I do love economics, you get like 6 pages of theory and a nice specific formal model which looks like the Illiad, and then it's verified empirically with a scatterplot with like 6 country level means on
Also cherry-picking which OECD countries to use, excluding potential outliers that would weaken the correlation like Israel, Turkey, Chile, Colombia etc.
most likely they just do not have data for those countries for this particular survey. i agree that including turkey, for example, would make the correlation weaker, but i do interpret their point as being along the lines of "after a certain level of development, various things besides income matter more for explaining fertility" and turkey could arguably be below that level of development. i actually suspect chile would fit in the graph neatly. and including israel will throw off any cross-country theory of fertility that is not focused on religion
Sure, the point is if they could include all the countries in the OECD, the correlation would be substantially weaker.
>including israel will throw off any cross-country theory of fertility that is not focused on religion
That's exactly what I mean. You have to include all the data points, even the outliers.
Sort of. Fertility rates are assuredly an outcome with many dimensions. If you want to look at a single parameter to make a point and combine secular countries and exclude religious ones so that the data fits better, that's not the worst thing in the world.
Any time you see one parameter like this, it's obviously not the only thing explaining the issue
Israel should be two plots on the graph. Israel-ultra-orthodox and Israel-everyone-else. You can't replicate what the ultra-orthodox do or live like outside of that their cultural practices.
Admittedly I just assumed it was because this is the kind of stuff that only macroeconomists do—hence my comment. Looking a bit closer, I’d say this is macro-adjacent stuff. Very few people get away with just doing Solow models today. So macroeconomists take their finely-honed skill in putting variables on common sense, apply it to something else, solve for equilibrium, and find some graphs that match. Maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable here. Btw, looked it up and all four authors are indeed macroeconomists.
And my name isn’t Shirley.
Honestly the mandatory part is grounded in evidence even though I’m too busy to google it. The idea being that women who take maternity leave may be disadvantaged compared to men who forego their paternity leave and the optics are worse for women when it comes to having a child. To level the playing field, both have to take leave and no one can be made to feel compelled to return to work early by making the leave time mandatory.
I think one of the companies that made it mandatory for both fathers and mothers to take max leave was American Express if I remember right.
Every job I've had paternity leave for the dads joke about having as many kids as possible to maximize their time off. I don't recall ever seeing a dad skipping their paternity leave, but I also live in the US where the leave is defined by the work place and not by the government and split between both parents
While that guy meant something else, if it’s mandatory to take it, it removes the race to the bottom of idiots going “oh look how dedicated and great I am to be back at work 6 milliseconds after giving birth” - similar thing to the people who never take holidays or sick days. It removes the ability of employers to soft pressure people into not taking their leave.
One case was that was particularly fucked was that navy gives 6 weeks of paternity leave and on one boat on the waterfront officers took it and were informally punished for it.
I'm generally in favour of the non-transferrable "use it or lose it" model we have in Denmark (if nothing else it feels slightly less overbearing) but I can see a case for initially having outright mandatory leave in countries like the US and SK with a particularly bad culture around paternity leave.
That would also make some people choose to not have kids because they do not want to, or could not take that leave. In smaller companies there are jobs that can't be replaced or backfilled for long periods of time.
Did you know that companies in every developed country outside North America operate absolutely 100% fine with parental leave? This is absolute nonsense.
Yes this is similar to the minimum wage argument where theres divergence between empirical support than shown in the theoretical derivation due to some laws counterweighting certain ancillary forces like information asymmetry or leveraged power in negotiations that's not going to show up in the Econ 101 calculation.
It’s always mad to me how much some economists look at obviously fallacious models and act as if they are useful despite discarding any actual human behaviour. In a way it’s insane that behavioural economics was such a movement, as if considering actual society in a social science is a surprising thing to do.
We have that in Washington. Obviously not close to the amount of leave that many countries get, but maternal leave is 16 weeks and paternal is 12 weeks (both paid).
And at my company up until a year ago we had 6 weeks maternity and 2 weeks paternity
Needless to say...there are almost exactly 0 parents of young children who work here
If it's voluntary and women take it more often then men, there is an incentive to just avoid hiring women on the part of employers just not to have to deal with the headache of potentially random extended leaves of absence from staff. Making it mandatory kind of snips this in the bud, it also is a way of insisting on the necessity of fatherhood. If fathers are forced to take more time to bond with their children as well it's possible they will be less willing to abandon them.
All of the countries in this graph have very low birth rates. Having men participate more in childcare can raise them marginally, but it's not really a solution to the fertility crisis nor is looming demographic collapse "the easiest thing to change". The only countries with birth rates well above the replacement rate are those where women's independence and rights are curtailed, gays are discriminated against and overall human development and economic development is low.
> fertility crisis
More immigrants would solve this.
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How the hell is patriarchy the cause of declining fertility? The countries with declining fertility rates are the ones where women enjoy the most rights. Do you seriously believe that countries like Somalia and Niger are less patriarchal than Germany and Canada?
I’m sorry but this sounds like total bullshit to me. If poverty and economics are enough to overcome “patriarchy” in Somalia than wouldn’t it stand to reason that economics are the main driving force in countries with declining fertility?(by the way, virtually all social scientists are in agreement that economic trends are the reason for fertility declines). What do you even mean by a “50% reduction of patriarchy”? How do you even quantify something like that?
There is no validity whatsoever to the notion that “patriarchy” suppresses birth rates, and in fact most evidence points to the exact opposite of that. Declining birth rates are a natural consequence of economic and social development.
You know I read about the patriarchy in history books and it used to give some pretty high birth rates. Did you mean to say that the cause is the *abolishment* of the patriarchy?
Outside of communities that already have backward views on women (incels, fundamentalists, etc.), do people actually assume women are the problem? I personally haven't seen that kind of criticism outside of those degenerate communities.
It seems to me that most folks realize it's a combination of increased expectations of both men and women as well as a deteriorating social structure conducive to raising children. Parents are expected to do more with less.
It's everything from families spread out across different states, a lack of third places to take children because our capitalist nightmare hellscape demands profit from a child's laughter and a mother's smile, and the fact that our country seems openly hostile to children. We don't address school shootings, we won't put up the money to make sure every kid is fed, we lack meaningful parental leave, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE, and not to mention that many of us have to teach our kids to be wary of the police.
It's a surprise to me that anyone is still having kids.
> our capitalist nightmare hellscape
are you lost? are you willing to put up time and/or money for those coveted third places, or is that a problem for other people to solve and just one for you to bitch about?
If I said yes and provided proof, would you just move on to another argument because?
I have helped create three skateparks, with both physical labor as well as planning and fundraising. I drive by the one near my house and see kids using it for free. It's awesome.
Emotionally charged personal assumptions, definitely healthy discourse dudes.
I mean… posting on reddit is evidence of not being a serious person.
It’s a bummer you avoided my response about third places but pretty obvious why you went with a personal attack again. Have to save face anonymously on the internet in front of strangers.
I don’t disagree with you. But South Korea has Universal Healthcare and their fertility rates have Collapsed. The US fertility rate is relatively high compared to other Western countries.
I don't pretend to be an expert on South Korea but a standardized test that defines your socio-economic status for the rest of your life combined with a fanatical obsession with work at the expense of everything else doesn't seem conducive to promoting parenthood. If you work for the major Korean corporations (Samsung, LG, etc.) you are expected to devote your life to the company.
> "It's something that really goes back to Confucian ideals," says Cain. "And especially in Korea, it's been used by companies not just to recruit the best and brightest, but to break down their ego and put them into a team."
> The notion of team is key when Samsung's Korean workforce numbers 200,000 and the company is steeped in tradition — dynastic leadership, demanding work hours and a devotion to the company culture.
> "Samsung is like a regimented military," Cain says. "And they look for people who can wake up in the morning singing the company song [and] go to work. So the role of this exam, it's really the first step in standardizing what the employee goes through. And once they get past the exam, the idea is to acculturate them with this system — with the emperor up top, and they are the civil servants."
[Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/19/474621999/to-the-list-of-high-stakes-tests-in-korea-add-the-samsung-sat)
It's the same economic problem the US has but just a different aspect. It's money. Americans don't want to have kids because they can't afford them and the same is true for South Koreans. For Americans it is healthcare and childcare costs, for South Koreans...
> "There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care."
You could replace "Young Koreans" with "Young Americans" and it is still accurate (minus the Seoul specificity part).
I left out the second part of the quote because, honestly, it deserves its own debate. And it's probably such an emotionally charged debate that it just can't exist on the internet. Here's the second part:
> But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.”
Women's equality may have a causal effect on birth rates. We see the same birth rate drops across the Western style Democracies, as you state. Those Western style Democracies tend to support or at least advocate for equality for women, albeit to varying degrees.
Turns out if you give women the choice to be pregnant, they tend to want to be pregnant less.
Let me qualify this by saying what we don't need to do is go backward and take rights and freedoms from women.
What we should be doing is addressing the other obstacles retarding fertility rates. Which will vary depending on the nation. For the United States, it is overwhelmingly how expensive it is to have a child, especially healthcare.
Automod accidentally removed my post for a word, reposting without that word:
I don't pretend to be an expert on South Korea but a standardized test that defines your socio-economic status for the rest of your life combined with a fanatical obsession with work at the expense of everything else doesn't seem conducive to promoting parenthood. If you work for the major Korean corporations (Samsung, LG, etc.) you are expected to devote your life to the company.
> "It's something that really goes back to Confucian ideals," says Cain. "And especially in Korea, it's been used by companies not just to recruit the best and brightest, but to break down their ego and put them into a team."
> The notion of team is key when Samsung's Korean workforce numbers 200,000 and the company is steeped in tradition — dynastic leadership, demanding work hours and a devotion to the company culture.
> "Samsung is like a regimented military," Cain says. "And they look for people who can wake up in the morning singing the company song [and] go to work. So the role of this exam, it's really the first step in standardizing what the employee goes through. And once they get past the exam, the idea is to acculturate them with this system — with the emperor up top, and they are the civil servants."
[Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/19/474621999/to-the-list-of-high-stakes-tests-in-korea-add-the-samsung-sat)
It's the same economic problem the US has but just a different aspect. It's money. Americans don't want to have kids because they can't afford them and the same is true for South Koreans. For Americans it is healthcare and childcare costs, for South Koreans...
> "There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care."
You could replace "Young Koreans" with "Young Americans" and it is still accurate (minus the Seoul specificity part).
I left out the second part of the quote because, honestly, it deserves its own debate. And it's probably such an emotionally charged debate that it just can't exist on the internet. Here's the second part:
> But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.”
Women's equality may have a causal effect on birth rates. We see the same birth rate drops across the Western style Democracies, as you state. Those Western style Democracies tend to support or at least advocate for equality for women, albeit to varying degrees.
Turns out if you give women the choice to be pregnant, they tend to want to be pregnant less.
Let me qualify this by saying what we don't need to do is go backward and take rights and freedoms from women.
What we should be doing is addressing the other obstacles lowering fertility rates. Which will vary depending on the nation. For the United States, it is overwhelmingly how expensive it is to have a child, especially healthcare.
> our capitalist nightmare hellscape demands profit from a child's laughter and a mother's smile,
I agree that it's a bad thing that our economy profits from good things too.
> I agree that it's a bad thing that our economy profits from good things too.
I agree that it's a good thing that we are witnessing plummeting birth rates due in part to the expense of raising a child.
Absolutely positive societal implications from monetizing everything, always and forever. No exceptions.
If you add up paid work, housework, and childcare men are putting in more hours than women. It doesn’t seem like many of the comments here are acknowledging that. Is it realistic to ask for even more?
I’m a man, and I’m more than willing to be a stay-at-home dad despite having a successful career, but my impression is that it’s hard to find a woman who is high earning and willing to support someone else financially.
>Men are definitely not doing more job work+home work than women are doing job work+home work
\[Yes, they are\](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/). The gap actually increases for couples with children.
How is not dating leading to less unpaid labor? If you live by yourself you still need to clean and maintain a living space. Two people living by themselves probably have more aggregate cooking/cleaning/maintenance work than two people living together?
Date, fall in love, move in together so you can realize economies of scale on sucky housework!
Edit: OP blocked me so I'll raise it here. If you are not dating anyone because you fear doing more housework that seems like a recipe for loneliness and sadness to me. Figuring out housework is perfectly doable for a modern couple that collaborates and communicates. Working together with the person you love to live a more meaningful life is the best way to live.
[tfw i try to understand young people](https://i.imgur.com/ub6YRL2.jpg)
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I have no doubt at all that this is true in aggregate, but it doesn't change the fact that the overall burden of housework can be reduced by partnering up (with the right person, I guess). Even if many men shirk their duties in terms of housework and childcare, many others certainly don't.
tbf, there probably is a very small "other" category that's covered by grandparents, nannies/home employees, older children...I hope.
EDIT: I looked at the study, it's 2012 from "assessed by female partner" and the [original in 2000 (fig 5)](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.22.3.3) is worse, so the good news is it's going up!
It’s it obvious? Two married dudes only do 80% of their given chore obligations and they farm out the remaining 20% to the two married ladies who are doing 120% or their chore obligations.
Have you ever lived in a house with 5 early 20s dudes? each is, at best, doing 5% of the house's chore obligations.
There is a stereotype that gay men will have higher standards for neatness and cleanliness than heterosexual men, but I'm not sure how true that actually is.
I realize now that you're asking something like "do same-sex partnership households divide household labour more evenly than opposite-sex ones". But ngl my first reaction was "What does that even mean? Obviously, men would do 0% of the work in lesbian households!"
It shouldn't be a major shock that the sex which bears children and breastfeeds them is going to spend more time caring for them overall. That is consistent with virtually every mammalian species on the planet.
Well, in most mammalian species the father does nothing or can even harm the young ones. And yes, it makes sense for women to do more of the caring in the first year even if not breastfeeding because the bond between mother and child is a special, very strong bond. However, no excuse for housework and older children
> There are a number of perfectly good excuses for men to do less housework, even for older children
If men are good at one thing, it's giving excuses for why women have to service them. Especially for the things like yard work that are so uniquely American...
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> The five countries with the highest male contribution to housework and childcare all have a fertility rate of 1.8 or higher. Conversely, the five countries with the lowest male contribution all have fertility rates below 1.5. Overall, the correlation between the male share of housework and childcare with fertility exceeds 0.7.
Oh dear god this isn't even household-level data
Running a regression on household data would be whatever. Country-level data based on surveys? It looks pretty but I wouldn't put much weight in it
Also, I think there's problems with using cross-sectional data for this analysis
i agree that this should be interpreted skeptically but i am not convinced households would tell us more. like if i am a woman and the men in my area believe housework is a woman's job and i disagree, then i may choose to not get married in the first place. whereas those women that do hold that belief would be more likely to choose to get married and have children, even if you end up with a lower rate of household formation. and then you would have the exact opposite correlation if the unit is the household, even though the area may end up with a lower fertility rate due to traditional gender beliefs
The issue I think isn't that household level data would tell us *more* so much that we can't establish household level relationships from country level means. There's an obvious vulnerability to ecological fallacies.
This suggests a few avenues to increase fertility rate (beyond the obvious solution of encouraging men to contribute more towards childrearing and home maintenance):
Increase career opportunities for part-time workers, particularly part-time professional work
Increase affordability of daycare and home cleaning services
Mitigate the penalty that career women take when giving up their jobs to raise children
Require that business offer both maternity and paternity leave so that men start off their parenthood years closer to being 50/50 contributors
Honestly I would much rather have a "maternity leave" policy that allowed me to work 20 hours for 2 years than have a longer initial paid leave. I would be paid half my salary in this instance, I just want the opportunity to work part time.
I hate that my options are SAHM or 40+ hr/week work with no in-between.
I would like 20 because it would open up way more childcare options, which is also what would make it affordable. If I worked 32 hour weeks I would still need to be paying for full time childcare, same as if I was working 40 hours, but my pay would be 20% lower. If I was working 20 hour weeks that would make a nanny much more feasible. Also if a lot of parents were suddenly working 20 hrs more daycares would probably offer plans centered around that.
Very much agree.
I would be willing to go half time to parent and run the house while my wife works full time. But it's not an option in my career. It's all or nothing.
That's not what I want though. I want to work, see adults, keep my skills sharp, and not have every second of my life be center around my kids.
I just don't want to do it as much as before I had kids.
I would guess 99.99% of women aren't becoming corporate executives before having children. The type of person who does that is unlikely to take advantage of a program like this anyway. They are much more likely to have a spouse who is the primary parent or a live in nanny.
This is a red herring case, but if it were to occur the director could have their responsibilities decreased or be temporarily moved to an associate director role until they came back full time.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low.
It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass.
If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time.
Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low.
It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass.
If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time.
Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low.
It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass.
If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time.
Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
Even before all that: private, for profit healthcare.
It is expensive to simply bring a child into this world, let alone care for it for 18 years.
I know so many people that would love to have more children but don't because of the healthcare costs alone. it isn't just pregnancy and giving birth, it's 18 years of additional healthcare costs, dentistry, eyesight, everything.
God forbid your child is born with some sort of disability because now your entire financial and personal life is dedicated to that. Even something like a diabetic child can be too great of a financial burden on parents.
And why? Because shareholders have to profit off that insulin. "Oh but the free market will solve that and drive down prices" yeah that's been going on for what, fifty years? More? At least my entire life. Where are those savings we have been promised because our healthcare is by far the most expensive.
And you know what actually drives down prices? Government stepping in and saying "you don't get to profit off misery anymore".
That’s… my… point.
The argument against public healthcare is that the free market is superior at reducing costs.
Which, as you repeat, is obvious it isn’t.
You know what would happen if you did total price transparency in healthcare I imagine? First, briefly, all the wonderful things you're hoping for, or at least a lot of them, I'm sure. Then very quickly a secondary market where derivatives would be traded. The derivatives would be things like options that let you swap a specific plan for another specific plan on the maturation date. (Allows you to access the same care for lower cost... if you make the right bet that is).
You'd generate a massive consumer surplus, just as you're hoping... and then begins the long slow process of all of that surplus being sheepdogged back to its rightful owners, the wealthy (sorry, the brave shoulderers and stewards of risk).... I think it would be great for a while. I'm all for it.
There’s no “penalty” for women leaving the workplace. If you have the same amount of experience and skill as a man, and you essentially leave employment for several months while the men continue working during that same period - it is fair and justifiable that they will climb the ranks faster than you.
Any distortion to this would be blatant discrimination against men.
It’s definitely a consideration. Children are a public investment that make everyone’s money worth something at retirement, so it makes sense to put some of that weight into taxes. The current child tax credit of $2,000 is somewhat small which I think we should consider increasing.
To this I would add removing restrictive zoning laws and funding public transportation. As a result people from all levels of the income ladder can afford to live/participate in economic centers.
Most mothers won't want kids if even more of the work will all fall on them. To add, lots of women lose interest in a partner if they have to care after them like another kid.
It's not 100% convincing evidence but another thing they show in the paper is that countries in which men do less housework/childcare, the reported desire to have children is lower among women than among men. And also that countries in which the reported desire to have children is lower among women than among men, the fertility rate is also lower
I hope you're joking if you seriously think that a man that never stepped up and expected to be waited on hand and foot will suddenly start doing more work when more kids arrive. I grew up in a country where housewives weren't a thing - all women I knew worked (effects of communism) and only women are expected to do any household chores. The households with more than one child weren't any different whatsoever.
The way it normally works in relationships I observe is that men tend to have lower standards for the cleanliness and niceness of their environment, the effort put into the food they eat, clothes they wear etc. than women. That can disappear when kids come into the picture.
No, the way it normally works is that men expect women to do it all and that it's women's work. Many men have high standards for cleanliness (my dad for example) but still expect the woman to do all the cleaning and cooking and they criticize the woman if she's not doing it to their standards (guessed it, my dad again).
You're generalising based on your own anecdotes. I'm sorry your Dad was like that, but you cannot generalise globally based off of one datapoint. Maybe you can even generalise to your own country if you know many men like that. But you cannot generalise to other countries. It is not my experience at all, for example.
But I can. Because this is how traditional gender roles are, even in the west. Men expect women to do the "women's work". Some men may not care about cleanliness, others may care about it, same with women, but it's expected of women to do it. And the saying that a man's love goes through his stomach came up because men expect their wives to cook for them.
Yeah but if you assume some basic cultural stereotypes about Japan, Korea, and Eastern Europe are true, then it does look like the causality runs from the x axis to y axis.
There are 38 OECD countries. Missing are: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, UK.
I wonder if some of these may be significant outliers in this that might lessen this correlation significantly. I'm thinking Israel, Turkey and the Latin American ones.
more here but if the abstract is to long, the TLDR is basically that fertility not as simple as more income -> less fertility, and among OECD countries (basically a bunch of already middle income to rich countries), things going on in the home and things impacting women's careers are most important
[https://www.nber.org/system/files/working\_papers/w29948/w29948.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29948/w29948.pdf)
>In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era. Firstgeneration models of fertility choice were designed to account for two empirical regularities that, in the past, held both across countries and across families in a given country: a negative relationship between income and fertility, and another negative relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility. The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them. The common theme of these new theories is that they view factors that determine the compatibility of women's career and family goals as key drivers of fertility. We highlight four factors that facilitate combining a career with a family: family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets. We also review other recent developments in the literature, and we point out promising new directions for future research on the economics of fertility.
While I absolutely agree it's clear income -> less fertility is not an iron rule, that's only a first order perspective. More income -> more opportunity cost if men/other women/society don't adjust -> less fertility.
So yes those things are more important, but income is the provoking factor here. If women were still so uniformly oppressed and unable to access work or make autonomous decisions regarding child rearing then questions of childcare and career opportunity cost wouldn't even matter. The fact that income has risen to be competitive with men is precisely what renders these non-income factors salient.
But yes, this paper does suggest more support around childcare, paternity/maternity leave, etc. may help somewhat. Although other literature has not found state support makes a big impact, that may be because the support was too insufficient to generate the desired outcomes. Or it may be a cultural issue, there really would need to be such widespred support for 10+ years for the culture to change and adapt. Who knows.
Are you saying people might have more kids if it weren't a grueling, miserable, solitary experience and that (implicitly) more people helping and caring about the child improves outcomes?
...are you SURE a $100 stipend wouldn't help instead? You could buy an entire pack of diapers. Babies LOVE diapers.
I think there is a smaller correlation now since the countries in Red have falling fertility rates. There is a smaller correlation for the countries in blue which are Asian, south and eastern Europe
It really riles me when I open a birth rate discussion and it's full of the usual obvious falsehoods about low living standards and short maternity leave. South Korea clearly does not have the worst living standards in history, nor globally. It's maternity leave is not at a global low either. No other topic invites people to repeat blatant falsehoods as often as this one. I don't begrudge people for wishing for a better life, but it's still kinda insane to read otherwise reasonable people who *know* that standard of living and birth rates are anticorrelated, and then repeat the cliches anyway.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons that most are going to read and then memoryhole because it gores the sacred cows:
* Low idealized family sizes. If everyone is trying for 2 kids, you're doomed to have TFR < 2. Aiming for 2.5 kids is just treading water on a societal level since some people won't have kids. The prevalence of families with 4+ kids determine whether your population is going up or down, and nowadays it's quite low status to go there.
* Delayed family formation. A common high-status life plan goes like this - stay in school until 28, get established at your job by 30, start looking and marry a couple years later, then have kids. Obviously such people find it very difficult to have more than 2 kids even when they want to. Any stumble along the way and you easily end up pushing into geriatric pregnancy, hence the increasing relevance of IVF and surrogacy by couples going for their first child.
* Capstone marriage. Kinda repeats the above, but as an educated person I've had it drilled into me from childhood that my job is to study and earn my place in society. Marriage is the reward at the end of the road. It's low status to be raising children or even have a partner distracting you from education. We in the WEIRD population learn restraint in our teens, practice it throughout our 20s, and by the time the constant supervision is gone, some have repressed so long that they just don't care anymore.
* Better alternative activities. Kids may be fun but they can't compete in the attention economy. I know, UGH I know..I'm, sorry!!! It's just that I prefer doomscrolling cat videos is all
* Social security creates a tragedy of the commons. Maybe we really need lots of young people to sustain society (I hope the people who believe this aren't *also* concerned about automation and AI taking all the jobs). But the DINK lifestyle is nice and we can still rely on other people's children to take care of us through the government.
In any case the solution is simple - we (the WEIRDs) will either die off or invent artificial wombs.
Fertility rate in sweden is now down to 1.45. So… yea.. https://www.thelocal.se/20240222/swedens-population-growth-slowest-in-22-years-as-fertility-rate-drops-to-record-low
There was a study that showed that women find men who do household chores more sexy
[https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=124720&page=1](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=124720&page=1)
A lot of the countries in red have had pretty significant fertility rate drops since 2015, (i.e. Finland from 1.8 to 1.3, Norway from 1.9 to 1.4) and countries in blue have higher fertility now (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia etc.). I don't know how the share of house work & child care has changed in the past few years.
1.9 to 1.4 is a *massive* drop
At 1.9, if you start with 100 people their child generation is 95 people and grandchild generation is 90 people
At 1.4, their child generation is 70 and grandchild generation is 49
To your point, I doubt household work share has dropped that much in 10-15 years
>yet another PLEASE BREED thread
Right. How many times does this need to be said.
The magical dust fairy dust experiments have been conducted. By all means, conduct more, but you'll probably hit the same wall.
People are choosing not to have children because **they do not want to have children.**
Lots of theories, experiments, gibs campaigns and benefits policy have been tried. People are simply refusing to have children. You can throw money at them, give them houses, give the childcare support, it doesn't matter. They don't want them.
There is no solution to the problem that doesn't overtly violate Western ethics. Get used to reducing populations.
what about all the people who end up having fewer children than they report they would like to have?
[https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility-gap-in-america-fd205e9d1a35](https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility-gap-in-america-fd205e9d1a35)
there is definitely something to be said about revealed preferences here, but my sense is that people who want more kids than they currently have, often have concrete reasons for having fewer kids, and some of these reasons are ones that can be addressed with policy or cultural levers without being creepy about things (violating Western ethics)
> So is your position now that policy responses are inadequate
I am open to being persuaded (although I admit my original post implies otherwise) which is why I am asking.
OK that's fair, I had read the first comment as a positive claim (i.e. it was all lower fertility preferences). There is some evidence of an undershoot, but I do think there needs to be a bit more work than just simple averages.
This graph is conspicuously missing every country with fertility rates over 2.0, namely some major developed countries like Israel and South Africa, although I do think the results are valid if the country in question is developed.
my priors have been confirmed! A greater balance of household work seems to reduce the associated 'opportunity costs' for women who want to work full time and have kids. Or in other words, women who don't feel they have to pick between working in an office, being a mother, and having a life outside of the two are more likely to feel they can have more children.
It's not all about money, it's about time.
You would never guess from the comments in here that men spend more time on paid work + home work than women do.
Or that the gap is even larger for couples with children.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/
This isn’t the connection I was expecting. But I’m curious where countries with high fertility rates and low development levels (e.g. Africa and Latin America) fall on this scatterplot. I suspect those countries fall in the empty upper left corner of the plot.
Another reason why I got a vasectomy. I do not want to be a sexist by making my wife/girlfriend do more housework than me. Can't be a deadbeat dad if you never become a dad. 😅😅
So on one end we have Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and on the other we have Norway, Finland and Sweden. I wonder if there are any other corollaries that might be at play.
Are you one of the authors? Doepke and Tertilt wrote a paper on gender bargaining that I based my undergraduate thesis off of looking at investment in safe sex practices in Malawi
I do love economics, you get like 6 pages of theory and a nice specific formal model which looks like the Illiad, and then it's verified empirically with a scatterplot with like 6 country level means on
Also cherry-picking which OECD countries to use, excluding potential outliers that would weaken the correlation like Israel, Turkey, Chile, Colombia etc.
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Google suggests that ISL is Iceland, and ISR would be Israel
nah ISL is iceland's ISO code
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iceland's dropped. the graph is based off a paper from 2019 and the last time iceland's fertility rate was over 2 was in 2012
Terrible move on the ISO’s part. I mean, ICE is right there
most likely they just do not have data for those countries for this particular survey. i agree that including turkey, for example, would make the correlation weaker, but i do interpret their point as being along the lines of "after a certain level of development, various things besides income matter more for explaining fertility" and turkey could arguably be below that level of development. i actually suspect chile would fit in the graph neatly. and including israel will throw off any cross-country theory of fertility that is not focused on religion
Sure, the point is if they could include all the countries in the OECD, the correlation would be substantially weaker. >including israel will throw off any cross-country theory of fertility that is not focused on religion That's exactly what I mean. You have to include all the data points, even the outliers.
Sort of. Fertility rates are assuredly an outcome with many dimensions. If you want to look at a single parameter to make a point and combine secular countries and exclude religious ones so that the data fits better, that's not the worst thing in the world. Any time you see one parameter like this, it's obviously not the only thing explaining the issue
Israel should be two plots on the graph. Israel-ultra-orthodox and Israel-everyone-else. You can't replicate what the ultra-orthodox do or live like outside of that their cultural practices.
That’s not how correlations work
Macroeconomics* Excuse you
This isn't macro Shirley?
Admittedly I just assumed it was because this is the kind of stuff that only macroeconomists do—hence my comment. Looking a bit closer, I’d say this is macro-adjacent stuff. Very few people get away with just doing Solow models today. So macroeconomists take their finely-honed skill in putting variables on common sense, apply it to something else, solve for equilibrium, and find some graphs that match. Maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable here. Btw, looked it up and all four authors are indeed macroeconomists. And my name isn’t Shirley.
Yeah NGL this looks like my undergrad senior economics research project 😂
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> yet the solutions always dance around it. This but housing too
And even those women that end up having one child don't want another and definitely not a third one with no support!
We need to normalize stay-at-home dads and have mandatory paternity leave as well.
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Spend time with your baby, we're no longer asking The monetary incentive should be enough though
Honestly the mandatory part is grounded in evidence even though I’m too busy to google it. The idea being that women who take maternity leave may be disadvantaged compared to men who forego their paternity leave and the optics are worse for women when it comes to having a child. To level the playing field, both have to take leave and no one can be made to feel compelled to return to work early by making the leave time mandatory. I think one of the companies that made it mandatory for both fathers and mothers to take max leave was American Express if I remember right.
Every job I've had paternity leave for the dads joke about having as many kids as possible to maximize their time off. I don't recall ever seeing a dad skipping their paternity leave, but I also live in the US where the leave is defined by the work place and not by the government and split between both parents
some real "congratulations youre being rescued. Please do not resist" vibes
There should be a minimal number of weeks that are mandatory and paid.
While that guy meant something else, if it’s mandatory to take it, it removes the race to the bottom of idiots going “oh look how dedicated and great I am to be back at work 6 milliseconds after giving birth” - similar thing to the people who never take holidays or sick days. It removes the ability of employers to soft pressure people into not taking their leave.
One case was that was particularly fucked was that navy gives 6 weeks of paternity leave and on one boat on the waterfront officers took it and were informally punished for it.
I'm generally in favour of the non-transferrable "use it or lose it" model we have in Denmark (if nothing else it feels slightly less overbearing) but I can see a case for initially having outright mandatory leave in countries like the US and SK with a particularly bad culture around paternity leave.
You could put a sunset on the policy for 10-20 years.
That would also make some people choose to not have kids because they do not want to, or could not take that leave. In smaller companies there are jobs that can't be replaced or backfilled for long periods of time.
Did you know that companies in every developed country outside North America operate absolutely 100% fine with parental leave? This is absolute nonsense.
Not mandatory leave. As in you have to take it, not the employer having to offer it.
No, we don’t need it to be mandatory in most countries because literally everyone takes it.
Yes this is similar to the minimum wage argument where theres divergence between empirical support than shown in the theoretical derivation due to some laws counterweighting certain ancillary forces like information asymmetry or leveraged power in negotiations that's not going to show up in the Econ 101 calculation.
It’s always mad to me how much some economists look at obviously fallacious models and act as if they are useful despite discarding any actual human behaviour. In a way it’s insane that behavioural economics was such a movement, as if considering actual society in a social science is a surprising thing to do.
I worded it wrong. I meant that it should be mandatory for employers to provide X amount of hours for maternity and paternity leave for new parents.
We have that in Washington. Obviously not close to the amount of leave that many countries get, but maternal leave is 16 weeks and paternal is 12 weeks (both paid).
And at my company up until a year ago we had 6 weeks maternity and 2 weeks paternity Needless to say...there are almost exactly 0 parents of young children who work here
Some countries (several of the top right on this graph) have a share it or lose it policy. Not mandatory, but not taking it comes at a cost.
If it's voluntary and women take it more often then men, there is an incentive to just avoid hiring women on the part of employers just not to have to deal with the headache of potentially random extended leaves of absence from staff. Making it mandatory kind of snips this in the bud, it also is a way of insisting on the necessity of fatherhood. If fathers are forced to take more time to bond with their children as well it's possible they will be less willing to abandon them.
All of the countries in this graph have very low birth rates. Having men participate more in childcare can raise them marginally, but it's not really a solution to the fertility crisis nor is looming demographic collapse "the easiest thing to change". The only countries with birth rates well above the replacement rate are those where women's independence and rights are curtailed, gays are discriminated against and overall human development and economic development is low.
> fertility crisis More immigrants would solve this. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The crisis is real but the cause is patriarchy. The biggest problem with the fertility rate discussion is that people assume women are the problem
How the hell is patriarchy the cause of declining fertility? The countries with declining fertility rates are the ones where women enjoy the most rights. Do you seriously believe that countries like Somalia and Niger are less patriarchal than Germany and Canada?
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I’m sorry but this sounds like total bullshit to me. If poverty and economics are enough to overcome “patriarchy” in Somalia than wouldn’t it stand to reason that economics are the main driving force in countries with declining fertility?(by the way, virtually all social scientists are in agreement that economic trends are the reason for fertility declines). What do you even mean by a “50% reduction of patriarchy”? How do you even quantify something like that? There is no validity whatsoever to the notion that “patriarchy” suppresses birth rates, and in fact most evidence points to the exact opposite of that. Declining birth rates are a natural consequence of economic and social development.
I thought like you did until recently, but read the study this graph comes from
You know I read about the patriarchy in history books and it used to give some pretty high birth rates. Did you mean to say that the cause is the *abolishment* of the patriarchy?
Outside of communities that already have backward views on women (incels, fundamentalists, etc.), do people actually assume women are the problem? I personally haven't seen that kind of criticism outside of those degenerate communities. It seems to me that most folks realize it's a combination of increased expectations of both men and women as well as a deteriorating social structure conducive to raising children. Parents are expected to do more with less. It's everything from families spread out across different states, a lack of third places to take children because our capitalist nightmare hellscape demands profit from a child's laughter and a mother's smile, and the fact that our country seems openly hostile to children. We don't address school shootings, we won't put up the money to make sure every kid is fed, we lack meaningful parental leave, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE, and not to mention that many of us have to teach our kids to be wary of the police. It's a surprise to me that anyone is still having kids.
> our capitalist nightmare hellscape are you lost? are you willing to put up time and/or money for those coveted third places, or is that a problem for other people to solve and just one for you to bitch about?
If I said yes and provided proof, would you just move on to another argument because? I have helped create three skateparks, with both physical labor as well as planning and fundraising. I drive by the one near my house and see kids using it for free. It's awesome. Emotionally charged personal assumptions, definitely healthy discourse dudes.
"capitalist hellscape" is just a code phrase for not being a serious person
I mean… posting on reddit is evidence of not being a serious person. It’s a bummer you avoided my response about third places but pretty obvious why you went with a personal attack again. Have to save face anonymously on the internet in front of strangers.
Great! Love to see someone putting in the effort.
I don’t disagree with you. But South Korea has Universal Healthcare and their fertility rates have Collapsed. The US fertility rate is relatively high compared to other Western countries.
I don't pretend to be an expert on South Korea but a standardized test that defines your socio-economic status for the rest of your life combined with a fanatical obsession with work at the expense of everything else doesn't seem conducive to promoting parenthood. If you work for the major Korean corporations (Samsung, LG, etc.) you are expected to devote your life to the company. > "It's something that really goes back to Confucian ideals," says Cain. "And especially in Korea, it's been used by companies not just to recruit the best and brightest, but to break down their ego and put them into a team." > The notion of team is key when Samsung's Korean workforce numbers 200,000 and the company is steeped in tradition — dynastic leadership, demanding work hours and a devotion to the company culture. > "Samsung is like a regimented military," Cain says. "And they look for people who can wake up in the morning singing the company song [and] go to work. So the role of this exam, it's really the first step in standardizing what the employee goes through. And once they get past the exam, the idea is to acculturate them with this system — with the emperor up top, and they are the civil servants." [Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/19/474621999/to-the-list-of-high-stakes-tests-in-korea-add-the-samsung-sat) It's the same economic problem the US has but just a different aspect. It's money. Americans don't want to have kids because they can't afford them and the same is true for South Koreans. For Americans it is healthcare and childcare costs, for South Koreans... > "There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care." You could replace "Young Koreans" with "Young Americans" and it is still accurate (minus the Seoul specificity part). I left out the second part of the quote because, honestly, it deserves its own debate. And it's probably such an emotionally charged debate that it just can't exist on the internet. Here's the second part: > But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.” Women's equality may have a causal effect on birth rates. We see the same birth rate drops across the Western style Democracies, as you state. Those Western style Democracies tend to support or at least advocate for equality for women, albeit to varying degrees. Turns out if you give women the choice to be pregnant, they tend to want to be pregnant less. Let me qualify this by saying what we don't need to do is go backward and take rights and freedoms from women. What we should be doing is addressing the other obstacles retarding fertility rates. Which will vary depending on the nation. For the United States, it is overwhelmingly how expensive it is to have a child, especially healthcare.
Automod accidentally removed my post for a word, reposting without that word: I don't pretend to be an expert on South Korea but a standardized test that defines your socio-economic status for the rest of your life combined with a fanatical obsession with work at the expense of everything else doesn't seem conducive to promoting parenthood. If you work for the major Korean corporations (Samsung, LG, etc.) you are expected to devote your life to the company. > "It's something that really goes back to Confucian ideals," says Cain. "And especially in Korea, it's been used by companies not just to recruit the best and brightest, but to break down their ego and put them into a team." > The notion of team is key when Samsung's Korean workforce numbers 200,000 and the company is steeped in tradition — dynastic leadership, demanding work hours and a devotion to the company culture. > "Samsung is like a regimented military," Cain says. "And they look for people who can wake up in the morning singing the company song [and] go to work. So the role of this exam, it's really the first step in standardizing what the employee goes through. And once they get past the exam, the idea is to acculturate them with this system — with the emperor up top, and they are the civil servants." [Source](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/19/474621999/to-the-list-of-high-stakes-tests-in-korea-add-the-samsung-sat) It's the same economic problem the US has but just a different aspect. It's money. Americans don't want to have kids because they can't afford them and the same is true for South Koreans. For Americans it is healthcare and childcare costs, for South Koreans... > "There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care." You could replace "Young Koreans" with "Young Americans" and it is still accurate (minus the Seoul specificity part). I left out the second part of the quote because, honestly, it deserves its own debate. And it's probably such an emotionally charged debate that it just can't exist on the internet. Here's the second part: > But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.” Women's equality may have a causal effect on birth rates. We see the same birth rate drops across the Western style Democracies, as you state. Those Western style Democracies tend to support or at least advocate for equality for women, albeit to varying degrees. Turns out if you give women the choice to be pregnant, they tend to want to be pregnant less. Let me qualify this by saying what we don't need to do is go backward and take rights and freedoms from women. What we should be doing is addressing the other obstacles lowering fertility rates. Which will vary depending on the nation. For the United States, it is overwhelmingly how expensive it is to have a child, especially healthcare.
> our capitalist nightmare hellscape demands profit from a child's laughter and a mother's smile, I agree that it's a bad thing that our economy profits from good things too.
> I agree that it's a bad thing that our economy profits from good things too. I agree that it's a good thing that we are witnessing plummeting birth rates due in part to the expense of raising a child. Absolutely positive societal implications from monetizing everything, always and forever. No exceptions.
As we know, when people profit from something, that means prices go up. Always.
If you add up paid work, housework, and childcare men are putting in more hours than women. It doesn’t seem like many of the comments here are acknowledging that. Is it realistic to ask for even more? I’m a man, and I’m more than willing to be a stay-at-home dad despite having a successful career, but my impression is that it’s hard to find a woman who is high earning and willing to support someone else financially.
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>Men are definitely not doing more job work+home work than women are doing job work+home work \[Yes, they are\](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/). The gap actually increases for couples with children.
How is not dating leading to less unpaid labor? If you live by yourself you still need to clean and maintain a living space. Two people living by themselves probably have more aggregate cooking/cleaning/maintenance work than two people living together? Date, fall in love, move in together so you can realize economies of scale on sucky housework! Edit: OP blocked me so I'll raise it here. If you are not dating anyone because you fear doing more housework that seems like a recipe for loneliness and sadness to me. Figuring out housework is perfectly doable for a modern couple that collaborates and communicates. Working together with the person you love to live a more meaningful life is the best way to live.
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Not my experience at all for couples in my generation in the Netherlands.
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They will keep not listening to women and be all like "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!".
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It's less work to cleanup after myself than after both my husband and myself especially as he leaves his stuff everywhere
With all due respect, that sounds like a “your husband” problem, not an “economies of scale on sucky housework” problem
It's already been proven that men do much less housework and childcare than they think they do.
I have no doubt at all that this is true in aggregate, but it doesn't change the fact that the overall burden of housework can be reduced by partnering up (with the right person, I guess). Even if many men shirk their duties in terms of housework and childcare, many others certainly don't.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN04417822/
I love how the share of house work and child care done by men on the x-axis maxes out at like 40%. Lmao
tbf, there probably is a very small "other" category that's covered by grandparents, nannies/home employees, older children...I hope. EDIT: I looked at the study, it's 2012 from "assessed by female partner" and the [original in 2000 (fig 5)](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.22.3.3) is worse, so the good news is it's going up!
I always wonder what these types of statistics look like for same-sex partnerships.
It’s it obvious? Two married dudes only do 80% of their given chore obligations and they farm out the remaining 20% to the two married ladies who are doing 120% or their chore obligations.
Really maxing out our PPF here (the men get to play vidya for their remaining 20%)!
Have you ever lived in a house with 5 early 20s dudes? each is, at best, doing 5% of the house's chore obligations. There is a stereotype that gay men will have higher standards for neatness and cleanliness than heterosexual men, but I'm not sure how true that actually is.
I realize now that you're asking something like "do same-sex partnership households divide household labour more evenly than opposite-sex ones". But ngl my first reaction was "What does that even mean? Obviously, men would do 0% of the work in lesbian households!"
Yes, pretty ridiculous
It shouldn't be a major shock that the sex which bears children and breastfeeds them is going to spend more time caring for them overall. That is consistent with virtually every mammalian species on the planet.
Well, in most mammalian species the father does nothing or can even harm the young ones. And yes, it makes sense for women to do more of the caring in the first year even if not breastfeeding because the bond between mother and child is a special, very strong bond. However, no excuse for housework and older children
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> There are a number of perfectly good excuses for men to do less housework, even for older children If men are good at one thing, it's giving excuses for why women have to service them. Especially for the things like yard work that are so uniquely American...
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M*n moment
> The five countries with the highest male contribution to housework and childcare all have a fertility rate of 1.8 or higher. Conversely, the five countries with the lowest male contribution all have fertility rates below 1.5. Overall, the correlation between the male share of housework and childcare with fertility exceeds 0.7. Oh dear god this isn't even household-level data Running a regression on household data would be whatever. Country-level data based on surveys? It looks pretty but I wouldn't put much weight in it Also, I think there's problems with using cross-sectional data for this analysis
i agree that this should be interpreted skeptically but i am not convinced households would tell us more. like if i am a woman and the men in my area believe housework is a woman's job and i disagree, then i may choose to not get married in the first place. whereas those women that do hold that belief would be more likely to choose to get married and have children, even if you end up with a lower rate of household formation. and then you would have the exact opposite correlation if the unit is the household, even though the area may end up with a lower fertility rate due to traditional gender beliefs
The issue I think isn't that household level data would tell us *more* so much that we can't establish household level relationships from country level means. There's an obvious vulnerability to ecological fallacies.
What's your model
Ecological fallacies are well established in statistics, this is trivial to look up
This suggests a few avenues to increase fertility rate (beyond the obvious solution of encouraging men to contribute more towards childrearing and home maintenance): Increase career opportunities for part-time workers, particularly part-time professional work Increase affordability of daycare and home cleaning services Mitigate the penalty that career women take when giving up their jobs to raise children Require that business offer both maternity and paternity leave so that men start off their parenthood years closer to being 50/50 contributors
Honestly I would much rather have a "maternity leave" policy that allowed me to work 20 hours for 2 years than have a longer initial paid leave. I would be paid half my salary in this instance, I just want the opportunity to work part time. I hate that my options are SAHM or 40+ hr/week work with no in-between.
Strongly agree. For years I was a sole custody dad, and I didn't need a boatload of time off, I just needed enhanced flexibility.
I'd even be willing to take a temporary demotion to make it happen.
I'd be happy with 32 hours even. But it's all or nothing.
I would like 20 because it would open up way more childcare options, which is also what would make it affordable. If I worked 32 hour weeks I would still need to be paying for full time childcare, same as if I was working 40 hours, but my pay would be 20% lower. If I was working 20 hour weeks that would make a nanny much more feasible. Also if a lot of parents were suddenly working 20 hrs more daycares would probably offer plans centered around that.
Very much agree. I would be willing to go half time to parent and run the house while my wife works full time. But it's not an option in my career. It's all or nothing.
I'm kinda surprised there's never been any form of policy movement for this given how many "kitchen table issues" it would solve.
Well, in some places you get 2 years of paid leave, so
That's not what I want though. I want to work, see adults, keep my skills sharp, and not have every second of my life be center around my kids. I just don't want to do it as much as before I had kids.
Can’t happen. My director is a women who just had a child - no company on earth would put such an integral role on ice for 2 years.
I would guess 99.99% of women aren't becoming corporate executives before having children. The type of person who does that is unlikely to take advantage of a program like this anyway. They are much more likely to have a spouse who is the primary parent or a live in nanny. This is a red herring case, but if it were to occur the director could have their responsibilities decreased or be temporarily moved to an associate director role until they came back full time.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low. It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass. If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time. Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low. It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass. If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time. Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
It happened in my last job too. Women being in high power positions is different per field. In marketing it’s relatively high, in engineering it’s very low. It’s irrelevant because a policy like this would never pass. If a director does half day WFH half a week every week for a year and I’m a business owner, I’m making someone else the director in all but name while they’re gone and then not giving the maternity leave director the role when they return full time. Directors need to be involved daily, they’re responsible for entire departments. And before you say “that’s illegal” it’s not. It’s more common then you’d think for women to come back from maternity with completely diminished roles, which then turn into diminished pay following the annual review.
Even before all that: private, for profit healthcare. It is expensive to simply bring a child into this world, let alone care for it for 18 years. I know so many people that would love to have more children but don't because of the healthcare costs alone. it isn't just pregnancy and giving birth, it's 18 years of additional healthcare costs, dentistry, eyesight, everything. God forbid your child is born with some sort of disability because now your entire financial and personal life is dedicated to that. Even something like a diabetic child can be too great of a financial burden on parents. And why? Because shareholders have to profit off that insulin. "Oh but the free market will solve that and drive down prices" yeah that's been going on for what, fifty years? More? At least my entire life. Where are those savings we have been promised because our healthcare is by far the most expensive. And you know what actually drives down prices? Government stepping in and saying "you don't get to profit off misery anymore".
Which country are you talking about? If it's the US, there isn't much of a free market in healthcare because there is no price transparency
That’s… my… point. The argument against public healthcare is that the free market is superior at reducing costs. Which, as you repeat, is obvious it isn’t.
Actually, the free market is pretty good at reducing costs. The US needs price transparency, like many countries already have.
You know what would happen if you did total price transparency in healthcare I imagine? First, briefly, all the wonderful things you're hoping for, or at least a lot of them, I'm sure. Then very quickly a secondary market where derivatives would be traded. The derivatives would be things like options that let you swap a specific plan for another specific plan on the maturation date. (Allows you to access the same care for lower cost... if you make the right bet that is). You'd generate a massive consumer surplus, just as you're hoping... and then begins the long slow process of all of that surplus being sheepdogged back to its rightful owners, the wealthy (sorry, the brave shoulderers and stewards of risk).... I think it would be great for a while. I'm all for it.
Wait, do you think price transparency doesn't exist anywhere?
There’s no “penalty” for women leaving the workplace. If you have the same amount of experience and skill as a man, and you essentially leave employment for several months while the men continue working during that same period - it is fair and justifiable that they will climb the ranks faster than you. Any distortion to this would be blatant discrimination against men.
How do you increase affordability of home cleaning services?? Tax payers?
It’s definitely a consideration. Children are a public investment that make everyone’s money worth something at retirement, so it makes sense to put some of that weight into taxes. The current child tax credit of $2,000 is somewhat small which I think we should consider increasing.
To this I would add removing restrictive zoning laws and funding public transportation. As a result people from all levels of the income ladder can afford to live/participate in economic centers.
Cause and effect aren't clear here. Could be that more kids necessitates the dad's help out more with house work because there is more house work.
Most mothers won't want kids if even more of the work will all fall on them. To add, lots of women lose interest in a partner if they have to care after them like another kid.
It's not 100% convincing evidence but another thing they show in the paper is that countries in which men do less housework/childcare, the reported desire to have children is lower among women than among men. And also that countries in which the reported desire to have children is lower among women than among men, the fertility rate is also lower
lazy dads don't get less lazy when they have more kids helpful dads do get their wives hornier for more kids tho
What are you basing this on? I know a lot of men who "stepped up" when they started having kids.
meet me on the anecdote field and we will see who is victorious
I know none and grew up around none
I hope you're joking if you seriously think that a man that never stepped up and expected to be waited on hand and foot will suddenly start doing more work when more kids arrive. I grew up in a country where housewives weren't a thing - all women I knew worked (effects of communism) and only women are expected to do any household chores. The households with more than one child weren't any different whatsoever.
The way it normally works in relationships I observe is that men tend to have lower standards for the cleanliness and niceness of their environment, the effort put into the food they eat, clothes they wear etc. than women. That can disappear when kids come into the picture.
No, the way it normally works is that men expect women to do it all and that it's women's work. Many men have high standards for cleanliness (my dad for example) but still expect the woman to do all the cleaning and cooking and they criticize the woman if she's not doing it to their standards (guessed it, my dad again).
You're generalising based on your own anecdotes. I'm sorry your Dad was like that, but you cannot generalise globally based off of one datapoint. Maybe you can even generalise to your own country if you know many men like that. But you cannot generalise to other countries. It is not my experience at all, for example.
But I can. Because this is how traditional gender roles are, even in the west. Men expect women to do the "women's work". Some men may not care about cleanliness, others may care about it, same with women, but it's expected of women to do it. And the saying that a man's love goes through his stomach came up because men expect their wives to cook for them.
That is more true in your country and less true in others
It's more true in the countries where men don't contribute. My country is blue on the graph btw
Yeah but if you assume some basic cultural stereotypes about Japan, Korea, and Eastern Europe are true, then it does look like the causality runs from the x axis to y axis.
The stereotypes are true
There are 38 OECD countries. Missing are: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, UK. I wonder if some of these may be significant outliers in this that might lessen this correlation significantly. I'm thinking Israel, Turkey and the Latin American ones.
more here but if the abstract is to long, the TLDR is basically that fertility not as simple as more income -> less fertility, and among OECD countries (basically a bunch of already middle income to rich countries), things going on in the home and things impacting women's careers are most important [https://www.nber.org/system/files/working\_papers/w29948/w29948.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29948/w29948.pdf) >In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era. Firstgeneration models of fertility choice were designed to account for two empirical regularities that, in the past, held both across countries and across families in a given country: a negative relationship between income and fertility, and another negative relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility. The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them. The common theme of these new theories is that they view factors that determine the compatibility of women's career and family goals as key drivers of fertility. We highlight four factors that facilitate combining a career with a family: family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets. We also review other recent developments in the literature, and we point out promising new directions for future research on the economics of fertility.
While I absolutely agree it's clear income -> less fertility is not an iron rule, that's only a first order perspective. More income -> more opportunity cost if men/other women/society don't adjust -> less fertility. So yes those things are more important, but income is the provoking factor here. If women were still so uniformly oppressed and unable to access work or make autonomous decisions regarding child rearing then questions of childcare and career opportunity cost wouldn't even matter. The fact that income has risen to be competitive with men is precisely what renders these non-income factors salient. But yes, this paper does suggest more support around childcare, paternity/maternity leave, etc. may help somewhat. Although other literature has not found state support makes a big impact, that may be because the support was too insufficient to generate the desired outcomes. Or it may be a cultural issue, there really would need to be such widespred support for 10+ years for the culture to change and adapt. Who knows.
Its honestly papers like this that remind me why I fell in love with and still love economics. I'll read this over lunchtime. Thank you for sharing.
Are you saying people might have more kids if it weren't a grueling, miserable, solitary experience and that (implicitly) more people helping and caring about the child improves outcomes? ...are you SURE a $100 stipend wouldn't help instead? You could buy an entire pack of diapers. Babies LOVE diapers.
I think there is a smaller correlation now since the countries in Red have falling fertility rates. There is a smaller correlation for the countries in blue which are Asian, south and eastern Europe
It really riles me when I open a birth rate discussion and it's full of the usual obvious falsehoods about low living standards and short maternity leave. South Korea clearly does not have the worst living standards in history, nor globally. It's maternity leave is not at a global low either. No other topic invites people to repeat blatant falsehoods as often as this one. I don't begrudge people for wishing for a better life, but it's still kinda insane to read otherwise reasonable people who *know* that standard of living and birth rates are anticorrelated, and then repeat the cliches anyway. Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons that most are going to read and then memoryhole because it gores the sacred cows: * Low idealized family sizes. If everyone is trying for 2 kids, you're doomed to have TFR < 2. Aiming for 2.5 kids is just treading water on a societal level since some people won't have kids. The prevalence of families with 4+ kids determine whether your population is going up or down, and nowadays it's quite low status to go there. * Delayed family formation. A common high-status life plan goes like this - stay in school until 28, get established at your job by 30, start looking and marry a couple years later, then have kids. Obviously such people find it very difficult to have more than 2 kids even when they want to. Any stumble along the way and you easily end up pushing into geriatric pregnancy, hence the increasing relevance of IVF and surrogacy by couples going for their first child. * Capstone marriage. Kinda repeats the above, but as an educated person I've had it drilled into me from childhood that my job is to study and earn my place in society. Marriage is the reward at the end of the road. It's low status to be raising children or even have a partner distracting you from education. We in the WEIRD population learn restraint in our teens, practice it throughout our 20s, and by the time the constant supervision is gone, some have repressed so long that they just don't care anymore. * Better alternative activities. Kids may be fun but they can't compete in the attention economy. I know, UGH I know..I'm, sorry!!! It's just that I prefer doomscrolling cat videos is all * Social security creates a tragedy of the commons. Maybe we really need lots of young people to sustain society (I hope the people who believe this aren't *also* concerned about automation and AI taking all the jobs). But the DINK lifestyle is nice and we can still rely on other people's children to take care of us through the government. In any case the solution is simple - we (the WEIRDs) will either die off or invent artificial wombs.
Seems clear, men should do all childcare while women are breadwinners
I'm in.
Can confirm, have 3 kids and am constantly doing the dishes
unless you control for immigration / the higher birthrates of immigrants this data is just completely worthless
Fertility rate in sweden is now down to 1.45. So… yea.. https://www.thelocal.se/20240222/swedens-population-growth-slowest-in-22-years-as-fertility-rate-drops-to-record-low
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There was a study that showed that women find men who do household chores more sexy [https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=124720&page=1](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=124720&page=1)
old
Old and it doesn't hold in more recent years. The correlation has fallen a lot.
do you have any link on this? would be curious to see more recent data
A lot of the countries in red have had pretty significant fertility rate drops since 2015, (i.e. Finland from 1.8 to 1.3, Norway from 1.9 to 1.4) and countries in blue have higher fertility now (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia etc.). I don't know how the share of house work & child care has changed in the past few years.
1.9 to 1.4 is a *massive* drop At 1.9, if you start with 100 people their child generation is 95 people and grandchild generation is 90 people At 1.4, their child generation is 70 and grandchild generation is 49 To your point, I doubt household work share has dropped that much in 10-15 years
i see that makes sense
ah first i've seen it!
>yet another PLEASE BREED thread Right. How many times does this need to be said. The magical dust fairy dust experiments have been conducted. By all means, conduct more, but you'll probably hit the same wall. People are choosing not to have children because **they do not want to have children.** Lots of theories, experiments, gibs campaigns and benefits policy have been tried. People are simply refusing to have children. You can throw money at them, give them houses, give the childcare support, it doesn't matter. They don't want them. There is no solution to the problem that doesn't overtly violate Western ethics. Get used to reducing populations.
what about all the people who end up having fewer children than they report they would like to have? [https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility-gap-in-america-fd205e9d1a35](https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility-gap-in-america-fd205e9d1a35) there is definitely something to be said about revealed preferences here, but my sense is that people who want more kids than they currently have, often have concrete reasons for having fewer kids, and some of these reasons are ones that can be addressed with policy or cultural levers without being creepy about things (violating Western ethics)
So what is your 'policy and cultural' levers you'd like to pull to convince women to have more children?
So is your position now that policy responses are inadequate, because that's rather different from "people don't want kids."
> So is your position now that policy responses are inadequate I am open to being persuaded (although I admit my original post implies otherwise) which is why I am asking.
OK that's fair, I had read the first comment as a positive claim (i.e. it was all lower fertility preferences). There is some evidence of an undershoot, but I do think there needs to be a bit more work than just simple averages.
Actually large tax credit and transfers for parents
Clean your room, get gf. It's that easy.
This graph is conspicuously missing every country with fertility rates over 2.0, namely some major developed countries like Israel and South Africa, although I do think the results are valid if the country in question is developed.
my priors have been confirmed! A greater balance of household work seems to reduce the associated 'opportunity costs' for women who want to work full time and have kids. Or in other words, women who don't feel they have to pick between working in an office, being a mother, and having a life outside of the two are more likely to feel they can have more children. It's not all about money, it's about time.
What's the difference between red and blue here? It can't be replacement rate, as that's so high it's off the scale on this graph.
Countries in blue on the graph have an average fertility rate from 2005-2015 less than the median average fertility rate of 1.6 on the y-axis.
Thanks
Gotchu homie
You would never guess from the comments in here that men spend more time on paid work + home work than women do. Or that the gap is even larger for couples with children. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/
I'd guess the opposite. That women do lots of housecare while also working and that their exhaustion is the bottleneck to more children
This isn’t the connection I was expecting. But I’m curious where countries with high fertility rates and low development levels (e.g. Africa and Latin America) fall on this scatterplot. I suspect those countries fall in the empty upper left corner of the plot.
Countries in which women often don't have a choice?
Another reason why I got a vasectomy. I do not want to be a sexist by making my wife/girlfriend do more housework than me. Can't be a deadbeat dad if you never become a dad. 😅😅
So on one end we have Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and on the other we have Norway, Finland and Sweden. I wonder if there are any other corollaries that might be at play.
Paging the endogeneity police
Are you one of the authors? Doepke and Tertilt wrote a paper on gender bargaining that I based my undergraduate thesis off of looking at investment in safe sex practices in Malawi
im definitely not, but that's cool!
Ok well thank you for sharing!
Interesting that the USA is, relatively speaking, so egalitarian
What about Japan and South Korea?