You can’t even pay people to have more kids
These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
…
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.
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.
People don’t want to bring children into this capitalistic hellscape. Color me surprised.
And even if they want to, they can't afford to
But they're being paid!!!
When it takes two people's income to live in the middle class, there is no time for children until much later. The trend is to have children at 30, when you are starting to make a decent income.
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.
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.
Don't live in fear of or apologize to the lemmygrad assholes, speak your piece.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/singapores-national-night-encourages-citizens-to-make-babies-15402105/
Can't believe the Mentos rap song campaign didn't work. They're the Freshmaker!
Most birds don't lay eggs without a proper nest
Tried everything...except work life balance.
Also didn't paying a livable wage
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
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.
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.
They've tried everything... except putting guardrails on these giant corporations and their runaway price-gouging. In the US at least, if the cost of wages kept pace with skyrocketing housing, higher education, and healthcare, I guarantee more people could afford to live and care for themselves and children...
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.
Is a declining birth rate a bad thing? 50 million people live in a country (South Korea) the size of Indiana. Maybe, just maybe the economy should just take a hit for a change so there can be fewer people here. I know rich people don't want that, but I bet the country would be a better place for it.
Korean here. The problem is the steepness of the trend. We are not ready for such dramatic change over short period. Gradual decrease in population will cause economic downfall for sure. But we can deal with that. But in current speed, it's going to be economic airplane crash. Claiming that it's only bad for the 1% is just delusional at best. The crash will overwhelm any social/economic structure.
I've noticed some people here practically yearn for disasters because it might hurt the rich. The absolutely staggering collateral damage to everyone else is ignored or waved away. It's very much a desperate "nothing left to lose" philosophy that's both sad and scary.
Multiple generations have had all the doors slammed in their faces, and all the ladders pulled up before them. Instead of acting like crabs in a bucket, they've decided they would rather have nothing so long as the people who trapped them suffer too. It's pure spite but can you blame them? I'd probably do the same thing.
You are ignoring the fact that there's going to be several times the loss in human workers added to the workforce by way of virtual laborers within 20 years.
This is just one of the many recent instances of humans being unable to adequately forecast consequences due to anchoring biases. While we typically see it in the other direction (minimizing increasing risks because of lower historical risk) here it's something that would have been concerning decades ago but won't be nearly as risky decades from now.
Maybe the chaebols should stop constantly putting up new apartment blocks now.
That's very far from what's happening right now. I'm curious where did you get that idea from.
Maybe the evidence is anecdotal, but I've lived in Korea for 20 years, and there's always a huge new, self-contained apartment complex going up nearby. If anything, they've ramped up production in that time. While older population centers are left to decline. Maybe not in Seoul which is shoulder-to-shoulder apartment complexes already, but the smaller cities are full of decaying apartment complexes since they put them up, then completely fail to maintain them as they know their market is full of people who will move into the next complex since "gotta have the latest and greatest" is a problem here.
I mean, in the short term (50-100 years), yes it is. Unless people start dying at a younger age, there's going to be a lot of orphaned seniors, which isn't good. We won't really see the benefits of a declining birthrate in our lifetimes, but we will see numerous negatives.
In the long term, it's probably more nessecary then "not bad," but again, you don't want to be the one of the people living during the population collapse.
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!
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.
Raising a kid in America starts around $200k, conservatively. A 2-3k incentive or even 6 months of paid leave worth around 25k aren't gonna make a dent.
Give me 2-3k per month for 18 years plus cost of living increase at 5%+ per year and I’ll consider it.
Otherwise, nah. Im good. I enjoy my free time and all the extra money I have due to no kids.
That's still too cheap.
There's probably a price that could be paid to encourage a higher birth rate, but I doubt the governments who have attempted such programs were willing to aim high enough.
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.
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.
People are generally depressed and struggling with little help, barely making ends meet, and then they get bitched at for not creating more people to thrust into this thankless meatgrinder. If people felt better about the world that they were bringing people into then maybe they would be more inclined.
We live in a world with an aging population that is happy to reap the benefits of short term thinking, leave it up to the next generation, then get pissed when people aren't giving them a next generation to pay the tab.
(it’s the economy and political landscape)
It's also that people do not need a lot of children anymore, so that some survive to take care of them, when they're old.
Sure you can. We could limit the work week to 32 hours, pay higher salaries such that homes and goods are affordable again.
That's great for the short term needs, but I'd rather not bring life into the world that will be faced with a dying planet and the extreme geopolitical unrest that comes with that coupled with the likely major but unpredictable disruptions of tech advancing at compounding rates.
We might be heading towards a utopia or a dystopia - but in one direction or another it's going to be getting more extreme.
I take great comfort in the idea that I'll be leaving this world without worrying about a child left behind in a collapsing society nor if that happens earlier on that I'll need to watch their suffering or demise.
There's no amount of money or shortened workweek that would make me give up that comfort given what lies ahead.
Same here and I'm fortunate enough that my fiancee, non of my brothers or their partners are interested in kids either. Won't be leaving any kids or nephews in this hellscape.
Free fucking childcare...
And healthcare
Europe got both, we are still below replacement rate.
Because it's a natural consequence of high education, lack of benefit for having a lot of kids, and our overall population having gotten too high.
I agree with this except for the bit about the size of the overall population. I can say with a great deal of certainty that most Americans (for example) are not giving a single thought to how many people live in China and India when deciding to have kids or not.
There is a third thing that people often miss in this discussion: legacy. If you own nothing then you have nothing to give to a child. The people who had the most children owned things, particularly land and business. The suburban nuclear families being as large as they were was a cultural artifact from their own parents' way-of-life, single-income households, and religious beliefs. It will not repeat itself.
With nothing to inherit, little individual hope for the future, a plurality of world leaders intent on pushing us into a world where "you will own nothing and you will be happy"... what did people expect would happen?
“Please have children to fuel our profiteering, war, and labor goals” basically
Go fuck yourselves.
Yeah! Cause we won't fuck each other except with reliable birth control or in lieu of that experiment with butt stuff!
Anal is at least as old as written history
It's a good reason to crack open a history book.
Sus
Maybe some mouth stuff too?
Kinky!
I just meant brushing your teeth you filthy harlot
That's just perverted. Then how are you going to savour the ass-taste?
My husband and I chose not to have biological children and there are so many reasons for it. It's not even just one big one - it's multiple huge ones. Lack of support systems for parents and childcare, finances (we are ok for a couple, but there is no way we could comfortably afford even a single child), healthcare costs alone will break you, the future of this planet is not looking so hot (or rather, VERY hot actually), carbon footprint of another child on the planet is huge, and I refuse to bring in another soul to become a slave for our corporate overlords. And I am not even listing any personal reasons, which there also are - these are just things that are happening in the world overall... and the best the politicians can do is pikachu face that there is no population growth. Because, ya know, 8 BILLION of us is not enough.
As a parent with two kids you are spot on about the financial aspect. Kids get hurt/sick a LOT. Their immunity is still developing, so we ended up in the ER almost several times a year. We had good health insurance, but it still broke our bank because of deductibles.
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.
Maybe a Logan's Run situation?
Honestly if you got over the horror of all the murdering it'd probably be pretty good for the species/society to send everyone to to glue factory around 65. At least all the politicians anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Kids are not affordable or cute or have fur, plus they take time l, a lot of time. For me there's no reason to have kids.
The problem with dogs and cats as a child replacement is you usually outlive them.
I can live with that, atleast I can take care of them until the end. And it's not like life is certain, I can die before them.
I can live with it too. I have twice now. But it is a very difficult heartbreak. I haven't had one of them for 13 years and I got her when I first moved out of my parents' house, so she was with me my entire adult life until she died. I still miss her.
That can happen with kids too, and it's far worse. At least with pets you know they're only going to live around ___ years.
True. Outliving my daughter is my greatest fear.
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.
You actually definitely could, they just didn't offer to pay enough
What could having a kid cost? $10?
Per kid as a whole? No. Per hour? Possibly.
$1,576,800 per kid to 18? I have no idea if this makes sense, what is this in bananas?
ChatGPT estimates around $233k for middle class family. So about $1.47 per hour.
I love how well this works for things that are both far too cheap and far too expensive.
When a menial worker complains their menial job doesn't pay enough. Boomers sing "that's not a real job" then expect those same people to have kids to support their greed.
Not to mention that when everyone decided they didn't want to work those jobs, they all threw a fit that no one wanted to work anymore. Wow I can't believe the industry that "isn't a real job" full of "unskilled labor" doesn't have people lining up to work at.
The optimal strategy for raising a child in the 21st century is to have just one so you can focus all your resources and attention on them for maximum chance of success.
I would honestly need twice my salary and a free home to consider it with my girlfriend.
Not even on the table.
I've been terrified of pregnancy my entire life and I'm a selfish adult who wants to do what I want.
So yes, nothing the governments do can ever make me want to have kids.
Not even you, Greg Abbott, you dickhole pathetic excuse for a "person". I fucking hate you!
Edit: One of my sentences was exceptionally dark.
I don't think it's selfish to not want kids. With how fucked the world is, maybe we should be thinking about if it's instead selfish to have kids.
I determined from about age 12 that I didn't want kids. 10 years later and I still don't want them, so I removed the possibility of accidentally having them. The government can't make me have kids - seeing as I yeeted my uterus.
If that's selfish, we should all be selfish. Fuck it we don't owe the world shit. What's it ever done for us?
Not to address your fears specifically, but there's a lot a government (society) can do to make more women feel safer and more comfortable about becoming pregnant and giving birth.
From high quality free healthcare, to maternity (and paternity) leave, to daycare, to schooling - at just a start - there are ways society can look after itself.
That is, I can understand (in a limited, "I'm not you" fashion) your POV.
Oh, also, I do hope you meant to include "want", as is in, "can make you want to have kids". Because government mandated pregnancy is a pretty horrifying concept.
Countries in Europe got most of that and they are still struggling with getting to the replacement rate.
Most isn't good enough. All of it might be enough to make me think about having a kid.
Truth, I'll go back and edit it to say "want". It does seem extra dark with the way its written.
But also, yes, there are a lot more things that society can do to make women feel safer and cared for when having children. And women who do want and choose to have a child should do so with comfort and support, because their body is literally making a human being - which is awesome, even if it's not for me.
It's just, here in the US, and red states specifically, maternity and infant mortality rates are fucking abysmal considering the level of Healthcare were supposed to be provided. It's unfortunately even worse if you're a WOC. I'm not sure what maternal care looks like in your neck of the woods, but hopefully better then here.
But I've been just...not materially inclined ever since I was a kid. I've never really felt the draw for it, and luckily found my husband whose cool with that.
You absolutely can pay people to do just about anything including having kids.
Give me a credit card that can pay ALL of my bills and i will both adopt a kid and find someone who wants to have one.
The problem is kids are a huge burden when you can barely afford to live your own life let alone provide and be responsible for another human being
Pay people to retire early and you will see a huge boom in population
Okay, so your solution for people who don't want children is to give them "children lite"?
Even if you think adopting a pet is a reasonable thing to do at the same time you adopt a child, that's just an insulting small incentive. May as well just offer a free cup of coffee.
There's no fucking way I can take care of a coffee and a child at the same time. They'll both be cold in minutes.
A "free" cup of coffee that you need to buy food and pay medical bills for.
You sonnova bitch, I'm in.
According to your quote, it's children plus children lite.
Children²
Less people means less waste and less fossil fuel consumption. This is not a bad thing.
-corpo douche, maybe.
It is a bad thing if you live in a country with a robust social system that is paid for through taxes and a below-replacement birth rate.
Like, we don't need "more" people, but we need to keep the population stable to make sure the disabled and elderly can live well. Because someone has to bear the cost, and we can't all be Norwegian.
Sounds like a good reason to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate. You could even have a global proportional tax rate if the will was there.
Then let’s keep it stable at a lower number than it currently is.
Here's today's friendly reminder that the economy is made up, and can be redesigned to better serve humanity
There are lots of people who are willing to endure a dangerous journey in order to become part of a stable, safe society in a country that isn't torn up by a war or ruled by despots, kleptocrats or terrorists.
Somehow when these people reach to a country desperately trying to grow its population (read: have more workforce and taxpayers), we tend to ostracize them, deny them opportunities, make it hard for them to integrate and generally be hostile towards them on both individual and systemic levels. And then scratch our collective heads why we have problems with the "others".
Curious species the human is. No wonder the extraterrestials from the Galactic Society never visit us and try their hardest to hide their existence from us😞
Giving birth to someone is the worst thing you can do to them. I'm not taking money for that.
And who wouldn't want to go to a singles mixer hosted by "the authorities". Sounds fun.
The DMV hosting a singles mixer would be interesting.
Well the earth is overpopulated, sounds like the human species as a whole is a lot smarter than politicians and anti social capitalists looking for $$ to numnum
Yeah, I'm definitely no expert on the subject, but we've got too many people, how is less kids a huge issue?
You want a gradual decline, not a quick one. A quick decline creates all sorts of stability problems (wars) and other terrible stuff like mass starvation and mass die-offs.
Like braking from 60 mph to a gradual stop, vs hitting a cement pillar at 60mph, haha.
Interesting. Definitely wouldn't have thought of that.
Ultimately it has to do with the way our society is structured economically. We need continuous growth to pay off the debt we're continuously accruing. If growth stalls or reverses the whole system collapses. Population decrease basically ensures that the required economic growth won't occur.
Probably a good incentive to change how we live as a society rather than quiver at an unavoidable scenario.
Ideally, but the ones with their hands on the controls are the biggest beneficiaries of the current system, so it's unlikely to change without a revolution or collapse.
Not sure what you’re bringing to the party but I don’t know why you’re telling me like I’m the complacent parent in all of this. You’re just as much part of getting dragged into this as the rest of us.
Not sure why you interpreted my post as accusatory. I agree we're all along for the ride and there isn't much we can do. As far as what I'm 'bringing to the party', I guess I would say that we should opt out of their broken system as much as possible. Reject blind consumerism and reject the extreme polarization the media is constantly trying to instill in us. Create value for others and store your economic energy in a system they can't control (Bitcoin). Try to raise awareness in others of the unfairness of the system, and its inevitable doom due to the inherrent requirement of infinite growth with finite resources (the logic of a cancer cell). It's not much on an individual scale, and probably won't affect the ultimate outcome, but hopefully we and the people we love can be somewhat insulated from the system as it exists and the chaos that will come when it falls.
Everything in moderation! Luckily, we are technologically at a place where we don't need a hundred people all threshing wheat by hand, or dying of preventable diseases...or even people spending all day on repetitive tasks. We can automate much more, so we can work with less. And overall, I think that slower decline will ease strain on the planet. We just wanna make sure we do everything carefully.
Two things:
Life sucks for a lot of people. Younger Gen X, Millenials, Gen Z all have had really hard times. Why would someone want to make their life harder?
The "declining" birth rates are actually returning to pre-Baby Boom levels. This is a fully natural thing.
It may or may not be natural, but it doesn't change the economic reality - if there are more people who can't work (the olds) than who can, the economy is fucked.
It seems like lots if boomers are retiring older - I have no data for that but that's the vibe - but that's not going to last forever, they can't (shouldn't) work until they literally die. The burden on the young (paired with pretty reckless tactics from the capitalists) - the olds are going to get left in the street.
Boomers won't let go. I worked at a company that used to have upward movement when people retire. Then the boomers just stopped retiring, I left as no where to go. They now have executives 80 years old plus. Boomers got theirs and are so self involved they won't stop.
Mandate a 32 hour, 4 day work week? That's one more day per week to think about makin babies?
I have a stable job and a good chunk of savings and I still feel wholly inadequate of raising a child. I know some of it is just me being selfish
Absolutely not selfish of you. And I say this as a parent. Absolutely no one should have a child that doesn't want a child. It is incredibly hard work, it is expensive, and no child should feel unloved or neglected. This is one of many reasons I think abortion should be legal and affordable.
I would much rather someone be aborted than be raised in a house by people who don't really want them, arent prepared to care for them, and can't afford to raise them.
Research shows that situation is a driver of crime and other social problems. It's much better that an abortion happens for everyone in a society - not just a potential parent.
It’s not selfish of you. Children need attention and time. Society has been so focused on maximizing productivity that it has taken away the time needed to raise children. There are many people that have enough money for a child but not enough time for a child.
Ensuring families have access to Child Healthcare, parents have time to parent their kids, kids have capable and loving parents and communities have programs to ensure the wellbeing of the children is SOCIALISM!
-Pro Life Republicans trying to Save The Children
Rightoids: we need to boost our population
Also rightoids: best we can do is make abortion illegal and encourage teen pregnancy
They tried EVERYTHING, except...
gestures broadly
I can't imagine signing anyone else up for this. Not until the trajectory turns in a positive direction
My feelings exactly.
I grew up lower middle class or more likely upper lower class, my parents both worked and owned a house but it was tough to make ends meet when they were getting older and my dad couldn't move as easily because of injuries.
I still grew up with parents that were home from work everyday, good food, lights, heat and internet were never cut off. I couldn't do what my parents did for me. I have a great job, my partner is much better educated has the opportunity to get much more important jobs and we earn more than 135k a year but it would be impossible to raise kids, even just one as well as my parents raised me and my sister.
Why would I want to raise a child in a worse environment than I grew up in? I can see why immigrants come in and have a family. Their next generation will likely have a far better life in Canada than in their home countries. I welcome others to have a better life here than back in their home countries and have kids here.
I'd be happy to have kids if you paid me! In fact, not having enough money is literally the whole fucking reason behind many of us not having kids! Businesses have lost the ideal that if you make your workers prosperous, they will make your company prosper. People can't even afford rent, let alone children now!
I have 4 friends in their mid to late 30s who have had to move back in with their parents this year because they can no longer afford to live on their own. Meanwhile, I've got relatives asking all the time, so when are you and the Mrs going to have a kid? I'm having to decide between my own medical bills, food, utilities and you want me to add a child to that? Go ahead and start paying me. Cause right now, in this economic climate, that's the only way it's gonna work!
Good. Lowering the birth rate at the global scale = more resources per person.
I agree with you, but also what are we going to do when there are a ton of old people who need to be taken care of, and there aren't enough young people to take care of them?
They will suffer. And I'm willing to be among them as it's worth it long term. The alternative of infinite growth isn't a realistic possibility in a world with finite resources.
Should get interesting as capitalism infinity profit model begins to buckle under its own weight.
You'll see AI stepping in on a lot of areas where there's decreased labor supply.
And a bonus for when you are old - AI is going to be far less likely to secretly be a sadistic fuck going into an industry with a vulnerable population in order to torture you when you have dementia and can't tell anyone about the regular abuse.
You'd be surprised at how often that kind of stuff happens when "young people take care of old people."
We also have that problem and you don't fix it by making more furore old people. That's what AI is for.
We can kill ourselves. Honestly you think the world wont be on fire for other reasons by then? Lol
for a little while.
How much cash? Is it drastically less than the increase in the cost of living since birth rates started to drop? I'll bet that it's as little as possible while still technically not being zero, and I'll bet it's taxed as earned income.
I agree with most the points others in this thread make about the economy having gotten worse such that it discourages more kids.. I have a decent job and if I had a second child I think I would never have a chance at retirement.
I am also curious about rising infertility.... My wife and I had go through ivf to even have one child.. This after 7 years of trying..
Several of our peers and friends have struggled with this as well.. It could just be a coincidence but we only know around 20 other couples outside of work and at least 6 of them have not been able to produce children naturally.
It could be due to microplastics/pollution affecting sperm counts.
First thing I found: https://news.sky.com/story/human-penises-are-shrinking-because-of-pollution-warns-scientist-12255106
Pay me. If you want me to raise your future workers. Pay me enough to live and raise them. It used to be possible to support a family of 7 on one income with a house and two cars in the driveway. People can barely keep their heads above water nowadays on two incomes. Since it requires two incomes, there is no time for child raising. The government doesn’t provide guarantees of time off to have them, doesn’t provide daycare so you can keep your job, and doesn’t provide healthcare. No, instead we write blank checks to the Pentagon and give the rich tax cuts.
At least in the USA and I presume other places, having a child is not only an increasingly insurmountable financial burden, but also society and school are actively anti-discipline to the point you can't even stop a kid from running wild and dominating the household. I am constantly amazed at parents who seem completely unable to keep their children from running amok and bothering people or destroying things in public, skipping school, eschewing homework, and disrupting class, yelling, punching, and kicking their own parents, etc.
Why anyone should want to subject themselves to a lifetime of hassle and heartache is the question. I have one kid and he is pretty awesome, but he was raised before the Internet and smartphones became the world's nannies. If I were of childbearing age, I would get my tubes tied if I could get somebody to do it.
Not to mention climate change is probably going to doom any child born now to life in a physical and political hellscape.
This is my only grievance with what you said. Wtf are you smoking. Yes, the method of discipline has changed but the only kids running wild and dominating the household are the ones where the parents aren't doing their damn job.
Source - am parent of 3 kids under 13 and none of them run wild or dominate my household because a household isn't a goddamn democracy it's a dictatorship.
Here's the core problem: people can't afford to have kids. Until economies are restructured so that a family can reasonably and rationally survive on a single income, you aren't going to see birthrates rise.
Alternatively, you could ban any and all forms of birth control, and institute a state-religion that tied into your economic system, so that people had huge economic incentives to appear outwardly devout. Handmaid's Tale, et al.
We had vast universal childcare during the commie period where I grew up. That made it possible for two working parents to have children. The population grew steadily throughout the whole period, until the fall of the regime. It's been in free fall since then.
IMO it's better to have a parent taking care of their children--I'm agnostic on whether that should be a mom or a dad in a traditional heterosexual, nuclear family--because that seems to help children develop better emotionally. Childcare in general is more impersonal. BUT the system that your country had under communism is still better than what we have in the US right now.
Anecdotally, I loved child care. I preferred being among other children heck of a lot more than being at home with my parents. It might be good for the parents as well to be on equal footing instead of one being the "breasmaker." That introduces a natural power imbalance in the relationship which you have to struggle to not let become detrimental.
Subsidized child care for younger ages (under first grade at public school) would be a good alternative too. We don't need every job to be able to support a family of 4. When women joined the workforce during wartime and maintained that working position, the economy and jobs shifted to paying less because less was needed and we had a larger paid workforce. With that said, that means that a 2 income household should be able to afford kids, and it cannot without external help from other family.
Shortly after I had my first kiss in late high school my mother got drunk and informed me I would receive no help or support if I went and got myself pregnant. Here I am 15 years later, married and aiming for a kid, and I know her words will be true today too.
Some families are able to live closer to each other and help each other raise kids, but the modern economy doesn't allow for people to stay in the same area as easily. Almost every job requires you to move to a different state hundreds of miles each time, every few years. And most people need to change jobs due to stagnant wages, it's the only way to receive a raise.
Yes, but also no. IMO, every job should at a bare minimum pay a living wage, by which I mean a wage that allows a person to live reasonably: healthy food, reliable transportation, a single bedroom apartment, the ability to do things that for entertainment, healthcare, and the ability to have a realistic retirement savings plan. While a single job may not--strictly speaking--need to be able to support a family of 4, each job should be able to support at least two people, assuming that you want each family to have at least two children.
Subsidized child care only goes so far, esp. when one or both parents are working jobs that aren't 9-5.
OTOH, I think that a significant reduction in the human population, particularly in the most developed countries, is probably a good thing. Even if that means that the remainder need to pay sharply higher taxes (oh no, won't someone think of the Republicans! :'( ).
It worked when Australia did this back in the mid 2000. But it probably wouldn't today, with today's cost of living, job and childcare shortages.
Yeah that is bull. There is a number you can pay me to have another kid I assure you. If you got money for a plane that can't fly in the rain and a border fence that fell down you got money to pay for babies.
i think to maintain the population, a couple needs to have to have 2.4 kids or something. there's no way im doing that it sounds like it sucks. fuck the future of humanity I don't give a shit
Humanity will be better off with a lower population.
The freak out around less people is the theory of dependence on labor replacement.
But the variables of that equation are about to change dramatically as a result of tech advancements.
Within a generation, it won't matter if there's billions less people because there will be billions more virtual laborers to offset the decrease.
Rich people are freaking out about birth rates for increasingly obsolete reasons.
I'm done after 2. I can't afford more. I can barely afford this,and I have a pretty good job.
I'm still eligible for financial aid at the hospital.
Like is it necessary to have replacement? I’m just think it’s not such a bad thing if population shrinks a bit, I’m only referring to the US. Like I think we find ourselves in a housing and inflation crisis because our parents and our parents parents had a bunch of kids. Am I the only person thinking a decline in population isn’t such a bad thing? Could it be possible to have a flat population?
You are not the only one. We stopped at one because there are too many people. When I was born there were almost half the number of people there are today. I'm 43. In 1980 I don't think there was an "oh my god we don't have enough people" vibe.
Especially in a time where we are all worried about our future on this planet, more people means more sources of pollution. More people want a car, more people getting on planes, more people consuming goods and throw away items.
Seems like sometimes less is more.
P.s. If the trend hadn't changed, we'd have been on track for around 16 billion in 50 years.
We have more than enough people.
This is good from an employment perspective as we move to AI and automation, replacing 2.4 million US jobs by 2030. We are getting to the point where you will need to work in a specialized trade or be highly educated in a specialized field if you want a paycheck. All low-skill jobs will be replaced by AI or automation.
I would love to have kids, a couple, one girl one boy. But not in this fucked up system.
There are so many reasons why we won't have kids. 1: money, we can't afford what we have now! How the hell we gonna pay 300000 and more over at least 18 years for a kid? 2: older gens have told us we're worthless and lazy. 3: the current political climate and actual climate, why the fuck would we want to bring a child into this bullshit system?
For no amount of money would O give up all my free time and sleep
This mentions row v wade and abortion and I saw just the other day the birth rate is going up in the red states. Now is the birth rate going up faster than the death rate in the red states?
For whatever reason the death rate was higher in the red states versus the blue after 2020 and I'm not sure if it has gone down pre 2020 levels
Russia going through this right now. Their demo is getting old and is getting worse.
Perfect time to send 100s of thousands of men in the prime of their lives to die in some pointless war.
I was gonna do a Victoria 3 joke about activating the +10% birthrate bonus if your government is liked by the major religious group but I don't know if many will understand it here.
As someone who doesn't have and never wanted kids, I'd hate this but...
If a country really wants a sustainable birth rate, it needs to make it painful to not be a parent. Already, non-parents have to pay for public schools they'll never use, and so-on. But, that's a minor expense compared to raising a kid. A country that made it a true priority to keep the population up could do so much more.
Jobs could be required to give 3 weeks additional vacation to parents every year so they could spend it with their children, while non-parents didn't get that time. Taxes could be significantly higher for non-parents vs. parents. Workplaces could get tax breaks based on the number of parents they employ. There could be tax incentives for workplaces that hire new parents. Retirement benefits could be based on the number of kids you raised, capping out at max benefits for 3 kids.
Of course, if any modern country tried that, a lot of people who never want kids would emigrate. But, if you ran an authoritarian country like China or North Korea and could control immigration, you'd definitely get people opting into having kids instead of enjoying a child-free life.
Alternatively, you're paying for the schooling that you did use so that the people following you still have the same access you did. Whether you spawned them or not is irrelevant, unless you plan to just close the door behind you.
Also (in theory) paying to educate those that will be voting for your government. And like, a thousand other reasons. Public school is good for society regardless of if you have kids
Great point.
You don't need to penalize the non-parents to entice people to have kids.
But it needs incredible systemic change to do that. The first one would be climate change policies and programs that will at the minimum stop the current trajectory we are in, and at best reverse it.
Second, we need to reign in the extremely greedy corps and make them pay their fair share. In a not so distant past, when the economy wasn't doing well, companies would cut their profits before raising prices. Today, this is practically unheard of. The margins must be kept at all cost, the rest be damned.
Third, create decent safety nets. Right now, our social policies are eroding pretty much everywhere. Some countries more than the others.
Then, we can start thinking about policies that favor the patents.
We have enough resources and technologies to solve all of our problems, but since society is lead by greedy conmans in the pocket of corporations, until that changes, people won't be comfortable having kids.
Not enough money. Too tough a situation.
having kids is immoral in this time period i believe.
we are vastly over populated act like it.
We want kids, but we can't biologically conceive, as much as we've tried. Surrogacy starts at like, $30k. Start paying for that, a year of paid parental leave for both parents, and real universal Healthcare, and we have a solid start.
Or perhaps fund adoptions? Those are just as expensive!
We're also in a same sex relationship, so that strikes a lot of adoptions right off... Even so, just for legal reasons, I'd prefer surrogacy. I just want a happy little family someday :)
I meant as a generality rather than for you specifically
if the main argument to have a kid is so they can enter the workforce why the hell would i want to have one?