These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
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My wife and I are well to do in the US, with a good household income that probably puts us in the top 2% or some shit. And to maintain the sort of life that used to be considered “middle class”, we need all of that income for our family of 4. Which means that we both work. We would have liked more kids. But there is only so much time to go around. Fuck are we supposed to do, have another kid and hire a nanny? Fuck is the point of that, we wouldn’t even be parenting.
You want more kids? Give people more time. Which means LESS WORK and BETTER CHILDCARE OPTIONS.
Not to mention better healthcare! Healthcare costs are the primary reason US citizens go bankrupt. Kids get sick, adults get sick, and if one of the adults in the house gets sick and can’t help bring in money for the kids then the entire household essentially goes from upper/middle to lower or bankrupt. If a kid gets very sick, oftentimes one of the parents has to stop working to argue every single claim that insurance would be paying but doesn’t, and call every department of every doctors office or hospital to get an itemized bill and get it lowered to a reasonable cost rather than them asking for a blank check. I’m afraid of having a sick kid and losing my job to their healthcare organization (note: not their healthcare directly, but calling insurance asking them to pay for life saving care, then calling hospitals asking why a small bandage is $1200), losing my house to bankruptcy after healthcare costs, and losing any semblance of future career due to time off and losing myself.
Word. What we really need is a societal overhaul. Not gonna happen, tho.
Absolutely. Taking healthcare costs off our backs would go a long way. The birth of my first kid absolutely wiped out the savings I had built up since getting out of school, and that was WITH insurance coverage. Six years of careful planning and saving just flushed down the toilet in an instant. There’s just no financially-responsible way to manage the risk of a hospital bill that could range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands depending on what does or doesn’t go according to plan, not to mention the following 18+ years of unknowns. It’s kind of a wonder that people are still having as many kids as they are these days.
Not to mention insurance won’t tell you what they cover until you have someone done. “Do you cover this” could mean they cover 10%, 70%, or 100%, and they don’t even know what their system will approve. This is with good insurance. Unless you are apart of the top 5% then everyone can be wiped from you very quickly without notice. Eat the rich anyone?
Not that we had much choice along the way, but you’re right, we were almost completely in the dark about how much anything was going to cost as it happened. Various groups were mailing us bills for the full amounts even before insurance had settled their portion. Nobody in the entire insurance and billing game is on your side.
It was a shock to my system to hear Americans setting aside 10k+ for delivering a child. What the fuck? For a country that claims it wants kids it sure as hell doesn’t act like it.
Here is the Canadian version: you go to the hospital, you deliver, you get the after care, then you go home. Cost to you: $0 (unless you came in an ambulance, then expect somewhere between $150-400?)
In the US ambulance can cost another $10k. They are local companies that have good connections with the local police stations, and the only way to contact them is through the police, and you can only get whichever has the best relationship with the police. I say police because to get an ambulance is the same emergency number. There is usually no competition and they can charge whatever they feel like and insurance may not cover much if anything. For an ambulance, there is literally no way to know how much you need to pay, because insurance determines if you were really experiencing an emergency or if you could have driven, and being unconscious isn’t enough to determine an emergency in many cases.
So much freedom. Freedom to die from preventable causes. Freedom to experience bankruptcy often. So much freedom.
I am you. I have two kids and fucking hell our expenses are getting out of control. Fortunately we spaced them out enough that only one is in day/preschool. But it’s still basically impossible to justify my wife being employed with only our youngest kid’s expenses. Looking at $2.5k per month of childcare expenses for one kid makes me want to give up.
My state, Oregon, passed a leave law that is currently saving our lives. Extra 4 weeks of leave that can be taken intermittently. We are financially fucked the moment we are out of our state leave. For reference I have an MS in ME and work in manufacturing. And my wife is one of the highest paid dental assistants I’m aware of.
Yes. This and this fella’s income.
Space between your kids and wait until they are ready to care for the other kids?
I hope you don’t have children that you’re forcing to be babysitters. I know people who did that growing up, their relationship with their parents is… not good.
What are you talking about?
I’m 6 years older than my sister and when we were younger, I have babysitted her every day after school until my parents came home a few hours later. That’s just not a traumatic thing at all.My parents had nine kids. The eldest still doesn’t talk to them, ten years after he left. Our two experiences must mean that the average reality is somewhere in between. Resentment sounds about right. /s
Isn’t it neat how we can have different experiences? Just because you are happy with your specific situation does not mean that certain actions won’t tend to cause resentment in the average home.
I think you’d agree that there is a stark difference between “babysitting your one sister” and “babysitting 8(!!) Children”. Yet, the comment I replied to just said broadly “letting one sibling babysit will traumatize that child and they will hate their parents” which I refuted as not being the universal truth the comment made it out to be. “Don’t cover your toddler’s nose” or “don’t let a toddler’s head fall back or forwards” are such truths. “Babysitting leads to resentment of parents” isn’t.
Also, babysitting and “caring for” are different things. While I absolutely agree that you should not be in a parenting role as sibling and being responsible for the upbringing of your younger siblings, babysitting usually means “watch for a few hours and keep the status quo so the child doesn’t starve or kill itself while the parents are away”, nothing more.
Besides, you closed your reply implying that I’m the outlier here because my experiences aren’t doing what would happen in “an average home”. Now don’t get.me wrong here but isn’t my home a little more average than your’s? Like… Going by the numbers in the very post above.
the comment I replied to just said broadly “letting one sibling babysit will traumatize that child and they will hate their parents”
It’s funny, i thought the exact opposite; your comment was saying that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, and the comment you replied to was obviously saying that kids baysitting kids is a bad habit to get into, but not terrible in moderation.
I am well aware that my family situation is an outlier, i just understood your comment to mean that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, so one counter example was enough to make my point, which was that you need to be careful about choosing to have enough kids so they can ‘parent themselves’.
Yeah, my last sentence sounds wrong in hindsight. Should have said “That is just not a traumatic thing to me at all” or "That was not a traumatic thing at all.
I absolutely agree that a line should be drawn where you expect children to prematurely… well… mature and be parents/adults.
In my case, I was 12 or so and my sister was 6, so we both came home from school and were alone until our parents got home from work. They never expected me to make her do things or something. When we hadn’t done our homework when they got home, the consequence was that the homework needed to be done still and we couldn’t go out and play. That’s it. My job was to make sure my sister got a warm meal (reheated; pre-cooked by my parents) and basically didn’T die. They asked us to do certain things while they were away (vacuum the living room or something) but they never really made a fuss when we failed to do it. They just made us do it later then.
The problem is that a child is the responsibility of the parents, and the parents alone. Could you have said no if you wanted to? You should have been able to, every time.
I personally take offense in strangers who tell me how my family life which I’m rather fond of “should have” been. You have no right to stamp your ideas of family onto me and my relatives. Period.
That isn’t happening. Stop trying to play the victim.
Oh? So uranibaba did not postulate their opinion on how responsibilities in a family “should be” and formulated them as absolute rights or wrongs? Did we read the same comment?
My oldest daughter is a bit over 6 years older than our baby. I might ask her to do something similar to what you are describing. Most people on here seem to think helping the family out equals trauma because birthing someone automatically means you retain full responsibility for them existing. It’s more complicated than that and I think the thing people are mad about is choosing to have kids in a way that you expect them to take care of each other.
For me, this always went under “caring for each other” which is something children should learn and practice. Besides, we always had a grand old time. They always made absolutely sure there was food to be warmed up, so that was.taken care of. After that, I’d play computer games upstairs, she’d watch cartoons downstairs and then shout for me when she heard someone coming. Then we’d tell our parents how we practiced piano or some shit and they knew what was up, yet let us go on.
The cost of raising a child has gone up thousands. No government has come close to subsidizing the increase.
That’s my experience too. I read the whole article to find out what countries have actually tried helping with the expenses of raising a child. The most financial help mentioned was a 30,000 LOAN that would be given to newly weds and only forgiven if they had 3 kids… 30k isn’t enough for one kid…
The only other financial help I saw was $7000 per kid in Russia.
And money is only one part of the problem. It takes time to raise kids. If both parents have to work full time there isn’t any time left to raise your kids even if you’re rich while working.
20th cenrury’s policies put a lot of effort into distancing us from our means and our families. Paying peanuts for a newborn wouldn’t help poor who are most likely to want it, only to dig themselves deeper. It’s, true, a systemic problem that can’t be solved with a mere donation.
Russia was already building their army back then hehe
Yeah, how much cash are they offering? If it’s a one time payment of like $1000, that won’t even cover the cost of nappies in the first year.
That won’t even cover the epidural for the delivery in the US
Even if you choose not to have kids, the sad thing is that you’ll spend the same money taking care of your parents when we stop taking care of our elderly in 20 years so the rich can have more tax breaks. The really sad part is you’ll spend all your money on both if you do have kids anyways
Have they tried raising the salaries so that one parent can stay at home and actually take care of the children, instead of sending them to way too expensive daycares. Having children is a “luxury” nowadays.
Just limit work to 35 hours (10-10-10-5) and have parents alternate schedules
Fuck that, have you worked 10 hour shifts? Pretty sure studies have shown you max out productivity at 6. I say 24 hour work week, 6 hours 4 days a week.
Yes, it is so much better
This is beyond out of touch with reality lol, you’ve been in your internet bubble for far too long
If you’re going to boil it down to bare economics, daycare should come out ahead. 2 people can take care of 9 babies versus a stay at home parent taking care of 1 or 2. And realistically today, advocating for a stay at home parent is telling women to go back to the kitchen. It’s regressive, unnecessary, and not actionable advice.
I would instead argue that modern life is not supportive of real-life, tight communities and lasting relationships. Online social lives are a starkly inferior substitute for real life but they’re easier to access and give the equivalent dopamine hit.
And realistically today, advocating for a stay at home parent is telling women to go back to the kitchen. It’s regressive, unnecessary, and not actionable advice.
No, what YOU said is regressive. The commenter never mentioned women; men can just as easily be house spouses, and that’s also without mentioning non-binary partners. You just assumed they meant women and ran with it
Edit: grammar
Also if more families could have a stay-at-home parent or could have the parents taking turns (for example, first parent A goes to work while parent B is with the kids for a week, and then do the opposite next week), then daycares would still have more resources to take of children whose families don’t want to or can’t have this kind of arrangement. And this would require bigger salaries so that families could afford to have only one working adult.
Are you seriously claiming that we’re done with equality in the workplace (positions, salary, respect)? No? Then stop misrepresenting what I said as some neanderthal spiel. We need daycare to give people options. Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.
Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.
Disagree with you there. Kids need to see their parents in person, and exploring humanities instead of prioritizing work over family and personal close relationships. Work isn’t the most important thing. I don’t care of it’s a gay couple, bi-couple, or a transgender couple with an adopted child. I think intrinsic to the support of LGBTQ communities should be every right afforded straight people, and I think income inequalities between genders needs to go away. At the same time, the value of the worker is what truly needs to change to help bolster all of the above. When we can get back to a much more regulated system (bringing back the regulations that make stock buybacks illegal), reducing the work week to just 32 hours but requiring that no TC concessions happen as a result, and forcing a more equitable share of prosperity from the corporate world to the workers, THAT will do more to help with many of the social issues we face.
Not to mention, the de-gentrification of communities, more rights for workers, affordable housing, and the tremendous benefits that would lead to in reducing our climate change risks, it’s asinine to split hairs over red herrings that distract us from who our true adversaries are: the rich. If you want to counter populism and win over Trump voters, you focus on the areas we have common ground with real life issues we’re facing.
Are you seriously claiming that we’re done with equality in the workplace
Can you make a point without a straw man? I said nothing of the sort.
And I don’t disagree with your point about daycare; I think people need options, but I disagree with your point about online relationships being dopamine-equivalent to “real” relationships, personally. I’d LOVE to have a family but I have neither the space nor the money to have kids.
Personally I think communal child raising should be more normalized; I think children experiencing many different and at times contradictory viewpoints is good for their development of critical thinking. But I don’t presume to fully know the solution to lose birth rates. I DO however claim that whatever financial incentives are being given, they aren’t enough.
You’re correct that my comment was not inclusive. That was not intentional on my part and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. However, this is a distraction from the main point.
It was not a strawman. I was making a statement about how society is right now, not how it should be. “men can be house spouses”, etc is true but until we have better workplace equality and in absence of daycare, the vast majority of prospective families are going to do some very simple budget math to figure out who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent. It is exactly the “kitchen” crap from years gone by but with some populist indirection to avoid calling it that.
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They don’t need a daycare, they need a parent/family
Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.
Why so they want to be some corporate slave for labor, fuck off
You raise another good point. Some people are simply not cut out for raising kids. Or interacting with normal people, for that matter.
Hmmm I’d like to stay at home and I’m the man. We both earn about the same, she earns more. I don’t trust daycare workers. You optimize for what you value, if you value economics you’re simply not going to optimize for what’s best for the child. Because at all the cross roads where the biological needs or psychological needs conflict the economical value you’ll not be making those choices.
At a coarse level, children from families with more money are better off so I disagree. Daycare is a small part of a child’s life. Really 3-4 years out of 18 and of those, only 9-5 at that. In exchange, you afford a nicer, safer town with better schools. If your family chooses a stay-at-home parent, you won’t afford those places when competing against dual income families.
At a coarse level, children from families with more money are better off so I disagree
And that seems like a correction that needs to happen.
I think of this daycare idea like public school, you ever notice the high income rich areas have a good public school system whereas the low income don’t?
If you’re on the whole okay with a certain percent of kids failing then on the coarse level it does seem like a good idea.
Sure, but people wanting families are facing these decisions right now. They don’t want to wait for society to get its head screwed on straight. The root comment was “stay at home parents! no more daycare!” but sailed right over all the macro and micro consequences of that.
Aldous Huxley described your vision of Utopia in brave new world. I think it’s ridiculous, unobtainable, and overall a terrible approach to society. Life is all about lasting and meaningful relationships, so any approach that views these as optional or outdated is broken before it even starts. Your entire premise is flawed from the start.
I think you read my comment backwards. I guess to follow your analogy, social media is “soma” and is a problem today.
I do believe that nobody “belongs in the kitchen” as far as gender roles go. What we’re up against is the weakness of the family unit in society and the breakdown of lasting friendships contributing to mental health issues. Online social lives are objectively bad for us, and I’d argue that the dopamine hit is just helping burn our dopamine receptors even more.
Regardless this reminds me of the classic argument that was had back in the 80’s about the kitchen itself, that it’s more “efficient” for people not to cook at home but to go to a place that prepares food en masse for a community. This was during the Soviet Communism era and there was a side debate going on. Western culture favored the family unit, while a communist concept favored social efficiency at the cost of liberties.
I don’t think it’s regressive to desire to have more time to be with your kids, whether it’s day care, school, etc. The real issue isn’t economics and progressive concepts, I think we’d all agree that a robust public education system is valuable, and that we should have economics that let us pick our kids up from school rather than send them to a day care. It’s not about sending anyone to the kitchen.
I like our kitchen, I like cooking food for the family, and I even enjoy it as a way to wind down after work. Modern life not supportive of tight knit communities and lasting relationships is complete bullshit. Modern life in that viewpoint is the continuous hustle culture and prioritization of work over a fulfilling life experience, and in my opinion your viewpoint is regressive for that reason alone. Kill hustle culture, eat the rich, and let’s have economics that give us a choice.
The food analogy is great. But I think there’s a quantitative difference in effort and long term commitment between what to have for dinner and how you’ll afford to raise your family.
Here’s a crazy idea, what if we end this second gilded age and return dignity to the working class? Instead of pushing for EV’s, how about we push for sustainable lifestyles and strengthen the family unit by returning much needed time back to workers? Instead of saying women belong in the workforce instead of the kitchen, how about we say nobody “belongs” in either and that we have the choices and freedom to make the decision? What if, thanks to an 8 hour workday four days a week, we drastically reduce the need for day care and allow parents to be more involved directly with their kids instead of setting a soulless worker drone example?
Lastly, how about you take a hint?
Plain raising of salaries would only drive hyperinflation.
Or the could offer free child care, but that’s socialism.
Assuming that additional income isn’t being wrestled back from the “profiteering rich” class: yes.
Even rightoid economists like Friedman disagree with this.
I assure you you can. The payment would have to cover all of the child’s needs plus a bit more but you definitely can.
But the cost of that would far exceed anything remotely reasonable. I say fuck it, let the birthrate drop for a few decades. The planet could use the break.
It’s only catastrophically low in traditionally “western” countries. the world’s population is still growing. It appears immigration is now a requirement to grow the economy. How interesting.
Conservatives/fascists are just gonna LOVE these next few decades. Climate change is set to destroy countless homes, displacing millions if not billions of people. If they think the “border crisis” is bad now, they’re gonna lose it then.
That’s why they want to militarize the border and normalize the concept of the ethnostate now, so they can machine gun climate refugees in the near future.
But don’t you dare call them fascists.
I think that’s predicted to level off in 60 years then drop. Though I guess it was level before the industrial revolution, so a lot could still change.
This, it’s not as though me and my partner don’t want children, it’s that we want children and we don’t want to be the source of their suffering for failing to care for them as well as we should, due to financial hardship.
A lot of childless people feel real responsibility to non-existent children, and feel like the world keeps pushing them down, making life harder, and making it feel impossible to be one of the people to have their own children.
Of course. Me and my significant other will end up doing the same thing. Both of us are from heavily catholic families but due to many reasons.
Yes, and the total payment would have to be substantial. The cost of raising a child from infancy to age 18 (not including university, obviously) in Canada is $320,000.
https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/making-it/how-much-does-it-cost-to-raise-a-child-in-canada/
Yep, it sounds weird but some politicians are floating the idea. It will never pass, but it’s the thought that counts(?). Of all people, Trump wanted to give a family 5k per child. So the idea exists in the us with some strong political people. ( because of lemmygrad I am saying this I don’t like Trump I am only using his statement to show how much the belief exists)
$5K one-time payment? No way!
$5K per month? Sign me up.
Florida is giving $8k per year for private school costs, and apparently homeschool can count. As against that idea as I am, I do think that could have a positive impact on population growth.
I could definitely see someone fantasizing having 4-5 kids then “retiring” to homeschool them. For $8k per year each kid.
Indiana gives $6k, but even though my daughter is in online school, she doesn’t get it because it’s a state program (except it’s run by Pearson). If she was in another online program, she’d get the $6k. Granted, we don’t have to pay tuition, so we don’t need the $6k, but it seems unfair to me.
Don’t live in fear of or apologize to the lemmygrad assholes, speak your piece.
Can’t believe the Mentos rap song campaign didn’t work. They’re the Freshmaker!
Just like the socalled “work shortage”, the problem is they aren’t offering nearly enough. That’s it.
Currently in Taiwan, citizens receive 2500 NT per month (i.e. $80 USD) per birth until the child is five years old. That’s a fucking joke.
Yeah there’s no way these programs are coming anywhere near the cost of having kids. Childcare alone is insanely expensive these days.
snort
Tried everything…except work life balance.
Also didn’t paying a livable wage
I suspect the rise of the dual-income family (often as a matter of necessity) has had a massive influence on this.
In addition to the absurd increases in cost of living etc.
Also the bleak outlook into the future.
In 1968, when Richard Nixon was first elected, “middle class” was defined as one Union type job paying for a family of four in a private house with a few luxuries. In those days, $1 million was a vast fortune. Nixon ramped up inflation with his Vietnam War buildup, and the Oil Crisis really increased it. Ronald Reagan got elected and by the time Bush Sr. finished the job, “middle class” was two incomes to keep the household going, and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
I sure as shit would have more kids if I had parental leave and child care options…
And money. And a place to live. And food prices that aren’t massively inflated.
Lot of folks can’t even afford to take care of themselves. Add a kid into that struggle? No thank you.
Look, if you didn’t want to be price gouged, you shouldn’t have paid those high prices! Vote with your wallet!
(For those who think I might be serious, I’m not. Voting with your wallet isn’t democratic, it’s literally plutocratic.)
Kidding aside, there’s a clip of some grocery store chain CEO talking about how they will raise their prices as high as the market will bear - it’s chilling, but, like, in the USA, it’s the law - it would literally be illegal if they didn’t.
Christ, it’s too expensive to be alive right now… fucking suffering.
That hasn’t stopped boomers
Kids are cheap to feed plus you eat their leftovers, so it’s a win win.
Don’t know if you know this, mate, but kids grow.
Not if you eat their food.
I know a fair chunk of my friends who have given up on the dream of kids. When both parents have to work full time at jobs their post secondary education qualified them for and court mental health issues because nothing they do for work feels meaningful just to scrape by with the bare minimum and accrue damn near nothing in savings… They don’t really want to have kids.
A lot of mammals when they don’t feel safe or secure in resources abandon or kill their young. Humans given control over their reproduction just seem to settle on raising dogs because they are cheaper.
It also kind of feels like society hates me for being ADHD and wants me to suffer so why would I want to bring another human into this world that has felt for 30+ years like a door slamming in my face.
I like when I tell boomers I don’t feel like I will be financially able to raise a kid until I am much older than I should be for having a kid and they smile and with a nostalgic look say “Oh, nobody is ever ready! You will figure it out trust me! We did!”. Makes me want to punch them in the face.
I’m with you on this. My family is, let’s just say, prone to melancholy and leave it at that.
My having children means there’s a significant likelihood that I’d be bringing even more misery into the world. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.
They might also recognize that shrinking family size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Lower birth rates around the world could lessen environmental degradation, competition for resources, and even global conflict, Wang Feng, a sociology professor at UC Irvine, writes in the New York Times.
In every single one of these “depopulation crisis” articles the “maybe a shrinking population isn’t entirely a bad thing” perspective is always in a throwaway paragraph near the end, if it’s even mentioned at all.
Also consistently missing in these types of articles: an actual breakdown of the costs of raising a child (including the opportunity costs to one’s career as the result of parental leave) vs the benefits the government is offering.
Also invariably missing: a description of the serious short- and long-term physical and mental risks of pregnancy and childbirth; at least this article mentions maternal mortality, but there’s so much more at risk even in a “healthy” pregnancy and birth, from post-partum depression to incontinence. Occasionally articles will muse about women’s fear of “frivolous” conditions like weight gain and stretch marks, but never life-altering ones like severe hemorrhaging, organ failure, and fistulas. How many women are postponing or forgoing pregnancy because they’re not willing to risk life and limb to procreate? We’ll never know as long as no one thinks to ask.
I have read a million of these “birth rates are dropping despite government efforts” articles, and they all echo the same pro-growth propaganda while conveniently neglecting these major, crucial points. JOURNALISTS, DO BETTER!
In every single one of these “depopulation crisis” articles the “maybe a shrinking population isn’t entirely a bad thing” perspective is always in a throwaway paragraph near the end, if it’s even mentioned at all.
That’s because people aren’t willing to leave the “babies are the super bestest things ever and if you are super happy then you’re a horrible person” narrative.
Woman of childbearing age here. Lots of my friends took another child off the table when Roe fell. Being potentially forced to die and leave your existing children orphaned is a big deterrent, turns out
Plus it just fucking sucks to be a mother these days. Things are a lot more egalitarian than they used to be, but society still expects the uterus-having to take on more of the child caring tasks, and the emotional labor especially tends to still fall disproportionately on women. Our careers suffer, our bodies suffer if we bore (and possibly nursed) the baby/ies, our mental health suffers from the unrelenting societal pressure and neglect, plus all of the other shit that every other parent deals with as well. The women and mothers I know are fed up and so, so tired. (I’m not bitter… not at all… :D)
I love my children to pieces, but if I had seen an older sister go through this I might have opted out of having kids entirely. Two of my sisters have.
Yeah can’t blame the ladies for that one, if I were a woman I’d be mighty tempted to seal up my womb too.
Interestingly this is actually how a lot of men feel about their own procreation. You’re one broken condom away from being beholden to an unwanted child and a selfish mother. It can ruin your life before you’ve even had a chance to start. Hell teenage boys raped by older women have had to pay child support.
I’d love to see this lead into a useful conversation about the rights of both sexes but it has been pretty one-sided so far.
Sure you can. We could limit the work week to 32 hours, pay higher salaries such that homes and goods are affordable again.
People who complain about falling birth rates usually want more humans to cheaply exploit as a resource.
In a world with fewer humans, human life and human labors are more valuable.
We should be celebrating declining birth rates, as infinite growth is not possible in a finite system and most of the existential threats we face are due to population pressures.
I celebrate wildly when anyone brings up the topic. Rude, yes, but it gets the point across.
infinite growth is not possible in a finite system
That’s one of the real problems. Economists and the people in charge have no idea what a successful zero-growth economy might look like. To me it seems pretty obvious. The economy may not grow in GDP or anything, but automation and tech advances mean that people spend less and less time actively working.
Let’s say food production. In the past running a farm required dozens of farm workers. These days with automation one person might be able to do it all by themselves. If current farms produce all the food a country requires, you don’t need more farms, and you don’t need more farmers. No growth is just fine.
If cars are being made more and more safe, and more and more durable, people can go longer between buying cars. That means fewer cars being made, which means “the economy is slowing down”… but that’s a good thing. Unnecessary production is reduced.
Part of the problem is that economies have traditionally been based on borrowing assuming more growth in the future, and having the kids pay for the retirement of the olds. Both those things need to stop. Some borrowing based on things improving in the future is probably smart. Things will probably be more efficient in the future, so there will be more surpluses to pay off debts. But, we shouldn’t be borrowing assuming that the economy is going to keep growing at X% per year. As for retirees, have them pay for themselves. That doesn’t mean you’re assigned a 401(k) at birth and that’s all you get when you retire. But, it does mean that a generation pays into a pension system during their lives, then is paid out of that pension system when they retire. It’s ridiculous to assume that there’s always going to be a pyramid shape to the economy and the big base of the pyramid will support the peak.
A shrinking population wouldn’t be a good thing for humanity if it continued until humanity disappeared. But, it’s unlikely that will happen. What’s probably going to happen is that when the world is less crowded the population will stabilize. The optimum population of the planet might be significantly less than a billion, so it might be that the population growth will go negative for a while.
Reducing the world population is the obvious answer to slowing the detrimental effects humankind are having on the earth.
Completely agree and we need to figure out a way to decouple population growth from keeping the economy afloat. It feels like we’re approaching the inevitable collapse of the infinite growth pyramid scheme. This isn’t rational and was always destined to fail.
But think of the capitalists! How will the stock market continue to make gains if there are less people?
It’s worth noting that communists and socialists also depend on population growth to sustain their civilizations as do trees and rabbits and beetles. It’s possible that economic systems don’t really matter all that much here.
Population collapse isn’t the road to some sustainable future. It is how species go extinct. Perhaps we are on that road, so it goes. But whistling past the graveyard pretending that “Star Trek” is on the other side is silly.
We’re billions of people on the planet. Most jobs don’t even pay enough to feed a couple of people. I believe that there is an oversaturation of people on the planet and this has caused a devaluation of their labor.
Europe would have remained feudal for quite a longer time if the population collapse caused by the black plague hadn’t happened and caused the demographic changes that it did. Without the plague, peasant labor would be plentiful and the status quo would not have changed. However, with the population reduction, the class in power had to concede to enough changes that brought about the Reinassance and the Industrial era quickly after.
In the Bronze age, without the climate changes that brought about cold and dry conditions and triggered the fall of the city states ruled by an oppressive theocratic class, humans would have still been tied to those stifling conditions for longer and wouldn’t have brought about the classical era.
With the onset of AI and advanced robotics, population collapse will allow people to see their labor valued adequately, instead of just more and more people in the workforce working more hours and getting paid less and less, doing meaningless busy work jobs to pay for things that they don’t need or enjoy, like crypto, gambling or online cam girls. A controlled collapse by fertility is not only non threatening, it is also desirable and the most acceptable way to cull numbers a bit. We need this, otherwise, the base of the pyramid will only get wider while the top will only get slimmer. Tragedy breeds suffering, but also change and we NEED change. The problem is the transition, but after the transition, we’ll be in a better place as a society and we will bring about change.
What is happening now is another adjustment, like the ones you mentioned in your post. Over a million people in the US died of Covid since 2020, and a lot of them worked some sort of job. And the people still around are no longer willing to sell themselves to a company 80 hours a week, so unions are starting to pop up.
Most of the people who died were old and didn’t work. COVID is much, much more likely to kill someone in their 70s vs in their 40s.
I’m not suggesting population collapse brings a better system. It’s a shame that the current system is built to collapse by short sighted greed on this mass scale, as there was an opportunity for tremendous gains to society through the technology we developed.
as do trees and rabbits and beetles.
Trees, rabbits and beetles are not experiencing long-term population growth. Their populations are long-term stable.
Scientists have been studying wolves and moose on Isle Royale for more than 60 years. It’s an isolated island where the wolves are the predator and the moose make up 90% of their diet. When the wolf population gets too high, the moose population drops. When the moose population drops, there isn’t enough food, so the wolf population drops. Without a lot of predators, that allows the moose population to rise. That then provides food for a lot of wolves, but means that there aren’t enough trees to feed the moose, who start having diet issues.
The number of wolves on the island has gone as high as 50 and as low as 2. The moose population has gone as high as 2400 and as low as 385. The important thing to sustain these populations isn’t “growth”, it’s stability. Bad things happen when the populations get either too big or too small.
Only one creature has had exponential growth for centuries, and it’s destroying the ecosystem in the process. Nature likes steady state solutions, not growth.
We have enough people, especially now that we are entering some form of second stage of automatization with AI developments. We’ll be fine if we end up being a few billion less.
What we should be aiming for is a more steady state economy, and not one that relies on endless growth (outside of like, new technology and gathering knowledge). Even today there are so many jobs that could be eliminated by more sane resource distribution, like eliminating fast fashion, building things to last, etc.
If nothing else, it buys you time to think about solutions before things get catastrophic.
Who’s going to take care of the elderly like you in 40 years?
Migrants? Robots? More efficient care workers? Themselves? Other elderly people? Having kids because one feels entitled to their future labors doesn’t seem fair or reasonable.
That’s a pyramid scheme
Life’s a scam
But the solution is not to scam others.
Do you suggest that the world’s population revert to a Quaker lifestyle? Seems really boring.
You probably meant Amish. Quakers lifestyle these days is just being really nice most of the time, in my experience.
Not, I meant Quackers. The Amish are horrific people.
You can actually by making the families cost of living and housing needs affordable on one parents income. One off baby bonus bribes and stuff that governments do will never actually work when both parents have to work themselves Into dust just to make ends meet.
