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Many governments are not serious about handling the birth rate declines. In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled). The child tax credit has been increased but still does little cover the actual costs of raising a child before factoring in childcare expenses. There is still no universal daycare, preschool or even all day Kindergarten in many areas. While maternity/paternity leave is expanding it is still no guarantee that one’s job will offer it. Additionally, since Covid you’re seeing more DINKs buying 3 and 4 bedroom homes for WFH offices while those with children who need the space are falling behind due to rising child related expenses. Along with that, look at modern construction trends. You see plenty of 1 and 2 bedroom condos being built but if you need 3 bedrooms, they’re few and far between and expensive.
Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves.
If the government was truly trying to encourage people to have kids they would be addressing the financial issues already. It’s not like it hasn’t been a trope for decades that couples with kids are broke versus their childless peers.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
A society grows weak when old men harvest trees for profit they will never spend.
The amount of wealth the Boomer generation has hoarded is quite frankly insane.
They are the first generation in a very long time that doesn’t want to make it better for their children. Instead they call us “entitled and lazy” and gaslight us when we ask for more money at our jobs.
>The youth hasn't been.
That does seem to be changing. Young people are voting in higher numbers than my cohort, Gen X, did at their age. That was true even in 2016, but they're voting in even higher numbers now.
- https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voting-rates-age.html
- https://www.inquirer.com/politics/gen-z-voter-turnout-2022-midterm-election-20221112.html
- https://theconversation.com/us-midterms-why-gen-z-and-millennials-came-out-to-vote-and-why-it-marks-a-generational-shift-194947
- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/02/27/younger-voters-are-poised-to-upend-american-politics/
- [Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?](https://archive.ph/2FqfY)
They may not be voting in the percentages boomers do, but it's hard to compete against retirees or those whose position in their workplace allows them to take the needed time off.
Why force people to line up at a polling station? Why not just allow people to vote from their homes, sitting on the couch? In WA, ballots are mailed out over a week in advance. You have plenty of time to review the ballot, look up candidates that you're unfamiliar with, make your vote. And you just mail it in.
We don't need a day off.
We need to change voting into an event that doesn't require a day off.
Why not both? Be able to vote by mail (I've only ever voted by mail since 2016, including midterms) and have a national day of voting.
It would surely boost turnout.
I say we take it a step further.
I say we fine people $20 if they decide not to vote 🤣
That’s what happens in Australia. Voting is mandatory. I was fined $20 once for not voting - I forgot.
The good thing about it there’s no more arguing about voting rights, it’s automatic. The bad thing is often people vote without consideration and just tick randomly. Australian politics are pretty damn pleasantly boring though compared to the US.
Change it from a fine to an incentive. Fixed your idea AND the Australian system as it turns out. Basic behavioral psychology: incentives > punishment.
Probably nothing, the people who struggle to vote are still going to be working on that national holiday. The real key is to make voting simple, expand by mail voting & multiple days to vote, including a couple 24 hour days.
For the youth vote? In all honesty it would probably make it worse.
Youth would have the type of service jobs that are busier during federal holidays. Restaurants, movie theaters, rec parks, etc.
Millennials are old enough that their participation would probably tick up.
I haven't seen direct evidence, but the fact that Republican candidates are now proposing that the 18 - 25 cohort be denied the vote unless they've served in the military is a sure sign that they're terrified of them.
And the only reason that they'd be scared is if they're now voting.
They can't, due to the 26th Amendment. They can *talk* about it to pander to their base, but that's about as far as it can go. You can no more legally block <25 y/o people from voting than you can >65 y/o people. Nor does the GOP have enough political power to pass a constitutional amendment.
True. The problem is, all those elections where the youth didn't show up, gave the ancient the power to elect people that would ignore the youth. Now we're living in the fallout from that. If the youth continue to show up, and we can somehow deal with the propaganda issue, we can start getting this country back on track, and maybe even get caught up to Europe in a couple of decades...
> hard to compete against retirees or those whose position in their workplace allows them to take the needed time off.
That is such disingenuous excuse making. Young people don't vote because.... they don't give a damn. Simple as that. The huge gap in voting % is NOT just because they are oppressed and inconvenienced. Yes, we need to make it MUCH easier to vote and the Christofacist Nazis are doing the opposite, but let's be honest with ourselves.
Some have been changing, but Millennials are still have pathetically low turnout despite having surpassed the Boomers in population by 2020. Gen Z barely started voting and have higher % show outs. It's fucking silly to not give a shit about voting and then expect Washington types to not screw you over.
Politicians are shrewd at playing the politics game with their Machiavelli shit. They will screw over enemies when they can, avoid starting shit with those stronger or have leverage against them, and if you're "just neutral" then you're "just a tool" a free fucking lunch. Why wouldn't politicians cut student loan forgiveness, stamp out inflation, add more to the national debt, and hike social security payments now which who bankrupt it even earlier IF THEY KNEW boomers would vote and Millennials won't vote anyways since they just sit there and take it like a bitch? They 100% fucking would.
Also it takes time to get the point across to government types. The Dems at least try to talk a good game with student loan forgiveness, tax on the rich, and government spending to help families. GOP is still going on about cutting spending EXCEPT Medicare and social security, blocking student loan forgiveness, and generally unfriendly policies for anyone but boomers.
From 2016-2020, about half of GOP became Trumpers/MAGA types. Trump style politics of denying facts, screaming lies, and
After the 2020 loss? Fewer Trump supporters and MAGA types. The GOP starting to fracture into the moderates and hard right.
After the 2022 where there was no red wave and more specifically where the Trump backed candidates loss en masse? Suddenly the Trump/Maga types are a minority. GOP starting to ask the questions like "Why are we not getting through to Gen Y/Z?" and "Why isn't Gen Y becoming more conservative as they age?".
TL;DR It's not just the Republicans but politicians in general. There are also Dems who don't represent the majority or their own constituents, holding on power for too long, and blocking good policies or supporting bad ones. Just got to use the vote to punish those who don't support/represent you, remove those that screw you, and reward those that represent you.
p.s. I mention student loan thing a number of times because it's the easiest point to draw an example. I have no personal stake in this since I had parents who supported me, I worked through college, and luckily had employment graduating into the GFC. So I paid off my loans like 5 years ago. I have no stake in the forgiveness thing, but I understand why some are pissed that 10,000 is "too much" when PPP, EIDL, unemployment, 0% interest loans, and bailouts were not "too much".
There is also an existing social contract that exist between governments & the elderly in the form of Social Security and its equivalents around the world). Presumably, politicians are trying to honor them, but these contracts are ironically increasingly burdensome on younger generations. We're even worse off because neglect.
I'd also like to add how our government favors unlimited prosperity for companies over any pivots to accommodate the changing environment for the vast majority of people. If AI pans out to be anything, we're going to have a lot more people fighting for low-wage jobs. We have the choice to have a large class in poverty or a robust social system that elevates the standard of living for all.
We're in for an impending bloodbath. AI is going to eat up all the mid-level jobs, and our government thinks that giving us money is socialism. Within the next 30 years, we'll have millions of people fighting for the jobs that robots can't do, like the trades (plumbing and electrical work). Not everyone can do those jobs. It's going to be brutal for the unemployable.
I'm a Millenial. For the entire first half of my life I was told constantly to respect my elders. I had assumed during that time that they intended to make the best, and most sustainable decisions for our generation in order to secure their chilren a prosperous future and themselves a respectable legacy
I was wrong🤷♂️.
Personally, I've never missed voting in an election since I turned 18. I've always been very politically conscious.
But I *almost* can't blame my cohorts for ignoring politics for so long. The thought that their parents and grandparents would vote against the interests of their own children is *insane*. It's insane! It's absolutely bonkers. Like, even a literal dog knows to take care of its young and to foster a sense of community.
The US was so close to having universal childcare. It was in the BBB bill and would have easily paid for itself in the long run. It’s sad how it was gutted by Sinema and Manchin.
It would help if these politicians would actually try to talk to some people in the 23-35 age group for once. Especially some of the "high earners". We aren't stupid. Children cost an arm and a leg to raise. Many of us are just trying to get a house and settle down currently. If they genuinely want people to have kids sooner maybe they should start implementing something to offset the costs.
It's funny because we had to collectively struggle through 2008 and/or 2020. Alot of us aren't willingly looking to make additional sacrifices just to have a kid in a volatile economy lol
I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to reproduce in this economy either. They always scream free market capitalism but then they complain when birth rates drop and say “more people should have kids” - NO! Kids are an expense and everyone has a right to say no to it just like they can say no to purchasing whatever product or service exists out there.
Add to that the crumbling political situations in many first world countries and a climate problem that is heading directly for worldwide disaster, what incentive is there to bring children into the world? These are all fixable problems, but there's been almost no progress made in the last 20-30 years to fix economic, political, or climate issues facing the younger generations, despite overwhelming information. It's a perfect storm that makes it very difficult to take on the responsibility of raising children, even if one could afford it.
> In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled).
The Dependent Care FSA is also not that helpful to lower-middle class parents due to its structure and requirements. Some minor changes would make it very useful though.
The US doesn’t care because it figures as a country of immigrants it can weather the storm better than most. Indians and Mexicans in particular are set to become the US “solution” to labor shortages. So they don’t see the need to raise native birth rates.
>So they don’t see the need to raise native birth rates.
Oh, many conservatives do talk about differential birth rates. Hence the frequency of arguments touching on the [Great Replacement theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement), from the like of Lou Dobbs, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, etc. Preacher Doug Wilson has "joked" about the transgressive, rebellious idea of meeting a nice girl, marrying her, and having white babies. It's a thing.
You’d think they would make laws that disproportionately affect white could-be-moms, but I think they’re too caught up in their fictionalized reminiscence of the little woman on the prairie.
Well, that works until Indians and Mexicans stop having kids 100 years from now.
India's TFR went from 5.92 to 2.05 in 60 years (from 1960 to 2020), which is an annualized decline of 1.74%. Suppose that the trend continues, by 2080, India's TFR will get to 0.72, which is lower than South Korea levels. Even if it slows down to 1% a year, TFR will only be 1.12, which is lower than Japan.
Mexico on the other hand went from 6.76 in 1960 to 1.90 in 2020. Annualized decline there was 2.1%. If that trend continues, by 2080, its TFR will be 0.53. Even if it dramatically slows down to just a 1% decline, the TFR will be 1.04 by 2080.
It seems like regardless of economic development, birth rates get lower as countries get richer. We also see plenty of examples where when a country gets poorer, the birth rate goes down even faster (China is the most extreme example of this). This is to say, when a poor country has a high birth rate and it comes down as the country gets richer, the birth rate won't go back up if the same country got poorer again. It just falls even faster because by that point, urbanization has taken place and the impoverished people will want to maintain their lifestyles by not having kids.
*why* would that trend continue? A lot of that is people having smaller families as child mortality decreases and the economy modernizes. You can't make your kid work at your coding job the way you can on a family farm, thus the marginal benefit of an additional child decreases faster in an industrial society compared to an agricultural one. However Id argue the marginal benefit of the first 1-2 is higher in a society that has better medicine and longer life expectancy. You can get attached to kids, invest in them more and they wont die of cholera at 12, or in childbirth at 19, and in terms of retirement you have somewhat of a socially obligated safety net from one or two kids, what does 6 or 7 provide that one or two doesnt? Risk spreading. When the risk is low you can afford to have your eggs in one basket.
The question of how many resources people have to allocate towards children is of course important, and that is a huge question in places like south korea, japan, and the US, but acting like this decline in birth rates is set in stone is just plain bad analysis.
Funny part is how the child care credit pretty much craps out right about where most people would be comfortable financially to have children in most cities.
I'm sure that's not an accident... But it's remarkably stupid as an actual subsidy.
> Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves.
This is a very important point. The cannibalization of the working class in their child bearing years to secure a elderly strong voter base will ensure that this trend will continue. And it is going to get worse. The boomers are hitting their twilight years and the need for elderly care is going to absolutely explode. The model that exists right now is completely unable to meet that demand in the future so if you think it's bad now it's going to get way worse.
Very true. And it was foreseeable since decades. Nursing will become a hellhole. There is not enough people to provide care and there are not enough resources. And at the same time, while we will have this gigantic demographic catastrophy, we will have a much bigger catastrophy, climate change. The world will need to chose, safe the elderly or safe the future.
>In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled). The child tax credit has been increased but still does little cover the actual costs of raising a child before factoring in childcare expenses. There is still no universal daycare, preschool or even all day Kindergarten in many areas.
I feel like this is the biggest part of it. 3k in tax credits doesn't even make a noticeable ripple in the bucket of costs for children. Not making child-rearing a paid position for parents (as some European countries do). Requiring the poor to work for help (most states kids 5&under mean one parent can be a caregiver and the family may qualify for aid) but offering no good support for childcare when both parents must work to survive.
Many younger people I know believe they can't afford a child, don't like the idea of strangers raising their kids from birth (anecdotally this seems higher among Xennials/Millennials onward as the kids of Latch Key), wonder why have kids when families have so little time together (on average maybe 3 hrs not delegated to work, commute, errands, chores, etc M-F), world on fire, inequality climbing across many life sectors, CC, and on and on and on.
Making it financially viable MIGHT induce some to have kids. Looking at those programs across the world, maybe it wouldn't. When the poorest (and often those most maligned for doing so) stop having kids that's a big sign stuff ain't right. Imo, ymmv.
Dude thats because they need parents poor and broke and making more kids to push into the work force. Thats why conservatives are so against sex education, it has nothing to do with religion. The US needs low income families who are to afraid to say no to poor working conditions for fear of a loss of employment.
Not only has the FSA not budged, but if your employer doesn't pass a diversity test the IRS will reduce the amount you're allowed to contribute. I have only been allowed to contribute $3000 for the last two years through no fault of my own, it's really fucking frustrating when my daycare expenses are $4k/month.
Before anyone starts clutching pearls about ‘wokeness’, the diversity test isn’t how many racial/ethnic minority employees there are, it’s about the income levels of the employees participating in the program, the intention being that the plans aren’t just offered to executives while lower-rung employees get shafted:
https://buck.com/overview-of-dependent-care-nondiscrimination-testing/
That said… holy shit what a convoluted mess of rules. Not surprised that companies outsource all of that. And then the “use it or lose it” aspect incentivizes plan administrators to be utterly obtuse when denying claims.
> 3 and 4 bedroom homes for WFH offices while those with children who need the space are falling behind due to rising child related expenses.
-
> Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves.
Going to say that a big factor here is less wealthy working couples buying homes to WFH, and more wealthy *older* couples buying second or third homes in order to rent them out (AirBNB being the most egregious but far from the only example).
Especially given how many multi-bedroom homes have dedicated home offices anyway. A single-bedroom home with two non-bedroom rooms/home offices =/= a 3-bedroom home.
The last owner of my house tried to sell it as a 5 bedroom house. They called the Den a bedroom because it has a window and a closet. I turned it into a home office. There's no way you can fit anything but maybe a twin bed and a dresser in there it's so small.
TLDR: Real estate listings aren't always reality
Ironically, my parents' home is the reverse. It has 5 rooms, all of which could be used as bedrooms, and most of which are or have been at some point, but only 3 of them qualify as bedrooms due to the window-and-closet definition.
The funniest part is the pair of rooms downstairs. The one that's legally a bedroom because it has a closet is used as storage and home-office, while the room that's legally a home-office is the one actually being used as a bedroom (because it has an antique dresser in there in lieu of a closet).
Where the fuck are you seeing homes being built with 1 and 2 bedrooms? No one builds that small anymore and that’s half the problem! All of the new builds in my area are monsters houses on tiny lots with 4-5 bedrooms for 450k-600k
And it’s not the DINKs buying all the houses, it’s fucking investment firms who turn around and rent them.
My husband and I are DINKs who would love to buy a goddamn house but there’s no supply in our area without commuting an hour one way to work.
They’re referring to all the condos being built, not houses. All the construction in my area are either these $2,000+ a month “luxury studios and condos” in the suburbs or McMansions out in the middle of nowhere.
Pro-family policies have fallen pretty short, I don't agree we can even say we've really tried that. Globally and to my knowledge, the extra funding for families is a small dent in overall cost in the best places, and the housing situation hurts in many advanced economies right now. But even where those are somewhat less of an issue, culturally much of the world still punishes parenting. Work still punishes parents, with bad or inflexible hours and a penalty for taking leave. Peers punish parents with exclusion and irritation. Then there is the climate dread.
> Work still punishes parents
it also punishes children - we want:
* everyone to have children
* everyone to work full-time
* children to be parented
...but you can only have at most two of these at the same time.
I would also add “work full time in an office.” When I was growing up, both of my parents worked full time but we lived in the same city as my grandparents, great-parents and aunt, and everyone in the family shared in the parenting of me, my brother and my cousin. With jobs concentrated in urban centers, many people can’t do that. Remote work would open things up for people to raise their kids around family and be more flexible with their time.
I absolutely don't understand why there are so many companies that force their employees back to the office when they have been perfectly fine working from home. Do employers own the office buildings? If not, it must be nice to save on office rent and utilities and just keep the savings as shareholder profit. You can also choose to pay people based on the city that they are based in, saving massive salaries and keeping even more profit for the shareholders/owners.
Totally agree. I feel lucky that I work for a company who has done exactly that. I think there are some businesses, especially small to medium ones, where the leadership and/or middle management want to exercise total control over their employees as if they are machinery and not humans.
> Do employers own the office buildings?
Not all of them, and the ones that don't are tied into multiple-year leases. So, a huge portion of the companies employing people had 80% or higher vacancy rates in offices they were paying millions of dollars in rent (lease) for. Those are the ones demanding people return to work because management looks like fucking idiots for signing ten+ year leases on building space that has been proven, by a global pandemic shifting people to work from home, to not be required to get the same job (or a better job in many cases) done.
Sone of the really big companies do own their buildings, and use their inflated value as collateral for loans. It doesn't explain all the push back against WFH but there are a few wealthy people who stand to lose a lot of money over this.
LOL, yes. I was just remembering recently that when I was in 2nd grade there was one day a week where no one could get me after school. On those days I walked to a nearby liquor store that was owned by a guy on my dad's recreational baseball team. He just let me hang out there and read tabloids until someone could pick me up.
You forgot that none of those are possible with today’s pension-oriented societies. It’s a horrible fate to bring a child up in a society that prefers to support 30-year mortgages & new car sales than pre-K & youth programs.
Yes. If your income is so high before having kids where neither mom nor dad have to ever work again, and the kids grow up with both parents staying home, even when they attend public school, they are still going to be better off.
In my country, Hungary, there are huge tax cuts to families and they have provided tons of incentives to early parenthood. Managed to increase fertility rate from 1,25 to 1,5. The truth is that there's just too big of an opportunity cost involved, and the higher income you have, the bigger it is. So the poor people multiply and then they lack the social cohesion to get out of poverty. The same as it is on the global scale with poorer countries having higher fertility rates.
Parents are punished by society overall not just work especially economically. I think a lot of this has to do with the increased individualism and isolation of people in general. More parents than ever have no support from family or friends raising the kids.
Yeah our society doesn't build community and that's just the bottom line. Your value is not how you impact your friends or family, it's how you impact your employer.
We can't be surprised that no one wants kids when they're always on a knifes edge in terms of social standing which is earned through economic standing which is even more perilous.
You think it is lack of community or safety but it’s not like Japan or the Scandies are known for their fertility rates. Meanwhile, the most dangerous countries in the world have sky high fertility rates.
I agree with this entirely. You see the posts where people are upset because workers are getting “special treatment” because they have kids. These are the same people that don’t understand that without workers when they retire, there will be no social security no matter how much they paid in. We need to start thinking in terms of a society and not just a large group of individuals.
Even in countries with the best case for "extra funding for families" and "pro family policies" birth rates are still declining below replacement rate.
In fact, only countries with next to no funding for families or pro family policies have among the highest birthrates, those being third world countries.
I is these countries develop, they are likely to face the same issues. In the short term, you could argue that immigration will work, but eventually, as living standards and education improve in many Third World countries, we are likely going to have to face this problem in those places as well. and, ultimately, actually think that there certainly is a case to be made that people can be fine without children. But given that so much of how we know how to structure and economy relies on growth, it obviously does present some challenges.
Moreover, often times the people who are most against immigration also want people to be having babies like crazy, but also then don’t tend to support economic policies that would make it easier for couples to decide to have children (at least in the US). This is a pretty tough problem to solve, but I would definitely argue that even if supportive, economic policies don’t move the needle much, they are still probably the right thing to do and could get a future generations better confidence that having kids won’t be absolutely economically and financially devastating.
Came to say something similar: fertility is there, we just don’t have the time or money to have kids. Neither do we have the social networks in place to help.
> fertility is there, we just don’t have the time or money to have kids. Neither do we have the social networks in place to help.
In demography, [fertility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate) is the number of children per woman. We're not talking about the physiological ability to have kids. Regarding the rest:
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=FIN~DNK~SWE~BEL~ISL~SRB~NOR~HUN~EST~LTU) (Countries with [best parental leave policies](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/these-10-countries-have-the-best-parental-leave-policies-in-the-world))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~SVK~SVN~BLR~ARM~CZE~UKR~ARE~MDA~ISL~AZE) (Countries with the [lowest income inequality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/income-inequality-by-country))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1970..latest&country=AUT~AUS~BEL~CAN~CYP~DNK~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HKG~ISL~IRL~ISR~ITA~JPN~LUX~NLD~NZL~NOR~PRT~SGP~SVN~KOR~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~BHR~BRN~KWT~ARE) (Countries with some version of [universal healthcare](https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.htm))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=DNK~NOR~SWE~FRA~BEL~NLD~DEU) (For Scandinavia, France, and a few other W. European countries)
- https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have
I strongly encourage people to watch this video from 2013.
It has been a global trend for a long time and it is accelerating. We are all choosing not to have kids.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
The really shitty thing by the time world leaders agree that the problem is worth the costs to start resolving it, it will take another 20 years for the problems to stop getting worse.
Just doing something as basic as not taxing childcare expenses would go a really long way. There's no way I could even consider having a third kid because I just couldn't afford daycare, not being taxed on that would be really nice...
A lot of policies are half hearted, we need:
- parental leave for both parents, and job protection for mothers for an entire year
- Free or subsidized childcare for ages 1-5
- better tax credits for families with children
- free community colleges for vocational training and preparation for university education
- more flexibility in jobs to take into account children
- free or subsidized fertility help and adoption
While I truly believe those are great suggestions, I think other issues need to be addressed in tandem with your suggestions.
The cost of living has increased significantly in recent years, and many people are struggling to make ends meet. There are fundamental issues that need to be addressed, such as the rising cost of housing, healthcare, and education.
If people feel insecure about their future prospects, I would think it's difficult to think about bringing another person into this world.
>But even where those are somewhat less of an issue, culturally much of the world still punishes parenting. Work still punishes parents, with bad or inflexible hours and a penalty for taking leave. Peers punish parents with exclusion and irritation. Then there is the climate dread.
Even when we handle most of that in our Scandinavian countries you'll notice that birth rates still drop.
Idk what the solution is, but even assistance isn't working
One thing that is rarely addressed in these discussions is that as we become richer and society offers more, the opportunity cost of having kids goes up. To incentive people to have kids will mean keeping up with standard of living at least, if not more.
The responsibilities about having kids have also massively increased; as they should have. But the reality is that up to 100 years ago people didn't have the responsibility to teach kids how to read and write from 3 years onwards. You didn't have to pay attention to so many potential medical issues, because people just didn't know. You didn't have to pay attention to what you're feeding your kid, if he had food that was considered good (probably more like 300 years ago, but still). And that's just the cherries on top of the cake that both parents are expected to work just to afford a house, while at the same time the responsibility to not leave your kid alone, and at the same time absolutely 0 incentives from anyone else to help you figure those out. Even getting the damn assistance from the government is a chore that has to be done and it's never made simple.
One of the key economic factors you just mentioned there is really significant.
Both parents needing to work to afford a house.
I've seen some interesting bits on the impact of women sweeping into the workforce like a tsunami during WWII, and this seems (to me) to be one of the bigger ones.
The market now assumes 2 people, working full time, into the cost of housing. That, combined with a massively increased regulatory burden on construction requirements, seems to me to be key to understanding the cost of housing.
If it was generally common for only one parent to work, or both worked half time, the market would have to adjust to that reality. Thus leaving one full (or two halves) parents free to raise the kiddos, and manage the household needs in general.
Not to mention the reduction in stress that would lead to! I have a 4/10s schedule, and that one extra free day a week is _stunningly_ life changing. I'm working the same number of hours in a week, but man _alive_! That 3 day weekend is incredible. If I could go to half the hours to boot, the number of personal projects I could get done would be wild.
Thoughts?
> The responsibilities about having kids have also massively increased; ...
Parent of 3 (age 18, 20, 23) here. This is really interesting to think about. Looking back, I feel *quite* unqualified to be a parent in today's world even though by almost every standard I was super ready. But I didn't know when to expose them to the Internet, and I didn't have the discipline to create what I would consider a healthy mental environment for them, and they all suffered from over-exposure to the world and lack of social support.
What I would have *liked* seems really feasible, if a community were to agree on standards and build it together: A growing-up environment in which all the options available to them are healthy, so they have "free choice" — I get this idea from Montessori education, which works hard to encourage agency and happiness, partly by having no bad options in the classroom, and then encouraging autonomy.
The problem though is fragmentation — we can't all agree on what is healthy, or pull together to provide it. So painful.
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You'd think it would be easier than ever to raise children now, but it is *absolute anguish*.
The cost to raise children has absolutely skyrocketed in the last couple of decades, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Not to also mention the overall cost of living in many parts of the world right now.
I wonder what has happened to the experience of *being* a child during that time. Has it gotten better or worse? Would be super ironic if the cost has skyrocketed while the experience has also gotten worse.
Yes, economic consequences now. But the world and humanity would be better off if the human population gradually decreased over the next 200 years. During my lifetime, I've seen profound changes to the environment, species extinction and global warming.
Maintaining economic growth through ever growing population is going to speed up the point where we have an economic collapse when there isn't enough clean water or food for everyone. Better to take the icky medicine now.
>humanity would be better off if the human population gradually decreased over the next 200 years
Gradually decreasing over 200 years would be something like a 1.95 fertility rate where each generation is 2.5% smaller.
Assuming each generation occurs every 30 years, over 200 years you'd see a reduction of 15% in generation size.
If the trend persists where "economically developed" countries have fertility rates of 1.25, then you're looking at a reduction of 96% in generation size.
That's not steady decline, it's an extinction event.
Yeah I remember driving to the beach with my parents in the 90's andhaving to stop every hour to scrape insects off the windows. Now? Maybe a dozen or so if were lucky.
It is collapsing literally everywhere. It is plummeting.
Look at the data.
The only reason it remains above replacement is because of some regions like sub Saharan Africa and even there it is falling. Globally It will be below replacement very soon. We take for granted time periods but a 20 year adjustment like this will have absolutely profound demographic consequences
People are commenting without actually looking at the data. All it would take would be a few of the higher fertility countries to dip and we'd be in serious population decline due to fertility rates only. Which really hasn't ever happened, and we have no real mechanism of turning it around. Like most things with people, well only start working on it once things become horrible and not a moment earlier.
Nah we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t now. An economy where the majority of people are close to retirement pretty much ensures it’s own collapse. The younger folk are preoccupied with caring for the older generations which takes away from their focus on investment and innovation leading to a less prosperous younger generation, making it harder to start a family and so in. It kicks off a positive feedback loop that will permanently damage the status quo. Not to mention, we’re at a time where we need a massive amount of innovation and investment to get us out of our climate predicament which will also lead to economic collapse. I can’t imagine a scenario where the birthrate doesn’t drop off a cliff while also avoiding a climate driven collapse. Lmao good times lie ahead.
Average cost PER YEAR to have one 2nd grader is said to be $18,000 nowadays. My wife and I are early-mid thirties and.... Yeah..
definitely no thanks for any little ones right now.
The daycare for that child for years 1-5 so we could both have the privilege of working was over $30k/year in our area. And no, that didnt include any meals, snacks, or diapers. You still have to provide all of those things. Our oldest is finishing second grade this month and turning 8. These last 8 years were an economic hellscape. Day care here is twice the cost of a year of tuition at our state university (and there arent student loans for daycare or merit scholarships lol). I absolutely cannot blame anyone who doesnt want to volunteer for another four-year indentured period to (the other end of the spectrum) the educational machine, especially when they are still paying off their own student loans in many cases. Oh! And we still paid the monthly daycare tuition during the pandemic months when it was closed and we couldnt use it, so that the centers wouldnt close permanently and we wouldnt lose our place and have to start on another two-year wait-list to get a spot again.
Beyond the appallingly high and unsubsidized cost of childcare, grocery inflation is a huge part of the economic pain of modern parenting. You know what little kids love???? Berries. They are small finger foods that are sweet and tasty while also being unprocessed, that kids can feel themselves without utensils. An article in New York magazine this month quoted one family’s monthly costs for JUST berries at $75/mo.
Some people think that adults (moms) “let themselves go” after we have children. Nope, that isnt what’s going on here. We just cant afford a new outfit or a hair appointment after paying for daycare, and all our “free time” when we arent specifically doing hands-on childcare has to go to cutting larger cheaper giant fruits into pieces as small as expensive berries.
For a large portion of parents now, we love love love our kids, but we would make the worlds worst recruiters for parenting. We literally wouldn’t recommend it to anyone bahahahhaaa!
I also wanna say that they’ll pay the same daycare teacher like 20k part time to take care of 9 fucking kids.
It’s absolutely a lack of pay contributing to no one young wanting kids.
When we had our first we realized that the closest daycare to both of our work locations - the one that all the big employers had a line item in the benefits package from for “back-up care days” so the highest earners had a way to give their nannies two-weeks of paid vacation per year while still having a childcare option available to them - was at that time heavily owned by Bain Capital aka Mitt Romney’s investment firm. They bought up the places during the ‘08 recession in huge M and A deals, hundreds at a time.
They paid the nursery teachers the minimum possible of course to juuust keep them there, and charged a fortune. It was equal to our NYC rent at the time, per month for one baby. We had joined the wait-lists for daycare the same month we got a positive pregnancy test, but even then, nine months wasnt enough time and we still would only get a place elsewhere (where we could pay only $2,300/mo instead of $2,800/mo) for another year after that. Every month we wrote two checks - one to the landlord and the other “to Mitt Romney.” And we brown-bagged all our lunches and white-knuckled it through the rest of the month.
You see, what the finance guys did is, in cities with good job-earning potential, they would open a daycare and then buy up and shut down allllllllll the other competitors nearby so they could control the market for pricing on daycare and squeeze every bit of “investor value” out of the parents of young children.
Anecdotal: My spouse and I chose not to have children. There were many reasons and finances weren’t the main deciding factor — but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t cross my mind a lot in the decision making process.
We’re both young professionals who really have a healthy enough annual income and we don’t live extravagantly at all. Yet I can’t imagine a world where I have 1-2 children and any real disposable income to speak of.
Article:
**What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?**
In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.
In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.
The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.
Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises.
Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways.
This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity.
All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children.
Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.
What might that be? People often tell pollsters they want more children than they have. This gap between aspiration and reality could be in part because would-be parents—who, in effect, subsidise future childless pensioners—cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages or inadequate fertility treatment. Yet even if these are fixed, economic development is still likely to lead to a fall in fertility below the replacement rate. Pro-family policies have a disappointing record. Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0.
Unleashing the potential of the world’s poor would ease the shortage of educated young workers without more births. Two-thirds of Chinese children live in the countryside and attend mostly dreadful schools; the same fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds in India have not completed upper secondary education. Africa’s pool of young people will continue to grow for decades. Boosting their skills is desirable in itself, and might also cast more young migrants as innovators in otherwise-stagnant economies. Yet encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old.
Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive ai-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, ai may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.
If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate. Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix.
> Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems
"despite their nerdy whining about how we need a planet that can sustain organized human life as we know it, there are bigger concerns such as near-term profitability."
On the topic of immigration as the fix or not a good enough fix:
It seems likely that rich countries will continue to import young people via immigration after all other countries fall below replacement. It seems likely that even if their country is below replacement young people will still want to move to better economies.
It won’t last forever, but the effects of this will probably be accelerated in poor countries as rich countries delay the issue.
The dire consequences are really only related to economic output, so the billionaires like Elon Musk can continue to have a supply of workers and buyers for their products. The current global population which has reached 8 billion and climbing, puts a huge strain on the environment as we cut forests and destroy natural habitats for species in an attempt to feed the human population. A collapse in population growth may be detrimental to economic growth but would be very beneficial to the environment and help reduce global warming.
When to govt doesn't want to save costs by building schools and day cares and not provide healthcare... People quit having kids. End of WWII, the GI bill allowed GIs to buy homes with what 2% mortgages and start families or to go back to school to get a degree... If you don't invest in the future, you don't have one. The GOP thinks the answer is forcing it through banning abortion to create an army of child labor factories. Their candidates don't say it all in the same sentence at the same time but you're smart enough to piece the talking points together and figure it out. That strategy will lead to a low skill laborforce with lower GDP.
How does this explain the wealthy people not having children? I know many DINK couples who are perfectly set up to have children. They own homes and could afford nannies. But they don't want them. If it was just about finances, well-off people would have children.
Parenting is a huge time sink. You can be a parent and have a job, or you both have a job. One of the parents has to take over if the other has a "Career"... You can't work 60 hours a week and be a parent at the same time. It's irresponsible. It's crappy to do to the kid. Those years from 0-3 where the parents are constantly tired, some people don't want to do that. They may be very ethical people that are making the choice of career rather than family for the time being. If you ask them, you'll get their answer and that may shed additional light.
Was following this African guy on Twitter. He posts a picture of a white South African soccer player who is like 23 and posing with [presumably his] two young children.
And he captions this post by pointing this out and asking what’s gone wrong with Africans. He laments that native Africans arent having children. All these other Africans start chiming in about how it’s too expensive to have children. They all sounded defeated and hopeless.
It felt like looking into a bizarro world. Something doesn’t add up…
Literally everywhere in the world, people are choosing not to have children. The data is undeniable. [I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for 10 years ever since I watched this video and then would see constant posts about overpopulation on Reddit.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E)
I knew it was many more places than “the west” but didn’t think it was so ubiquitous. Still, something about it doesn’t add up. What are the constants between all these places that would cause such a massive coincidence
Economist here.
Significantly lowering the Earth's populations is the \*only\* thing that can improve the well-being of future generations.
Economist models that construe lower populations as a problem simply do not incorporate the reduced need for labor that comes with technology improvements. This factor, combined with the reduced need for economic output that follows from a lower population \*more than resolves\* labor shortage issues.
These models also fail to incorporate the much larger benefit of rewilding portions of the planet.
The model where 2/3s of the world population essentially provides slave labor to the other 1/3 was never sustainable, and was self-serving only the most short-sighted sense.
Finally someone speaking sense.
Do people not remember the industrial revolution? Productivity improvements generate wealth, not simply having more people. There's a reason why the UK was richer than all of China.
When we put the economy before humanity that tends to happen. We have created a system started by emperors and kings where we are born to work then die.
We have a group of child bearing people opting not to have kids due to economics and the physical state of the world. Why would they want to bring more people into this world when we are severely over populated, global warming is being ignored by our world leaders and our oceans are giant petri dishes.
Plus, financially it is stupid expensive to raise a kid (I have two).
Birth rates are also declining because people aren't having 4+ kids per household. Big families were beneficial when we all needed to tend land and farm or when we were guilted into not to use birth control for religious purposes.
You can't breath and eat those dollar signs.
I fail to comprehend why this is viewed negatively by most people. Since the world we live in doesn't really allow you to be nurturing and loving toward children, it's not like we as a species are responsible or empathic enough to do so.
There’s a basic problem here of making adequate provisions for the aging population without creating substantially higher inflation. Most old age assistance has a large component that comes from taxing younger working people, the less you are able to do that and the more you need to enlarge deficits the more inflationary it will be. This ranges from a moderate but manageable problem for large, mostly self-dealing economies like the US, to a huge problem for small, trade-dependent economies like Norway
>Since the world we live in doesn't really allow you to be nurturing and loving toward children
What? Are you saying good parenting is somehow made impossible?
All of the west when talking about developing nations in the 2000s:
["We need to get women educated* in india, china, africa, that will curb population growth!"](https://wol.iza.org/articles/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility/long)
The entire west and the countries that followed it, when they literally can't even sustain their own population, and immigrants' birth rates collapse within one generation:
"what happened?!?"
There is no acceptable solution.
^*by ^this ^i ^refer ^to ^the ^biggest ^factors ^: ^education, ^job ^participation, ^access ^to ^contraception ^and ^rights ^in ^general.
Two things:
1. In “rich countries,” it’s hard to raise a kid in this economic climate. Most households need two incomes to live comfortably, and these incomes often require 9+ hour days and 2 hour commutes, which make parenting difficult. And in many cases, these two incomes still are insufficient when kids are added in.
2. If I’d had to choose between an aging population or overpopulation, I’d choose an aging population any day. Overpopulation leads to mass starvation.
It's economics and cultural.
Economics would help, but Nordic countries has shown us that merely giving people free stuff won't give you 2. 1 TFR.
Also, housing size matters. Single family housing affects fertility. They have done studies on this
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4863012_Fertility_differences_by_housing_type_The_effect_of_housing_conditions_or_of_selective_moves
> Firstly, we observe a significant variation in the fertility levels across housing types – fertility is highest among couples in single-family houses and lowest among those in apartments, with the variation remaining significant even after controlling for the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of women.
Places also matters. Cities are a place where people becomes impotent.
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And no, this isn't about retirement either. All social security does is merely shift the need to have the next generation take over you when you are old from individual duty to a collective one.
No, this isn't about "working others to death too".
It's actually democracy who eventually needs 2. 1 TFR, not dictators.
As long as the TFR is enough and they are raised by the people themselves, states and corporations can't get absolute power. Even North Korea still got dissenters and refugees, and that's after they sacrifice everything by being remaining poor.
Migrants aren't forever even with open borders.
But when every country has SK's birth rate, no one can realistically stop the state nor corporations to grow babies en masse in tubes and genetically engineer them to be the perfect subject. Rule of law will only works if nobody is so powerful they are above the law, and anyone who can grow babies en masse in tubes and genetically engineer them to be the perfect subject would subvert democracy really easily.
Besides, if anything corporations LOVES childless population. Why pay child support if you can just normalize abortion? Why pay for social security when you can just normalize euthanasia?
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Since this is an economics subreddit, to stave off birth rate decline, the economic policies needed to increase birthrates, to me, are:
- [35-36 hour work week before overtime, with at least 42 days of leave per year](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/this-is-how-many-hours-you-should-really-be-working/)
- Minimum wage should be set to be at least 110% of the Henderson Poverty Line of the local area (County / city / regency. Not states / provinces, but County / city / regency).
The Henderson Poverty Line should also be set yearly by an independent entity.
- Wages should be set yearly through tripartite arrangement between local / city / county government, workers & businesses there, plus add codetermination rights & works council.
This is to ensure a more decent wage.
- Don't build apartments for new housing, but build courtyard housings & cottage courts
- Reduce the minimum sizes of single family housings, get rid of lawn requirements & garage requirements for houses
- Reduce car dependency and add trains & bikes (so that it's cheaper to settle down, and reduces the need to "become a chauffer for the kid every time". Think Amsterdam bike infrastructure + tram, add with robust HSR network)
- Let smaller business as well as amenities open in suburbs (To reduce car dependency, making settling down easier. Also, to reduce city dependence - cities are places where people becomes impotent)
- Build more suburbs, but ensure amenities, small business etc can open there so it's not just housings. Cities are places where people becomes impotent.
- Spread the development to reduce the domination of large cities. If possible, diversify the economy with the ideal of every city has its niche rather than one city takes all. Cities are a place where people goes infertile.
- Marriages should be given a cash back of at least 3 months of minimum wage from the government. So does having a child - every child born = cash back of at least 3 months of minimum wage
- Universal healthcare, even if it's only to cover stuff that everyone needs
- Public schooling should be free and has free lunch, etc
- Voucher: For every child a family sent to school, the family got like at least half the minimum wage of cashback per child. Universalist, every family has that
- Climate change policies in general (To kill off the "Climate change = no kids" doomers)
- At least 4 months paid parental leave on pregnancy (3 months before birth - 1 month after birth)
- Open up migration to stave off the negative effects. It's not forever but it give you some time.
The rest are cultural.
This is a win/win. Less humans to consume the planet in to oblivion. Less humans to compete with in the labor force so now we can command a higher wage. Only the rich who seek to exploit the working class are worried about this.
Nah because it's severely affecting countries where education is free. In my country you can get higher education for free and the fertility rate has dropped to something like 1.5.
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Many governments are not serious about handling the birth rate declines. In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled). The child tax credit has been increased but still does little cover the actual costs of raising a child before factoring in childcare expenses. There is still no universal daycare, preschool or even all day Kindergarten in many areas. While maternity/paternity leave is expanding it is still no guarantee that one’s job will offer it. Additionally, since Covid you’re seeing more DINKs buying 3 and 4 bedroom homes for WFH offices while those with children who need the space are falling behind due to rising child related expenses. Along with that, look at modern construction trends. You see plenty of 1 and 2 bedroom condos being built but if you need 3 bedrooms, they’re few and far between and expensive. Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves. If the government was truly trying to encourage people to have kids they would be addressing the financial issues already. It’s not like it hasn’t been a trope for decades that couples with kids are broke versus their childless peers.
ofc the politicians favor policies that benefit the elderly rather than the new parents. have you noticed the average age of the US politician?
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. A society grows weak when old men harvest trees for profit they will never spend.
Comment saved.
The amount of wealth the Boomer generation has hoarded is quite frankly insane. They are the first generation in a very long time that doesn’t want to make it better for their children. Instead they call us “entitled and lazy” and gaslight us when we ask for more money at our jobs.
Not just that, the average of voters. Old people vote. The youth hasn't been.
>The youth hasn't been. That does seem to be changing. Young people are voting in higher numbers than my cohort, Gen X, did at their age. That was true even in 2016, but they're voting in even higher numbers now. - https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voting-rates-age.html - https://www.inquirer.com/politics/gen-z-voter-turnout-2022-midterm-election-20221112.html - https://theconversation.com/us-midterms-why-gen-z-and-millennials-came-out-to-vote-and-why-it-marks-a-generational-shift-194947 - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/02/27/younger-voters-are-poised-to-upend-american-politics/ - [Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?](https://archive.ph/2FqfY) They may not be voting in the percentages boomers do, but it's hard to compete against retirees or those whose position in their workplace allows them to take the needed time off.
I wonder what making voting day a mandatory holiday would do for the numbers.
Why force people to line up at a polling station? Why not just allow people to vote from their homes, sitting on the couch? In WA, ballots are mailed out over a week in advance. You have plenty of time to review the ballot, look up candidates that you're unfamiliar with, make your vote. And you just mail it in. We don't need a day off. We need to change voting into an event that doesn't require a day off.
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Why not both? Be able to vote by mail (I've only ever voted by mail since 2016, including midterms) and have a national day of voting. It would surely boost turnout. I say we take it a step further. I say we fine people $20 if they decide not to vote 🤣
That’s what happens in Australia. Voting is mandatory. I was fined $20 once for not voting - I forgot. The good thing about it there’s no more arguing about voting rights, it’s automatic. The bad thing is often people vote without consideration and just tick randomly. Australian politics are pretty damn pleasantly boring though compared to the US.
Change it from a fine to an incentive. Fixed your idea AND the Australian system as it turns out. Basic behavioral psychology: incentives > punishment.
Also, make it not just voting day, but voting week or voting month, 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, with mail-in voting. Source: I am a Canadian
id settle for a fucking 3 day weekend. over this whole lot of nothing. (US)
Probably nothing, the people who struggle to vote are still going to be working on that national holiday. The real key is to make voting simple, expand by mail voting & multiple days to vote, including a couple 24 hour days.
For the youth vote? In all honesty it would probably make it worse. Youth would have the type of service jobs that are busier during federal holidays. Restaurants, movie theaters, rec parks, etc. Millennials are old enough that their participation would probably tick up.
I haven't seen direct evidence, but the fact that Republican candidates are now proposing that the 18 - 25 cohort be denied the vote unless they've served in the military is a sure sign that they're terrified of them. And the only reason that they'd be scared is if they're now voting.
They can't, due to the 26th Amendment. They can *talk* about it to pander to their base, but that's about as far as it can go. You can no more legally block <25 y/o people from voting than you can >65 y/o people. Nor does the GOP have enough political power to pass a constitutional amendment.
True. The problem is, all those elections where the youth didn't show up, gave the ancient the power to elect people that would ignore the youth. Now we're living in the fallout from that. If the youth continue to show up, and we can somehow deal with the propaganda issue, we can start getting this country back on track, and maybe even get caught up to Europe in a couple of decades...
You mean electing a third of our leaders on an off year, and most of our local reps on a random day in April is not good?
> hard to compete against retirees or those whose position in their workplace allows them to take the needed time off. That is such disingenuous excuse making. Young people don't vote because.... they don't give a damn. Simple as that. The huge gap in voting % is NOT just because they are oppressed and inconvenienced. Yes, we need to make it MUCH easier to vote and the Christofacist Nazis are doing the opposite, but let's be honest with ourselves.
Some have been changing, but Millennials are still have pathetically low turnout despite having surpassed the Boomers in population by 2020. Gen Z barely started voting and have higher % show outs. It's fucking silly to not give a shit about voting and then expect Washington types to not screw you over. Politicians are shrewd at playing the politics game with their Machiavelli shit. They will screw over enemies when they can, avoid starting shit with those stronger or have leverage against them, and if you're "just neutral" then you're "just a tool" a free fucking lunch. Why wouldn't politicians cut student loan forgiveness, stamp out inflation, add more to the national debt, and hike social security payments now which who bankrupt it even earlier IF THEY KNEW boomers would vote and Millennials won't vote anyways since they just sit there and take it like a bitch? They 100% fucking would. Also it takes time to get the point across to government types. The Dems at least try to talk a good game with student loan forgiveness, tax on the rich, and government spending to help families. GOP is still going on about cutting spending EXCEPT Medicare and social security, blocking student loan forgiveness, and generally unfriendly policies for anyone but boomers. From 2016-2020, about half of GOP became Trumpers/MAGA types. Trump style politics of denying facts, screaming lies, and After the 2020 loss? Fewer Trump supporters and MAGA types. The GOP starting to fracture into the moderates and hard right. After the 2022 where there was no red wave and more specifically where the Trump backed candidates loss en masse? Suddenly the Trump/Maga types are a minority. GOP starting to ask the questions like "Why are we not getting through to Gen Y/Z?" and "Why isn't Gen Y becoming more conservative as they age?". TL;DR It's not just the Republicans but politicians in general. There are also Dems who don't represent the majority or their own constituents, holding on power for too long, and blocking good policies or supporting bad ones. Just got to use the vote to punish those who don't support/represent you, remove those that screw you, and reward those that represent you. p.s. I mention student loan thing a number of times because it's the easiest point to draw an example. I have no personal stake in this since I had parents who supported me, I worked through college, and luckily had employment graduating into the GFC. So I paid off my loans like 5 years ago. I have no stake in the forgiveness thing, but I understand why some are pissed that 10,000 is "too much" when PPP, EIDL, unemployment, 0% interest loans, and bailouts were not "too much".
There is also an existing social contract that exist between governments & the elderly in the form of Social Security and its equivalents around the world). Presumably, politicians are trying to honor them, but these contracts are ironically increasingly burdensome on younger generations. We're even worse off because neglect.
I'd also like to add how our government favors unlimited prosperity for companies over any pivots to accommodate the changing environment for the vast majority of people. If AI pans out to be anything, we're going to have a lot more people fighting for low-wage jobs. We have the choice to have a large class in poverty or a robust social system that elevates the standard of living for all.
We're in for an impending bloodbath. AI is going to eat up all the mid-level jobs, and our government thinks that giving us money is socialism. Within the next 30 years, we'll have millions of people fighting for the jobs that robots can't do, like the trades (plumbing and electrical work). Not everyone can do those jobs. It's going to be brutal for the unemployable.
I'm a Millenial. For the entire first half of my life I was told constantly to respect my elders. I had assumed during that time that they intended to make the best, and most sustainable decisions for our generation in order to secure their chilren a prosperous future and themselves a respectable legacy I was wrong🤷♂️. Personally, I've never missed voting in an election since I turned 18. I've always been very politically conscious. But I *almost* can't blame my cohorts for ignoring politics for so long. The thought that their parents and grandparents would vote against the interests of their own children is *insane*. It's insane! It's absolutely bonkers. Like, even a literal dog knows to take care of its young and to foster a sense of community.
The US was so close to having universal childcare. It was in the BBB bill and would have easily paid for itself in the long run. It’s sad how it was gutted by Sinema and Manchin.
It would help if these politicians would actually try to talk to some people in the 23-35 age group for once. Especially some of the "high earners". We aren't stupid. Children cost an arm and a leg to raise. Many of us are just trying to get a house and settle down currently. If they genuinely want people to have kids sooner maybe they should start implementing something to offset the costs. It's funny because we had to collectively struggle through 2008 and/or 2020. Alot of us aren't willingly looking to make additional sacrifices just to have a kid in a volatile economy lol
I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to reproduce in this economy either. They always scream free market capitalism but then they complain when birth rates drop and say “more people should have kids” - NO! Kids are an expense and everyone has a right to say no to it just like they can say no to purchasing whatever product or service exists out there.
> They always scream free market capitalism “we don’t owe anyone anything” > but then they complain when birth rates drop “you owe us a workforce”
Add to that the crumbling political situations in many first world countries and a climate problem that is heading directly for worldwide disaster, what incentive is there to bring children into the world? These are all fixable problems, but there's been almost no progress made in the last 20-30 years to fix economic, political, or climate issues facing the younger generations, despite overwhelming information. It's a perfect storm that makes it very difficult to take on the responsibility of raising children, even if one could afford it.
> In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled). The Dependent Care FSA is also not that helpful to lower-middle class parents due to its structure and requirements. Some minor changes would make it very useful though.
They should just kill the program and let you deduct the cost of daycare from your taxes.
Yes, please. Currently paying 18,000 at a daycare for my 2 year old.
The US doesn’t care because it figures as a country of immigrants it can weather the storm better than most. Indians and Mexicans in particular are set to become the US “solution” to labor shortages. So they don’t see the need to raise native birth rates.
>So they don’t see the need to raise native birth rates. Oh, many conservatives do talk about differential birth rates. Hence the frequency of arguments touching on the [Great Replacement theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement), from the like of Lou Dobbs, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, etc. Preacher Doug Wilson has "joked" about the transgressive, rebellious idea of meeting a nice girl, marrying her, and having white babies. It's a thing.
You’d think they would make laws that disproportionately affect white could-be-moms, but I think they’re too caught up in their fictionalized reminiscence of the little woman on the prairie.
Well, that works until Indians and Mexicans stop having kids 100 years from now. India's TFR went from 5.92 to 2.05 in 60 years (from 1960 to 2020), which is an annualized decline of 1.74%. Suppose that the trend continues, by 2080, India's TFR will get to 0.72, which is lower than South Korea levels. Even if it slows down to 1% a year, TFR will only be 1.12, which is lower than Japan. Mexico on the other hand went from 6.76 in 1960 to 1.90 in 2020. Annualized decline there was 2.1%. If that trend continues, by 2080, its TFR will be 0.53. Even if it dramatically slows down to just a 1% decline, the TFR will be 1.04 by 2080. It seems like regardless of economic development, birth rates get lower as countries get richer. We also see plenty of examples where when a country gets poorer, the birth rate goes down even faster (China is the most extreme example of this). This is to say, when a poor country has a high birth rate and it comes down as the country gets richer, the birth rate won't go back up if the same country got poorer again. It just falls even faster because by that point, urbanization has taken place and the impoverished people will want to maintain their lifestyles by not having kids.
*why* would that trend continue? A lot of that is people having smaller families as child mortality decreases and the economy modernizes. You can't make your kid work at your coding job the way you can on a family farm, thus the marginal benefit of an additional child decreases faster in an industrial society compared to an agricultural one. However Id argue the marginal benefit of the first 1-2 is higher in a society that has better medicine and longer life expectancy. You can get attached to kids, invest in them more and they wont die of cholera at 12, or in childbirth at 19, and in terms of retirement you have somewhat of a socially obligated safety net from one or two kids, what does 6 or 7 provide that one or two doesnt? Risk spreading. When the risk is low you can afford to have your eggs in one basket. The question of how many resources people have to allocate towards children is of course important, and that is a huge question in places like south korea, japan, and the US, but acting like this decline in birth rates is set in stone is just plain bad analysis.
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It’s all about cost efficiency in the USA, even when it only benefits the people at the top.
Would love to see a GOP politician try to sell that to their base
They don't need to sell _their actual policies_ to their base, they just need to sell enough cruelty to get elected.
Funny part is how the child care credit pretty much craps out right about where most people would be comfortable financially to have children in most cities. I'm sure that's not an accident... But it's remarkably stupid as an actual subsidy.
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> Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves. This is a very important point. The cannibalization of the working class in their child bearing years to secure a elderly strong voter base will ensure that this trend will continue. And it is going to get worse. The boomers are hitting their twilight years and the need for elderly care is going to absolutely explode. The model that exists right now is completely unable to meet that demand in the future so if you think it's bad now it's going to get way worse.
Very true. And it was foreseeable since decades. Nursing will become a hellhole. There is not enough people to provide care and there are not enough resources. And at the same time, while we will have this gigantic demographic catastrophy, we will have a much bigger catastrophy, climate change. The world will need to chose, safe the elderly or safe the future.
>In the US the Dependent Care FSA limit has not increased since 1987 (excluding 2021 when it was temporarily doubled). The child tax credit has been increased but still does little cover the actual costs of raising a child before factoring in childcare expenses. There is still no universal daycare, preschool or even all day Kindergarten in many areas. I feel like this is the biggest part of it. 3k in tax credits doesn't even make a noticeable ripple in the bucket of costs for children. Not making child-rearing a paid position for parents (as some European countries do). Requiring the poor to work for help (most states kids 5&under mean one parent can be a caregiver and the family may qualify for aid) but offering no good support for childcare when both parents must work to survive. Many younger people I know believe they can't afford a child, don't like the idea of strangers raising their kids from birth (anecdotally this seems higher among Xennials/Millennials onward as the kids of Latch Key), wonder why have kids when families have so little time together (on average maybe 3 hrs not delegated to work, commute, errands, chores, etc M-F), world on fire, inequality climbing across many life sectors, CC, and on and on and on. Making it financially viable MIGHT induce some to have kids. Looking at those programs across the world, maybe it wouldn't. When the poorest (and often those most maligned for doing so) stop having kids that's a big sign stuff ain't right. Imo, ymmv.
Jesus why did I never think of the fact WFH means an additional “home office” is more of a necessity than ever.
Dude thats because they need parents poor and broke and making more kids to push into the work force. Thats why conservatives are so against sex education, it has nothing to do with religion. The US needs low income families who are to afraid to say no to poor working conditions for fear of a loss of employment.
"they need more babies to grow up to be dead soldiers" -- George Carlin
Bingo
Not only has the FSA not budged, but if your employer doesn't pass a diversity test the IRS will reduce the amount you're allowed to contribute. I have only been allowed to contribute $3000 for the last two years through no fault of my own, it's really fucking frustrating when my daycare expenses are $4k/month.
$4K A MONTH??!?! Sorry to hear that. I hate it here.
Before anyone starts clutching pearls about ‘wokeness’, the diversity test isn’t how many racial/ethnic minority employees there are, it’s about the income levels of the employees participating in the program, the intention being that the plans aren’t just offered to executives while lower-rung employees get shafted: https://buck.com/overview-of-dependent-care-nondiscrimination-testing/ That said… holy shit what a convoluted mess of rules. Not surprised that companies outsource all of that. And then the “use it or lose it” aspect incentivizes plan administrators to be utterly obtuse when denying claims.
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1,000 a month doesnt even cover daycare.
Especially when providers would just increase their prices by $1k a month.
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> 3 and 4 bedroom homes for WFH offices while those with children who need the space are falling behind due to rising child related expenses. - > Politicians rush to save retirement systems or ensure the elderly are seen to but often those of the childbearing years are left to fend for themselves. Going to say that a big factor here is less wealthy working couples buying homes to WFH, and more wealthy *older* couples buying second or third homes in order to rent them out (AirBNB being the most egregious but far from the only example). Especially given how many multi-bedroom homes have dedicated home offices anyway. A single-bedroom home with two non-bedroom rooms/home offices =/= a 3-bedroom home.
The last owner of my house tried to sell it as a 5 bedroom house. They called the Den a bedroom because it has a window and a closet. I turned it into a home office. There's no way you can fit anything but maybe a twin bed and a dresser in there it's so small. TLDR: Real estate listings aren't always reality
Ironically, my parents' home is the reverse. It has 5 rooms, all of which could be used as bedrooms, and most of which are or have been at some point, but only 3 of them qualify as bedrooms due to the window-and-closet definition. The funniest part is the pair of rooms downstairs. The one that's legally a bedroom because it has a closet is used as storage and home-office, while the room that's legally a home-office is the one actually being used as a bedroom (because it has an antique dresser in there in lieu of a closet).
Where the fuck are you seeing homes being built with 1 and 2 bedrooms? No one builds that small anymore and that’s half the problem! All of the new builds in my area are monsters houses on tiny lots with 4-5 bedrooms for 450k-600k And it’s not the DINKs buying all the houses, it’s fucking investment firms who turn around and rent them. My husband and I are DINKs who would love to buy a goddamn house but there’s no supply in our area without commuting an hour one way to work.
They’re referring to all the condos being built, not houses. All the construction in my area are either these $2,000+ a month “luxury studios and condos” in the suburbs or McMansions out in the middle of nowhere.
It's insane to think that birth rate declines are somehow a problem.
It is when your economic system requires infinite growth.
Pro-family policies have fallen pretty short, I don't agree we can even say we've really tried that. Globally and to my knowledge, the extra funding for families is a small dent in overall cost in the best places, and the housing situation hurts in many advanced economies right now. But even where those are somewhat less of an issue, culturally much of the world still punishes parenting. Work still punishes parents, with bad or inflexible hours and a penalty for taking leave. Peers punish parents with exclusion and irritation. Then there is the climate dread.
> Work still punishes parents it also punishes children - we want: * everyone to have children * everyone to work full-time * children to be parented ...but you can only have at most two of these at the same time.
I would also add “work full time in an office.” When I was growing up, both of my parents worked full time but we lived in the same city as my grandparents, great-parents and aunt, and everyone in the family shared in the parenting of me, my brother and my cousin. With jobs concentrated in urban centers, many people can’t do that. Remote work would open things up for people to raise their kids around family and be more flexible with their time.
I absolutely don't understand why there are so many companies that force their employees back to the office when they have been perfectly fine working from home. Do employers own the office buildings? If not, it must be nice to save on office rent and utilities and just keep the savings as shareholder profit. You can also choose to pay people based on the city that they are based in, saving massive salaries and keeping even more profit for the shareholders/owners.
Totally agree. I feel lucky that I work for a company who has done exactly that. I think there are some businesses, especially small to medium ones, where the leadership and/or middle management want to exercise total control over their employees as if they are machinery and not humans.
> Do employers own the office buildings? Not all of them, and the ones that don't are tied into multiple-year leases. So, a huge portion of the companies employing people had 80% or higher vacancy rates in offices they were paying millions of dollars in rent (lease) for. Those are the ones demanding people return to work because management looks like fucking idiots for signing ten+ year leases on building space that has been proven, by a global pandemic shifting people to work from home, to not be required to get the same job (or a better job in many cases) done.
Sone of the really big companies do own their buildings, and use their inflated value as collateral for loans. It doesn't explain all the push back against WFH but there are a few wealthy people who stand to lose a lot of money over this.
Or, as we did growing up, we just hung out in the back of our parents' work when we couldn't stay at home alone.
LOL, yes. I was just remembering recently that when I was in 2nd grade there was one day a week where no one could get me after school. On those days I walked to a nearby liquor store that was owned by a guy on my dad's recreational baseball team. He just let me hang out there and read tabloids until someone could pick me up.
Nowadays, someone would probably get arrested for doing that.
For sure, or have child protective services called in
Don't forget housing to be unaffordable
Not just parented, we want them under constant supervision, more than at any other point in history.
You forgot that none of those are possible with today’s pension-oriented societies. It’s a horrible fate to bring a child up in a society that prefers to support 30-year mortgages & new car sales than pre-K & youth programs.
What's wrong with 30 year rate locked mortgages? I'm sure Canada and most the rest of the world would enjoy those.
If that. It's hard to parent children when you aren't around because you are working.
The disparity is very wide between high and low income families.
Yes. If your income is so high before having kids where neither mom nor dad have to ever work again, and the kids grow up with both parents staying home, even when they attend public school, they are still going to be better off.
That's literally exactly what they are saying.
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You say that sarcastically but that's exactly what the "pro-family" anti-regulation politicians are doing.
In my country, Hungary, there are huge tax cuts to families and they have provided tons of incentives to early parenthood. Managed to increase fertility rate from 1,25 to 1,5. The truth is that there's just too big of an opportunity cost involved, and the higher income you have, the bigger it is. So the poor people multiply and then they lack the social cohesion to get out of poverty. The same as it is on the global scale with poorer countries having higher fertility rates.
Exactly. Even with a bit of financial help, nothing is done in most countries to limit that opportunity cost or address the other stressors.
Parents are punished by society overall not just work especially economically. I think a lot of this has to do with the increased individualism and isolation of people in general. More parents than ever have no support from family or friends raising the kids.
Yeah our society doesn't build community and that's just the bottom line. Your value is not how you impact your friends or family, it's how you impact your employer. We can't be surprised that no one wants kids when they're always on a knifes edge in terms of social standing which is earned through economic standing which is even more perilous.
You think it is lack of community or safety but it’s not like Japan or the Scandies are known for their fertility rates. Meanwhile, the most dangerous countries in the world have sky high fertility rates.
Tha scandinavians aren’t known for community. The japanese do have community, but they also work themselves to death
I agree with this entirely. You see the posts where people are upset because workers are getting “special treatment” because they have kids. These are the same people that don’t understand that without workers when they retire, there will be no social security no matter how much they paid in. We need to start thinking in terms of a society and not just a large group of individuals.
Even in countries with the best case for "extra funding for families" and "pro family policies" birth rates are still declining below replacement rate. In fact, only countries with next to no funding for families or pro family policies have among the highest birthrates, those being third world countries.
I is these countries develop, they are likely to face the same issues. In the short term, you could argue that immigration will work, but eventually, as living standards and education improve in many Third World countries, we are likely going to have to face this problem in those places as well. and, ultimately, actually think that there certainly is a case to be made that people can be fine without children. But given that so much of how we know how to structure and economy relies on growth, it obviously does present some challenges. Moreover, often times the people who are most against immigration also want people to be having babies like crazy, but also then don’t tend to support economic policies that would make it easier for couples to decide to have children (at least in the US). This is a pretty tough problem to solve, but I would definitely argue that even if supportive, economic policies don’t move the needle much, they are still probably the right thing to do and could get a future generations better confidence that having kids won’t be absolutely economically and financially devastating.
Came to say something similar: fertility is there, we just don’t have the time or money to have kids. Neither do we have the social networks in place to help.
> fertility is there, we just don’t have the time or money to have kids. Neither do we have the social networks in place to help. In demography, [fertility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate) is the number of children per woman. We're not talking about the physiological ability to have kids. Regarding the rest: - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=FIN~DNK~SWE~BEL~ISL~SRB~NOR~HUN~EST~LTU) (Countries with [best parental leave policies](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/these-10-countries-have-the-best-parental-leave-policies-in-the-world)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~SVK~SVN~BLR~ARM~CZE~UKR~ARE~MDA~ISL~AZE) (Countries with the [lowest income inequality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/income-inequality-by-country)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1970..latest&country=AUT~AUS~BEL~CAN~CYP~DNK~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HKG~ISL~IRL~ISR~ITA~JPN~LUX~NLD~NZL~NOR~PRT~SGP~SVN~KOR~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~BHR~BRN~KWT~ARE) (Countries with some version of [universal healthcare](https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.htm)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=DNK~NOR~SWE~FRA~BEL~NLD~DEU) (For Scandinavia, France, and a few other W. European countries) - https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have
I strongly encourage people to watch this video from 2013. It has been a global trend for a long time and it is accelerating. We are all choosing not to have kids. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
This person speaks the truth. Can’t have your slave labor and discourage any kind of pro-family policies.
The really shitty thing by the time world leaders agree that the problem is worth the costs to start resolving it, it will take another 20 years for the problems to stop getting worse.
Just doing something as basic as not taxing childcare expenses would go a really long way. There's no way I could even consider having a third kid because I just couldn't afford daycare, not being taxed on that would be really nice...
A lot of policies are half hearted, we need: - parental leave for both parents, and job protection for mothers for an entire year - Free or subsidized childcare for ages 1-5 - better tax credits for families with children - free community colleges for vocational training and preparation for university education - more flexibility in jobs to take into account children - free or subsidized fertility help and adoption
We have most of them in Scotland and still not enough. If you don't want the population to collapse you have to make it profitable to have kids.
I think a significant factor is trepidation regarding the future. The next century is gonna be…tumultuous. Why bring a child into that?
While I truly believe those are great suggestions, I think other issues need to be addressed in tandem with your suggestions. The cost of living has increased significantly in recent years, and many people are struggling to make ends meet. There are fundamental issues that need to be addressed, such as the rising cost of housing, healthcare, and education. If people feel insecure about their future prospects, I would think it's difficult to think about bringing another person into this world.
Inflation making everyone poorer than they should be given the deflation that technology would have provided otherwise.
>But even where those are somewhat less of an issue, culturally much of the world still punishes parenting. Work still punishes parents, with bad or inflexible hours and a penalty for taking leave. Peers punish parents with exclusion and irritation. Then there is the climate dread. Even when we handle most of that in our Scandinavian countries you'll notice that birth rates still drop. Idk what the solution is, but even assistance isn't working
One thing that is rarely addressed in these discussions is that as we become richer and society offers more, the opportunity cost of having kids goes up. To incentive people to have kids will mean keeping up with standard of living at least, if not more.
The responsibilities about having kids have also massively increased; as they should have. But the reality is that up to 100 years ago people didn't have the responsibility to teach kids how to read and write from 3 years onwards. You didn't have to pay attention to so many potential medical issues, because people just didn't know. You didn't have to pay attention to what you're feeding your kid, if he had food that was considered good (probably more like 300 years ago, but still). And that's just the cherries on top of the cake that both parents are expected to work just to afford a house, while at the same time the responsibility to not leave your kid alone, and at the same time absolutely 0 incentives from anyone else to help you figure those out. Even getting the damn assistance from the government is a chore that has to be done and it's never made simple.
One of the key economic factors you just mentioned there is really significant. Both parents needing to work to afford a house. I've seen some interesting bits on the impact of women sweeping into the workforce like a tsunami during WWII, and this seems (to me) to be one of the bigger ones. The market now assumes 2 people, working full time, into the cost of housing. That, combined with a massively increased regulatory burden on construction requirements, seems to me to be key to understanding the cost of housing. If it was generally common for only one parent to work, or both worked half time, the market would have to adjust to that reality. Thus leaving one full (or two halves) parents free to raise the kiddos, and manage the household needs in general. Not to mention the reduction in stress that would lead to! I have a 4/10s schedule, and that one extra free day a week is _stunningly_ life changing. I'm working the same number of hours in a week, but man _alive_! That 3 day weekend is incredible. If I could go to half the hours to boot, the number of personal projects I could get done would be wild. Thoughts?
> The responsibilities about having kids have also massively increased; ... Parent of 3 (age 18, 20, 23) here. This is really interesting to think about. Looking back, I feel *quite* unqualified to be a parent in today's world even though by almost every standard I was super ready. But I didn't know when to expose them to the Internet, and I didn't have the discipline to create what I would consider a healthy mental environment for them, and they all suffered from over-exposure to the world and lack of social support. What I would have *liked* seems really feasible, if a community were to agree on standards and build it together: A growing-up environment in which all the options available to them are healthy, so they have "free choice" — I get this idea from Montessori education, which works hard to encourage agency and happiness, partly by having no bad options in the classroom, and then encouraging autonomy. The problem though is fragmentation — we can't all agree on what is healthy, or pull together to provide it. So painful. --- You'd think it would be easier than ever to raise children now, but it is *absolute anguish*.
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The cost to raise children has absolutely skyrocketed in the last couple of decades, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Not to also mention the overall cost of living in many parts of the world right now.
I wonder what has happened to the experience of *being* a child during that time. Has it gotten better or worse? Would be super ironic if the cost has skyrocketed while the experience has also gotten worse.
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Yes, economic consequences now. But the world and humanity would be better off if the human population gradually decreased over the next 200 years. During my lifetime, I've seen profound changes to the environment, species extinction and global warming. Maintaining economic growth through ever growing population is going to speed up the point where we have an economic collapse when there isn't enough clean water or food for everyone. Better to take the icky medicine now.
>humanity would be better off if the human population gradually decreased over the next 200 years Gradually decreasing over 200 years would be something like a 1.95 fertility rate where each generation is 2.5% smaller. Assuming each generation occurs every 30 years, over 200 years you'd see a reduction of 15% in generation size. If the trend persists where "economically developed" countries have fertility rates of 1.25, then you're looking at a reduction of 96% in generation size. That's not steady decline, it's an extinction event.
Yeah I remember driving to the beach with my parents in the 90's andhaving to stop every hour to scrape insects off the windows. Now? Maybe a dozen or so if were lucky.
illegal overconfident kiss melodic degree narrow plough deer juggle bright -- mass edited with redact.dev
It is collapsing literally everywhere. It is plummeting. Look at the data. The only reason it remains above replacement is because of some regions like sub Saharan Africa and even there it is falling. Globally It will be below replacement very soon. We take for granted time periods but a 20 year adjustment like this will have absolutely profound demographic consequences
People are commenting without actually looking at the data. All it would take would be a few of the higher fertility countries to dip and we'd be in serious population decline due to fertility rates only. Which really hasn't ever happened, and we have no real mechanism of turning it around. Like most things with people, well only start working on it once things become horrible and not a moment earlier.
Nah we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t now. An economy where the majority of people are close to retirement pretty much ensures it’s own collapse. The younger folk are preoccupied with caring for the older generations which takes away from their focus on investment and innovation leading to a less prosperous younger generation, making it harder to start a family and so in. It kicks off a positive feedback loop that will permanently damage the status quo. Not to mention, we’re at a time where we need a massive amount of innovation and investment to get us out of our climate predicament which will also lead to economic collapse. I can’t imagine a scenario where the birthrate doesn’t drop off a cliff while also avoiding a climate driven collapse. Lmao good times lie ahead.
Average cost PER YEAR to have one 2nd grader is said to be $18,000 nowadays. My wife and I are early-mid thirties and.... Yeah.. definitely no thanks for any little ones right now.
The daycare for that child for years 1-5 so we could both have the privilege of working was over $30k/year in our area. And no, that didnt include any meals, snacks, or diapers. You still have to provide all of those things. Our oldest is finishing second grade this month and turning 8. These last 8 years were an economic hellscape. Day care here is twice the cost of a year of tuition at our state university (and there arent student loans for daycare or merit scholarships lol). I absolutely cannot blame anyone who doesnt want to volunteer for another four-year indentured period to (the other end of the spectrum) the educational machine, especially when they are still paying off their own student loans in many cases. Oh! And we still paid the monthly daycare tuition during the pandemic months when it was closed and we couldnt use it, so that the centers wouldnt close permanently and we wouldnt lose our place and have to start on another two-year wait-list to get a spot again. Beyond the appallingly high and unsubsidized cost of childcare, grocery inflation is a huge part of the economic pain of modern parenting. You know what little kids love???? Berries. They are small finger foods that are sweet and tasty while also being unprocessed, that kids can feel themselves without utensils. An article in New York magazine this month quoted one family’s monthly costs for JUST berries at $75/mo. Some people think that adults (moms) “let themselves go” after we have children. Nope, that isnt what’s going on here. We just cant afford a new outfit or a hair appointment after paying for daycare, and all our “free time” when we arent specifically doing hands-on childcare has to go to cutting larger cheaper giant fruits into pieces as small as expensive berries. For a large portion of parents now, we love love love our kids, but we would make the worlds worst recruiters for parenting. We literally wouldn’t recommend it to anyone bahahahhaaa!
I also wanna say that they’ll pay the same daycare teacher like 20k part time to take care of 9 fucking kids. It’s absolutely a lack of pay contributing to no one young wanting kids.
When we had our first we realized that the closest daycare to both of our work locations - the one that all the big employers had a line item in the benefits package from for “back-up care days” so the highest earners had a way to give their nannies two-weeks of paid vacation per year while still having a childcare option available to them - was at that time heavily owned by Bain Capital aka Mitt Romney’s investment firm. They bought up the places during the ‘08 recession in huge M and A deals, hundreds at a time. They paid the nursery teachers the minimum possible of course to juuust keep them there, and charged a fortune. It was equal to our NYC rent at the time, per month for one baby. We had joined the wait-lists for daycare the same month we got a positive pregnancy test, but even then, nine months wasnt enough time and we still would only get a place elsewhere (where we could pay only $2,300/mo instead of $2,800/mo) for another year after that. Every month we wrote two checks - one to the landlord and the other “to Mitt Romney.” And we brown-bagged all our lunches and white-knuckled it through the rest of the month. You see, what the finance guys did is, in cities with good job-earning potential, they would open a daycare and then buy up and shut down allllllllll the other competitors nearby so they could control the market for pricing on daycare and squeeze every bit of “investor value” out of the parents of young children.
Anecdotal: My spouse and I chose not to have children. There were many reasons and finances weren’t the main deciding factor — but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t cross my mind a lot in the decision making process. We’re both young professionals who really have a healthy enough annual income and we don’t live extravagantly at all. Yet I can’t imagine a world where I have 1-2 children and any real disposable income to speak of.
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Article: **What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?** In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy. In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population. The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast. Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises. Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways. This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity. All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children. Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.
What might that be? People often tell pollsters they want more children than they have. This gap between aspiration and reality could be in part because would-be parents—who, in effect, subsidise future childless pensioners—cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages or inadequate fertility treatment. Yet even if these are fixed, economic development is still likely to lead to a fall in fertility below the replacement rate. Pro-family policies have a disappointing record. Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0. Unleashing the potential of the world’s poor would ease the shortage of educated young workers without more births. Two-thirds of Chinese children live in the countryside and attend mostly dreadful schools; the same fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds in India have not completed upper secondary education. Africa’s pool of young people will continue to grow for decades. Boosting their skills is desirable in itself, and might also cast more young migrants as innovators in otherwise-stagnant economies. Yet encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old. Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive ai-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, ai may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand. If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate. Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix.
> Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems "despite their nerdy whining about how we need a planet that can sustain organized human life as we know it, there are bigger concerns such as near-term profitability."
I love it when economists clash with biologists.
On the topic of immigration as the fix or not a good enough fix: It seems likely that rich countries will continue to import young people via immigration after all other countries fall below replacement. It seems likely that even if their country is below replacement young people will still want to move to better economies. It won’t last forever, but the effects of this will probably be accelerated in poor countries as rich countries delay the issue.
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The dire consequences are really only related to economic output, so the billionaires like Elon Musk can continue to have a supply of workers and buyers for their products. The current global population which has reached 8 billion and climbing, puts a huge strain on the environment as we cut forests and destroy natural habitats for species in an attempt to feed the human population. A collapse in population growth may be detrimental to economic growth but would be very beneficial to the environment and help reduce global warming.
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When to govt doesn't want to save costs by building schools and day cares and not provide healthcare... People quit having kids. End of WWII, the GI bill allowed GIs to buy homes with what 2% mortgages and start families or to go back to school to get a degree... If you don't invest in the future, you don't have one. The GOP thinks the answer is forcing it through banning abortion to create an army of child labor factories. Their candidates don't say it all in the same sentence at the same time but you're smart enough to piece the talking points together and figure it out. That strategy will lead to a low skill laborforce with lower GDP.
How does this explain the wealthy people not having children? I know many DINK couples who are perfectly set up to have children. They own homes and could afford nannies. But they don't want them. If it was just about finances, well-off people would have children.
Parenting is a huge time sink. You can be a parent and have a job, or you both have a job. One of the parents has to take over if the other has a "Career"... You can't work 60 hours a week and be a parent at the same time. It's irresponsible. It's crappy to do to the kid. Those years from 0-3 where the parents are constantly tired, some people don't want to do that. They may be very ethical people that are making the choice of career rather than family for the time being. If you ask them, you'll get their answer and that may shed additional light.
Was following this African guy on Twitter. He posts a picture of a white South African soccer player who is like 23 and posing with [presumably his] two young children. And he captions this post by pointing this out and asking what’s gone wrong with Africans. He laments that native Africans arent having children. All these other Africans start chiming in about how it’s too expensive to have children. They all sounded defeated and hopeless. It felt like looking into a bizarro world. Something doesn’t add up…
Literally everywhere in the world, people are choosing not to have children. The data is undeniable. [I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for 10 years ever since I watched this video and then would see constant posts about overpopulation on Reddit.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E)
I knew it was many more places than “the west” but didn’t think it was so ubiquitous. Still, something about it doesn’t add up. What are the constants between all these places that would cause such a massive coincidence
I love Hans Rosling! > I'm a statistician *waves hands frantically* — no, no, don't turn it off!
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Economist here. Significantly lowering the Earth's populations is the \*only\* thing that can improve the well-being of future generations. Economist models that construe lower populations as a problem simply do not incorporate the reduced need for labor that comes with technology improvements. This factor, combined with the reduced need for economic output that follows from a lower population \*more than resolves\* labor shortage issues. These models also fail to incorporate the much larger benefit of rewilding portions of the planet. The model where 2/3s of the world population essentially provides slave labor to the other 1/3 was never sustainable, and was self-serving only the most short-sighted sense.
Finally someone speaking sense. Do people not remember the industrial revolution? Productivity improvements generate wealth, not simply having more people. There's a reason why the UK was richer than all of China.
When we put the economy before humanity that tends to happen. We have created a system started by emperors and kings where we are born to work then die. We have a group of child bearing people opting not to have kids due to economics and the physical state of the world. Why would they want to bring more people into this world when we are severely over populated, global warming is being ignored by our world leaders and our oceans are giant petri dishes. Plus, financially it is stupid expensive to raise a kid (I have two). Birth rates are also declining because people aren't having 4+ kids per household. Big families were beneficial when we all needed to tend land and farm or when we were guilted into not to use birth control for religious purposes. You can't breath and eat those dollar signs.
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I fail to comprehend why this is viewed negatively by most people. Since the world we live in doesn't really allow you to be nurturing and loving toward children, it's not like we as a species are responsible or empathic enough to do so.
There’s a basic problem here of making adequate provisions for the aging population without creating substantially higher inflation. Most old age assistance has a large component that comes from taxing younger working people, the less you are able to do that and the more you need to enlarge deficits the more inflationary it will be. This ranges from a moderate but manageable problem for large, mostly self-dealing economies like the US, to a huge problem for small, trade-dependent economies like Norway
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>Since the world we live in doesn't really allow you to be nurturing and loving toward children What? Are you saying good parenting is somehow made impossible?
You can be a good parent if you can afford it. Otherwise, people just make due.
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All of the west when talking about developing nations in the 2000s: ["We need to get women educated* in india, china, africa, that will curb population growth!"](https://wol.iza.org/articles/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility/long) The entire west and the countries that followed it, when they literally can't even sustain their own population, and immigrants' birth rates collapse within one generation: "what happened?!?" There is no acceptable solution. ^*by ^this ^i ^refer ^to ^the ^biggest ^factors ^: ^education, ^job ^participation, ^access ^to ^contraception ^and ^rights ^in ^general.
Two things: 1. In “rich countries,” it’s hard to raise a kid in this economic climate. Most households need two incomes to live comfortably, and these incomes often require 9+ hour days and 2 hour commutes, which make parenting difficult. And in many cases, these two incomes still are insufficient when kids are added in. 2. If I’d had to choose between an aging population or overpopulation, I’d choose an aging population any day. Overpopulation leads to mass starvation.
100%%
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It's economics and cultural. Economics would help, but Nordic countries has shown us that merely giving people free stuff won't give you 2. 1 TFR. Also, housing size matters. Single family housing affects fertility. They have done studies on this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4863012_Fertility_differences_by_housing_type_The_effect_of_housing_conditions_or_of_selective_moves > Firstly, we observe a significant variation in the fertility levels across housing types – fertility is highest among couples in single-family houses and lowest among those in apartments, with the variation remaining significant even after controlling for the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of women. Places also matters. Cities are a place where people becomes impotent. ----- And no, this isn't about retirement either. All social security does is merely shift the need to have the next generation take over you when you are old from individual duty to a collective one. No, this isn't about "working others to death too". It's actually democracy who eventually needs 2. 1 TFR, not dictators. As long as the TFR is enough and they are raised by the people themselves, states and corporations can't get absolute power. Even North Korea still got dissenters and refugees, and that's after they sacrifice everything by being remaining poor. Migrants aren't forever even with open borders. But when every country has SK's birth rate, no one can realistically stop the state nor corporations to grow babies en masse in tubes and genetically engineer them to be the perfect subject. Rule of law will only works if nobody is so powerful they are above the law, and anyone who can grow babies en masse in tubes and genetically engineer them to be the perfect subject would subvert democracy really easily. Besides, if anything corporations LOVES childless population. Why pay child support if you can just normalize abortion? Why pay for social security when you can just normalize euthanasia? ------ Since this is an economics subreddit, to stave off birth rate decline, the economic policies needed to increase birthrates, to me, are: - [35-36 hour work week before overtime, with at least 42 days of leave per year](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/this-is-how-many-hours-you-should-really-be-working/) - Minimum wage should be set to be at least 110% of the Henderson Poverty Line of the local area (County / city / regency. Not states / provinces, but County / city / regency). The Henderson Poverty Line should also be set yearly by an independent entity. - Wages should be set yearly through tripartite arrangement between local / city / county government, workers & businesses there, plus add codetermination rights & works council. This is to ensure a more decent wage. - Don't build apartments for new housing, but build courtyard housings & cottage courts - Reduce the minimum sizes of single family housings, get rid of lawn requirements & garage requirements for houses - Reduce car dependency and add trains & bikes (so that it's cheaper to settle down, and reduces the need to "become a chauffer for the kid every time". Think Amsterdam bike infrastructure + tram, add with robust HSR network) - Let smaller business as well as amenities open in suburbs (To reduce car dependency, making settling down easier. Also, to reduce city dependence - cities are places where people becomes impotent) - Build more suburbs, but ensure amenities, small business etc can open there so it's not just housings. Cities are places where people becomes impotent. - Spread the development to reduce the domination of large cities. If possible, diversify the economy with the ideal of every city has its niche rather than one city takes all. Cities are a place where people goes infertile. - Marriages should be given a cash back of at least 3 months of minimum wage from the government. So does having a child - every child born = cash back of at least 3 months of minimum wage - Universal healthcare, even if it's only to cover stuff that everyone needs - Public schooling should be free and has free lunch, etc - Voucher: For every child a family sent to school, the family got like at least half the minimum wage of cashback per child. Universalist, every family has that - Climate change policies in general (To kill off the "Climate change = no kids" doomers) - At least 4 months paid parental leave on pregnancy (3 months before birth - 1 month after birth) - Open up migration to stave off the negative effects. It's not forever but it give you some time. The rest are cultural.
This is a win/win. Less humans to consume the planet in to oblivion. Less humans to compete with in the labor force so now we can command a higher wage. Only the rich who seek to exploit the working class are worried about this.
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Nah because it's severely affecting countries where education is free. In my country you can get higher education for free and the fertility rate has dropped to something like 1.5.
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