Declining Fertility Is a Luxury Problem
Replace baby with plant. Plant doesn’t need French lessons.
You see it if you’ve got eyes. Less prams. Less crying in supermarket aisles. Fewer kids kicking dirt in backyards, fewer teenagers loitering at the servo.
It’s not just Tokyo or Seoul. It’s almost everywhere.
Three out of five countries now bury more than they birth.
And it’s indiscriminate – across culture, geography, and religion– which makes me doubt conspiracies, philosophical narratives, or that people are sitting in rooms contemplating their first child. No, the cause must be simple. Simple and universal.
What we often hear is that kids cost too much. I believe that’s true—but not in the way they mean.
The living cost crisis. Real incomes stagnating. Stable careers like marble relics. Home ownership out of reach.
The average age of a first home buyer in London: 35.
In Australia: 36.
That’s when a man is about expected to settle. When he’s finished wandering. And it’s no easier for women. Not only do they bear the baby, but they today feel the same expectations of men. Degrees, career, wealth. And all that by harsher age.
Don’t forget the kid itself. The clothes, shelter, the titanium pram. In the UK, the cost of raising a child to age 18 was estimated at 260,000 GBP.
A new luxury good.
But I’m still not convinced we’re poorer.
Materially. We live in an age of abundance.
Try lecturing a 1950s mother—who boiled cabbage, reused tea bags, and sowed clothes—that today’s youth are ‘too poor’ for children. She’d spit in her hand, light a smoke, and hand you a bottle of cheap whiskey. Single working adults today have access to more goods, more services, more conveniences, and more entertainment than the royal family of a century ago.
You can fly to Venice for a few ales. Buy a car the size of a tank. Plasma screens— once reserved for wizards – are now so common that the posh folk hide them to avoid appearing too lower-bourgeois. But the obesity statistics tell a bigger story. We are not starving. We are overfed.
I still agree the essentials have gone up: childcare, housing, and energy (which is no small thing). But how much of that is just from living in major capitals? UK household net wealth has risen by 20% since 2006/8. It's hardly reasonable to say that the majority of kids are born in economic depravity.
But there is a cost that has risen dramatically: the opportunity cost.
In economics, opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative you give up when you make a choice. When you spend an hour on TikTok, you’re not just ‘wasting existence’—you’re forgoing a walk, a workout, a date, or writing a novel.
When you have a child, you forgo a lot. Sleep. Time. Freedom. For some high-achieving professionals, you may forgo promotions, travel, and status. All that becomes harder—sometimes impossible—once you're timing breastfeeding and daycare.
Here’s what you should remember then: the more opportunities your society provides, the higher the opportunity cost of children.
What options did a young person have back then? Job in the sticks. Modest house. Pub’s alright. Today? Degree galore. Goat yoga. Tiktok poems. Find your soulmate. How about a start up? and why not do all the above based in Bali?
All these options blasted at you by social media– our temple of want. Everyone’s best bits beamed straight into your cranium. Fame. Bums. Dosh. And all of it pouring in, without any of the accompanying cost or sacrifice (apparently). no sweat, just filters.
And look at you sitting on the loo.
Gary Becker, the father of the economics of the family, predicted this decades ago. As societies grow wealthier, more abundant, the time of both men and women becomes more valuable. And since raising kids is time-intensive, the cost of having kids grows too—not in dollars, but in hours, in foregone ambition, in missed freedom.
Today, men and women value that freedom more than ever. They crave room to move, to shift, to not be pinned.
They don't scorn kids. They love their options.
Look at pets. Dogs and cats— they’re booming because they let you scratch the nurture itch without closing the door. Want to be a Crytok dance coach? Send little Fido to the vet for a bye-bye prick.
A toddler? Not so easy.
But look. People still want kids. They’re just having them later.
And that’s fair, but it’s part of the fertility struggle.
The average age of first-time mothers in Europe has risen from about 27 to 30 in just over a decade. In the US, it’s gone from 28 to 30.
That means the high-fertility window—when it’s biologically easiest to have multiple children—is shrinking. The odds of complications increase sharply with age, especially for women. By the time many couples feel ‘ready to rumble’ they have only a few viable years left. Some find out too there’s nothing left.
The worst part is, economically speaking, this:
the first kid is the most expensive, in terms of opportunity cost. You sacrifice the most freedom, take the biggest career hit, and adjust your entire lifestyle. But once you’ve had the first, adding a second or third is way easier.
You’ve already taken the hit, and a larger family becomes cheaper and cheaper.
Yet, because couples delay starting families, they often run out of time to continue them.
The whole thing is paradoxical. We’re not childless because we’re poor. But because we’re rich in options. In this age of abundance, we think we can have everything without caveat. Youth is our altar— potential worshipped, never spent.
But beneath it: the fear of limit.
of choosing.
of losing.
You see it in personal stories.
The man who never commits, chasing the perfect hips. The woman stacking degrees like pillows. The couple counting coins while time slips out the womb.
In rich societies, the problem is rarely lack of means. It’s an abundance of alternative dreams. And with that comes the dread of missing out.
So we wait.
We plan. We scroll. We say: not yet.
And sometimes, not yet becomes never.