Please Cite Your Factual Opinions (Illusion of Truth!)
I recently thought about why birth rates in all developed countries except for Israel are declining.
My intuition tells me it has to do with culture. Click for more thoughts
I believe this because in Israel there is a strong culture of having children, going as far as to extract semen from dead soldiers. Let’s not discuss the morals of this as it’s clear in every society that exceptions are made for rules that would be considered wrong in other situations. Examples: for COVID-19 vaccines, the health of the population is more important than bodily rights; In several US states, the right to be born is more important than the right of both bodily autonomy and even property rights (i.e. the right to remove a trespasser even if the trespasser is deceased); In the Israeli case, population growth is more important than bodily autonomy.
Aaaanyways, I came across this Reddit comment (I know I know, I also loathe Reddit), and there are ZERO citations in this top comment regarding the eight claims it made. Let’s take a look at these claims. Almost all of these are accepted based on Redditor biases and not hard evidence based research. How else do people end up believing that bike lanes cause congestion?
This is not a discussion on intelligence or being more analytical than the average person, there is a lack of culture to SEEK THE TRUTH. The ILLUSION OF TRUTH exists, and it’s clearly very prevalent among liberals. Before I begin I’d like to share quote because it needs to be made into a shirt.
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There’s a huge literature on fertility decline with development in demography, much of it written by sociologists
Is that so? Let me apply the Socratic method. How do you know? Let’s search for something.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com: title search for declining birth rates
Since the bigger theme is not just about understanding why birth rates are declining, but what we can do about it, let’s look at
Noriyuki Takayama and Martin Werding (eds.), Fertility and Public Policy: How to Reverse the Trend of Declining Birth Rates which was published on 27 June 2012. So 12 years have gone by, and birth rates have not shot up. 50 US dollars to read the PDF? Why not? I’ll add it to my reading list. I’ll update this article and post a new one once I do. Assuming this article is correct, are all developed country policy makers just incompetent? Is that a valid answer?
- Women face higher opportunity costs to childbearing in today’s society than previous society’s
Sure there is a cost to bear a child, however would an adopter not agree that the consumer surplus of paying to adopt a child is infinite?
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Meanwhile work institutions that were established on the assumption of a breadwinner / homemaker model have adapted incompletely to the two-earner household, and work/life balance/integration issues have accordingly intensified
What? This makes no sense. If anything, workplaces have NOT adapted to the two-earner household. Russia understands this. I’m trying my best not to add non-cited opinions, so I’ll leave it at that. Basically, 7 hour shifts, 5 days a week is normalized in all developed cultures, and there are only a very few cases where work hours can go down while leisure goes up. Where are the part-time white collar workers and jobs? Please call me (as in I’m curious what you do). The only thing I can really think of is if workplace institutions started rewarding the most productive employees by reducing work hours and pushing workers to get married and have children. In developed country, this would be illegal due to discrimination, but at least in Canada we have section 33.
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Along with these economic and institutional changes have come cultural changes such that marriage is viewed as a capstone at the end of young adulthood rather than its foundation at the beginning
What? Millennials making things up. What’s next, thinking Gen X isn’t liberal?
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marriage and childbearing have become decoupled
No elaboration on how birth rates decline due to decoupling
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decisions are more individualized and less subject to family and cultural pressures
For a long time humans died very young and humans did not need family and cultural pressures to grow a population.
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Finally, with advancing globalization our economic fortunes have come to seem much more uncertain
An argument these people seem to make is that you need to afford a house to have children, but do not consider that maybe housing prices have also adjusted to two-earner couples? Sure I need to confirm based on housing prices to household incomes, but I haven’t seen any studies that look at only millennials. The oldest millennials started working in the early 2000s, and did not lose money in the dotcom bubble, real wages continued growing past 2010, and had the opportunity to ride one of the longest bull market in history, while technology got much better.
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kind of cultural pessimism has taken hold perhaps in tandem, making the decision to bring a child into the world seem riskier.
Again? Is there a word for having mentally illness due to being chronically online?