I recently put out a post on fertility collapse, The Paradox of Low Fertility, in which I claimed that the fertility collapse is mostly due to modern birth control.
Great post. One meta-comment is that it's shocking to me how little detailed discussion and debate there is about such a profound topic. I think it'd be great to have more debates on this and really dig into the data.
Look out your window. Are you inspired to bring more children into the world you see out there? I think the declining birth rate is a rational decision on the part of wise young people. Sure, birth control technology played an enabling role, but it didn't light the fire.
By most objective measures we are better off than we ever have been. We just have a lot of bad actors these days trying to frighten people. (Which I'm sure they feel justified in doing. How many people will care about climate change if it's framed with nuance, and not as an existential crisis?)
Your appeal to intuition is contradicted by history. We could've said the same thing about the world right after the Great Depression and WWII (two of the worst times ever in human history) happened. And yet, the GI generation had a baby boom of children anyway. Your comment is naive.
> Are you inspired to bring more children into the world you see out there?
Yes, of course I am. This world would be better off if we had smarter people running it.
To me the line of argument that gives the most credibility to your hypothesis is one you didn't mention: That the majority of the drop in fertility in the US can be attributed to a rapid decline in teen pregnancy over that period. Even among the poorer classes now, teen pregnancy has almost entirely gone away. It's hard to imagine that easily-available contraception didn't play a major role in that.
You've displayed many great arguments and data in this essay. However, I think that the birth control deniers would probably point out how Iran is much more educated than most other Islamic countries. Around 2020-2022, approximately 40-45% of young adults in Iran were enrolled in some form of higher education. And according to a source mentioned on Wikipedia, women make up over 70% of all university students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Iran#Women_in_education
I also argued with JayMan about this once by responding to a tweet that he had pinned on his account. After the tweet exchange, he never conceded, but I noticed that he unpinned the tweet pretty quickly. https://x.com/0Contradictions/status/1884275395652170118
A bit late but nonetheless: I think the most recent drop across nearly all countries including such diverse ones as North Korea, Mozambique, China, USA, Germany, Czechia, Spain, Island etc coincides much better with smartphones then they do with Plan B.
It seems especially unlikely that Plan B is causing the decline in Africa, I would credit this to "traditional" birth control measures starting to have an effect.
But this leads to the question why these two similar trends coincide so much.
I think that Plan B is less important and that smartphones export Western child-rearing standards into the third world. I even saw an interesting study that fertility decreases just as enough income for a basic smartphone is reached (sadly I lost the study-link).
For Western societies I am not sure what we are seeing but basically all groups are impacted, even immigrants and so on. Plan B seems to specific and also to early, the big drop was post 2013/14. So maybe smartphones through a different causal pathway?
That's an interesting point and I agree that birth control has played a major role in shaping fertility trends. However, as you noted, it doesn't fully account for everything. The post-war baby boom, for instance, still challenges birth control as the central cause of declining fertility. Take Seoul as an example: with a birth rate of just 0.3, we're seeing an extraordinarily low number that likely stems from a complex mix of factors. I think there's still valid space for cultural analysis in trying to understand why fertility rates have dropped so dramatically. That said, I completely agree that blaming it all on “leftism” or feminism is overly simplistic, lazy, and ultimately unconvincing.
Love this! How do you always come up with fresh ideas to write about? You’re way too smart for this society. We don’t deserve you
Great post. One meta-comment is that it's shocking to me how little detailed discussion and debate there is about such a profound topic. I think it'd be great to have more debates on this and really dig into the data.
Look out your window. Are you inspired to bring more children into the world you see out there? I think the declining birth rate is a rational decision on the part of wise young people. Sure, birth control technology played an enabling role, but it didn't light the fire.
By most objective measures we are better off than we ever have been. We just have a lot of bad actors these days trying to frighten people. (Which I'm sure they feel justified in doing. How many people will care about climate change if it's framed with nuance, and not as an existential crisis?)
Your appeal to intuition is contradicted by history. We could've said the same thing about the world right after the Great Depression and WWII (two of the worst times ever in human history) happened. And yet, the GI generation had a baby boom of children anyway. Your comment is naive.
> Are you inspired to bring more children into the world you see out there?
Yes, of course I am. This world would be better off if we had smarter people running it.
To me the line of argument that gives the most credibility to your hypothesis is one you didn't mention: That the majority of the drop in fertility in the US can be attributed to a rapid decline in teen pregnancy over that period. Even among the poorer classes now, teen pregnancy has almost entirely gone away. It's hard to imagine that easily-available contraception didn't play a major role in that.
You've displayed many great arguments and data in this essay. However, I think that the birth control deniers would probably point out how Iran is much more educated than most other Islamic countries. Around 2020-2022, approximately 40-45% of young adults in Iran were enrolled in some form of higher education. And according to a source mentioned on Wikipedia, women make up over 70% of all university students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Iran#Women_in_education
I've gotten downvoted by LessWrongers for insisting on the importance of birth control. After disproving their talking points, they just stopped responding, and they didn't remove their downvotes. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HmbnM2tvHdEXNCNYa/demography-and-destiny#Wg5ZNQd3sGqo5poum
I also argued with JayMan about this once by responding to a tweet that he had pinned on his account. After the tweet exchange, he never conceded, but I noticed that he unpinned the tweet pretty quickly. https://x.com/0Contradictions/status/1884275395652170118
A bit late but nonetheless: I think the most recent drop across nearly all countries including such diverse ones as North Korea, Mozambique, China, USA, Germany, Czechia, Spain, Island etc coincides much better with smartphones then they do with Plan B.
It seems especially unlikely that Plan B is causing the decline in Africa, I would credit this to "traditional" birth control measures starting to have an effect.
But this leads to the question why these two similar trends coincide so much.
I think that Plan B is less important and that smartphones export Western child-rearing standards into the third world. I even saw an interesting study that fertility decreases just as enough income for a basic smartphone is reached (sadly I lost the study-link).
For Western societies I am not sure what we are seeing but basically all groups are impacted, even immigrants and so on. Plan B seems to specific and also to early, the big drop was post 2013/14. So maybe smartphones through a different causal pathway?
That's an interesting point and I agree that birth control has played a major role in shaping fertility trends. However, as you noted, it doesn't fully account for everything. The post-war baby boom, for instance, still challenges birth control as the central cause of declining fertility. Take Seoul as an example: with a birth rate of just 0.3, we're seeing an extraordinarily low number that likely stems from a complex mix of factors. I think there's still valid space for cultural analysis in trying to understand why fertility rates have dropped so dramatically. That said, I completely agree that blaming it all on “leftism” or feminism is overly simplistic, lazy, and ultimately unconvincing.