The social democratic model of offering people economic leverage and an enhanced standard of living has rarely superceded the medieval practice of forcing people to procreate and beating resistance with an iron fist. What we’re seeing with people like Musk is an kind of Neo-Fascism. The Fascists had public campaigns/policies aimed at drastically increasing demographic rates for purposes of military expansion – a motif explicitly derived from precisely the same practice conducted universally in the ancient world.
What i’m saying is a radical polarization of a society as a consequence of wealth inequality and generalized economic stagnation tends to produce just as much forceful and brusque political behavior as it does political charity.
Well all the people have to ask this, since only few are thinking about it and are getting attracted to virtual world rather than the real one makes it even harder.
In the words of a very racist old lady who lived on my street: these brown people are having more kids than they can afford so we (Canadians) subsidize them with our tax dollars. That’s why we need to cut all these government programs that encourage them.
Me: wouldn’t that hurt your daughter too since she gets the same support for her kids?
Her: that’s different, we’ve lived here for generations, we’ve earned it.
So there it is in a nutshell: it’s not that declining birth rate is so important, it’s that birth rates are rising for “the wrong type of people”
Yup. And if declining birth rate is so important, why not fund women’s healthcare research? Endometriosis affects 1 in 8 women and causes infertility up to 50% of the time, but gets significantly less funding than most other diseases that affect far fewer people. Women’s healthcare is in the dark ages still, I fear.
Declining birth rate is only important in the sense you’re reading about because of the capitalist infinite growth model and its need for an ever increasing population. It’s not possible to have this type of society AND make it affordable for young people with few built up assets to afford children and a comfortable lifestyle both.
People who write articles freaking out about it are saying the things they do because a declining birth rate in a highly technologically developed society like Japan is a problem because when the biggest segment of the population is too old or sick to work, every industry suffers and money is lost.
All of the first world capitalist nations have this problem already and as the population of lesser developed second and third world countries become more educated and catch up to the level of development in places like Europe, they will start to have declining birth rates too. Once a particular society’s young people learn that there ARE other ways to live besides the traditional track of get married – have kids – work until you die at a job you hate…they start living different lives and their society eventually changes.
The only way people stop freaking out about declining birth rates is if they let go of the capitalist “must buy and consume” lifestyle and return to a more pastoral, pre-industrial revolution lifestyle.
Since few people are willing to do that, we will eventually “infinite growth” ourselves into extinction from pollution, disease or starvation in the not too distant future.
Congratulations, that’s how any competent nation facing severe population decline goes about it and then tossed some extra incentives at people who have kids.
The declining birth rate is not important. There are too many people on this planet as it is; reducing that number without a major war or plague would be a GOOD thing, not a bad one.
That would require the people who have to much to give some of their excess to people who don’t have enough. If there is one thing people with to much hate it’s giving up things they don’t need just to help someone in need.
Anyone who talks about birthrate is leaving out the part where they really only care about the birthrate for white people. You can’t just help make raising a child more affordable in general, because then Black and Latino people would ALSO find it easier to raise children.
You misunderstand, they don’t care if you have a comfortable or fulfilling life, they want to continue to profit off of future generations of tax paying consumers.
No one can agree how to actually accomplish this task. As a Republican and they would say “a 1950s America would do it”, a Democrat would likely say a different era. There is no one universal approach
Because they don’t *just* want more babies. There are conditions:
The right color babies.
The right class of babies.
The reasons they are so worried about birth rates are varied, but kinds boil down to those two categories.
There’s a strong racial/tribal component where they are worried about being “replaced” by people who aren’t white, which they think of as a default condition for being in charge and running things. In their diseased minds having too many “brown” people will give them enough leverage to insist on a measure of control, and that’s simply unacceptable because they aren’t fit to run things. Because they aren’t white. To avoid that, they want to out-breed them.
Secondly, their power comes from and depends upon great and disproportionate wealth, and that requires capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, requires continual and eternal growth. If the population declines, that growth stops and right quick the whole system will collapse. Now, what they want are obedient and fearful serfs to run the machines and do the scut work and continue to prop up the system while reaping few or none of the benefits.
Because it’s not about empowering people to have kids if they want or making the world better so more people want them. It’s about oppressing women and boosting the white birth rate.
The concern over the birth rate in general is just a very transparent fig leaf.
Because keeping women desperate, poor and silenced so they can’t challenge the status quo and the power of the rich who profit from this system is more important than actually having healthy, cared for kids
Because they need the poor, uneducated kids to work at McDonalds and, later move up to factories and coal mines. Throwing a couple of thou at poor parents now to have kids, but keep them poor the rest of the kids lives guarantees poor, uneducated, downtrodden workers later on.
It’s cheaper and more controlling to just cut-off access to abortion care instead. If they think they can get away with it, they’ll always go for stick over carrot.
Meh, I dont think our politicians actually care enough about the future right now to do anything about it. Like what if ‘the other side’ is in power when the payoffs happen and they get the credit?! They just wanna do things that benefit them now or make them look good now. But it’s all performative and not actually for any long term benefit. In fact they seem happy to make the future significantly worse for everyone for small gains now.
There have been many attempts to reverse this in advanced modern societies as well as in some empires and countries in the past but all pretty much fail. There are so many complicated reasons birthrates drop and they simply cannot be fully addressed.
The truth is that humans have to come to terms with overpopulation and climate change and must begin to prepare for a world economy not revolving around impossible eternal growth.
Who do you think is even capable of doing that aside form various cults but to do it over the entire or even 1/2 of whatever country you think this is possible in.
I don’t understand this bullshit at all. I worked directly with a guy a few years ago, I can’t remember his background but it was one of them that needs to have as many kids as they can.
Every fucking day this guy would ask why I don’t want kids. I told him it’s not for me and my partner and I both agree on it. It has nothing to do with finances or anything. I just don’t want them and neither does she.
After a month of this being asked to me every few days, I lost it and told the guy “dude, I don’t want kids, I don’t need to justify why so fuck off and mind your own business”.
He then (without my knowledge) complained to my boss about what I said. Remember that I didn’t know about any of that part and he wasn’t in the next day. My boss came to me the next morning and told me he was terminated based on him asking me this and because he was trying to push religion based views, which is what he explained to my boss as why I said what I said to him.
So moral of my response, not everyone needs to have or wants kids. Some of us are happy living the life we have. Mind your own business. If you want kids then have kids but don’t look down on others who just don’t want them.
How’s it going to work telling vast swathes of people that the property they’ve spent years scrimping and saving for will be worth a lot less? Good way for a government to commit suicide. Kicking the can down the road means it’s some other poor sod’s problem.
To a lot of people – particularly conservatives, life is a zero sum game.
Lets say there’s $100 on the table. You’re getting $30 and I am getting $70.
For you to receive any more than $30 it’s gonna have to come from me. Even a $5 raise is going to come from me somehow – whether that’s less wages, increased prices, or increased taxes. As such these people will always vote against wage increases, unions, social welfare, school levies and anything else that benefits society on the whole. That would include measures to improve quality of life and make having children more affordable.
In this model, it’s every man for himself. It’s the bucket of crabs. For any crab to get out of the bucket they have to step on everyone else. Furthermore, once they are out of the bucket (that’s a house and at least once nice car in America) they don’t want other crabs to escape because it would diminish the effort they put in escaping the bucket.
It’s a very simple way of thinking that ignores things like corporate profits and greed, individual wealth, tax brackets, stagnant wages, the United States GDP as a whole, the stock market, how the government actually acquires it’s money, and many other things that should be part of the conversation but are too complex for most people who are not economists.
Given that our country is relatively balanced it’s really just tug-o-war back and forth between the factions with nothing positive really happening.
declining birth rate is only a problem in unhealthy, unsustainable economies. resources are not endless, they never were, and anything designed around them being endless is just ignorant as fuck honestly.
Because it’s not just about creating more people. It’s also about forcing women out of the workplace, forcing women into a strictly domestic role, making women dependent on their husbands, and about making more people of a specific race/ethnicity.
If the government actually enacted policies that made it easier for couples to have and raise kids, those couples would have more freedom to conduct their lives as they themselves see fit. Conservatives don’t want that.
yeah, just make making preschool and kindergarten free and available would probably dramatically raise birth rates. it would probably pay for itself with the number of stay at home parents that could enter the workforce or go from part time to full time.
Humanity doesn’t usually address problems before they become catastrophic. Sometimes even then it doesn’t address them properly. Covid is the best, most recent example of that.
Real problems are uncomfortable to solve, they require people to sacrifice. Unless society is willing to sacrifice for the greater good, the problem won’t be addressed.
It’s only important because Whites aren’t having that many, or any at all, and the government is worried about not having enough wage slavers. That’s why they (US) trotted out that laughable 5k idea. Pregnancy can be beautiful, child birth is horrific. Then you add the sleepless nights, tantrums, quality of education, worrying if you’re failing as a parent. If someone sees parenting as lowering their quality of life then there’s nothing you can do to change their mind.
Because fixing the declining birthrate would effectively require dismantling capitalism wholesale, and that’s not abv8sble solution for the oligarchs that benefit from it
Because the reasons for the lower birth rate are not entirely financial. A lot of people just don’t want kids, and given the choice, will choose not to have them.
There are personal and cultural values at work which will prove to be resistant to policy intervention.
I suspect it has a lot to do with trying to force people back towards the Stay at Home Mom era, even if it truly is not and can likely never be affordable again.
Ironically it’s the opposite. Look at the people who are having kids in the US and it’s not the well off ones. Look at it globally and it’s not the rich ones either. Historically and currently the people who have the most kids are the ones in the worst situations. People in Niger are having 6 kids per woman while a quarter of the population is almost starving to death. Everyone in the US (even the homeless) can easily “afford” the historical norm of having a kid which is to give them enough calories to barely stay alive. Obviously that’s not acceptable now but that’s how things have been throughout almost all of history. But culture changes and so did our ideas on what raising kids should be as we have gotten wealthier. While there might be some admirable goals like universal health care, affordability, home prices, family support, support for women, etc none of them have led to people having more kids when implemented. Incentives don’t matter either, screaming at people to have kids doesn’t matter, executive orders to have more kids doesn’t matter. It’s entirely a cultural decision
That’s a good question! In theory, if housing were affordable and living costs weren’t insane, more people might consider having kids. But banks profit massively from mortgages, and they’re incentivized to keep housing prices high. Meanwhile, if the governments wanted to fund policies to make family life cheaper (like subsidies or tax breaks), the scale of money needed is mind-blowing. To outmuscle the housing market’s greed or fund universal childcare, you’d need trillions. And most politicians would rather cozy up to banks than fight for policies that actually help families.
I would have had a boatload of kids (at least 3) if I could afford it. I love being a mom. But I can’t afford it. And being responsible means staying within my limits.
First and foremost we have not built enough housing for a long time now and the housing crisis makes family life very difficult because you need more space for a family, generally speaking.
In short in the last couple centuries we have learned to make all manner of things far, far more efficiently than in the past. Say in 1940 an auto worker could make one car a week. Now they can make five cars in a day. Per one human’s worth of effort cars are way cheaper and more efficient than they used to be. (these are all made up numbers, just serving as an illustration)
Child care has seen very few improvements in efficiency so a worker today can effectively look after about the same number of kids as they could in 1940. This means child care has become proportionately more expensive as compared to TVs, cars, whatever else. We could definitely make it more affordable but that probably means subsidies of some sort and those can get expensive.
So a mix of bad policy choices (housing) and shifts in society that make kids expensive, and we don’t want to pay for it as a society.
Most countries that go out of their way to make childcare more affordable, shorten work hours and increase welfare, etc. have some of the lowest birthrates.
Moreover, immigrants in the exact same countries still have many more children than the natives. So “people can’t afford children” is not the main constraint.
As for making it more “attractive ” to young people, that’s easier said than done. You’ll need to fundamentally change the current culture around children and the average life path of young adults.
Someone else will just figure out how to siphon the savings from you and you are back where you started. A classic example is two working parents, as it was a temporary band aid to afford a few kids, but now everything has gotten so expensive that it’s near impossible without two incomes.
Another example: easy and cheap student loans…. well guess what everyone will just raise tuition.
They would have to socialize healthcare and childcare or subsidize it to the extreme in order for having children to be remotely attractive from a financial perspective. Childcare for 2 kids in a mid to high cost living area is more than most people earn in a month.
Parents get huge tax breaks, making the tax burden on childless citizens greater, to pay for the schools and resources for the children of the people with the huge tax breaks
Because that isn’t why they’re not having kids. Other countries with robust social welfare systems also have declining birth rates. The reason for this is urbanization. There’s no way to reverse this. Humanity is reaching it’s carrying capacity and the population will level out by the end of this century.
Younger couples don’t want to have kids because they don’t believe they can afford them. They struggle to buy a house and set up a home and almost always both salaries are used up just running it. How can you expect people to then consider starting a family with childcare costs and all the other financial strains children add?
If you make getting a home achievable, babies will follow.
Comments
The social democratic model of offering people economic leverage and an enhanced standard of living has rarely superceded the medieval practice of forcing people to procreate and beating resistance with an iron fist. What we’re seeing with people like Musk is an kind of Neo-Fascism. The Fascists had public campaigns/policies aimed at drastically increasing demographic rates for purposes of military expansion – a motif explicitly derived from precisely the same practice conducted universally in the ancient world.
What i’m saying is a radical polarization of a society as a consequence of wealth inequality and generalized economic stagnation tends to produce just as much forceful and brusque political behavior as it does political charity.
Well all the people have to ask this, since only few are thinking about it and are getting attracted to virtual world rather than the real one makes it even harder.
Couldn’t agree more @OP
Where’s the money in making things more affordable?
because politicians love saying theres issues and then not doing anything to fix said issues if the fix could possibly negatively impact them
The suffering is the point.
In the words of a very racist old lady who lived on my street: these brown people are having more kids than they can afford so we (Canadians) subsidize them with our tax dollars. That’s why we need to cut all these government programs that encourage them.
Me: wouldn’t that hurt your daughter too since she gets the same support for her kids?
Her: that’s different, we’ve lived here for generations, we’ve earned it.
So there it is in a nutshell: it’s not that declining birth rate is so important, it’s that birth rates are rising for “the wrong type of people”
I think the declining birthrate is fantastic. It comes with economic difficulties, but long term it will absolutely be beneficial.
Because the young people who are not having kids are not the poor ones.
Yup. And if declining birth rate is so important, why not fund women’s healthcare research? Endometriosis affects 1 in 8 women and causes infertility up to 50% of the time, but gets significantly less funding than most other diseases that affect far fewer people. Women’s healthcare is in the dark ages still, I fear.
We live too long for considering having kids a “profitable” investment, so no amount of money will make having a family “attractive”.
But then the extremely wealthy people would have less money!
Declining birth rate is only important in the sense you’re reading about because of the capitalist infinite growth model and its need for an ever increasing population. It’s not possible to have this type of society AND make it affordable for young people with few built up assets to afford children and a comfortable lifestyle both.
People who write articles freaking out about it are saying the things they do because a declining birth rate in a highly technologically developed society like Japan is a problem because when the biggest segment of the population is too old or sick to work, every industry suffers and money is lost.
All of the first world capitalist nations have this problem already and as the population of lesser developed second and third world countries become more educated and catch up to the level of development in places like Europe, they will start to have declining birth rates too. Once a particular society’s young people learn that there ARE other ways to live besides the traditional track of get married – have kids – work until you die at a job you hate…they start living different lives and their society eventually changes.
The only way people stop freaking out about declining birth rates is if they let go of the capitalist “must buy and consume” lifestyle and return to a more pastoral, pre-industrial revolution lifestyle.
Since few people are willing to do that, we will eventually “infinite growth” ourselves into extinction from pollution, disease or starvation in the not too distant future.
That would take away from the tax cuts for the wealthy
Congratulations, that’s how any competent nation facing severe population decline goes about it and then tossed some extra incentives at people who have kids.
The declining birth rate is not important. There are too many people on this planet as it is; reducing that number without a major war or plague would be a GOOD thing, not a bad one.
Because declining birth rate isn’t totally a bad thing.
That would require the people who have to much to give some of their excess to people who don’t have enough. If there is one thing people with to much hate it’s giving up things they don’t need just to help someone in need.
Every other nation has figured out universal health care, education, retirement, housing, etc.
We figured out how to tax poor and working people to redistribute money to billionaires.
Not a win-win.
They want more kids to have more cheap wageslaves. Giving more money to people is counterintuitive to that.
Anyone who talks about birthrate is leaving out the part where they really only care about the birthrate for white people. You can’t just help make raising a child more affordable in general, because then Black and Latino people would ALSO find it easier to raise children.
Hope that helps.
Because that would cost wealthy people money, and would provide relief to the proles. That’s the last thing they want.
You misunderstand, they don’t care if you have a comfortable or fulfilling life, they want to continue to profit off of future generations of tax paying consumers.
No one can agree how to actually accomplish this task. As a Republican and they would say “a 1950s America would do it”, a Democrat would likely say a different era. There is no one universal approach
Who’s doing the ‘making’? And what’s their incentive?
Prices aren’t going down. The only thing that could happen is wages can increase because wages are stagnant. How can I afford everything for a family?
Because they don’t *just* want more babies. There are conditions:
The right color babies.
The right class of babies.
The reasons they are so worried about birth rates are varied, but kinds boil down to those two categories.
There’s a strong racial/tribal component where they are worried about being “replaced” by people who aren’t white, which they think of as a default condition for being in charge and running things. In their diseased minds having too many “brown” people will give them enough leverage to insist on a measure of control, and that’s simply unacceptable because they aren’t fit to run things. Because they aren’t white. To avoid that, they want to out-breed them.
Secondly, their power comes from and depends upon great and disproportionate wealth, and that requires capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, requires continual and eternal growth. If the population declines, that growth stops and right quick the whole system will collapse. Now, what they want are obedient and fearful serfs to run the machines and do the scut work and continue to prop up the system while reaping few or none of the benefits.
i think a declining birth rate is good.
less traffic.
less crying babies on airplanes.
less tax money on schools.
Because it’s not about empowering people to have kids if they want or making the world better so more people want them. It’s about oppressing women and boosting the white birth rate.
The concern over the birth rate in general is just a very transparent fig leaf.
Boomers still outvoted the young and they don’t want that.
Because that would impact quarterly profits.
because “how dare young people use all their money buying avocato toastes”?
Because keeping women desperate, poor and silenced so they can’t challenge the status quo and the power of the rich who profit from this system is more important than actually having healthy, cared for kids
Because they need the poor, uneducated kids to work at McDonalds and, later move up to factories and coal mines. Throwing a couple of thou at poor parents now to have kids, but keep them poor the rest of the kids lives guarantees poor, uneducated, downtrodden workers later on.
But then you can’t import people for cheap.
It’s cheaper and more controlling to just cut-off access to abortion care instead. If they think they can get away with it, they’ll always go for stick over carrot.
People don’t really understand the dollar, it’s not that things cost more, but actually the dollar is losing value
That hurts the income of the ultra rich that are complaining about the birthrate.
Meh, I dont think our politicians actually care enough about the future right now to do anything about it. Like what if ‘the other side’ is in power when the payoffs happen and they get the credit?! They just wanna do things that benefit them now or make them look good now. But it’s all performative and not actually for any long term benefit. In fact they seem happy to make the future significantly worse for everyone for small gains now.
There have been many attempts to reverse this in advanced modern societies as well as in some empires and countries in the past but all pretty much fail. There are so many complicated reasons birthrates drop and they simply cannot be fully addressed.
The truth is that humans have to come to terms with overpopulation and climate change and must begin to prepare for a world economy not revolving around impossible eternal growth.
Remember this administration doesn’t do things because they make logical sense
Who do you think is even capable of doing that aside form various cults but to do it over the entire or even 1/2 of whatever country you think this is possible in.
Because then the oligarchs would have to give up a tiny margin of their profit and that’s simply injustice.
/s for the dopes in the back
Because that alone doesn’t even completely solve the problem
Because those wanting increased birth rates don’t want to pay for it. They just want to force women into motherhood as chattel slaves.
That’s too logical. 😂😂
And technically it isn’t as divisive (which is the goal) as specifically natalist rhetoric.
I think it’s time to just let the humans die off.
Because the USA can still wiggle a pen on paper (change immigration law) and import more of who they want while overcharging all of us for everything!
I wasn’t aware that a declining birth rate was particularly important?
We don’t do that here.
I don’t understand this bullshit at all. I worked directly with a guy a few years ago, I can’t remember his background but it was one of them that needs to have as many kids as they can.
Every fucking day this guy would ask why I don’t want kids. I told him it’s not for me and my partner and I both agree on it. It has nothing to do with finances or anything. I just don’t want them and neither does she.
After a month of this being asked to me every few days, I lost it and told the guy “dude, I don’t want kids, I don’t need to justify why so fuck off and mind your own business”.
He then (without my knowledge) complained to my boss about what I said. Remember that I didn’t know about any of that part and he wasn’t in the next day. My boss came to me the next morning and told me he was terminated based on him asking me this and because he was trying to push religion based views, which is what he explained to my boss as why I said what I said to him.
So moral of my response, not everyone needs to have or wants kids. Some of us are happy living the life we have. Mind your own business. If you want kids then have kids but don’t look down on others who just don’t want them.
How’s it going to work telling vast swathes of people that the property they’ve spent years scrimping and saving for will be worth a lot less? Good way for a government to commit suicide. Kicking the can down the road means it’s some other poor sod’s problem.
To a lot of people – particularly conservatives, life is a zero sum game.
Lets say there’s $100 on the table. You’re getting $30 and I am getting $70.
For you to receive any more than $30 it’s gonna have to come from me. Even a $5 raise is going to come from me somehow – whether that’s less wages, increased prices, or increased taxes. As such these people will always vote against wage increases, unions, social welfare, school levies and anything else that benefits society on the whole. That would include measures to improve quality of life and make having children more affordable.
In this model, it’s every man for himself. It’s the bucket of crabs. For any crab to get out of the bucket they have to step on everyone else. Furthermore, once they are out of the bucket (that’s a house and at least once nice car in America) they don’t want other crabs to escape because it would diminish the effort they put in escaping the bucket.
It’s a very simple way of thinking that ignores things like corporate profits and greed, individual wealth, tax brackets, stagnant wages, the United States GDP as a whole, the stock market, how the government actually acquires it’s money, and many other things that should be part of the conversation but are too complex for most people who are not economists.
Given that our country is relatively balanced it’s really just tug-o-war back and forth between the factions with nothing positive really happening.
TLDR : People are selfish and petty
How would one do that?
declining birth rate is only a problem in unhealthy, unsustainable economies. resources are not endless, they never were, and anything designed around them being endless is just ignorant as fuck honestly.
Because they want being poor to be as miserable as possible.
Every country that has tried this has failed.
Because it’s not just about creating more people. It’s also about forcing women out of the workplace, forcing women into a strictly domestic role, making women dependent on their husbands, and about making more people of a specific race/ethnicity.
If the government actually enacted policies that made it easier for couples to have and raise kids, those couples would have more freedom to conduct their lives as they themselves see fit. Conservatives don’t want that.
yeah, just make making preschool and kindergarten free and available would probably dramatically raise birth rates. it would probably pay for itself with the number of stay at home parents that could enter the workforce or go from part time to full time.
Humanity doesn’t usually address problems before they become catastrophic. Sometimes even then it doesn’t address them properly. Covid is the best, most recent example of that.
Real problems are uncomfortable to solve, they require people to sacrifice. Unless society is willing to sacrifice for the greater good, the problem won’t be addressed.
It’s only important because Whites aren’t having that many, or any at all, and the government is worried about not having enough wage slavers. That’s why they (US) trotted out that laughable 5k idea. Pregnancy can be beautiful, child birth is horrific. Then you add the sleepless nights, tantrums, quality of education, worrying if you’re failing as a parent. If someone sees parenting as lowering their quality of life then there’s nothing you can do to change their mind.
It’s not just money
Lots of countries have thrown tons of resources at this problem
France I think more than anyone and I believe they have the best birth rate and even it’s not great
Because fixing the declining birthrate would effectively require dismantling capitalism wholesale, and that’s not abv8sble solution for the oligarchs that benefit from it
Because the reasons for the lower birth rate are not entirely financial. A lot of people just don’t want kids, and given the choice, will choose not to have them.
There are personal and cultural values at work which will prove to be resistant to policy intervention.
The Canadian Child Benefit is pretty generous.
I suspect it has a lot to do with trying to force people back towards the Stay at Home Mom era, even if it truly is not and can likely never be affordable again.
The people who think the birth rate is important think that because they want more consumers and workers.
that would require giving us some of the bag. They just need workers to keep the machine running, they don’t care about quality of life
The powers that be want to normalize misery
The rich cry for more workers to compete for jobs. They want more shareholder value.
They don’t even see family life as something that needs help. They only see their profits and their companies’ bottom lines.
Because that would be smart. It would also not make anyone rich.
Ironically it’s the opposite. Look at the people who are having kids in the US and it’s not the well off ones. Look at it globally and it’s not the rich ones either. Historically and currently the people who have the most kids are the ones in the worst situations. People in Niger are having 6 kids per woman while a quarter of the population is almost starving to death. Everyone in the US (even the homeless) can easily “afford” the historical norm of having a kid which is to give them enough calories to barely stay alive. Obviously that’s not acceptable now but that’s how things have been throughout almost all of history. But culture changes and so did our ideas on what raising kids should be as we have gotten wealthier. While there might be some admirable goals like universal health care, affordability, home prices, family support, support for women, etc none of them have led to people having more kids when implemented. Incentives don’t matter either, screaming at people to have kids doesn’t matter, executive orders to have more kids doesn’t matter. It’s entirely a cultural decision
made my choice a few years ago .. got snipped 🤷🏻♂️
NO INCENTIVE, ONLY RESULTS!!
Under further introspection, you’ll discover it’s all a dog whistle for white supremacy
“But… but that’s deflation! It’s BAD when your hard-earned money gains value! The rich people said so! Muh economy!”
Then we need universal healthcare, and paid parental leave…like most of the developed world
It should be government mandated for all businesses…and funded by our taxes
Because that would cost money and that’s money that the billionaires would rather spend on upgrading to a bigger yacht
You fuckng socialist commy bastard! /s Fr though, it would seem logical.
That’s a good question! In theory, if housing were affordable and living costs weren’t insane, more people might consider having kids. But banks profit massively from mortgages, and they’re incentivized to keep housing prices high. Meanwhile, if the governments wanted to fund policies to make family life cheaper (like subsidies or tax breaks), the scale of money needed is mind-blowing. To outmuscle the housing market’s greed or fund universal childcare, you’d need trillions. And most politicians would rather cozy up to banks than fight for policies that actually help families.
It’s very simple, the ultra wealthy want us to have children AND not be able to afford to have children.
The hand-wringing about the birth rate is a cover. They know why the birth rate is falling, they did it on purpose.
I would have had a boatload of kids (at least 3) if I could afford it. I love being a mom. But I can’t afford it. And being responsible means staying within my limits.
It’s not a problem, there are way enough people in the world. It’s only a problem for people that insist that it will be the right people.
Because that would be woke or smth idk
There are a few problems:
First and foremost we have not built enough housing for a long time now and the housing crisis makes family life very difficult because you need more space for a family, generally speaking.
Baumol’s cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
In short in the last couple centuries we have learned to make all manner of things far, far more efficiently than in the past. Say in 1940 an auto worker could make one car a week. Now they can make five cars in a day. Per one human’s worth of effort cars are way cheaper and more efficient than they used to be. (these are all made up numbers, just serving as an illustration)
Child care has seen very few improvements in efficiency so a worker today can effectively look after about the same number of kids as they could in 1940. This means child care has become proportionately more expensive as compared to TVs, cars, whatever else. We could definitely make it more affordable but that probably means subsidies of some sort and those can get expensive.
So a mix of bad policy choices (housing) and shifts in society that make kids expensive, and we don’t want to pay for it as a society.
Most countries that go out of their way to make childcare more affordable, shorten work hours and increase welfare, etc. have some of the lowest birthrates.
Moreover, immigrants in the exact same countries still have many more children than the natives. So “people can’t afford children” is not the main constraint.
As for making it more “attractive ” to young people, that’s easier said than done. You’ll need to fundamentally change the current culture around children and the average life path of young adults.
Someone else will just figure out how to siphon the savings from you and you are back where you started. A classic example is two working parents, as it was a temporary band aid to afford a few kids, but now everything has gotten so expensive that it’s near impossible without two incomes.
Another example: easy and cheap student loans…. well guess what everyone will just raise tuition.
Bc, at least in Germany, the majority of the voters is old. So the bigger parties make politics for the people that are voting for them.
They would have to socialize healthcare and childcare or subsidize it to the extreme in order for having children to be remotely attractive from a financial perspective. Childcare for 2 kids in a mid to high cost living area is more than most people earn in a month.
That’s what the $5k is for.
If gun violence is due to mental health problems, why not fund mental health services?
If abortion is murder, why not fund sex education and contraceptive resources?
If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not make it easier for immigrants to establish legal residency?
Nobody who champions these point of views is interested in fixing the problems.
Because a few billionaires want to make more money.
Because then the Boomers will be forced to finally admit that they were wrong all along.
Parents get huge tax breaks, making the tax burden on childless citizens greater, to pay for the schools and resources for the children of the people with the huge tax breaks
Because that isn’t why they’re not having kids. Other countries with robust social welfare systems also have declining birth rates. The reason for this is urbanization. There’s no way to reverse this. Humanity is reaching it’s carrying capacity and the population will level out by the end of this century.
So that’s done and it still doesn’t work.
Go to the CIA factbook. Look up fertility rate; top and bottom. Then look at GDP and the like.
Because that’s ‘lib talk.’
Younger couples don’t want to have kids because they don’t believe they can afford them. They struggle to buy a house and set up a home and almost always both salaries are used up just running it. How can you expect people to then consider starting a family with childcare costs and all the other financial strains children add?
If you make getting a home achievable, babies will follow.