And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.
If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.
If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.
I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.
Me, but I have no dogs and don’t play video games.
I’ve learned that i’m a LOT less sexual than a lot of my peers so I just don’t get it.
This is probably the differentiating factor. I am a highly sexual person.
You would be categorized in the study as “childless” - wanting children but being unable to have them - and thus would not be part of the headline statistic.
You’re fitting the problem to the things you want it to address. As someone who was formerly a young man, I can tell you that I didn’t care about owning a house, healthcare was an ephemeral thing I didn’t think about, and making fast food wages was good enough for me. But I did care a lot about the fact that I wasn’t getting laid.
I’m honestly wondering if this post isn’t just missing the forest for the trees. Like, what if it really is all about just guys not getting laid?
Like, OOP goes to college, spends time with lots of women, goes to parties, and sleeps with some of them. His view is now that society is reasonably just, since he now has a reasonable expectation that he will be able to have sex.
I mean, we can think about the various manosphere spaces: the red pill - treat women badly to get sex; mgtow - give up on relationships with women and just do your own thing; incels - just give up, you were doomed to l be a virgin from the start; “male loneliness epidemic”, aka, I can’t get a girlfriend. And then we have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson giving these men advice, which if you remove the toxicity, boils down to: stop caring about what women think of you, take care of yourself, work out, get hobbies, spend time with friends, do well in your career. Which is pretty good advice to follow if you are a man, looking for women!
And it’s not like sex is some trivial thing, either. From an evolutionary point of view, if you can’t have sex and have no expectation of being able to get it in the future, that’s a death worse than death. It is the end of your genes, which are programmed to want to continue existing even more than any individual is.
So if you’re looking to deradicalize young men, it’s possible that the solution is to just give them a straightforward path to getting some pussy.
I mean, why would anyone want to live in Venezuela as a life choice? Typically, those who would really like to leave don’t have the means to, and those who have the means to leave don’t have a real reason to. This current shake up is concerning, but you have to also understand that most people’s lives don’t revolve around the actions of the federal government. They revolve around the social connections they’ve made, the physical things they own or have built, and the places that they know and call home. Leaving means losing all of those things. And my perspective, as a blue tribe member in the US, is that most of my friends are watching this unfold with a worried grimace, but with an assumption that we’ll oust the dumbass from office in the next election and begin the work of rebuilding what he broke. In the meantime, they are worried about raising their kids, fixing up their houses, building their businesses or advancing in their careers, going on dates and finding partners, staying fit and healthy, and all the other things people really tend to spend their time thinking about.
In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.