A recent study published in Scientific Reports suggests that political beliefs are increasingly linked to the number of children Americans choose to have. The findings indicate that while conservative individuals tend to maintain birth rates near historical averages, left-leaning individuals are having significantly fewer children. This demographic trend provides evidence that differing birth rates are a main driver of recent fertility declines in the United States.
The data revealed a pronounced change in how political beliefs relate to family size. For individuals born in the early 1900s, political orientation had almost no association with the number of children they had. However, beginning with the cohort born between 1943 and 1947, a massive divergence emerged.
“We expected these results, but not to such a dramatic extent,” Fieder told PsyPost. From the mid-century cohorts onward, individuals with right-wing political views maintained birth rates at or slightly above the replacement level. The replacement level, typically considered to be 2.1 children per woman, is the rate needed for a population to replace itself from one generation to the next without immigration.
In contrast, the birth rates of left-wing individuals dropped sharply, falling well below the replacement level in the more recent cohorts. The authors noticed this drop aligns with historical changes in family planning. “We found that the gap began with the introduction of modern contraception,” Fieder said.
No? Most women say they’d have more kids if they could afford it.
When women have access to education, career opportunities, and contraception, birth rates drop.
We assessed the quantitative impact of education and family planning in high‐fertility settings using a regression framework inspired by Granger causality. We found that women’s attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline and found an accelerating effect of contraceptive prevalence for modern methods. We found the impact of contraceptive prevalence to be substantially larger than that of education.
Widespread use of contraceptives and, to a lesser extent, girls’ education through at least age 14 have the greatest impact in bringing down a country’s fertility rate.
Three mechanisms influence the fertility decision of educated women: (i) the relatively higher incomes and thus higher income forgone due to childbearing leads them to want fewer children. The better care these women give increases their children’s human capital and reduces the economic need for more children; (ii) the positive health impacts of education, on both women and their children, mean women are better able to give birth and children’s higher survival rate reduces the desire for more; and (iii) the knowledge impact of education means women are better at using contraceptives. For developing population policies, it is thus important to understand these impacts on income, health, and knowledge, and their influence on fertility decisions in the specific country context.
Sure, but even then they stay above replacement. You need the economic calculus of an urbanized capitalist economy to get the shitshow seen in most of the developed world.
Affordability is only 36% of the stated reasons women aren’t having more children.
The other reasons are: still looking for the right spouse, lifestyle or career, family is still growing, and trouble conceiving.
There’s many reasons and just shrugging and saying it’s the economy doesn’t explain enough.
Trouble conceiving is often related to age. Ability to conceive naturally drops in women’s thirties. If a woman in her twenties didn’t think her family could support kids, then in her thirties she may find out she’s having trouble conceiving
We should stop making young people support people in old age. It drops fertility, makes the electorate older and more likely to vote for more benefits for themselves.
One example is rent control. It only decreases your cost of living if you’ve been there a long time. It decreases the supply of housing long term