For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).

If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).

Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.

> folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids.

Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.

> Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.

Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans. You're basically talking about something so screwed up that it makes people straight-up ignore their built-in drive to have kids.

> Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans.

Sex is the straight-up genetic instinct with a strong drive. It used to correlate very closely with reproduction, so the difference between the two was meaningless. The issue is we managed to decouple them, with modern reliable hormonal birth control.

> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.

Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).

Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).

The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.

Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".

It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.

There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.

What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.

> Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".

Capitalism probably not the only cause, but I think it's a pretty central cause, and may be driving some of the other causes. I also think its worth pointing out because it can be one of those things that's so familiar that it can become invisible.

Birth control technology is probably the other big cause, because it would have the effect of "unblocking" the effect of other cultural trends on birthrate.

> There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school...

I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education.

I think a bigger factor is probably early focus on career pushing many women to try to start having children even later in their late 20s/early 30s. And that goes back to capitalist workplaces being pretty unaccommodating to parents (it's a bit better now, but work still demands your first priority to be your work).

> What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy.

That's not that new though: the book Bowling Alone was published in 2000 and is apparently based off a 1995 essay. COVID and smartphones just accelerated existing trends.

"I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education."

In cities and in richer families, yes. In rural settings, everything was sped up a bit, and, until very recently, most population worldwide was rural. Even if we look at highly fertile regions today (Afghanistan, Niger, Chad...), the first-time mothers tend to be between 16 and 18 and live outside the few cities that are there.

My own grandmother grew up in a rather underdeveloped corner of Slovakia in the 1930s (no electricity, wooden huts etc.), and a peasant girl who wouldn't be at least betrothed by 20 was seen as a bit weird.

Quite a lot of our previous fecundity was driven by rural mothers having six or seven children. This was a major source of "kid surplus". The urban population was never as fertile, plus there was some extra mortality from diseases and higher cost of food.

your suggestion of "socialize childcare big-time" is tried in EU, countries like sweden offers the best support of families and yet are parley getting the numbers up without immigration, the root of the drop is the change of women role in society, finding a political sweet spot is required, if women get a salary from the government when they have more than 3 kids then it might encourage families to take the big step and the women to spend more time doing the real full time job of home care, also families needs help with bigger housing, logistics and home duties when they have more kids, normally that help came from the grandparents but it's not happening anymore because the average age of the grandparents is higher, and baby boomers and "older generations" are assholes by blocking the housing options for their kids, i can also suggest that a adults with no kids can get some money by hour from the government for helping families with many kids as it is also needed sometimes.

solve this: - Housing issues. - Income issues. - Care and time issues.

It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.

Some countries are even working against people having children. Germany introduced a new law that now if the parents have their combined salaries over a certain amount, you get 0 child care. And the funny thing is that that limit is very low for people living in a big city. This policy came from the Greens actually, which are supposed to be more left leaning. But they couldn't care about this, or women or families, for them anyone who earns a bit above average needs to be punished. In our case, just when we were actually thinking of having a baby, we realised that if we actually would do it, our income would be basically more than halved because my wife earns even more than me, so not only would we earn way less, but we would earn way less with an extra child in our family, so yeah, thanks for the support.

I mean a more radical fix. Like, some kinda government-run breeding facility where folks drop off their newborns right after birth, and the state takes over raising 'em with standardized management and training. Then, once the kids are past the heavy-care phase, hand 'em back full-time to the parents.