These Fertility Stats Chilled Me: This Is Worse Than I Could Have Imagined

In this episode, we delve into concerning statistics about the declining intention of Gen Z and Millennials to have children. Malcolm reveals historical data showing a significant increase in childlessness compared to previous generations. We explore survey results from Pew, Teen Vogue, and OnePoll, highlighting that nearly 50% of young adults now plan not to have children. Historical context shows only 5% intended childlessness, translating to 15% actual childlessness. The episode discusses various factors impacting these trends, such as housing market pressures and societal expectations. We also examine how traditions like marriage and fertility are being affected by modern dynamics and propose potential cultural shifts and incentives to address the fertility crisis.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to go over some chilling statistics that I have been looking for, for some time at this point. Ooh. I've always sort of said in the background, like, because we found a bunch of other statistics on how few Gen Z plan to have kids today and I've always been like, what was that number historically and what percent actually completed having no kids?

But I could never find that number historically and I finally found it and the number is so much worse than you would imagine.

Simone Collins: Okay, let's go into this.

Malcolm Collins: So if we go at a few surveys here 2018 to 2023, a Pew survey looking at adults under 50 who said they plan to have no kids. The numbers went from 37 percent to 47 percent in 2023, so we're looking at around half in that survey, okay? Now, and this is Pew, if we go to Teen Vogue, you'll get slightly better results. Teen Vogue says for Millennials and Gen Z about a third plan to have No kids.

If you look at research by one poll into a [00:01:00] thousand people aged 18 to 34, this was in the UK it found that over one in four had ruled out having a baby completely and over 50 percent were unlikely to have a baby.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So you get the idea here. So we're looking at like maybe on the good side, like 31%, maybe up over 50%.

Simone Collins: But suffice it to say, having kids, or I guess the intention to not have any kids or expectation that one will not have any kids is higher now than it ever was before.

Malcolm Collins: Right. So I was trying to understand what did that look like historically? Historically, about 5 percent of women intended to be childless, about 15 percent ending up without children. Wow. And it looked at many years of data to get this. So this is like over a big swath of data. It wasn't just in that year, like obviously it's been going up.

It looked across countries, it looked across regions. Now where this gets chilling is that means that at a historic level, about 5 percent of people, women specifically in a country plan to have no kids. [00:02:00] And the number who actually end up without any kids, it's three times that. So 15%.

Oh

Simone Collins: no. So there's always had been a pretty big gap between people's intentions and reality when it comes to kids.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. How do you even do the math when 31 percent say they want no kids or when 50 percent say they want no kids? You can't just triple it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I'm thinking about all these other factors like The Canadian housing market, which is so insane.

I'm obsessed with this too, this new account that just compares really crappy houses in Canada with castles in Europe that cost less. And this just, there are so many headwinds. It might make people delay having kids. I think that's

Malcolm Collins: all nonsense. No, but I'm

Simone Collins: still thinking that like there, there are some factors.

This definitely happened with us. We're like, we're going to start our family when, and ours may not have been as solid [00:03:00] as it

Malcolm Collins: was. So that things were cheaper. Like you can move these people who actually are

Simone Collins: reasonable. You think people are willing to make sacrifices to have,

Malcolm Collins: but I'm pointing out that I don't think it's healthy to buy into their fantasies of, I can't afford a house in Canada.

Therefore I have to genetically commit. Seppuku, you know, like that is not, no, no, that's a silly, silly argument by people who do not want to think outside the box or do the extra work that's required of our generation. And as we've seen historically, you know, the numbers just aren't that correlated.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm at least those who have a lot of kids are having them for ideological reasons and not because it's the right time or it's convenient.

Malcolm Collins: But the point I was trying to make with this. for our listeners is when you talk to people and they go, how bad is it going to be? When people wonder why I just keep being like, no, you don't get how bad this drop is going to be.

If [00:04:00] you're looking at historical data to attempt to predict it. A lot of people just like blow it off. They're like, oh, it couldn't possibly be that bad. It couldn't possibly be almost nobody. And that's what it might turn out to be for this next generation, especially among educated groups, especially among groups with any degree of you know, intellectual freedom.

You can see that. I've got other stuff I want to go over here, but just in case people are wondering, if you're looking at me and you go, Malcolm, your face looks insane right now. What happened to you? I have had a horrible flu and have extremely swollen lymph nodes right here. And going to a doctor and maybe a hospital tonight, so we'll see but i'm never going to not give you guys an episode and we're going to go into more stats here in just a second

Simone Collins: talk about dedication to the cause malcolm I have massive respect for you, and i'm really sorry

Malcolm Collins: So right here, I'm going to put some graphs on screen these graphs cover [00:05:00] intended actual childlessness in percentages and then excess childless in percentages of the intended childness.

And you can see it by different countries going up. If you're looking at the countries that had lower kids those are now all of them had less kids than they had anticipated. But some had like Way less than they had anticipated. The ones with the most less were Italy at the very top, then Germany, Greece, Spain, Austria the Slovenia.

What you'll notice here is a lot of Catholic and Eastern European ones. That historically well, one, they don't use IBF as much. So of course they're going to be well below when you

Simone Collins: take any Catholic country that. As people marrying later and later, they'll have high expectations and then they'll refuse to use help and then

Malcolm Collins: and then they end up with these invisible fertility rates.

Yeah, you'll actually see here. That their fertility rate was 20 percent lower than they had [00:06:00] anticipated. Oh, man. Oh now if you're looking at the countries where it was not so bad, you're looking at countries like Bulgaria, Lithuania, the United States, the Czech Republic, France, Latvia, Norway. Estonia, Hungary, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

So again, it's, it's, this is one of those clear Protestant Catholic splits here. And I think that people do not understand how much these traditions are leading to their own extinction.