In the general case, with some exceptions, we have found that two types of interventions stand above all others in terms of long term positive economic impact:
1. Infrastructure projects - like building roads 2. Gender projects - projects furthering women's rights in some way
These projects are long-term sticky and does not rely on continuous funding. A paved road will remain paved even after the funding is gone, and will have a positive impact on the community for many decades. Roads allow children to go to school in neighbouring villages, and people to sell their goods in a market, use a bike or other vehicle where they otherwise would not be able to.
Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women often has a major impact on the economic output of a community both because more people can contribute, but also because the types of products and services become more diverse. This type of project is also sticky, once attitudes or structural barriers disappear they don't tend to come back.
Education or sanitation initiatives can be hit or miss, where, once funding dries up, all that is left is a non functioning latrine or empty school building.
The USA has spent billions of dollars in the last century on trying to help African countries, but all it's realistically really led to is just more people in need in Africa. What happens to all those people that have become dependant on the aid when the US economy crumbles and there is no more money to send overseas?
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...
The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...
Some things are just absolutely bad.
Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage.
Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory (or a city full of them where educated people work) it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something.
But yeah, if you are afraid of a war you want your group to be big, uneducated, easy to manipulate and expendable.
Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ... so bootstrapping is a little harder because they have intrinsic value they can fall back on (someone is going to get angry at me for saying that, but it's just the way it is). If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that. You have to get someone to come in and force enough of them to feel like they're a failure for not getting an education and then eventually they'll socially reinforce it themselves without further outside influence.
I believe this is why it's much higher yield for the enlightened outsider to come in and declare their moral and intellectual superiority and tell the females they are losers (or less happy, or less independent, whatever the politically correct terminology is used nowadays) for not getting an education, and get (read: bribe) their families to put them into it.
> If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that
Fyi, “just marry” incorporates a lot of things would disqualify the use of the term “just”. The least of which is pregnancy and the risks thereof, especially in these poorer societies without healthcare.
Women can pretty much do anything men can do. How is a wealthy, financially successful woman less valuable than a man?
Every human is equally valuable in the moral sense.
But value is subjective when we are talking about relationships and we can only generalize about this value.
High income women are more valuable to low income men.
High income men already have money. They value other attributes.
And this is the paradox successful women can face. Their success doesn’t attract the mates they desire, quite the opposite. And worse, they were never told that. They were told the opposite.
I'm not a moral relativist, but I'm not sure we've perfected things here either.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).
> underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans
Please respond to the correct argument I made, not the incorrect argument you wish I had made.
Yeah man, I told the judge the same thing on my shoplifting case.
The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”
(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
You might think “why does it matter?”, but if you’ve drawn the wrong lesson, you’re setting up millions of dollars in failed investments in just building schools and sending teachers into them, which won’t have the affect you expect, and that will fail to improve the lives you thought you would improve.
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
That's why there's an article, with text beyond the headline.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
Both happen at the same time, it's not one causes the other or smth like that. When families struggle with money, marrying girls off reduces their costs. Married boys remain with the family and actually bring someone new into the household, increasing costs or keeping stable if the boy works. Even in cultures where women pay dowries to marry, the ROI could be worth it if you reduce household costs every year going forward and your manual labor work has little chance of growing your income significantly.
Putting a kid through, even free school, costs money and at rural poverty levels in the Global South it's similar to a huge car payment one can't afford. Marrying the kids off is like ending that payment (if they go to live with another family which only girls do)
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]
Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.
Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.
[0] TL;DR for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
Basically any adult can officiate a marriage, then its just a matter of filing the right paperwork with the county clerk - that is what constitutes the legal/civil marriage in the US.
There was the famous case of the clerk in a county in Kentucky refusing to certify same-sex marriages a few years back.
There is also something called "common law" marriages where the state considers you married even if you didn't file the proper paperwork, but were co-habitating and especially if you had children. But this is a dying practice and only recognized by a few states / territories (ironically Washington D.C. is one of them ...)
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.
My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.
Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.
That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8
[0a] (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8.pdf
Edit: actually, since the submitted link (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00796-2) is paywalled, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.
I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.
I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)
When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.
[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.
My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today.
As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws:
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.
The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).
You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.
Your right it doesn't offset opportunity cost. The point is that even providing assistance a high multiple of most other countries has been insufficient to get above replacement.
I'm sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway, and even scaling for cost of living differences very few countries are near Norwegian child benefit levels, so it seems likely it will be exceedingly expensive.
There are three cost buckets: cost of birth, opportunity cost of birth, cost of child rearing and opportunity cost of parenting.
Norway is solving the first and probably the second while subsidizing the third. That leaves the opportunity costs untouched and direct costs, still, a net negative. Norway would need raise its annual payment to parents to completely cover the actual cost of raising a child, and then something for the career hit. I don’t know what those numbers are, but given it would directly increase the tax base, it’s almost precisely what one should borrow for.
1. Maybe this isn’t mainly a money problem?
2. And if it is a money problem, there might still be trade-offs. If you give people enough support, some may decide it makes more sense to stay home with their kids. That could mean fewer people working, less tax income, and then less money available to solve the problem long term.
(And yes, I know Norway has the wealth fund, around $400k per inhabitant or something like that. But I’m keeping that out of it here, because otherwise it becomes harder to compare Norway with other countries.)
There are also other things to think about.
For example: Do we want a system where one part of society has more kids and stays more at home, while another part has fewer kids and focuses more on careers?
I’m saying this because earlier in Norway, families had more freedom to choose between staying home with kids with financial support, or sending kids to kindergarten. Some political parties didn’t like that model because:
a) They saw it as bad for gender equality.
b) Immigrant women were more likely to stay home than Norwegian women, which could make integration harder.
So I think there’s probably more going on here than just money, even though money obviously matters too.
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve an extremely sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.
Unless we find other means of driving up the fertility rate, it's not clear most places will stomach the financial adjustments it will take.
The answer is wealth redistribution. The rich simply hoard too much for society to keep working.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken.
Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty.
Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism.
The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
The more educated/developed a nation, the lesser their birth rate is going to be.
I understand the "shoulds" but that's not what the data suggests.
In essence, we can't have the pie and at the same time eat it.
The most useful thing education does for children is reduce child-mortality rate.[1]
Sources: https://raphael-godefroy.github.io/pdfs/mali_final.pdf
> Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated.
There is no evidence of this being true. This is certainly a narrative peddled by many ideologues.
> Both genders need education and child support programs.
Poorest of poor and illiterate people happen to have more children than the rest.
> Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child.
If men are educated on responsibilities of alimony and child support, with almost no rights, they would neither marry nor have legitimate children.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
This maybe your personal dream and that's fine. But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
> Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
Family-planning is euphemism for reducing children per woman. There's no benefit of having less children -> leading to less economic activity in the future. The family support you keep touting about is moot point. Government does not have their own money. People pay taxes which are used by government.
> An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
Agreed on this point. The definition of benefits are subjective but overall, it is agreed that it is a net positive.
How are you defining "improve"? Is it "increase" or "decrease"?
I feel that informing males beforehand about the responsibilities of fatherhood would decrease the birth rate. Maybe you consider that an improvement? Many people in this thread consider increasing the birth rate an improvement.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
Societally, almost everyone would argue we shouldn't encourage women to have kids that young.
Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1t6akt4/id...
Just because women used to birth 7 kids with high morbidity and mortality rates does not mean they wanted to.
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
Please show the evidence for this being true. Birthrates are low even in countries that provide a lot of support.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
The evidence suggests this is not true. The rest of your comment points to non-financial issues.
https://www.newsweek.com/norway-birth-rate-fertility-rate-pa...
Women get poorer in divorce. They report higher hapiness after divorce and tend to stay single longer. And also, women file for divorce more often.
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
No, the children are fine in this scenario, there are even proportionally fewer than now and so there are any number of available carers.
The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?
> If someone things the population on the planet is too big,
This isn't a centrally planned thing, it's just an exaggeration of the observable reality. On the whole humans who could carry a baby to term but understand exactly what's involved are not keen and if they're willing to do it once or twice draw the line there. The assumption that we're just not compensating them financially enough to reproduce more is let's say, not well supported by available evidence.
I think we should choose to be entirely OK with that until there's risk of a real population bottleneck, e.g. 1000x fewer people -- in the expectation that conditions change and it might sort itself out without action.
Remember, these elderly will be most of us. IIRC many 20 and 30-somethings today will be still alive by the time shit hits this specific fan. How old are you?
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.
A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.
Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.
Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.
Yes, but not to infinitely grow. Any animal population with unchecked growth will eventually be culled by their own outgrown presence if their environment cannot support them. Humans have deemed current society cannot support their children in the ways they deem important.
Thus we've culled ourselves, not by over-grazing, but by using our own reasoning.
In this case, Humans are capable of supporting as large or small population as we'd like. The planet would support it. What the greater challenge is, is resource allocation. We've collectively decided society-by-combat is the most efficient way to allocate resources and because of that, some people have checked out and used what power they have to not continue that game.
The people deciding not to have children will be the same that suffer in their old age. That is their vote.
Multiple problems with this:
- converting farms from one type of crop to another is often enough outright impossible (because climate and/or soil conditions don't allow other crops), very expensive (e.g. need to replace specialized machinery and buildings) or takes decades (if you shift to anything based on bushes and trees, that shit needs time to grow)
- rebalancing agricultural subsidies is a very, very fine line to walk. as a country, you want overproduction of at least core crops, even if it means excess going to biofuel, and you want to isolate farmers from wild speculation swings on global markets so that they don't call it quits and you suddenly end up with (far) less than you actually need. famines haven't been an issue for the Western world precisely of the artificial oversupply situation for many, many decades.
- healthcare doesn't need more budget. The US, Germany and many other Western healthcare systems have more than enough money - their issue is waste, corruption and perverse incentives.
- corn subsidies aren't automatically wasteful. the corn is needed to provide bio-ethanol as a synthetic fuel, and there are more than enough usecases that foreseeably cannot be converted to electric.
- letting farms just die out or go fallow and no one take over is also bad, especially in areas where soil erosion is already an issue. Once soil dries out and there is no plant material to tie it together, it either can get blown away by the wind or in the worst case it can compress all the way down to the nearest layer of bedrock, making it all but impossible to restore.
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-swea...
We can say the factory is better.
Oh yes, and that includes HIV/AIDS, you know, what you are way more likely to get if you're in non-monogamous relationships (which perhaps is more likely for those that aren't married).
And the #1 in general non-communicable risk factor reported here is, surprise, "air pollution." You know, that comes from factories and heavy industry.
[]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria
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>The data don't support your perspective.
No, "my source" (yours is: nothing cited, so pretty hilarious rebuttal) shows 43% of deaths (not under 5, generally deaths) in 2023 from infectious disease and 1.8% from maternal disease.
Lets see your sources on how that 1.8% rises above the 43% even when narrowed to "teenage girls." I saw elsewhere you posted some vague not even nigerian focused data that also included "unsafe abortions" to get to your claim (what does this even mean? Include things like taking a bunch of drugs and hoping it's only strong enough to kill the fetus?)
You're literally proclaiming the data "don't support your perspective" when I'm refuting your uncited perspective with at least something, which is absolutely hilarious position for you to be proselytizing about data from.
>Your source is focused on children under five. If you data source includes children under 10, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant. If it includes boys, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant.
Lol so you didn't even look through it all the way. Because children under 5 was only one part of it. It showed general statistics as well. Unfortunately for your claim your provide .... nothing ... while damning those questioning your "trust me bro." You don't get to set an even lower standard of evidence for yourself than you demand of others.
Your data source does not seem to break out teenagers over 15. It does focus on children under five. It has some data just on children, which seems to be under 15 in this dataset but I am not sure and don’t have time to continue to dig in on this. Your dataset is unable to answer the question you are posing as presented.
The vast majority of deaths in countries like Nigeria are young children, old people, and men. Girls and women aged in their teens, which you did not seem to find any specific data for, generally have relatively low mortality. The leading cause of death globally, centered in less developed nations, in this population, is complications from pregnancy. This was until recently generally put down to improvements in western medicine and childbirth being dangerous. Since about 2020 people have started to realize child marriage is the issue.
The reason for this is mechanical: their pelves are underdeveloped and not ready to birth a baby with a big head.
Unsafe abortions is exactly what it sounds like, and a health risk specific to pregnancy. It can be in order to prevent death in childbirth, whether done early and quietly, or during childbirth in more tragic cases.
I also want to know exactly what it means by "unsafe abortions" whether this includes things like "decided to kill the fetus, and myself" which technically is still an unsafe abortion but more like suicide.
So far you haven't shown the data at all, you did a bunch of handwaving angry at other data which more than clears your standard of evidence of nothing while setting a much looser standard of trust-me-bro for yourself or the non-datapoint of what a vague uncited blurb I had to hunt down elsewhere in your comment links to about 15-19 year olds which is 2/5ths adults. You're holding me to a high standard of evidence. Remember, we're talking about a claim you originally made for which you have the burden of proof, so don't try to bullshit me by holding yourself to a different standard of evidence than me. I'm not going to continue play the fuck-fuck game where I have to get the data concerning your own argument for you (as I did) and you lazily declare it's not good enough.
The data don't support your perspective.
> 1. Let's not pretend that young people... don't make their own terrible decisions too. Look at the divorce rate and the rates of reported DV in the West.
Do you believe that there will be happier marriages and less domestic violence when brides are 16 years old and have little to no agency in choosing who marries them? It seems like your argument should be that people should be more careful in choosing who they marry, not less.
> 2. The Western way ("love marriage" + "women must work or the family will be in poverty") has led to most Western countries being on a downward spiral to literal extinction...
This is just literal ignorance on your part. In every country in the world, higher quality of life (wealth, education, longevity, etc.) has lead to a decrease in population. This is not correlated to "love marriage" or "women must work or the family will be in poverty" -- indeed, women in less developed countries work more hours than their peers in developed countries, though often in the informal sector.
I get that European- and US-based writers often assume their own culture's ideas are best. But your arguments are doing nothing to refute the article. Rather than adding to the discourse, you just seem like you're standing on a soapbox against women having agency.
Comparison isn't necessarily binary. I'd posit these things are more likely determined by other socio-cultural variables, the individuals involved (which is partially contextualized by said variables) and a noisy baseline than whether or not a marriage is arranged. In otherwords, an independent variable (which means I disagree with the both of you)
> In every country in the world, higher quality of life (wealth, education, longevity, etc.) has lead to a decrease in population.
I'm not sure that holds. Do you mean that a higher quality of life leads to a decrease in fertility rate? It's obviously true that population booms eventually end, and historically large ones are usually followed by contraction as a correction. But overall those things you list result in an increase of population, it simply hits a ceiling and stabilizes. We just had the largest population boom in observable (more than recorded!) history, the industrial revolution dwarfs the agricultural one. It stands to reason we should see a pretty hefty population contraction which tapers into a very mild amount of growth until we raise the population ceiling once again.
I don't think he's particularly right that low fertility rates are caused by "marriage for love". It's more like many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history. Other places are only just now having their local population booms, or correcting for other population effects (like war.) It's very unlikely we will contract more than a few billion over the next couple hundred years. Keep in mind the industrial revolution is what caused us to rocket into the billions in the first place. For reference the upper bound estimated population of the 10th century is 400 million, and the upper bound of the 17th is about 500 million. 25% global growth over 700 years. The last 300 years is something like 1700%.
Almost all rhetoric about birth rates never accounts for any of this. So again, independent variables.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
That being said, I’m not against any of this progress but you can’t just introduce these sweeping societal changes to millenia old traditions and expect the social order in the country to survive.
There is also tremendous bad and horror in all that. Some peoples lives completely sux due to that.
Key Aspects of Education Costs in NigeriaPrimary & Junior Secondary:
Officially free in public schools, but hidden fees (development levies, PTA) are common.
Federal Technical Colleges: These are tuition-free, with the government covering costs for uniforms and books.
Senior Secondary & Tertiary: Not generally free. State-owned schools, while cheaper than private, still charge fees, and federal universities charge significant "acceptance" or facility fees.
Regional Differences: Free education initiatives can vary significantly by state.
In other words how long the girl stays in school is directly correlated to how much money the family has.
Don't have any links though.
In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)
I'm not educated enough on the topic to know who is right, but there are plenty of people who say the planet is currently beyond sustainable carrying capacity. Nonstop population growth and urbanization is nonsensical. Who knows what the harmonious number of humans really is, but the only imperative is not to get it wrong in the overpopulation direction and cause billions of deaths from ecological collapse.
One reason I'm not against the attempt of Mars colony is that it would teach us, with a relatively small number of casualties, that humans need a complete ecology around them to thrive.
"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"
Roger Freeman, then advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1970, said "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat" [7], leading to Reagan unwinding the free college of the UC system and this was a progenitor to the current student debt crisis.
But beyond college education, there's also an attack on education at K-12 levels. Homeschooling and a lack of sex education contribute to perpetuating abuse and trapping children (primarily girls) in this cycle.
[1]: https://calmatters.org/politics/2023/06/child-marriage-calif...
[2]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/married-young-the...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/09/chil...
[4]: https://www.freedomunited.org/u-s-child-mariage-laws-individ...
[5]: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage...
[6]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/child-marriag...
[7]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
A very high portion of teenage pregnancies resulted from sexual abuse from an older adult.
People are out there quite literally arguing that the sexual abuse of essentially children is good for society, to enable the population pyramid scheme.
That tells you everything you need to know about the Right.
Something horrifying. Among other things, the commenter ignored this is about child marriages, but also had some delightful gems like arguing about what women are "designed to do best" for "their happiness". You can imagine the rest. Or just watch The Handmaid's Tale I suppose.
Culture warriors will jump up and scream, "Hooray! You see? Education is the solution! Gives us a bajillion more dollars for educational funding!"
Meanwhile, the cultural core belief that child marriage is ok remains.
It is 100% cultural. Clearly you are not well researched enough on the topic, but I applaud your effort.