After all, stated fertility intentions in Europe and America – the number of children women say they want to have – are still well above replacement level, with women in the US listing factors such as expensive childcare, financial instability or struggles with work-life balance as major reasons why they haven’t been able to have the families they wanted.
Ever since the question was asked desired fertility has been one child above real fertility. Who wouldn’t love to have another babbie around the house? But when it comes to actually…..
The lack of babies is because of status wars among women – a suitably Worstallian suggestion.
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/its-embarrassing-to-be-a-stay-at
My solution to part (and only part) of the problem: Stop being a bunch of prissy prudes and allow women to charge £50,000 or more for surrogacy, Mid life women spend a lot of money on IVF and often fail to get pregnant. Instead let mid life women go to the local uni and find a suitable looking student and offer her a substantial amount of cash to be a surrogate . The mid lifer women gets a child, and the student walks away from uni with a degree and no debt meaning she will not have to pay the graduate tax which adds something like 7% to her marginal rate of income tax.
@salamander: that’s not a bad scheme – think of the status implications of being able to boast that you could afford £50k to get someone else to do the disagreeable pregnancy bit for you.
Maybe twice.
But would the £50k be chargeable to income tax or CGT? Or a special Labour labour tax?
So, it turns out that there are opportunity costs in life? Having a 3rd child means settling for a Toyota instead of a BMW or just less free time? Pretty sure married couples have been weighing these options for quite a long time & figuring it out for themselves.
I’ve known quite a few couples who had a bit of a disagreement over whether to go for a 3rd or 4th child for these very reasons.
But this is now a crisis, I assume.
Person in Pictland,
I’ve thought for a while that there is little rational explanation for a lot of mothers working (the post-cost salary is piss all) which has led me to think that a lot of it is about being where the other women are, which is status.
Women don’t actually care about the work. They want the office and to wear power suits. It’s entirely a status thing.
Women’s travel is nearly all about status. They all go to the same places and get instagram selfies. It’s not actually about seeing what’s in the Uffizi, it’s about being seen to be in the Uffizi.
But I think it’s all wrong, Because it’s all anti-Darwinian. Like women chasing men with useless degrees rather than successful tradesmen. A load of dysfunctional alcoholics at Cosmo and elite women (who can do both) have sold this to women as the dream. A lot of women don’t understand what men value. There was something released recently about the age selections on dating apps and how women have a range near them, but men set their minimum at 18. And there are women shocked and disgusted at this. Like, sorry ladies, have you seen who is on the cover of Playboy, who was in Page 3? How do you not get this?
But I’m not worried about doomsday, because I think that the women who want a basketball team of kids are going to prioritise that and not iPhones or going scuba diving in the Red Sea. This whole “you can’t live on one income” with kids is bullshit. I know lots of people who do. The bloke puts in more hours, you have older cars, you eat out less. And once you’re in that situation, you might as well have 3 or 4. The actual cost of kids is not a lot now. Toys, clothes, books, food it’s all cheap.
Notions of status can change.
It’s possible that being a full time mother will become enviable. Look at me, I’ve got a man who earns so much I don’t have to commute.
I think elite and rich women have children due to status. The media frequently does profiles on the daughters of the elite, rich and famous and I find it interesting that a lot of the women are in their twenties and have a couple of kids.
“I’ve got a man who earns so much I don’t have to commute.”
Right, let’s stop all this Working From Home rubbish, impose the commute, and see lots of women claim status by having babies and avoiding the commute.
It’d be interesting to know how many children the person wrote the article has.
Esteban, having a third child means a minibus, being the only thing you can fit 3 legally required kiddie seats in the back of.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
Men are to blame.
Babies only happen when the man gives his confidence to the woman. That’s how sex magic works.
But look at Millennials and Zoomers, do you have any confidence in them? Do they look and behave like men?
I saw a film recently, called Deadpool and Wolverine. It’s a very silly film, but it is entertaining and that’s why it made over a billion dollars.
55 year old Hugh Jackman still looks like a statue of a muscular Greek god, but if you stare at his glistening, hairy abs you’re missing the point.
It’s the masculinity of the character he plays that makes him compelling. Chicks love men who are all man. Not simpering soyboys or disappointing girly men. It takes a man to convince a woman to let him put a baby in her. The fertility crisis is a crisis of masculinity.
Salamander; or simply run through the England footie team, or any PL team. Most of the players (or their SOs) start pumping out the kids by age 25 or so. Compare that to the national average.
BiG – that’s just brilliant.
Although, what’s the effect of cheap credit?
Ducky, of course when you are a multimilionaire at 25 and have women throwing themselves at you, it isn’t difficult to pick the best one, have 5 kids with her, starting at a sensible (younger than everyone else) age.
The chief problem these people seem to have, for some completely inexplicable reason, is they tend to have more kids with women other than the one they marry.
BiG – the other strange thing about footballers that crops up is the “childhood sweetheart”.
Now, I’m pretty damn sure that I have never met anyone who did this. Which is interesting, in that the earning potential of a 14 year old lad playing footie at some level must be highly visible to a 14 year old lass.
What we don’t know is how many 4-ish year “childhood sweetheart” relationships fail by age 18-19 when the lad doesn’t get his professional contract, or how many fail when he’s bombed out of the youth system at age 16.
Actually, there’s an implication to the visibility of higher future potential earnings, something that WB sort of said.
In theory, the local lasses in university towns would be hunting for signals amongst the male students, who would be internal migrants. Subject studied, how well they’re doing, future employers and their locations. The strongest signals would be in the final year, but they’d probably need to take a punt before that.
So, a 19 year old lass working as a waitress in a cocktail bar in Durham, would be looking for a 21 y/o CS student aiming to work in the City, say. If successful, they start pumping the sprogs out by roughly 25/7, slightly later than the footballers wives, but still earlier than the national average.
Ducky.
To be honest, this level of strategic thinking is something most 19 years old are simply not capable of. I recently was in the local pub and there was a uni student studying history wondering about their career prospects. My advise was to try and go into the civil service. The student laughed. My explanation was that if you pass the entrance exams and play your cards right you will be on a 6 figure salary by the time you are 30-35 and have a cast iron defined benefit pension. On top of that, if you screw up you will not have to take the rap. Rather, the minister will take the rap for you.
The student refused to believe me.
Latest rumours are that food products such as bread, pasta, oatmeal, breakfast cereals and tortillas supplied in London are to be heavily taxed. The tax is to be called the Capital Grains Tax.
I have to wonder how much of the “I must work” with women is the thought in the back of their mind “What if this doesn’t work out? What will I do then?”
Divorce among those who bother to get married, and breakups among those who don’t, is pretty common after all.
And yes, there’s an element of self-fulfilling prophecy there.
Well, may be, may be not. But they will be selecting somehow, even if they’re not actually writing it down and working through the numbers with pencil and paper.
I’d also hazard a guess, given your example, that the Civil Service just isn’t actually that attractive to 19 year olds anyway, it’s just inherently less sexy than finance, or tech start-ups, or whatever.
If there is an expectations effect, then it should show up by wading through something like NOMIS to identify high wage areas, then checking household composition and then local births against lower wage areas. The potential issue is whether the benefits system masks it or completely screws with it, or whether you’ve just got a tiny sample (there’s only about 1,500-ish PL and Championship level inflated bladder kickers in the country).
M – I have to wonder how much of the “I must work” with women is the thought in the back of their mind “What if this doesn’t work out? What will I do then?”
This is why the man has to supply his confidence.
Steve,
There’s various things that are good attributes for a man. My biggest issues are men not chasing girls and not working hard.
From the age of 15 I worked as much as I could. Saturday jobs, summer jobs. I asked a lot of girls out, got a huge rejection rate, but the odd one, I’d spend good money on, at least relative to my situation. I didn’t even understand the psychology of it. You just showed her a good time.
Blokes today are nearly all not working hard, and they’re gaming. And many hours of my misspent youth were on the ZX Spectrum, but if there was a disco or a party, that meant girls, and who wants to be bashing away at a keyboard on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon instead of making out behind the back door of the rugby club?
Ducky, the surefire guaranteed way to get women to take interest in you as a student is to be a married grad student. Speaking from experience, that is. Prior to that you are ignored by all, but The One.
Everyone wants what they can’t have.
It’s almost as if classic novels by female authors were written about this phenomenon in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Ducky – alpha fucks, beta bucks.
And all this shit happens on line these days anyway.
I bet even the teenage ladies have their modern equivalent of pencil and abacus out.
Western Bloke – Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was a destroyer of joysticks, but a great laugh with your mates.
I think even the shut-ins of the 80’s had more of a social life than Zoomers do now. You couldn’t take your Speccy (+ tape recorder, + portable telly) to the toilet with you and people rarely stared at Jet Set Willy on trains.