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Jennifer's avatar

I read somewhere (NYTimes?) that in spite of fertility declines, we are not seeing more single child families. Society is becoming split between families with and without multiple children. This may be more of a developed-country phenomenon but it would be interesting to dig into the numbers at the distribution of children per family. One child is actually a fairly efficient way to experience parenthood with many fewer costs - however, there is also a sense that it isn't great to be an only and so they are in a sense "protecting" the child from that fate by just not having him/her. This data bite struck me, because it seems like having a huge chasm between lots of people with no kids and then a bunch of people still having families with multiple children could be really bad for society. I think we already see this with comparisons between pets and children. Soon it will be between robots/AI and pets and children. The expectation of level of control you will have over your life and environment falls through the floor with multiple children and I think contributes to an impatience with children in public spaces, and lack of interest in subsidizing them, as well. How can we build ties between the childless and families with multiple children? How can we develop these bonds? This kind of binary could create problems at work, and social lives outside of work could become quite distinct. There is a lot to chew on here.

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

Two things:

1. It seems important that a bunch of developed countries' TFR dropped below 2 in the interwar period, aka before modern contraception, and then rose back above it in the postwar baby boom. I got this stat IIRC from the MoreBirths Twitter account, which speculates that labor saving household machinery and expanded housing supply helped raise the postwar birth rate-- consistent with your Baumol story.

2. In general there are a lot of parallels to climate change, another very complicated "success problem" of modernity, where the problem takes many decades to really bite and solutions likewise take decades to really work. You have denialists insisting that this is not really a problem and the people who say so are pushing an extreme political agenda, and doomers who say that modern society is done for and the future belongs to the Amish. You have personal-sacrifice people trying to do their bit and others who insist solutions must be systemic.

My sense is that fertility now is sort of like climate change 40ish years ago, where we are waking up to the problem and brainstorming solutions but a viable path out seems speculative and impossibly far away. If things follow on a parallel track, then, the problem will be much worse in 40 years and locked-in to get worse still in the near future, but some combination, unforeseeable today, of technological and social changes will at least have us on a realistic path to an eventual solution, and even to a future world much more congenial than the world before we had the problem. This is far from a guarantee, but it is the way I would bet.

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