), it would appear that the birth rate differences are negligible.

[1]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Birth-Rates-for-Females-by-Ag...

Fertility doesn't decline in a linear fashion but it does decline and to my knowledge, it doesn't ever increase over time.

I think you need to reexamine what the stats you are quoting are really about.

Haven’t looked at the science tho.

Hello, fellow Georgian! Having attended the other of these two colleges, I will avoid mentioning which one belongs in the #1 spot and which belongs in the #2 spot, and will instead just say that I have very much enjoyed reading your comments on this topic today.

She's currently a high ranking employee at the CDC.

[1] https://www.asrm.org/globalassets/asrm/asrm-content/news-and...

[2] https://yourfertility.org.au/for-women/age/

(I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you aren't convincing.)

Angela Merkel is one of these GDR children, she studied physics and has a PhD in quantum chemistry. She is childless, but her mother - despite being very old now - is still teaching English because she has never stopped being passionate about her chosen profession (I know an interview where Merkel says that her mothers work attitude always inspired her). Well, she never had to throw her education away because society or her husband expected it either. Another well-known politician I can think of here is Sarah Wagenknecht. Peter Scholze who just won the Fields medal was born in Dresden (growing up in Berlin) - his father is a physicist and his mother is a computer scientist working as network technician.

This is not a panacea, and average age of mothers is also quite high due to a high proportion of people going for graduate degrees. However, it shows that a family with 2, 3 children can still be thought of as desirable and attainable by educated parents in a 1st world country, with the right environment.

When government decides that it has zero responsibilities towards helping the next generation, and when the cost of living (and the cost of educating that next generation) is so darn high, women make the completely rational choice not to have children, or to have fewer than they would otherwise like.

America found a way to offer childcare during WWII, when keeping women in work was a priority. But somehow we've forgotten how to do it in peacetime.

To be less controversial, the number of artists in ancient Greece was small. Today, depending upon definition, a huge portion of people make a living creatively. Heck, even a job like Food Photographer is an historical outlier in terms of the skill set.

As more types of jobs open up, and society has much, much better individual food security, people make decisions to enter more and more niche professions that don't always make for great statistics.

That's part of the modern, western problem, that when people are free to do what they want, and what we individually want is complicated, they tend to choose paths that lead to an aggregate we didn't expect. I mean, honestly, how many people ever predicted Instagram models in the 1980s? Youtube stars are analogous to TV stars, but Instagram? You take a photo of yourself next to something? That's your job?

In previous generations, people were more likely to marry outside of their education level and their family's economic class. So you might get a solidly middle-class, white-collar guy marrying a woman from a working-class family who never went to college, and they lived off one income.

But nowadays, it is much more likely that both spouses work, and also that people marry within their own class and education level. So, in general, you get either two low-income earners, two middle-income earners, or two high-income earners.

That greatly widens the household income gap, because now you're dealing with a combination of two incomes of roughly the same degree.

And so it becomes much harder for people to make changes to their economic status, because dual-income households are the norm, and if both spouses have to work, they have less time and opportunity, particularly at the lower end, to do things (like earn a degree) that might help them improve their economic status.

Isn't it then still educated men marrying educated women relative to gender possibilities? The different seem to be only that women had lower level of education in general.

A men at that time would only rarely marry up.

One yields a lot more decision making power, responsibilities and possibly much higher salaries.

This makes me worried about the implications. There ought to be middle tracks, to have kids and a career without putting one aside so long or to such a great extent.

Or to put it another way, the ROI of investing additional time into raising your children remains high as you go from spending 5 minutes a day up to 1,000 minutes a day.

So I think it’s natural and beneficial that parents try to invest the maximum amount of time into their children as physically possible, and career will come second to that.

I’m not at all saying the choice shouldn’t be available to work and raise children, or passing any moral judgement on families who take that path. Just that it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people decide they will focus on one or the other and not try to do both.

Advancing in a career and parenting a child are both extremely onerous (and rewarding) tasks. There are only 24 hours in a day, and in both employment and parenthood you are “competing” against other people who are 100% committed to one or the other.

Speaking for myself as a 36 year old male, the number of hours I work is probably 50% what it was before I had my two children. I used to be the #1 contributor at my job, no task couldn’t be done, no customer couldn’t be blown away, no deal couldn’t be closed through mastery and shear force of will.

Now my priorities have shifted. That level of focus and exertion simply isn’t possible anymore with the number of hours a day I spend with the kids.

Do you mean ROI for the parent (satisfaction of spending time with your child) or for the child? It seems counter-intuitive but I believe a lot of research has shown that upbringing actually doesn't matter too much, provided you meet a certain obvious threshold (giving them proper food, not abusing them, etc)

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...

http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html

That's my big gripe with the NYT article and charts - these would be considerably more informative if they were also broken down by race. As it is, the real story is incredibly blurred.

You'd immediately have to double the number of graphics and do god knows what to the amount of text, and that's if you just did a very simplified racial breakdown. Better to leave an ethnic, racial, or religious breakdown (and they're all worth discussing) for a follow-up article.

Because there are only two races?

Serious question. I'm genuinely wondering what it means in all of this?

Its like if you asked “what’s the average height of the most popular American Olympic athletes?” And found that the answer is 5 foot 6. Huh, they’re just like us? No, the gymnasts are 4 foot 8 and the swimmers are 6 foot 4.

That's still a bit confusing. Maybe I'm being dense, but one chart is for women with college degrees having babies and the other is for women without college degrees having babies.

So what impact would race have on when a woman with a college degree has a baby? (I mean, whether they are married or not is presumably irrelevant to the question of whether they have a college degree. So why would race not be irrelevant to that question?)

My question is the similar for the graph of married vs unmarried? If you are married and having a baby, (I mean, unless I'm missing something?), you are married and having a baby. Why would your race change that fact?

But the charts are not counting women who have college degrees AND are married. The chart is a count of women who have college degrees and had their first child. So whether or not a college educated black or hispanic woman is married, is totally irrelevant to that question.

I'm starting to think that, perhaps, you have misread the graphs? These are not graphs of women who are college educated AND married. These are graphs of women who are college educated. And then there is another set of graphs for women who are married. With both factors isolated to get a true picture of what's going on.

It's remarkable, that you don't "reason based on anecdata" but you were happy to kick off the thread with some racist assumptions. Go ahead, show us some "data" about all those 20yo white women who are just taking some time off from their college careers to work minimum wage while paying for daycare and waiting for daddy to get a job...

Recent immigrants have higher birthrates than nth-generation descendants. I've not verified, but my initial assumption is that the less wealthy have higher birthrates than the more wealthy.

This isn't really a matter of race, but one of economics and social norms.

Look at the blob in Arizona for example on Without a college degree vs poverty. So yes the south east black population clusters in similar areas as poverty but out west they look rather different.

My ancestors (and my wife's) all arrived in Virginia. Over the course of several generations they gradually moved West - first into the Shenandoah Valley, then down through SW VA and into Kentucky and Tennessee. They arrived in Northern Arkansas from 1840 or so through 1900.

This a common enough story that it's listed as a migratory group by Ancestry.com. It seems likely that what you're seeing here is a social norm among a discrete population with a mostly shared culture.

http://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-election...

The big one is the Bible Belt minus the Black Belt, and also seems to be missing the Carolinas, maybe because they've had so much internal migration from the Northeast recently.

El Paso and surrounding area is surely associated more with the Rio Grande Valley of far south Texas than either of these two areas -- a culturally distinct area of Tejanos and more recent Hispanic immigrants.

I don't know what to attribute the area of lower-age married fertility in eastern CO + western KS to, or other scattered areas.

The big catch is insurance in the US... and that really pisses me off that it such a big deal. Also FMLA is kinda wonky in the us. I worked for a company based in CA... CA employees got paid on FMLA, I (being outside of CA) did not :P

I agree it is higher risk having only one wage earner, but sometimes it makes financial sense, and it definitely can have developmental benefits (e.g. 1:1 ratio instead of 1:6 or 1:8).

I would suggest that if anyone does do stay-at-home, that when the kid has all of their shots, you send them to a play group or preschool so they can learn to socialize.

PS - We also had kids fairly late, so got all our student loans paid off, and saved a little money which has helped as a buffer.

Wage growth compounds, so you have to take that into consideration. If your employer has a modest retirement contribution that you can take advantage of, that alone makes employment "worth it" from a purely financial prescriptive.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/staying-home-to-parent-can-...

So even if matching retirement contributions technically tipped the scales, it would still be nowhere close to worth while.

But it also probably means living a less robust lifestyle to keep expenses reasonable for a one-income household. The trap many DINKs fall into (not accusing you, just riffing on my observations) is living a lifestyle that's on the edge of affordability for two earners, and thus feeling like they HAVE to have two earners indefinitely.

I know a few couples who didn't take the loss of 1 income into account and they are really struggling.

https://youtu.be/CXSz0bA9CiE

The risk of job loss in this economy is a lot lower than several years ago, so now may be the time to do it. Once a kid is 3, then they can go to preschool, and that cost is lower than individualized care, and goes down with age.

It’s also not going to get easier if you wait, as complications increase with age, even in early 30’s. My wife was on bed rest for 12 weeks, 10 of those in the hospital. A total of $140k, so better damn well have insurance, and I needed to use FMLA too.

Also, 48% of pregnancies are paid for by Medicare. Plenty of illegal immigrants having border babies, which you are paying for, from birth through college.

This New Yorker article from 2008 digs into the political/cultural factors behind it:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/03/red-sex-blue-s...

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option.

The article points out the factor that is a near complete explanation: education.

In fact, if anything, by making it more viable to wait to have children until later in life, and thus increasing the age of first reproduction relative to lifespan (i.e. slowing the reproductive cycle), fertility treatments could contribute to a slowing of population growth.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...

Key sentence of the presentation. Population overshoot is a fact.

As it is, total biomass of livestock exceeds that of all wild mammals. Certainly, if we were clever enough, we could have a world with very little biodiversity. Basically, just humans, livestock, pets, managed trees and food crops, and associated pests. But that would arguably be a tragedy. And it would be extremely fragile, and prone to disasterous collapse.

Per World Bank data, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90/day) has dropped from 44% to just 9% since 1980. In that time, the population has grown from 4.4B to 7.6B.

Speaking of population growth, it's down to 1.09%, the lowest since the numbers I'm looking at started being kept, in 1951. That's down about 50% from a high of 2.09% in 1968.

So two facts here. First, the population is leveling off. Second, even with the population growth over the past almost 40 years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. So the idea that overpopulation is making things worse is demonstrably, factually untrue.

The next stage of this argument would be one of overconsumption - that we are "destroying the planet", and this cannot be sustained. But what does that mean? Well, what if we run out of fossil fuels? (This is the one that worries me the most.) Currently, we are shifting rapidly to renewable sources. Even if they don't dominate, the curve is heading that way at logarithmic speed. Already, solar/wind are cheaper per kwh than coal or currently-cheap natural gas. As storage mechanisms become widespread, it seems like the grid will likely adapt from the current baseload + peak model to a wind/solar + storage model. That's clean decentralized, and (for now) limitless power.

Well, what about global warming? Yeah, it sucks, but. We can and will adjust. Even as oceans rise, they rise slowly enough to abandon unworkable structures and replace them with new ones on higher ground. Farming will adjust crops and techniques to changing climate. It's not impossible, just difficult.

What about habitat distruction and loss of biodiversity? Yeah, so? Again, this sucks... but it's mostly just unaesthetic. It doesn't truly harm the human population. It's not going to kill billions.

And remember what's driving this population growth - a massive increase in our odds of surviving as individuals, due to vaccination, sanitation, and education. Birth rates drop within a generation when a region develops modern sanitation and education. What we're seeing isn't an increase in birthrate, but rather an increase in survival rate. Birth rates are under control in most of the world today, but it will take half a century or more for the baby boom from the transition periods to die of old age.

So no, I'm not convinced that overconsumption and overpopulation are a fact.

1. Below replacement fertility rates indicate that humans are facing some novel selective pressure to which we are poorly adapted. "Modern Life" is probably a useful label for this negative selective pressure.

2. The fact that there is high variance in reproductive outcomes in the developed world—and, specifically, that some women still have many children—indicates that some humans are already adapted to this novel selective pressure.

3. Because the variance in fertility rates between women is so high (some women have 0 children, while others have 4+), the adaptations which result in high fertility should spread throughout the entire population relatively quickly.

So, yeah, we don't have an overpopulation problem now. And we probably won't have one while you and I are alive. But the future of this planet is for it to be terraformed to support as much human life as possible. If we're smart we'll start thinking about how to make that future one where a high quality of life is possible.

I was thinking earlier about this birth rate in terms of generations. I'm 53. My paternal grandparents, living in rural poverty in Kentucky, had 13 children, of which 8 survived. None of those 8 had more than 4 children of their own. My grandfather, born in the 19th century, was illiterate and worked someone else's tobacco fields. My father went to high school and owned a blue-collar business. I went to college and work in software. My spouse is 47. Her maternal grandfather grew up in the Kansas Dust Bowl during the Depression, hunting squirrels after a day's work so his family could eat, and he went to bed hungry sometimes. He parlayed his WWII service into a Harvard MBA, and became a VP at Ernst and Young, retired a millionaire. He and his wife had 8 children, all of whom survived, because they were living much better than my father's family did. None of those 8 children had more than 3 children of their own, and some are childless. I have three siblings. None of us had more than two children. Of my two adult children, one will almost certainly be childless, the other I give a maybe 75% chance of children.

This is what happens to birth rates.

Iran, for example. In the early 1980s, the birth rate in Iran was over 5. Now, it's 1.6, lower than the USA or Europe. Iran isn't unusual. This happens everywhere that gets out of extreme poverty. And extreme poverty? That was my grandparents, in the US, in the 20th century. For the most part, such poverty no longer exists in the tobacco fields of southern Kentucky.

I don't think it's productive to speculate about a sudden sharp increase in birth rates over a century from now, based on conditions that are necessarily different from the conditions that are driving a drastic drop in the birth rate today. It's not really our problem, and we have no useful facts.

What we do know is that today, birth rates are plummeting worldwide, to below replacement level. As the last generations of population boom fade away over the course of the 21st century, it's unlikely to grow again. Barring unforeseeable changes, global population will likely shrink some over the 22nd century and then stabilize at whatever level of "terraform" is necessary.

By then, the era of fossil fuel will be over, and hopefully the atmosphere will start to stabilize. Humanity will be mostly on solar power, with sustainable agriculture feeding everyone. I believe that centuries from now, Earth will be a garden of Eden again, as the surplus resources get turned to making it beautiful, rather than just fending off starvation.

All of human history up until the middle 1800s was spent at the malthusian limit: barely enough food to feed all the people. We are living through an aberration at the moment caused by a drastic increase in food production combined with a decline in birth rates. What I am saying is that birth rates will bounce back.

My family tree looks a lot like yours: lots of dead ends. My father has 6 siblings and my mother has 3, for a total of 11 siblings (including my parents). Collectively, all of those siblings would have to produce 20 offspring to maintain 0 population growth. But there are only 7 offspring in my generation. That represents a huge pruning of my lineage.

But.

All of the children in my generation are the offspring of parents who decided to have children in the age of birth control, women in the workforce, etc. And all of the children in the next generation will have gone through another round of intense selection. If you just play that out for a few generations, you're left with a population that has a really strong pedigree for fertility in the face of Modern Life.

You might think this is no big deal, but I can tell you that there are people out there who have a really strong innate drive to have children. I am one of them. So is my wife. We'll start working on our 4th child next year. All of the other people we know with 3+ children have markedly different personalities from the people we know with 2 or less.

Once resistance to modern life starts to gain prevalence in the population, it will spread incredibly rapidly. Take a look at the Haredi Jews in Israel. In 1990, they represented 5% of the Jewish population in Israel. Now, 30 years later, they account for roughly 30% of the Jewish population under 20. What happens when you play that process out for another 30 years? I'll tell you: what happens is that the Haredi are the Jews in Israel.

The same thing will happen with high fertility people in the rest of the developed world. You're just not seeing it because your vantage point is from a part of the tree of life that is being pruned. But there are parts of the population that you're not exposed to. They're religious and conservative and hard to notice because they're too busy raising children to be visible on social media and in high culture. But they're there.

The thing is that they are quite visible, and quite a fair share of the people that are now in the group choosing to reproduce at or below replacement rates, either strategically or just by deprioritized reproduction cookies to career, etc, so that it is delayed come from those backgrounds. Biological decent doesn't dictate personal choice.

Interestingly, I did some googling on the Haredim. As of 2010, the poverty rate for the Haredim in Israel was 60%, far higher than the rest of Israel's Jewish population (probably more in line with the occupied Palestinians, who also have a very high birth rate). Population size or not, this is extremely limiting for their political power. Money counts for a great deal. If they can't afford to expand their communities, and refuse to participate in the broader economy, they'll necessarily be limited in their growth.

So no, I'm not concerned about this problem. Religious groups that refuse to participate in mainstream society may have high birth rates, but will also have high poverty rates. And I see no evidence at all of this behavior in American society, outside of tiny cults. Even the Mormons, probably the best and largest analogy, have seen their birth rate drop drastically, falling 18% from 2007 to 2014 alone. I'm not expecting the LDS church to overrun the nation anytime soon.

Get clean water and vaccinations, and the mortality rate drops. Get educations for young girls so they are literate as adults, and the birth rate drops. It's as simple as that.

For example, "There’s a strong chance a third of all people on earth will be African by 2100":

https://qz.com/africa/1099546/population-growth-africans-wil...

What could go wrong ?

In 1900, the population of Sweden was about 5M, and the birth rate was 4.02 (which was already falling from its historic average of around 5.0). In the 19th century, 20% of the population fled to the US to escape famine. Today, the population is around 10M, and the birth rate is 1.79. Sweden was pretty typical of Europe, pre-WWI.

Would you have said "What could go wrong?" when talking about Europe's birth rate and population growth a century ago? No? Then why be afraid of the same pattern in Africa?

Population growth today is mostly a function of increased life expectancy and drastically reduced child mortality rates. Low child mortality has led to reduced birth rates everywhere, to the point where most industrialized nations have negative growth (discounting immigration). The birth rate has already leveled off globally. It will level off in Africa, too, and the population will stabilize. A century from now, Africa will have zero population growth.

Thanks for updating your wording.

Technology invalidates the very idea of a zero-sum economy. If tomorrow we reach a breakthrough in fusion energy and are able to deliver all the energy the world needs at several order of magnitudes less cost, material, and space... well then we just gave a lot and took very little -- the pie grew -- the possibilities grew. It's not zero-sum.

Listen, simply decrying "zero-sum" doesn't make an argument anymore intelligent. You must seek to understand the concept and basis underlying the words you use. Only then does their true explanatory power become accessible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production%E2%80%93possibility...

As to how the zero sum game improves understanding: It's competition in a resource-constrained environment. I don't want to stick to strict economic theory and assume that wealth creation solves this issue. We've seen that people aren't satisfied by their phones, apps, food and entertainment choices, and high-tech gadgets that people in the past could only dream of. If anything it makes people want more. All the things mentioned, the house, the car, the kids, world travel, are goals people have that don't appear to have satisfying alternatives that don't use up a lot of resources or pollute the environment.

Good education is a zero sum game (free places at ivy league for example).

Health care has waiting lists in some countries.

The whole idea that the "pie gets bigger" because even homeless people can now have cheap electronic gadgets is deeply flawed, but perhaps it is in the interest of some people to create the illusion of progress.