Posted on 03/18/2021 9:20:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
What really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.
The world’s richest countries typically have the world’s lowest birth rates. The highest-income people in those wealthy countries on average have the smallest family sizes.
Those two facts conflict with the broad perception, especially among lawmakers, that Americans aren’t having babies because they’re worried about how expensive kids are. So may the results of a new study out today, which finds that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines.
“Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly associated with lower birth rates in wealthy countries,” authors Laurie DeRose and Lyman Stone write in the Institute for Family Studies paper. Later, they observe, “placing a high degree of value on work can dampen fertility desires and make them less likely to be realized.”
This all suggests, the authors say, that specific societal and individual values strongly influence birth rates in wealthy countries, not necessarily income or welfare availability.
Many demographers have argued that societal values that flatten the differences between the sexes would help boost fertility — for example, if husbands did more childcare and household chores and women had more earning power. Yet this study finds that people with so-called “egalitarian” values are less fertile than those who embrace differences between men and women.
The differences were especially pronounced among those who both expressed feminist values and prioritized work over family. Beliefs about sex roles affected fertility the least among those for whom family was their highest priority.
“Men and women who place a high value on work and expect a high degree of gender equality have the lowest fertility, whereas gender equality expectations are less predictive of fertility among men and women who see work as a less important element of life,” the authors find.
“Women who valued family over work had the most children,” the study says. In addition, the higher fertility among non-feminists “was more pronounced for women than for men: the fertility differential associated with gender role attitudes was more than twice as large among women in every category.”
Another contradiction to the argument that encouraging the same life script for men and women would increase fertility, the authors found, was that countries with some of the highest reported egalitarian values experienced a significant fertility decline, just like peer nations. These same countries with high support for so-called gender equality also offer numerous government subsidies to those who have children.
So countries with high birth welfare and very egalitarian attitudes still saw fertility drops, again contradicting common narratives about potential solutions to low fertility. Rather than government childbearing subsidies and other expensive taxpayer-subsidized incentives such as extensive mandatory paid leave, or shifts towards more feminist attitudes, what really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.
“In recent years, fertility rates have fallen sharply in many countries formerly believed immune to very low fertility,” DeRose and Stone write. “Egalitarian values and generous social welfare states had been credited with protecting the Nordic countries in particular from very low fertility rates, yet since 2008, birth rates in those countries have nonetheless plummeted.”
The authors conclude from this that “Efforts to achieve full private sphere gender equality between partners are not likely to yield large fertility recoveries, especially if they are achieved in a way that raises the salience of career-mindedness even more.”
So countries’ efforts to increase birth rates by, for example, providing taxpayer-sponsored daycare, mandating affirmative action for women on company and nonprofit boards, and other policies that attach childbearing-age women to work may actually reduce fertility by reinforcing an anti-fertility careerist mindset, the study suggests.
Sometimes politicians attempt to get around this problem by suggesting instead that governments simply hand parents cash unattached to work, such as with an expanded child tax credit or a universal basic income for parents akin to the one Democrats stuck into their latest government spend-a-thon. The IFS report also suggests this.
Yet subsidizing child production with no or a low expectation that the people who created the children stay together to parent and provide for them seems likely to have devastating consequences, such as increasing rates of criminality, self-harm, depression, and dependency. All of those are far higher among the children of unmarried parents, and so are many other social ills and private wounds. As long as Democrats would refuse to require marriage of subsidy recipients — and to suggest it is immediately to realize that would have a snowball’s chance in Hades — such programs would only increase societal misery.
Instead, the most politically useful takeaway from the report is that those who care about the nation’s ability to sustain itself demographically need to encourage pro-family attitudes, teach the young to look forward to parenthood, emphasize the value and happiness of raising a family, and oppose subsidies that work to separate mothers (and fathers) from children.
The authors used global datasets from the World Values Survey/European Values Survey. These surveys use self-reported values from survey respondents about how high they rate the importance of work and the importance of family.
Low birth rates fuel future fiscal crises for countries, like the United States, that redistribute huge amounts of money from younger working people to older, non-working people. Low birth rates also create many other national problems besides financial ones.
Aging countries are less culturally dynamic and resilient. They also face greater pressure to do things that may be not in the national interest, such as importing foreigners with low job skills and far less likelihood of assimilation.
The United States hit a record-low birth rate in 2019, and research since the lockdowns suggests 2020 and 2021’s birth rates will drop even further. Countries need women to have an average of 2.1 children each to keep their population even. In 2019, the U.S. birth rate was 1.7.
At least women are getting into all of those exciting, challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling careers ... sitting in a cube entering data into a spreadsheet. You see, for ages, women were denied the right to experience just how awesome a career really is. Men were getting to go to work and party like on Mad Men. Feminism is poison.
No prob, the commies will just establish a “breeder” class of women who will be sex slaves of the elite.
For your interest.
Everyone needs to start thinking about this before Rejuvenation biotechnology and the science of longevity (biological immortality) is here for real.
Americans focus on “careers” because they are up to their eyeballs in debt, having been turned into financial serfs by Wall Street, chasing a materialist dream fed to them by Neo-marxists.
Like mice on a treadmill
Our printed, fiat, centrally-manipulated and politicized monetary system is to blame. It designed to support central government, and its approved oligarchs.
Note to the Federalist: Careers...or something else?
Try this: Compare the birth rates in high property tax states with birth rates in low or no prop tax states.
Just a suggestion.
When you subtract all the expenses that result from both working: Day Care, Transportation etc., that second job really doesn’t pay off that much, over one spouse staying at home.
This is not just an American phenomenon.
So, like, we had it going in the right direction in the 1950s? yep I agree.
They can look forward to bouncing financial reports on their knee.
Old school thinking:
“We’re doing it all wrong! This is a crisis! Populations are exploding! Think of future generations! It’s going to be a nightmare! We need to make some changes!”
New school thinking:
“We’re doing it all wrong! This is a crisis! Populations are decreasing! Think of future generations! It’s going to be a nightmare! We need to make some changes!”
It’s not necessarily the careers, it’s access to very effective birth control.
Had almost 100% effective birth control, as well as abortion been available in the in the 1950’s, the fertility rate would have been far lower.
Muslims don’t have that problem. They will just keep on having babies until they outnumber the rest of the country and then they will own it.
Well, I guess that’s what America wants since they keep murdering their own children.
And don’t get me started on no-fault divorce.
Report: Americans’ Obsession With Careers Is Contributing To Our Dangerous Lack Of Babies
In viewing the attitude of todays woman I can fully understand why.
We have already passed the irreplaceable population barrier and will in time see the Muslim population supreme. 6 or 7 children to our 1. No brainer.
Some people can come to the USA and have babies. They don’t have to worry about things like paying the bills. So they will have the babies that Americans don’t have because of the need to work hard to afford anything.
Couples who both work have an enormous amount of money taken by the government and redistributed to the ones who aren’t working. Did you ever wonder why you’re earning a lot of money but still can’t afford anything?
Everybody get on hamster wheel!!!
At least we know they are having babies in the military.
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