These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
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My wife and I are well to do in the US, with a good household income that probably puts us in the top 2% or some shit. And to maintain the sort of life that used to be considered “middle class”, we need all of that income for our family of 4. Which means that we both work. We would have liked more kids. But there is only so much time to go around. Fuck are we supposed to do, have another kid and hire a nanny? Fuck is the point of that, we wouldn’t even be parenting.
You want more kids? Give people more time. Which means LESS WORK and BETTER CHILDCARE OPTIONS.
Not to mention better healthcare! Healthcare costs are the primary reason US citizens go bankrupt. Kids get sick, adults get sick, and if one of the adults in the house gets sick and can’t help bring in money for the kids then the entire household essentially goes from upper/middle to lower or bankrupt. If a kid gets very sick, oftentimes one of the parents has to stop working to argue every single claim that insurance would be paying but doesn’t, and call every department of every doctors office or hospital to get an itemized bill and get it lowered to a reasonable cost rather than them asking for a blank check. I’m afraid of having a sick kid and losing my job to their healthcare organization (note: not their healthcare directly, but calling insurance asking them to pay for life saving care, then calling hospitals asking why a small bandage is $1200), losing my house to bankruptcy after healthcare costs, and losing any semblance of future career due to time off and losing myself.
Word. What we really need is a societal overhaul. Not gonna happen, tho.
Absolutely. Taking healthcare costs off our backs would go a long way. The birth of my first kid absolutely wiped out the savings I had built up since getting out of school, and that was WITH insurance coverage. Six years of careful planning and saving just flushed down the toilet in an instant. There’s just no financially-responsible way to manage the risk of a hospital bill that could range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands depending on what does or doesn’t go according to plan, not to mention the following 18+ years of unknowns. It’s kind of a wonder that people are still having as many kids as they are these days.
I am you. I have two kids and fucking hell our expenses are getting out of control. Fortunately we spaced them out enough that only one is in day/preschool. But it’s still basically impossible to justify my wife being employed with only our youngest kid’s expenses. Looking at $2.5k per month of childcare expenses for one kid makes me want to give up.
My state, Oregon, passed a leave law that is currently saving our lives. Extra 4 weeks of leave that can be taken intermittently. We are financially fucked the moment we are out of our state leave. For reference I have an MS in ME and work in manufacturing. And my wife is one of the highest paid dental assistants I’m aware of.
Yes. This and this fella’s income.
Space between your kids and wait until they are ready to care for the other kids?
I hope you don’t have children that you’re forcing to be babysitters. I know people who did that growing up, their relationship with their parents is… not good.
What are you talking about?
I’m 6 years older than my sister and when we were younger, I have babysitted her every day after school until my parents came home a few hours later. That’s just not a traumatic thing at all.My parents had nine kids. The eldest still doesn’t talk to them, ten years after he left. Our two experiences must mean that the average reality is somewhere in between. Resentment sounds about right. /s
Isn’t it neat how we can have different experiences? Just because you are happy with your specific situation does not mean that certain actions won’t tend to cause resentment in the average home.
I think you’d agree that there is a stark difference between “babysitting your one sister” and “babysitting 8(!!) Children”. Yet, the comment I replied to just said broadly “letting one sibling babysit will traumatize that child and they will hate their parents” which I refuted as not being the universal truth the comment made it out to be. “Don’t cover your toddler’s nose” or “don’t let a toddler’s head fall back or forwards” are such truths. “Babysitting leads to resentment of parents” isn’t.
Also, babysitting and “caring for” are different things. While I absolutely agree that you should not be in a parenting role as sibling and being responsible for the upbringing of your younger siblings, babysitting usually means “watch for a few hours and keep the status quo so the child doesn’t starve or kill itself while the parents are away”, nothing more.
Besides, you closed your reply implying that I’m the outlier here because my experiences aren’t doing what would happen in “an average home”. Now don’t get.me wrong here but isn’t my home a little more average than your’s? Like… Going by the numbers in the very post above.
the comment I replied to just said broadly “letting one sibling babysit will traumatize that child and they will hate their parents”
It’s funny, i thought the exact opposite; your comment was saying that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, and the comment you replied to was obviously saying that kids baysitting kids is a bad habit to get into, but not terrible in moderation.
I am well aware that my family situation is an outlier, i just understood your comment to mean that kids babysitting kids will never cause resentment, so one counter example was enough to make my point, which was that you need to be careful about choosing to have enough kids so they can ‘parent themselves’.
Yeah, my last sentence sounds wrong in hindsight. Should have said “That is just not a traumatic thing to me at all” or "That was not a traumatic thing at all.
I absolutely agree that a line should be drawn where you expect children to prematurely… well… mature and be parents/adults.
In my case, I was 12 or so and my sister was 6, so we both came home from school and were alone until our parents got home from work. They never expected me to make her do things or something. When we hadn’t done our homework when they got home, the consequence was that the homework needed to be done still and we couldn’t go out and play. That’s it. My job was to make sure my sister got a warm meal (reheated; pre-cooked by my parents) and basically didn’T die. They asked us to do certain things while they were away (vacuum the living room or something) but they never really made a fuss when we failed to do it. They just made us do it later then.
The problem is that a child is the responsibility of the parents, and the parents alone. Could you have said no if you wanted to? You should have been able to, every time.
I personally take offense in strangers who tell me how my family life which I’m rather fond of “should have” been. You have no right to stamp your ideas of family onto me and my relatives. Period.
People don’t want to bring children into this capitalistic hellscape. Color me surprised.
And even if they want to, they can’t afford to
But they’re being paid!!!
Except that is the whole point of the article, money isn’t why.
8 months pay isn’t going to pay for 18 years
From the article (that you didn’t read):
“In a 2018 US poll, about a quarter of respondents said they had or were planning to have fewer kids than they would ideally like to have. Of those, 64 percent cited the cost of child care as a reason. Ballooning costs — of child care, housing, college, and more — are an issue around the world”
In 2009, after decades of falling birth rates, it began offering six months of paid parental leave, reimbursed at 60 percent of a new parent’s salary — then recently increased that share to 80 percent. The government has introduced a cash benefit and a tax break for parents of young children, and has invested in child care centers.
They’re giving money but you’re taking a 20% pay cut with massive increases in cost. Math doesn’t really work that way. You’d probably need an extra $50k/year to even consider it.
Costs keep going up and income keeps going down.
At the end of the day it’s a good thing. Less humans = less consumption = slowing the trashing of our planet.
Less billionaires would be better than less humans in general.
When it takes two people’s income to live in the middle class, there is no time for children until much later. The trend is to have children at 30, when you are starting to make a decent income.
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The cost of raising a child has gone up thousands. No government has come close to subsidizing the increase.
Yeah, how much cash are they offering? If it’s a one time payment of like $1000, that won’t even cover the cost of nappies in the first year.
That’s my experience too. I read the whole article to find out what countries have actually tried helping with the expenses of raising a child. The most financial help mentioned was a 30,000 LOAN that would be given to newly weds and only forgiven if they had 3 kids… 30k isn’t enough for one kid…
Then only other financial help I saw was $7000 per kid in Russia.
And money is only one part of the problem. It takes time to raise kids. If both parents have to work full time there isn’t any time left to raise your kids even if you’re rich while working.
20th cenrury’s policies put a lot of effort into distancing us from our means and our families. Paying peanuts for a newborn wouldn’t help poor who are most likely to want it, only to dig themselves deeper. It’s, true, a systemic problem that can’t be solved with a mere donation.
Even if you choose not to have kids, the sad thing is that you’ll spend the same money taking care of your parents when we stop taking care of our elderly in 20 years so the rich can have more tax breaks. The really sad part is you’ll spend all your money on both if you do have kids anyways
Just like the socalled “work shortage”, the problem is they aren’t offering nearly enough. That’s it.
Currently in Taiwan, citizens receive 2500 NT per month (i.e. $80 USD) per birth until the child is five years old. That’s a fucking joke.
Yeah there’s no way these programs are coming anywhere near the cost of having kids. Childcare alone is insanely expensive these days.
I assure you you can. The payment would have to cover all of the child’s needs plus a bit more but you definitely can.
But the cost of that would far exceed anything remotely reasonable. I say fuck it, let the birthrate drop for a few decades. The planet could use the break.
It’s only catastrophically low in traditionally “western” countries. the world’s population is still growing. It appears immigration is now a requirement to grow the economy. How interesting.
This, it’s not as though me and my partner don’t want children, it’s that we want children and we don’t want to be the source of their suffering for failing to care for them as well as we should, due to financial hardship.
A lot of childless people feel real responsibility to non-existent children, and feel like the world keeps pushing them down, making life harder, and making it feel impossible to be one of the people to have their own children.
Can’t believe the Mentos rap song campaign didn’t work. They’re the Freshmaker!
In 1968, when Richard Nixon was first elected, “middle class” was defined as one Union type job paying for a family of four in a private house with a few luxuries. In those days, $1 million was a vast fortune. Nixon ramped up inflation with his Vietnam War buildup, and the Oil Crisis really increased it. Ronald Reagan got elected and by the time Bush Sr. finished the job, “middle class” was two incomes to keep the household going, and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
Reducing the world population is the obvious answer to slowing the detrimental effects humankind are having on the earth.
But think of the capitalists! How will the stock market continue to make gains if there are less people?
It’s worth noting that communists and socialists also depend on population growth to sustain their civilizations as do trees and rabbits and beetles. It’s possible that economic systems don’t really matter all that much here.
Population collapse isn’t the road to some sustainable future. It is how species go extinct. Perhaps we are on that road, so it goes. But whistling past the graveyard pretending that “Star Trek” is on the other side is silly.
We’re billions of people on the planet. Most jobs don’t even pay enough to feed a couple of people. I believe that there is an oversaturation of people on the planet and this has caused a devaluation of their labor.
Europe would have remained feudal for quite a longer time if the population collapse caused by the black plague hadn’t happened and caused the demographic changes that it did. Without the plague, peasant labor would be plentiful and the status quo would not have changed. However, with the population reduction, the class in power had to concede to enough changes that brought about the Reinassance and the Industrial era quickly after.
In the Bronze age, without the climate changes that brought about cold and dry conditions and triggered the fall of the city states ruled by an oppressive theocratic class, humans would have still been tied to those stifling conditions for longer and wouldn’t have brought about the classical era.
With the onset of AI and advanced robotics, population collapse will allow people to see their labor valued adequately, instead of just more and more people in the workforce working more hours and getting paid less and less, doing meaningless busy work jobs to pay for things that they don’t need or enjoy, like crypto, gambling or online cam girls. A controlled collapse by fertility is not only non threatening, it is also desirable and the most acceptable way to cull numbers a bit. We need this, otherwise, the base of the pyramid will only get wider while the top will only get slimmer. Tragedy breeds suffering, but also change and we NEED change. The problem is the transition, but after the transition, we’ll be in a better place as a society and we will bring about change.
What is happening now is another adjustment, like the ones you mentioned in your post. Over a million people in the US died of Covid since 2020, and a lot of them worked some sort of job. And the people still around are no longer willing to sell themselves to a company 80 hours a week, so unions are starting to pop up.
I’m not suggesting population collapse brings a better system. It’s a shame that the current system is built to collapse by short sighted greed on this mass scale, as there was an opportunity for tremendous gains to society through the technology we developed.
Completely agree and we need to figure out a way to decouple population growth from keeping the economy afloat. It feels like we’re approaching the inevitable collapse of the infinite growth pyramid scheme. This isn’t rational and was always destined to fail.
Who’s going to take care of the elderly like you in 40 years?
Migrants? Robots? More efficient care workers? Themselves? Other elderly people? Having kids because one feels entitled to their future labors doesn’t seem fair or reasonable.
That’s a pyramid scheme
Life’s a scam
Do you suggest that the world’s population revert to a Quaker lifestyle? Seems really boring.
You probably meant Amish. Quakers lifestyle these days is just being really nice most of the time, in my experience.
Not, I meant Quackers. The Amish are horrific people.
I suspect the rise of the dual-income family (often as a matter of necessity) has had a massive influence on this.
In addition to the absurd increases in cost of living etc.
Less people means less waste and less fossil fuel consumption. This is not a bad thing.
but, just hear me out here. We need cheap labor. And they need exponentially more cheap labor, because… like… those profits aren’t going to earn themselves.
So please, take the condom off and start banging so I can get myself an even bigger yacht and turn the head-old thing into a helicopter tender.
-corpo douche, maybe.
It is a bad thing if you live in a country with a robust social system that is paid for through taxes and a below-replacement birth rate.
Like, we don’t need “more” people, but we need to keep the population stable to make sure the disabled and elderly can live well. Because someone has to bear the cost, and we can’t all be Norwegian.
Sounds like a good reason to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate. You could even have a global proportional tax rate if the will was there.
When you’re looking at recurring expenses like welfare, you need the incoming money to be there as well for the math to work. The wealthy and the corporations aren’t an unlimited pot, particularly at the scale of national welfare. Social security spent 1.5 trillion dollars in the 2023 fiscal year. You could entirely liquidate Apple, pretend that doing so wouldn’t collapse its value, and that would pay for less than two years of Social Security, to say nothing of other welfare programs, and this is just America.
You also have to consider that lower population growth can also result in lower corporate profits, causing there to be less money available for you to tax in the first place. At the scale of an entire country’s population, taxing the wealthy doesn’t go as far as people think.
That may be a problem… but our global carbon footprint is a much bigger problem, and part of what can help reduce that is reducing the size of the population.
A cursory search suggests that global population is expected to peak sometime around 2090, so an actual reduction in population really can’t be a primary component of our mitigation strategy relative to a general shift towards green energy. By the time we reach that point, we’ve either solved it or solidly doomed ourselves, population be damned.
Don’t argue with economically illiterate people, they’ll never learn.
Eh, depends on the source and intentionality of the illiteracy. I’ve had good conversations with Mr. FlyingSquid before, and I was myself a lot more ignorant in the past. A lot of people genuinely don’t know what they don’t know and believe, for example, that it’s possible to create a UK-style NHS by simply taxing the billionaires and corporations a little bit more. When you see stats about wealth inequality, it’s easy to find yourself believing that they can do essentially anything, and people are bad at intuitively understanding the scale of national populations.
we need to keep the population stable
Then let’s keep it stable at a lower number than it currently is.
There are lots of people who are willing to endure a dangerous journey in order to become part of a stable, safe society in a country that isn’t torn up by a war or ruled by despots, kleptocrats or terrorists.
Somehow when these people reach to a country desperately trying to grow its population (read: have more workforce and taxpayers), we tend to ostracize them, deny them opportunities, make it hard for them to integrate and generally be hostile towards them on both individual and systemic levels. And then scratch our collective heads why we have problems with the “others”.
Curious species the human is. No wonder the extraterrestials from the Galactic Society never visit us and try their hardest to hide their existence from us😞
“… robots…. We’ll make robots to do all the work. Then we won’t need the stupid poors.”
-rich guys
Here’s today’s friendly reminder that the economy is made up, and can be redesigned to better serve humanity
They’ve tried everything… except putting guardrails on these giant corporations and their runaway price-gouging. In the US at least, if the cost of wages kept pace with skyrocketing housing, higher education, and healthcare, I guarantee more people could afford to live and care for themselves and children…
People who complain about falling birth rates usually want more humans to cheaply exploit as a resource.
In a world with fewer humans, human life and human labors are more valuable.
We should be celebrating declining birth rates, as infinite growth is not possible in a finite system and most of the existential threats we face are due to population pressures.
I celebrate wildly when anyone brings up the topic. Rude, yes, but it gets the point across.
“Please have children to fuel our profiteering, war, and labor goals” basically
Go fuck yourselves.
Yeah! Cause we won’t fuck each other except with reliable birth control or in lieu of that experiment with butt stuff!
Anal is at least as old as written history
Maybe some mouth stuff too?
Kinky!
I just meant brushing your teeth you filthy harlot
I have a stable job and a good chunk of savings and I still feel wholly inadequate of raising a child. I know some of it is just me being selfish
Absolutely not selfish of you. And I say this as a parent. Absolutely no one should have a child that doesn’t want a child. It is incredibly hard work, it is expensive, and no child should feel unloved or neglected. This is one of many reasons I think abortion should be legal and affordable.
I would much rather someone be aborted than be raised in a house by people who don’t really want them, arent prepared to care for them, and can’t afford to raise them.
Research shows that situation is a driver of crime and other social problems. It’s much better that an abortion happens for everyone in a society - not just a potential parent.
It’s not selfish of you. Children need attention and time. Society has been so focused on maximizing productivity that it has taken away the time needed to raise children. There are many people that have enough money for a child but not enough time for a child.
gestures broadly
I can’t imagine signing anyone else up for this. Not until the trajectory turns in a positive direction
My feelings exactly.
I’d be happy to have kids if you paid me! In fact, not having enough money is literally the whole fucking reason behind many of us not having kids! Businesses have lost the ideal that if you make your workers prosperous, they will make your company prosper. People can’t even afford rent, let alone children now!
I have 4 friends in their mid to late 30s who have had to move back in with their parents this year because they can no longer afford to live on their own. Meanwhile, I’ve got relatives asking all the time, so when are you and the Mrs going to have a kid? I’m having to decide between my own medical bills, food, utilities and you want me to add a child to that? Go ahead and start paying me. Cause right now, in this economic climate, that’s the only way it’s gonna work!
