Read full text: https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/02/can-we-fix-our-demographic-doom-loop/
If women aren’t attracted to men who make less money, that would help explain why they aren’t marrying these men and having children. But also relevant to the decline in births are two myths that are slowly disintegrating despite ongoing mainstream denial. The first is the familiar trope that women only make 83 cents for every one dollar earned by men. Not true. When normalizing for job type, qualifications, and hours worked, the “gender pay gap” all but disappears, thus diminishing the pool of eligible males.
The second myth is that women are more likely to find fulfillment in careers than in having children. Also not true. A study of American women aged 18-55 found that married women with children were twice as likely to be “very happy” as unmarried women with no children and only half as likely to be “not too happy.” As long as this myth persists, however, women are impelled to choose career over children.
These findings all come with uncomfortable implications. Are women choosing to be alone because they have an innate need to only be with a man who is more able to provide for them than they can provide for themselves, and there are no longer enough of those men to go around? Are the only cultures where women still have babies above a replacement level those cultures that discourage women from having education and careers?
The cost of living, toxins in the environment, and the isolating impact of technology are all playing a role in the catastrophic decline in birth rates in developed nations. But there are also profound and very recent changes in how we collectively choose mates and choose to have families that are probably playing the larger role. If we ignore these cultural factors, we risk losing everything. The heritage we have painstakingly built over millennia may be erased because we didn’t want to talk about it. Babies don’t yet come in bottles. Women either get pregnant and give birth to them, or we go extinct.
For decades, fear of being called racist has suppressed honest debate over mass immigration. Similarly, fear of being called sexist prevents honest debate over why there is a population crash and what to do about it.
