India's surprise baby bust

Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.

In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty

if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?

Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.

The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.

if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…

If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.

The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.

And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.

Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc.

The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals.

My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.

"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"

That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.

There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.

I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.

But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)

I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!

“Have more children!”

“Make housing affordable!”

“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”

There’s your problem.

I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.

Why exactly would a democratic society oppose this? Are you conflating democratic and capitalist?

Most if not all postwar European societies had ambitious social housing projects that aimed to secure housing for young workers.

>western society slowly collapses

good riddance

Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.

Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.

Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.

I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.

Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.

Birth control.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.

Also, consumer credit was illegal until the same time period, and only legalized for people with vaginas in the mid-1970s. That alone might have made all the difference with marriage and fertility (which after all are only mildly related).

Imagine how your choices would expand if unlike your mother, you did not need to become Mrs. John Doe to be able to move out of your father's house.

As usual...

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Large families were your source of farm labor.

Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.

I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.

Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.

I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.

Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.

I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.

There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.

IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.

Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.

Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.

(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)

Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.

I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...

For comparison I assume you're German given the username, here this would amount to 300 billion per year, which is about 100x what the government spends on BAföG (the mentioned federal student aid). I genuinely wonder how much countries will have to spend until people realize that this has quite literally nothing to do with money.

When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.

Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.

The incentives just aren't there.

I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.

For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.

Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.

It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.

Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.

In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.

How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?

If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas that remain high cost.

Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.

This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.

My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.

This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.

I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.

So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.

The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.

You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.

Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.

Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.

Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.

You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.

I agree with you.

Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!

People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.

If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.

and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.

In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.

Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).

Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.

Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.

Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.

So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.

Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.

I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.

So no, their characterization was not correct, since the point was that, absent a particular group, fertility would be, like in almost every other OECD (and many non OECD) countries, below replacement.

"Being ready" to have a child is an impossibility so you have to embrace the unknown and be ok with mistakes. Kids are resilient, and many millions have had to do with less.

I have always considered this to be a selfish sentiment. Wanting children so that you yourself are less lonely. That isn't to say it's a bad thing, mind you.

I have daily reminders that validate my choice. The fact that it's finally something people can choose is a major factor in the downtrend.

I only encourage people to do the requisite research to make sure they make the right choice for themselves, because for many it's not.

So it doesn't seem that that cultural difference boosts the fertility rate all that much.

huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)

Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.

Also, I've definitely seen pro-parenthood posts be downvoted on Reddit. I don't mean anything obnoxious, just literally people talking about how they like parenting or how rewarding it is when it's relevant to the conversation. Obviously that's a super liberal group and that's where we see almost all of the decline, though.

Don't get me wrong, I think the problem is multifaceted, but don't you think it's odd that in very disparate cultures they're practically all having the same issue, but only in places that have first world-type amenities? Yes, there are odd groups here and there that don't conform, but the trend to that affect is worldwide. And again, this is when we know our hormones are definitely getting disrupted.

"Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one."

I don't understand that. Why? If anything I've heard the opposite most of my life, where men are afraid to have kids for child support reasons.

There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.

They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.

But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?

both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?

Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).

And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.

We live in a blessed window.

We have billionaries and LLCs, supervillains whose superpowers are based on being rich, don't worrying about the future much beyond the next quarter, and pretending personhood to hold rights like people, but without the possibility of getting arrested.

We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".

Our economic system is a pyramid of consumption, wealth gets concentrated up and relies on an ever increasing lower strata to maintain the status quo. When the lower section stops increasing, it breaks down. I barely want to live in a world of constant harassment by middle men.

I don't want a child to be a pawn in the greater "Population decline!!!!" propaganda mill, where the threat and fault of the failing pyramid scheme is placed on the lower strata rather than the doomsday-bunker class.

>Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?

More sweeping current problems under the future generation's rug. We could solve many of these problems today, but the causes of the problems are protected by the state.

They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.

women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant

Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.

Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk. The active cook time itself does not increase much either.

Hand me down clothing and books are all shared. The kids also help watch, teach, and entertain each other.

I feel sorry for children that grow up without siblings. But even more so for parents that that choose to not have any at all.

This of course being said about the situation without any parents around. The step from two to three is worse for car/transportation and hotel room but I think it’s not nearly as hard as from one to two.

What you also have to consider: You’re gonna have bad nights. With one kid only, it’s fine. You can recover. With two, you simple don’t have room for that. The bad nights will eat you up.

In theory very little of it has to be about women specifically, but practice is different. (The expectations that used to exist for ~teenage girls to babysit for free for their relatives are somewhat undersold relative to adult labor, maybe)

https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.

(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)

Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.

300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.

It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.

but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.

https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...

It’s very simple.

If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.

To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.

Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_and_nominal_value

When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.

When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?

When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.

This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?

History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.

Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.

Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.

You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.

Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.

Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.

The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.

Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.

The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.

You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.

Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.

So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.

It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.

In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.

Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.

I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.

I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.

Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.

What are you concerned we would run out of?

Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.