@Jungibaaz @VCheng how much of it in layman percentage would be marital or social rather and how much is economics?
I could probably paste a dozen articles on how millennial lifestyle and economic stratification versus boomers makes it much much more difficult to maintain a family structure.
The current housing market inflation may seem like a supply issue but it directly impacts couples looking to “settle down” and put roots
Also, marriage is measured in licenses whereas couples living together (probably just holding off for a big day or not ready to commit) that doesn’t speak to the actual social constructs of offspring.
Well, anything we may say is at best a guess because of how hard it is to model and quantify these effects, especially when comparing them against one another due to the collinearity discussed before, and the fact that some of these factors are causing and reinforcing one another.
You raise a valid point about modern day difficulties and financial hurdles. I'll go one further in saying that millennials (and younger) are, and will be, far poorer relative to the generations that came before them in the West. The West is undergoing secular stagnation, market forces have been arrested in trying to bailout existing wealth, countries like China are eating into the West's historical monopoly of having the lion's share of the global middle class, and most of the countries we're considering are seeing ageing populations. So if there were ever a time to see falling birth rates due to economic constraints, it would be now.
However, my best guess is that the majority component is cultural and societal, and of course structural too. First off, the falling birth rates pre-date the current generation of young people, birth rates (quoted as 'TFR' in academic papers) have been falling across Europe for 200 years. Plenty of these countries saw falling birth rates even when real wages were rising and unemployment rates were low. Those were time periods in which having kids would be becoming more affordable, yet birth rates were still falling.
It also used to be the case in the US that the more educated women would be less likely to be mothers, now that gap has narrowed to much lower levels according to Pew.
That East Asian paper I talked about in the previous pages, I managed to find it, and it quotes that some one third of the fall in birth rates that they've observed can be directly attributed to increased labour participation of women. So I guess this lends some credence to assigning more weight to cultural, structural, and societal trends. Another paper I've just skimmed over right now says that the nature and instability of modern relationships, as well as the cost of having a family, make it too risky or just not possible to have kids. While this might lend a little credence to the economic view, the paper also says that government efforts to subsidise childcare, or other government transfers and payments during pregnancy, or via assisted reproduction, these efforts do little to move the fertility rate. They may be beneficial for families, but the effect on TFR is insignificant. So I suppose that even when some governments throw money at the problem, they can only do so much to fight the trend.
So to make long story short, I'm inclined to believe that culture and societal trends are bigger than the economic factors in causing falling birth rates. But that is just a guess.
Are your borned out of wedlock? Relax
Financially, it is often a big loss for men and so they are reluctant to get married. Somehow the system is rigged against men.
