WSJ’s Daily Shot covered our research - a society with no children?

Eugen G Tarnow  December 15 2017 08:41:37 AM

By Eugen Tarnow, Ph.D.
Avalon Business Systems, Inc.
http://AvalonAnalytics.com

The Wall Street Journal's Daily Shot covered our research.  See https://blogs.wsj.com/dailyshot/2017/12/15/the-daily-shot-median-household-net-worth-has-languished-since-the-recession/#FoodforThought and scroll to "Avalon".

The Daily Shot had shown that the workforce participation of women in Norway is higher than in the US. The Scandinavian countries always have an air of superiority and I decided to check it out.  It turns out that for each increase in workforce participation in Norway over US, there was a similar decrease in the number of children.  In other words, Norwegian women are not any more hard working than US women, there is simply a tradeoff between having children and going to work.

This trade-off is a world-wide phenomenon. Below are the graphs showing that as the workforce participation over the last 25 years increases, the number of children decreases.  The left graph shows the number of kids below 5 years of age, the right one the number of kids being born. In either case, an extrapolation shows that we will have no kids when the women work force participation is 59-60%.and the same extrapolation suggests it will happen 50 years from now.  If about two kids is necessary for replacement (I never quite understood this factoid) then our global population will start to not replace itself in about 12 years.

If we consider all the possibilities of the ending of the human race, nuclear war, supervolcanos, asteroids, global warming, etc., our decision to not have children is definitely up there.

Perhaps men need to start to work less and take over the raising of kids?

Of course, extrapolations do not take into account system changes, but it is food for thought.



As always, I reserve the right to be wrong.
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