Why are Birth Rates Falling?
Decreased Utility from Children
Historically, additional children marginally increased their families’ wealth and quality of life, representing either a near-future source of income or another pair of hands in the fields or around the house. This began to change with the rise of large-scale wage labor in some parts of the world at the turn of the 1900s, but this change was still largely contained as said wage labor was only available to males.
When wage labor became widely available to both males and females around the 1970s—just as the birth control pill and more advanced forms of birth control gained wider adoption—birth rates began to plummet in developed countries. The role of female wage labor in this process explains why birth rates have been more robust across countries and cultures featuring fewer egalitarian views toward gender. **When each additional child decreases a family’s wealth and quality of life, people begin to need exogenous motivators (like religion or racism) to justify large families.**
Optimization for Happiness & Memetic Shifts
Does having kids really lower adults’ happiness? While there is some nuance to this question, many studies[[95]](#_ftn95) suggest that having kids can at least temporarily lower factors like subjective well-being and marital satisfaction,[[96]](#_ftn96) especially when parents lack ample childcare support[[97]](#_ftn97) (though other studies suggest that having kids brings more meaning to parents’[[98]](#_ftn98) lives and that parents—especially fathers—gain far more joy than misery from kids).[[99]](#_ftn99) Even if having kids does not objectively lower happiness, merely the perception that becoming a parent (or having more than two kids) lowers quality of life will drive fewer people to reproduce above repopulation rate.
If a third of a group decides to have no kids and a third has two, then the final third must have more than four kids in order to keep the population stable. While it could be argued that having one or two kids will increase quality of life of some individuals, it becomes difficult to justify each additional kid beyond the second from a purely hedonic perspective.
This can be seen in the larger trends. Actually, family size is increasing for educated mothers[[100]](#_ftn100) and older mothers,[[101]](#_ftn101) though not enough to offset the rapid drop in overall family size among those with over four kids.[[102]](#_ftn102) This problem is really only addressed by increasing the size of already-large families, not convincing more individual people to have kids.
In addition to the above trends, most families have historically operated under “fitness-increasing memes:” Memes that partially spread by increasing the birth rate of those who adopt them (what we call cultivars elsewhere in this book). Most fitness-increasing memes take the form of religions. These memes (typically religions) act as an exogenous motivator to increase birth rate, but are currently declining.
Dropping Fertility
Rapidly declining male fertility presents an additional—yet little-understood—factor contributing to demographic collapse. This can be seen in a rapid decrease in both male testosterone and sperm production/motility. A study from 2007[[103]](#_ftn103) reported testosterone decreasing by 22% when comparing 1985-1987 levels and a study from 2021[[104]](#_ftn104) indicated a roughly 25% decrease between 1999 and 2016. Researchers also found that male fertility has generally decreased by about 10% over the past 16 years.[[105]](#_ftn105) This decline in fertility seems to be gaining momentum and is not localized but global, with a 50% reduction in average sperm count since 1973.[[106]](#_ftn106) Following this trend, the average man will not be able to have children unassisted by 2050.
There is some debate over what is causing this, but environmental pollutants like phthalates, herbicides, air pollution, radiation from cell phones / laptops, cadmium, and general endocrine disruptors are the most likely culprits. Infertility is rising so quickly that rates of assisted reproductive technology use are rising by 5% to 10% per year. (Note: This problem is not unique to the male side of the equation, just better studied there.)
Broken Relationship Markets
A final factor contributing to demographic collapse—of which we have not even begun to see an impact—involves broken partner-finding markets. This is a big focus of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, so we won’t go too deep into the topic here, but searches for both sexual and romantic partners has grown dramatically more difficult since the popularity of image-focused, swipe-based dating apps took hold, as is reflected in falling sex rates.[[107]](#_ftn107) More specifically the rate of people between the ages of 18 and 30 reporting no sex in the last year went from around 10% when Tinder was released to around 28% for men today and 18% for women today.
To put it succinctly, the swipe model of partner sorting forces all individuals participating in that market to compete along a single metric (attractiveness). While people don’t like to choose long-term partners who are below average, people were historically able to compete along multiple metrics (attractiveness, position in local social hierarchy, intelligence, creativity, etc.) meaning that very few would be below average on all metrics and most appealed to at least some pool of potential partners.
Side note: One of our test readers insisted we mention the book Real World Divorce by Alexa Dankowski, Suzanne Goode, Philip Greenspun, Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz, and Tina Tonnu (an extensive resource on divorce made accessible to anyone online at RealWorldDivorce.com). The work highlights the severe disadvantages men face in family law (divorce, custody, etc.) in most Western countries.
While we agree male treatment in family law is unfair and worthy of serious reform, we doubt it plays a major role in declining birth rates. In the real world, divorce among those in post-Baby-Boom generations is incredibly rare (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for a discussion of the stats and how the myth of the 50% divorce rate was popularized). Anecdotally, while we know of many bad divorces from our parents’ generation, we can’t think of a single non-amicable divorce in our wider friend network.
Women, despite their unfair advantages in family law disputes, also get screwed in marriage (in that a woman with a kid or one who has been married for around ten years will really struggle to secure another high-quality partner). Everyone, man or woman, can be hurt by the person they marry. We can’t think of a single period in human history when at least one gender wasn’t rendered incredibly vulnerable by long-term relationships—and yet birth rates have only recently begun to plummet.
Marriage isn’t dating; it’s not about providing you with amusement, attractive arm candy, or even regular sex. Rather, marriage is a long-term strategic alliance. Don’t marry someone if you think they are unstable or might stab you in the back.
The Capitalism Thesis for Birth Rate Decline
Wolf Tivy of Palladium Magazine posits that the free-market economy is structured in a manner that organically identifies and maximally utilizes talent to drive productivity—in the moment. This means the system differentially sorts for the most potentially productive among us, then offers them just enough money and status to convince them to forgo activities that don’t generate immediate value. Almost nothing draws a person away from immediate productivity more than child rearing. For this reason, the centers of productivity in a capitalist society will intrinsically be structured in a manner that is ill-suited for raising large families.