(Thanks, @Ken.)
The question of money and how many children people have has been discussed here before, but I think this article deserves its own topic because of how it actually goes into talking about sex differences, marriage, children, money, and what’s holding people back.
I’ll put this out here.
Also, a quote from Aaron Ren: “It has proven to be much easier to suppress child birth than to promote it.”
It’s interesting that both articles mention the positive impact marriage has on birth rate. It’s one of those common sense things that is easily missed today because our common sense has lost the connection between marriage and sex and also between sex and procreation.
Both very interesting articles. If things keep going how they are, perhaps North Korean juche will win by default in another 100 or 150 years.
I think getting folks married earlier would do wonders for our TFR. Average age at first marriage is over 30 now for both men and women in the US.
But while we keep arguing about gun control or whatever, we just have fewer and fewer babies. Nobody in national life even really seems to care at all about this, whereas it looks to me like one of the biggest problems we have going. Maybe if we talked about the problems we could find some way to solve them?
Israel’s example is worth studying. I think Hungary’s pro-natal policies have shown some success also, though not enough to hit replacement rate from what I remember.
If South Koreans or Americans were animal species, it seems like there would be more concern and action.
According to what I’ve read, the decline in marriage rate is the main contributor to the decline in birth rate in recent decades.
This is a factor, but it is secondary to the decline in marriage rate.
In my experience, when people are unwilling to address an obvious and serious problem, it indicates that an idol is involved.
This is true so far as it goes, but it would be hard to improve one without improving the other. If you think of it like concert ticket sales, sliding demand earlier in time is likely to improve overall ticket sales also.
A likely daft laddie question on the decline in marriage and birth rates. Do we have any data as to how things are behaving in this respect within the Christian community proper? My thesis would be that ‘age at first marriage’ is not as high as it is in the culture (but higher than it was), and that family size is larger than in the community as a whole, but not much larger.
I don’t have a link on hand, but the data support your thesis. The degree of difference in marriage age and family size between the Christian community and secular society depends on the particular Christian community.
@Joel
…The degree of difference in marriage age and family size between the Christian community and secular society depends on the particular Christian community.
Yes; and all other things held equal, I would think that working-class Christian communities would have earlier marriages and larger family sizes. Worth pondering!
Yeah, Hungary’s birth rate is -.31%, versus the US at .68%. Hard to believe.
I looked it up and Hungary has gone from a recorded low TFR of 1.2 in 2011 to 1.6 in 2020 (data.world bank.org) down to 1.49 (CIA World Facebook 2023 estimate). So, yeah, it’s down in the micro but up in the macro.
In the same rough timeframe, the USA hit a local maximum in 2007 at 2.1, down to 1.9 in 2011, down to 1.6 in 2020 where the World Bank taps out. It’s up to 1.84 per the CIA’s estimate for 2023.
I’ll have to look it up, but I thought the US birth rate has been below replacement since the 70s.
edit: Growth in annual U.S. births since 1970 driven entirely by immigrant moms | Pew Research Center.
And Hungary’s other problem is a continued loss of many of its young people to other countries in the EU, seeking better opportunities or in dislike of Hungary’s fairly autocratic Prime Minister, or both. If they learn a foreign language at school, and most young Europeans do, that process is even easier.
Outwards emigration of young adults is not an issue in the USA, but it is in a lot of the less well-off parts of the EU. And when these people do have their families, it is often in their ‘new’ country.
Curiously, Hungarian is arguably the most distant from other European languages of any of the European nation-states’ tongues. I have also heard that Hungary has a habit of dubbing foreign (American) media rather than subtitles. I suspect this has contributed to Hungary’s relative isolation here in the 20s.
And I’ve heard Hungarian Christians dispute this characterisation.
Well, scratch that “nobody.” We wouldn’t be on the same page as some/all of these folks on big issues, but at least someone is talking about it: