- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45445434
Fox News Senior Medical Analyst Marc Siegel made some eyebrow-raising comments lamenting that birth rates are down among teenagers aged 15 to 19.
On Thursday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the U.S. fertility rate fell to another record low. The agency reported that the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age declined from 53.8 in 2024 to 53.1 last year. The latest figure represents a continuation of a decades-long decline in fertility rates.
Siegel joined Friday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, where Dana Perino said that while the continuing trend is not surprising, “the numbers might feel a little shocking.”
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The big concern is probably a decline in number of wage slaves. Children of teenage single moms are probably the best demographic for enslavement.
Next they will be decrying the decline in crime because it will harm the prison industrial complex. “We need more cops to arrest more people to keep us safe (from underpopulated prisons).”
Researchers like Timothy Leary felt psychedelics could alter the fundamental personality structure or subjective value-system of an individual to great potential benefit. Beginning in 1961, he conducted experiments with prison inmates in an attempt to reduce recidivism with short, intense psychotherapy sessions. Participants were administered psilocybin during these sessions weeks apart with regular group therapy sessions in between.[24] Psychedelic therapy was also applied in a number of other specific patient populations including individuals with alcoholism, children with autism, and persons with terminal illness.[24]
Studies on medicinal applications of psychedelics ceased entirely in the United States when the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970. LSD and many other psychedelics were placed into the most restrictive “Schedule I” category by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Schedule I compounds are claimed to possess “a high potential for abuse and the potential to create severe psychological and/or physical dependence” and have “no currently accepted medical use”,[28] effectively rendering them illegal to use in the United States for all purposes. Despite objections from the scientific community, authorized research into therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs had been discontinued worldwide by the 1980s.
Can’t have prisoners being reformed when they can be rented out as ditch-diggers for less than minimum wage. Just don’t call it slavery.
They’re saying the quiet part out loud and why they’re anti-abortion. The younger the better for a quick turnaround:
They need the poors to fight their wars and work on their factory floors.
I frequently just stand outside and look at the sky and think, yep, we weren’t meant to work all day. We were meant to pick berries and mushrooms and take naps. I feel better about my station in life, knowing those oligarchs can never be satisfied, and all I have to do to feel right is take a walk outside.
Didn’t we always hunt?
Yeah, that’s why we can run
Edit: Distance running that is. Humans have better endurance than almost any land animal, so we can chase prey to exhaustion. It helps that we’re crafty enough to carry water and snacks with us
Not an expert, but that would depend on the location, probably. Smaller game, certainly, but not everyone had large animals roaming around. Likewise, there were probably people who hunted and didn’t gather that much because there simply wasn’t that type of plant around.
But the point made still stands: modern life is not something natural to our evolution.
Yeah, Ill sit in a deer stand all afternoon, or pick blueberries. Both are better than email.
Peoples would migrate across continents to follow the populations of animals if there were no large animals presently roaming around.
Given that, I think it’s safe to guess most early humans were more than willing to put in a little more effort to hunt over gather regardless of location.
No, they want robots to work in the factories, because they don’t complain and don’t unionize, and don’t take time off, and work for electrons.
Yeah, but the good news is they are going to keep us desperate and dependent until that can be attained with certainty just in case that plan doesn’t work out for them and they’re stuck with us.
They want to not have to pay the people who will be buying the things produced in the factories.
The logical problem with that is too many steps ahead for them to see.
I distinctly remember a time when boomers and talking heads would automatically respond to concerns about issues with the cost of having kids with:
“Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them.”
“If you couldn’t afford kids then you should’ve kept your legs closed.”
“Don’t expect a handout, nobody forced you to have kids.”
“Healthcare and child care are too expensive? Tough shit snowflake, that’s the free market! Work harder!”
“Why are my taxes paying for a public school when I don’t even have any kids that go there?”
So nope, no sympathies. And no, you can’t have your child sex brides, either.
They are still saying this when it’s convenient for them. The only consistent thing for such people is their cowardice in the face of responsibility.
Who the fuck wants to be having kids in this day and age anyway. Also why is it up to the underage teens to push out babies to keep the population up. Yeah let’s put pressure on them to ruin their entire lives before they even get to live it. Love the American standards.
The dude was conflating a number of things.
Teen birth rate is down the most, at 7% in 2025. 70% since 2005. Overall births are down slightly last year.
Overall we have a sub replacement birth rate of 1.53 per woman.The last one is a societal problem. But just saying we need women to have more kids isn’t a solution. You need to find out why people don’t want to have as many kids. Which I would bet is almost entirely economic. Kids are a large long term expense. And if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, with an uncertain financial future, a kid is a scary prospect.
The problem is the sub replacement birth rate of 1.53 per woman.
This is not actually a problem, except we want to keep the completely unsustainable economic system unchanged.
So what’s the alternative? Everyone’s old and nobody produces anything? I kinda like having food and stuff and that’s not fully automated yet.
There is still a substantial amount of working age people in that scenario. They just need to be allocated to jobs that matter instead of made up bullshit like for instance the vast majority of medical insurance employees. We have enough labor available that we could live in a straight up utopia but instead much of it is oriented to perpetuating economic serfdom.
Think about it… We used to have a large proportion of people running households instead of working for money, but now we both have more automaton than ever and a higher percentage of people in the labor market, and we don’t even work fewer hours.
Well running a household was also more than a full-time job.
If you’re even talking about stuff like medical insurance employees, you’re talking from one of the wealthiest countries in the world, where such bullshit jobs are more common and easier to justify economically. Everything you use comes from poorer countries which makes it seem like it doesn’t take much labor to produce the stuff you use.
I was not disparaging homemaking. Now, many people have to scrape together that labor AND do a paid job, which is obviously a degradation in quality of life.
RE: rich country poor country - we have enough labor globally to make everyone happy and healthy globally. That quality of life is so different in different places is another symptom of the global system of economic serfdom.
Are you implying that everyone globally needs to be unified under one government to dictate which jobs they all do? Because good luck getting that government to represent everyone’s needs.
There’s still a 1.53 replacement rate. That means if you just reallocate the people that idk, are currently making bombs to throw on other people (or other such things), to producing “food and stuff” instead, we’ll definitely have enough food.
Defense indudstry in most countries is under 5% of all employees I’m pretty sure. And we also kinda need weapons to defend ourselves. Maybe you don’t, but if Russia sends bombers here, it’d take a whole 5-10 minutes to reach my house from the moment they exit Russian airspace.
If anything, I think we should do away with the entertainment industry, liberal arts, etc. If anyone wants to produce art in their spare time that’s fine, but everyone under 75 should be forced to work a real job. We could also mostly get rid of the auto industry since old people shouldn’t be allowed to drive anyway so that’s a good thing, but then that doesn’t exist in most countries either so it’s not really a great place for cutbacks in most of them.
I also propose cutting back on doctors and nurses in fields that disproportionately affect older people. Great way to reduce the burden on society.
OR we can just start slashing the social safety nets now. I’m paying into the national pension of the current old people now, but there are going to be no young people to pay my generation’s. They’re already raising the retirement age, but they’ll have to start raising it faster.
NATO is pushing a commitment to a minimum of 5% of GDP on defense.
Which, admittedly even the USA does not do. But in the 60s it was north of 9%.
Most of the cost of things is the embedded cost of labor. Even minerals in a lot of cases. There are a lot of deposits of pretty much everything we could be mining but aren’t because of the cost.
One business may only have 25% labor costs, but the suppliers also have labor costs, and their suppliers, all the way down the line. And 25% is on the low side. Even rent has labor costs embedded.
The trouble with getting rid of all that is that other countries won’t. Until we have one world order, it’s not feasible to completely abolish defense.
NATO works. Russia has not dared to attack a single member. I’m writing this from a former soviet country that would’ve been conquered by now if we weren’t a member of NATO.
Economy or not, having one person who needs to take care of two elderly parents, themselves, and 0.75 kids isn’t great. That’s not the goal
Society doesn’t have to work that way.
Of course not. That’s the point. We don’t want it to work that way
Birth rates are down all over the developed world with Japan being the hardest hit
Most of the developed world has the same societal problems that boil down to, no one has the money, time or energy to have kids.
Also health as well. Pregnancy permanently changes a woman’s body.
Japan is also contributing to my country’s declining birthrate.
I live in poverty and I gotta say, being a single recluse… between anime, their music, and JRPGs they offer entertaining and cheap ways to get my dopamine hits, but aside from a one off, their media does not help me get laid.
I cant tell if those are rhetorical questions because you’re upset…
Or if you genuinely don’t understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren’t having babies…
You must be joking if you think “I genuinely don’t understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren’t having babies…”
Honestly I’m concerned just why that’s the age range the “Oligarchs” are specifically calling out, not having enough babies. All I’m saying is, why is it up to the kids, and not the adults who have JOBS and MENTAL stability.
And I’ll go back on my first sentence, WHO in their right mind, in 2026, is like "Yeah, the economy is in such a great place today, that I think I’ll raw dog my wife until she becomes pregnant, and in 9 months I’ll dish out thousands of dollars just for her to birth a child, and then dish out even more thousands of dollars for doctor bills, diapers, formula, etc. And that’s just their infancy. Ok. Not everyone is financially stable to raise a child, even as a full grown adult. And not everyone is mentally stable, to raise a child.
But we’re wondering why the kids aren’t having kids.
I agree with the 1st sentence, but you cant expect people to wait until they are 30 to have kids
Its better to marry than to whore around… regardless of age, thats why “child” marriage should be legal but challenged by the families and test if there is actual love or nut
Live fast die young was most of human history, and I like it
We have way too much order, that it gets in the way
Think about that for a few years.
What reality are you living in? Are you 16?
whoring around is so fun tho
I remember when teen pregnancy was considered bad and a sign of a decaying morality across the country. Now the same right wing moralizers are saying they need those teen moms again. But this time it’s about money so they are noticeably quiet about morality.
I remember when teen pregnancy was considered bad and a sign of a decaying morality across the country.
before that it was commonplace though. I’m 61, my grandmother started having her kids at 16, she had 8, one of them my mother, the youngest of her kids. Many of her friends were similarly 15-19 having thier first kid. My mother was 19 with me, I was born when she turned 20. She had 3 kids, i have none, my sister none and my brother 2, so family dynamics have changed.
This is Australia though, you can read books of some of the early convict ships coming over and they arrived with all the 13-16yr old girls pregnant, or having had their kid on board and being married etc
You can see some of the effect in The Philippines, pregnant teen mothers are everywhere. Religious indoctrination in regards anti contraception doesn’t stop teens fucking (and this in a nation with no divorce)
Only locally it’s a bad thing. Nationally, they need those girls waiting tables in diners. How else is someone going to get their nostalgia kick while driving route 66?
And don’t forget future soldiers are needed. There’s a place for everyone.
Yeah let’s feed the young men to the cannons, so that old guys can have the young girls, urghh…
Fucking lemongrab grade screeching of purity and abstinence for decades and then suddenly this
Now, now, let’s not pretend these people are encouraging sex, those young whores are still to be shamed.
They’re just supposed to have kids and be loyal to husbando. No pleasure involved.
(Also, they always supported teen pregnancy because they have always been anti-sex education and anti-contraceptive which allows the process of teenage parents to happen without them having to condone it).
Our masters want us to breed.
Every accusation a confession.
In a normal country, a doctor endorsing teen pregnancy would get their licence suspended.
This just reminds me of a US coworker of mine who just became a great grandmother. It’s teen pregrancies all the way down. Mother at 16, grandmother in her 30s, great grandmother at 50.
How embarrassing
She’s pretty proud of it.
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Tech
Matt Gatez says ‘I’m doing my part’
Exactly, half of me expects them to spin this into, “Trump and Epstein were just trying to fix the population crisis.” Give it a week.
I wonder how much breaking up the trump-epstein ring lowered the fertility rate of 15-19 year olds.
Maybe if you just imprison fertile women and give them to rich couples to fuck and impregnate, that will solve the problem? You could call them handmaid’s to distract from what they really are!
Maybe change their names, to reveal who owns them. Say Ofelon, Ofdonald1, Ofdonald2, etc.
How many times do conservatives have to prove that they’re all pedophiles before the rest of us will learn?
not a matter of “learning”, it’s a matter of “caring”
everyone knows by now this regime is full of pedophiles… but nobody gives enough of a fuck to do anything about it
I’m not talking about the regime. I mean every last one of them.
Fertility rates are an issue for capitalism not humanity
Logistics at a certain point does not care what economic model you follow. Someone has to plant the crops and do all the other work that leads to people being fed, clothed, and housed under any system.
If your demographics are such that there are not enough people of working age to take care of those too old to work, you’re going to have the kind of problems that led other human societies to kill their elders.
It’d be great if we could automate our way out of this, but I don’t see that happening soon enough.
15-19 yr olds aren’t supposed to be having kids.
In a regular society? Yes. But this is America we’re talking about.
Hell some of them ARE kids
From my perspective, everyone under about 24 is still a kid.
Fixing the birthrate is pretty simple in theory. The government needs to meet the needs of people having kids. The details are a little more complicated.
In order to have more kids in their 20’s people need:
A higher income in their 20’s. If they work full time they deserve to be able to afford a 3 bedroom place, food, etc…
A place to live - Build affordable housing that people can own and build a life. These need to be 3-4 bedroom places that one income can cover.
Medical care: free quality medical care to cover little things like birth cost and the doctor visits a child needs.
Time: Hard to make babies when you are working 60+ hours a week. Mandatory 40 or less work week. 2 months of vacation every year.
Childcare - Free or heavily subsidized childcare for working parents. Currently childcare for 2 children is more than the net average income for one person in many areas. Earlier retirement programs are also highly effective.
Quality schools and education: ban private schools, invest heavily in public schools increasing teacher wages and requirements, reducing classroom sizes, and providing quality educational material. Free college and trade schooling as well.
Hope: Stop fucking up the planet for temporary gains. If we started to reverse our environmental damaging behaviors more people would be willing to have kids
When standards of living rise, birthrates drop.
Western countries, japan & korea all have low birthrates and all developed them as av. income rose. China too but one-child made it a less clear example. Even within a society, middle and upper classes have smaller families than the working class.
Declining birthrates can’t be fixed by improving living standards, but that’s fine because low birthrate is a good thing - a sign of a society doing well.
If a high income/low birthrate society needs more citizens, immigration from low income/high birthrate areas is the only viable option. Endless expansion is a fools errand anyway.
There is the question if the birthrates just dropped because the market now expects both people in a relationship to be working, making it impossible for the parents to care for their kids by reducing hours and childcare costs being more or close to what one person earns, especially in lower paying jobs. The effects on lifetime income for a mother are still devastating, and domestic work is still VERY undervalued. Fix this, and I am sure that birth rates will go up. But that would mean that our corporate overlords will make less.
Maybe if the population numbers in the US crash hard there will be a rethinking of priorities. The combination of xenophobia and economic pressure to keep working without having kids will take care of that in the next decade or two.
But none of the low income / high birth rate countries are mostly white and Protestant 😭😭
What nationalities do you consider white?
As the standard of living rises, the birthrate initially increases. This was the boomer years.
Then birthrate falls because an industrialized society requires more resources per child. Eventually you reach a period of stagnation when the resources available match the number of children born.
Then in all capatilist societies, the standard of living declines which triggers the birthrate to free fall.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/japan/birth-rate
Japan peaked in the 1940’s, stagnanted in the '60-'70s and has been in free fall ever since.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/birth-rate
South Korea peaked in the 1950’s, stagnated in the '80s and 90’s and has been in free fall since.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate
The United States peaked in the 40’s-50’s. Stagnanted from the 1970’s to early 2000’s (bouyed by 1st generation immigration) and is now in free fall (due to immigration idiocracy).
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/france/birth-rate
France followed the U.S. due with an extended period of stagnation due to 1st generation immigrants. It also has had a much slower decline in the standard of living versus the other countries which has bouyed up the birthrate.
Post-war/crisis baby booms are likely a seperate phenomenon, there’s some archaelogical evidence of them in similar situations - like in athens after the persian war there seems to have been a baby boom that helped fuel their rise to imperial power in the aegean.
Then why do people like Elon Musk, Trump and so many other rich/upper class people usually have 4 or more children? I don’t think technology, things becoming easier or more comfortable lower birthrates, if anything, they increase it as we saw in the baby boomer era, which had a fertility rate similar to those in medieval times 2000 years ago, so. I am sure people said the same thing as you every 100 years whenever there was a downward trend in the fertility rate, no? “It’s because people are happier, more comfortable now, more educated too”. But imo, those things make you want to have more children, not less.
I think this is a common observation because most societies that become big start to get ran by greedy evil oligarchs and leaders who stagnate the economy for the working class. It does still talk a lot about humanity’s nature as a whole, but not the individual, because, we all can see how our baby boomer grandparents had so many children when their living standards were higher than ours. They’d have 7+ children in average, a home at 19 years old, economic stability, more social lives, physical human contact, not isolation in front of a machine online, all without a college degree like my grandpa, who had 10 children like that. He lived really happy. I wish having children was easier, I’d like to have 1 or 2, teach them how to play videogames like me someday, but it won’t happen, because it’s insanely expensive, I am 28 and still cannot afford a home even after working for 3 years as a software engineer who graduated from ITESM, the “top #1 college in all Latin America” a college a lot of Americans and people from other countries send their children to, has a very hgih reputation. I was a good student too, I was the dude of that meme that says every group has these 3 teammates: the dude that does 91% of the work (that was always me because I had to maintain a scholarship that paid 80% of my debt and I am poor asf so), the dude that helps the first guy by doing the other 9%, the third guy who does nothing but is motivated asking questions and willing to do the presentation, and the 4th guy, the one we all didn’t even know was part of the group, but he showed up in the presentation day. I noticed so, so many people procrastinate and don’t work or try hard in school at all. They are so lazy, and I guess I can’t blame them as I used to anymore, it is not worth working for this world and system.
You also see people like Elon Musk, having more than 10 children. Trump has a lot too. A lot of rich people have so many children, like both of my grandparents, or the politicians and doctors with no free time I know in the family, most have at least 3 children and so on, and they’d have more if they had the same wealth as my grandparents, but they never achieved it either. Not even by being the co-founder of an hospital, like my uncle, who has 2 children, but also has fun collecting motorcycles, built a gaming room for his son, a room with 6 high-end computers for his friends to join him in videogames right there, a LAN party room. He had the entire Disney Infinity or Skylanders figurines collection to play with, forgot which. Those you place on a console, like Amiboos in a Nintendo Switch or UB Funkeys… I don’t think technology or becoming educated are the problem, it’s the lack of money/resources 100%. The only reason my uncle, who is crazy rich, he has gifted my mom 2 of his SUVs because instead of repairing them he buys a new one, only had 2 children because of time. He got his wealth gradually, he probably struggled at first unlike our grandparents who could make it young, and he’s also a gynecologist who’d be busy all the time. My other grandpa was also a gynecologist, and he had 7 children, a house with a pool and enough bedrooms for the children, etc.
I don’t think the existence of the Internet, smartphones, videogames, or whatever you want to name that our grandparents didn’t have back then, are the issue. It’s the lack of money, and that’s thanks to Reagan who convinced and influenced multiple countries, including mine, Mexico, of adopting his Trickle Down Economics theory, of lowering taxes to the rich, who used to pay about 70%, some say 91% in rare cases, of taxes back then; today, they pay near 0% and they are not creating jobs as we were promised they would, they are instead replacing us with AI. People today are unhappier than our baby boomer grandparents as much as they talk about how hard it was to live back then. There is no point in having so many commodities when you are still not happy, and one important thing to be happy is human contact. There are clearly way more virgins and incels today than before. People staying inside homes, doomscrolling memes and posts that don’t make them laugh or smile anymore, but make them feel like crap, depressed, jealous of what others have and display in their instagram. People are also slowly being informed of how fucking crap their lives truly are, the moment they see and explore others’ lives online. Remember than about 50% of humanity is not in the Internet yet. That 50% of humanity are most likely the poorest in the entire world, the people starving to death in the streets, or the boney children you see in TV. No way they can afford a phone of any brand or kind, not even the cheapest one. Just wait until those people join and chime in with their opinions, life experiences and cultures. They will be the wildest stories and posts you might ever see, I bet.
So I think it’s simpler: When people have a lot of resources, birthrates rise. If they don’t have enough resources, birthrates drop. It’s not about how easy, how comfortable technology has made us or whatever, that’s a lie, and that’d be something the government, those greedy rich assholes would try to convince us of it being the problem so we stop blaming them and continue fighting sideways like they want us to. No, it is the rich the cause people are not having children; they are creating an artificial difficult living standard, which is having to work 5x times LONGER than your grandparents to get even a quarter of what they had at your age. It was so easy for them to do that. Just own both the home, the land it is on, and the jobs. Imagine a rich CEO who owns all the jobs in a small city; he decides the wages and the costs of living so easily. He can dictate the mental state of his people; he can control their sanity, their anger, their fertility rate. They are getting angrier and protesting? Increase wages a little, but also increase the cost of food and housing by a lot in silence, on the side. As we can see, wages are never adapted with inflation. Inflation rises, but wages have been the same since decades ago.
No one here has donated more than 100$ USD in total to politicians or candidates they wish got elected. You NEVER, and still DO NOT have a real democracy. You NEVER had democracy or true freedom. We have all been forced to elect either politician A which appeals to empathy, or politician B which appeals to sympathy, both with a touch of apathy for the other, both ready to answer for the interests of the rich, not ours. You will never be able to compete against the millions, if not billions of dollars the richest 1% have. They get to decide who rules us, not us. However, this is the only place where I have hope for humanity. Zohran Mandami proved that you can defeat the rich with words, no matter how much money they spend to attack you. Young people today trust content creators and influencers more than traditional media, and that is a good thing. Traditional media has proven to be against us, not for us. They are owned by the rich, just like Jeff Bezos owns the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times, forgot which one was it, I don’t care. I rather listen to people who are more relatable and honest and humane. It’s so easy to verify and confirm the things they’re saying are true or not, or the right thing or not. Just boil everything down to the question “Is this the best choice for humanity in the long-term?”.
After you turn 30, your chances of having children with disabilities increase significantly too. So, time is ticking.
The ideal society, in my opinion, would be that one that is highly educated and capable and motivated of adapting to the fertility rate, to what humanity can currently afford. That’d be jumping between having 1 child or 3. A fertility rate under 2.1 means the population is declining, which could be a good thing if overpopulation is being problematic like it happened in China during the early 2000s and their 1-child policy which I am not very well-informed about (I remember believing they’d kill your children if you had twins or more when I was a kid, lol. Anti-China propaganda was so much more effective back then), we need time to build more houses, we need time to prepare more jobs too, people would have only 1 child, which is still better than 0. If society needs to keep the population constant, people would be recommended to have no more than 2 children, which is still better than 0. If we need to grow and expand, we could have 3 or more children, whatever the experts recommend at the time. Still better than 0.
Trump and musk show many traits of psychopaths, who tend to have a lot of children.
Don’t know how or why you think 2000 years ago were “medieval times” but let me shock you a little bit; we’re as close to what you’d call the middle ages as they were 2000 years ago, give or take a few decades.
It is generally agreed that the Early Middle Ages started at the end of the Western Roman Empire and that’d be around 500 AD. The late Middle Ages were between 1300 and 1500 AD and then slowly transitioned into more modern times after the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Eastern Roman Empire. A lot of what you’d think of as “medieval” lingered on throughout the Renaissance and so on into more modern times.
2000 years ago was Classical Antiquity and would remain so for quite some time yet.
I think it’s rare for people to be that precise with things like that. Most will call it Medieval/Middle or Prehistoric, I’ve never heard anyone say “Classical Antiquity” before in my life until now. I rather use what most people do so they understand quicker, but yeah, in more formal contexts I’d prefer the precision
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My opinion is that doing all those things won’t magically fix the birthrate. Truth is that the more educated a country is, the lower its birthrate is. Countries like Korea and Japan have the lowest birthrate but also the highest literacy rate and most educated populations. While countries like Afghanistan and several African countries have high birthrate but also poor education levels and high infant mortality rates. More educated people realize that having kids sets them back from achieving their goals with the time and energy it takes to raise them. And the ROI isn’t even guaranteed because kids move away once their adults and aren’t necessarily going to take care of parents in their old age.
In pre-industrialized nations the amount of resources it takes to raise each child is minimal. People have so many children because the resource requirement for each one is minimal or even a positive addition to the income of the parents.
In industrialized nations that math reverses. The amount of resources each child requires to become a functioning member of society increases dramatically (up to 10,000x more). Children are a pretty much universally a net cost to the parents not a source of income.
The birthrate is Japan and S. Korea have plummeted recently because of extreme wealth inequality.
S. Korea - the bulk of the countries economy is controlled by 5 families. The average 20 year old is in debt, working obscene hours per week and is barely making ends meet.
Japan - Has had 30 years of wage stagnation as the wealth inequality has steadily been growing. Young Japanese face the same issue as the S. Koreans. Long hours of work for little pay and no benefits.
I think one other thing that’s super important to add on to this list is “desirable partners.” The current generation of young men have leaned hard into the alt-right pipeline while young women have become more left leaning as their rights are being threatened loudly and chipped away at globally.
The details aren’t complicated, these rich fucks literally just need to pay their share of taxes and almost all of these criteria could be met. It’s simple.
I’d even take all of the above minus the hope. I’m not about to wait for a perfect world in order to live life to the fullest.
But I’ll be damned if I ever raise a child in suffering and abject poverty.
That one scene in Seven comes to mind, where the wife asks Morgan Freeman for his advice on whether or not she should bring a child into this world. And I tend to agree with his thoughts on it.
humans. can’t. breed. in. captivity.
Bullshit. We’d be extinct otherwise
