> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
> the average number of years a woman spends being educated;
Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know
The main researchers associated here are Samir KC and Wolfgan Lutz. Their latest update (with a long list of coauthors) is from 2024 [1]; this is a followup of the important 2013 paper [2].
[1] https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/19487/1/WP-24-003.pdf
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344470
I don’t have any structured references saved, sorry.
My understanding is that the only real correlation is years in education, but this is at the national level; the very rich and very poor (which imperfectly correlates with level of education attained) tend to have more children than the middle class, but fertility rates are down across every income level. What this means is that if you look at two countries and see that one has a higher level of education than the other, you would expect the country with the higher level of education to have a lower fertility rate, but within both countries you would expect to see a relatively uniform decline in fertility across every income level, with a more pronounced decline around middle income levels.
This is maybe what’s being referenced when people saying they’ll have kids when capitalism gets sorted, but this isn’t seen in countries where standards of living have improved considerably.
The simplest theory is that more people are using contraceptives because they simply don’t want children. Some people might subjectively feel like they can’t afford to have children, but by world historical (and contemporary) standards of living this argument looks incredibly silly.
At some point years of education crimps into childbearing years - I know two women who could easily have obtained their degree even after having a child, but quickly got to a “fuck this shit I’m a mom” and left the program never to return.
I don’t even know if things like FMLA apply to college classes.
This was my theory initially but it doesn’t pan out due to the decline being observed among all income and education levels; you would also expect to observe a steeper decline among women with advanced degrees, but women with master’s degrees and doctorates actually have a slightly higher fertility rate than those with just a bachelor’s degree. Taking even 5 years at college still gives a woman around 15 to 20 years to find a partner and have children.