It's not just rich places that are becoming less fertile.
"Demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions." - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise...
Any efforts to improve socioeconomic systems to make having children a more attractive economic proposition (and thereby increasing the fertility rate) will take years to implement, perhaps longer, if at all. Like a furnace warming a room, it’s getting colder faster than the thermostat can ever raise the temperature back up.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp...
Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much.
I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.
Most people who are having kids in india are lower income people.
so i just don't understand when people say it's because of money issue, when people with comfy jobs fail to have babies, it's not about money.
The kids pick up on this lament consciously or unconsciously and realise that the more kids they will have, the worse the problem.
The "poor" people get subsidies and freebies, and the more children they have, the more sops state governments throw away at them.
I'm also told, but can't confirm it, another factor is social media pushing fancy vacations abroad spending their entire income.
Money matters but is not the primary.
Blame capitalism, but the real estate part.
Real estate: there's not enough of it, new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit. Young people without families optimize for themselves and continually are willing to compromise for less space for the same money but minimum_space(single) << minimum_space(family+kids)
So new construction, particularly large apartment building have few to no units that anyone could actually raise a family in and trend towards "studio" concrete cylinders.
Places with more space are zoned for exclusive residential and are thus tremendously boring.
Mixed use places are full of vacant commercial space because lowering the rent would trigger property revaluation and the places that aren't vacant are tremendously expensive because of the large amount that has to go to paying the rent ... or paying their low-to-middle income employees who spent half their income on rent.
All of this money is getting sucked out of the economy into A) people who want real estate income without working and B) the financial system giving them loans.
Nobody wants kids because they have to chose between expensive housing where it's boring and extremely expensive housing where it's not. Just furthering the generation on generation the young paying for the previous generations real estate "investment" growth.
Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit
Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service.
And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.
Which this article basically does, at first glance. It assumes capitalism is bad for baby-rearing, doesn't really motivate why, and instead just goes East Germany had a higher birth rate than West Germany before reunification, then after reunification, it flipped, therefore capitalism causes low birth rates.
Honestly - it’s hard to find a publication that isn’t biased, or in many cases just outright wrong outside of a narrow subject matter and are ignorantly pushing someone’s propaganda because they don’t know better. The Atlantic, Economist are posted often and come to mind. I’m exaggerating slightly I’m sure Jacobian has a reason for being disdained.
I do not know any actual leftists that take it seriously it mostly just serves to embarrass everyone.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins
> the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".
Of course they are, on a global scale. There is no other process than birth that can increase global population.
An inverted population either kills the old or enslaves the young.
We reached peak baby 5 years ago. There is a still a path to steady state population but that is closing fast.