Birth rate decline: the rising age of marriage

Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. One of the issues, one of the reasons of the birth rate decline is that the average age of women at marriage is going up dramatically in basically every country. Interestingly enough, the, the country that's going up the highest is Sweden. The United States is actually quite moderate. The average age is still, you know, less than 30, which is lower than that for most other countries. That actually correlates with the fact that the United States is a little bit more religious than other countries too, which is a major factor. Having a late age of marriage is a problem because even when you want children, people are a lot less fertile, especially women in their 30s. So you have a lot of problems. Whereas if you get married in your early 20s, like say the Amish do, It's much easier to have a larger family if you want it. But the crucial thing to look at is why people are getting married later. And the reason is because there's a change in character in the general population, and it's got to do with dopamine insensitivity, which means that family and marriage is less appealing emotionally than it used to be. So people are delaying it and they're putting things like career and travel and other things first. That's your basic problem. It's a cause of a declining birth rate, but it's also a result of the change in character which is causing the declining birth rate.