(I didn’t see any rules against purely text posts to stimulate discussion. But if this is against the rules, please let me know)
Some discussion if you’re unaware.
…conclude that “shifting priorities” about family, careers, and how to allocate one’s time and resources is the most likely explanation for the dramatic reduction in rates of childbearing seen among more recent cohorts of young adults. We have not found compelling data support for more readily observed (and potentially altered) policy or economic factors, like the price of childcare or rent.
So, is this a problem to you at all? If it is, then how would you address it? If it isn’t, is this a problem that can be addressed along with addressing what you believe is the greater problem? How?
UBI, parental leave, subsidized day care, …
We got that in Germany
It’s not enough. You need to get rid of the hassle culture to make people enjoy their life then it’ll change.
People don’t decide to make a baby when it’s convenient or easy, they decide to do it if it’s worthwhile.
Birth rate decreasing isn’t a problem, it’s a symptom of declining quality of life/access to resources.
Instead of unsustainably adding more people maybe we should worry about the damage an obsession with growth+profit does to the climate and social structure.
Specifically declining quality of life in regards to what is actually available as a potential quality of life.
Married couples making $45,000 a year both working full-time jobs and having capped out their potential income for the foreseeable future are not the kind of people who typically want to have kids.
On the flip side, in the middle class, married couples making $85,000 or $100,000 a year have a vast awareness of how little distance twice the income of their poor neighbors makes in their quality of life and are also starkly aware of how difficult things would be if a spouse had to stop working in order to raise the child, even for half a year.
Jobs not paying enough for a single person to support a family of three is the primary reason why people do not want to have kids.
Secondary to that is the extraordinary cost of owning a home. Most renters do not necessarily want to add a child into their one-bedroom apartment.
Needs to be viable financially to have children. Which at this point would require a complete re-work of society in many ways. You used to be able to drive a bus for a living or wait tables and make enough to support a spouse who works part time or is a full time caretaker for the children, own a modest home and a car, and often have a basic pension for retirement.
Now days, a huge number of people are making well into the 6 figures, both partners working full time, sometimes also suplimenting income with gigs, and are barely able to afford their monthly rent and expenses.
Many people my age just laugh when you talk about the prospect of having kids. With what money and time? They can’t afford for one parter to quit their job to stay home with the kid(s), they can’t afford childcare while both partners work, and even if they can scrape the money together for one of those options, they aren’t able to save any significant money for the kid for college. And degrees are only becoming more expensive every year and less effective as the job market becomes more vicious.
People are looking at the pros and cons and aren’t finding hardly any pros. Everybody’s quality of life suffers greatly by having a kid in that setting, including the kid.
This is not a problem. If we want an increased population, we can allow more immigrants in to offset any declines in birth rates.
Now, some people will consider that a problem, and those people are also wrong.
Also, what is a problem is the cause of this birth rate decline: increasing wealth inequality. So if you’re worried about declining birth rates, fix wealth inequality.
As everyone else has said, I don’t consider it a problem. Earth is pretty far over carrying capacity as it is.
It isn’t over it’s capacity but I also don’t think declining birthrates should be considered a problem unless the total amount of people begins to decline at a significant rate. Birthrates only need to be high so that capitalist will have more people from which they can extract capital. If the population stagnates it’s not possible for a business to expand indefinitely and investors do not like when they can’t profit.
I’m sure there is much more that can be expanded on here but this is a personal belief I just considered and wrote on the spot.
Edit: having young people is important to a communist society as well and a age distribution with a fat middle can be a problem there too because young people do the majority of the work but i think with current technological advances this issue may be and become less significant with time.
- If we can’t have free healthcare, have free health care for children under the age of 21, from neonatal to age 21. This includes paternal leave for the first year.
- Free daycare from infant to teen, with well-paid daycare workers who are trained and certified, and no overcrowding.
- Pay teachers well, at least a living wage, with pay bumps for length of stay, with federal paychecks so poorer states don’t suffer
- No overcrowding of schools, less than 20 students per teacher
- School food programs with delicious, nutritious food, for free
- Free college
- Tax incentives for kids
If we actually prioritize our children as a better foundation, more people will have them. Kids who are “left behind” due to poverty will get a better chance.
How do #3-6 address declining birth rates? I’m not saying they don’t…but I can see how 1, 2, and 7 do.
People will want to have kids if the schools are properly funded and attended.
Declining birth rate is directly tied to declining quality of life. There’s no one cause but a bunch of interlinked ones. Dealing with climate change would address concerns about the future of the planet. A universal single payer healthcare like pretty much the entire rest of the world has would help with both health concerns and financial concerns. UBI would help with worries about future employment and job market as well as financial concerns. Straight outlawing first past the post voting and enacting some kind of proportional voting system would help address concerns around human rights and democracy. Just an across the board reevaluation of the way the government functions and replacing a number of things that are currently traditions or conventions with actual rules and policies would help with worries about future coup attempts.
At the local level, reevaluation of our approach to zoning and civil engineering would go a long way towards addressing a great many issues around transportation, housing, and the environment.
Pushing for much wider spread adoption of nuclear power would help with climate change, pollution, energy independence, and even international trade.
Declining birth rate is directly tied to declining quality of life.
Industrialized countries are the ones with declining birth rates, though. South Korea, Japan, some EU contries, and the U.S. are all experiencing declining birth rates with high GDPs. And, if you buy the GDP-Quality of Life link, then they have the highest qualities of life.
So, I’m not so sure this bit is true.
GDP is a terrible measurement of quality of life, particularly with the rampant income inequality in the US. The average US citizens quality of life is significantly worse than it has been in decades.
I agree. I see little link between GDP and quality of life. Personally, I like the idea of fewer people, will never have kids, and am happy about it, so no problem with the issue here. I would, however, like to restructure the economy so it wasn’t so dependent on an ever-increasing supply of young workers/consumers.
It’s a global issue that affects every highly educated society. And it’s been decade after decade of governments bribing their populations to try and get them to have children. It failed every time. The economic strategy of people who live in post industrial urban centers is just not compatible with a growing population. You can of course look at it from the point of view of rising childcare costs, but that’s part of a larger social democratic project. From what I understand the american population will continue to grow via immigration and the country isn’t in a situation as dire as, say, Japan.
Ultimately, if there’s a problem to be fixed it is the fact public and private finance will have to deleverage themselves somehow once the pyramid topples over. Widening the base is simply not going to happen.
Honestly, I think at some level, the issue is that raising a child is labor- a lot of it, and it’s work that needs to be done full time (hence why when neither parent can be home, kids are generally sent to daycare or school depending on their age), but which is also unpaid. A lot of people probably won’t like this, because it would be a huge government expenditure that would require higher taxes on everyone not benefitting, and people would probably object to paying for other people’s kids, but I think to really fix this, we need to pay a parent from each family that has them to stay home and take care of their kids. And not to the degree we currently do, I mean an entire, living wage income, with no requirement for any other kind of work for that parent (indeed possibly the opposite, since the entire point is to treat raising that person’s family as their adequately compensated full time job). Leave it up to the parents involved which one of them is the one to do this, have the system be flexible to allow for the family to switch which parent is taking on this role if they want or need to, and increase the amount a bit with multiple kids to deal with increased cost of supplies and such.
Basically, I think that to really fix this, the system needs to be set up so that the cost of having and actually raising and being there for a kid is offset entirely, such that the decision to have one has no financial impact on a family at all.
we need to pay a parent from each family that has them to stay home and take care of their kids. And not to the degree we currently do, I mean an entire, living wage income, with no requirement for any other kind of work for that parent (indeed possibly the opposite, since the entire point is to treat raising that person’s family as their adequately compensated full time job)
Oh man, that is a bold policy solution!
Basically, I think that to really fix this, the system needs to be set up so that the cost of having and actually raising and being there for a kid is offset entirely, such that the decision to have one has no financial impact on a family at all.
It’s a well-known fact that having children makes you poorer, and I think that’s what you’re trying to address it. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to reduce the effect of having children to nothing financially. I mean, if a data scientist with an annual salary of $200K has a baby, then it makes less sense to give them their full salary than an Amazon wage slave that has a baby who works for $20/hr.
I may not have made myself clear- I don’t mean that we should pay people the wage that they were making before they leave to raise their children; a policy like that would give those who least need the help the most money and leave someone struggling to make ends meet before having kids still not having enough after the extra expenses associated with a child are added. What I meant was that we should calculate a reasonably comfortable living wage for a given state or region, add the average additional cost a child would involve for things like food and clothing expenses, and pay a parent from each family that amount. My assumption was that this is probably more than or roughly equivalent to what most people make, and so would if successful mitigate the cost of having children. I suppose it would still make kids a net cost to people who are very well off, but these people less need the help anyway
Yeah, I can get behind this.
If you set a per City or per county minimum income and every family that falls under the income level receives the difference as long as at least one person in the family is working a full-time job and there is at least 1 child in the household then that would go a long way to solving the issue.
Sure it would suck for the people that are making $5 a year more than the annual minimums to know that their neighbor that’s working minimum wage at McDonald’s is making almost as much as they are, but wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world that wasn’t littered with abject poverty for no reason other than rich people have no upper limit to how rich they want to be?
It’s not a problem anywhere because there are eight billion people on this planet. “Declining birth rates” is typically a thinly veiled racist talking point.
“Declining birth rates” is typically a thinly veiled racist talking point.
While I know what you’re talking about, and would generally agree, the Brookings article linked discusses it at the national level without differentiating between demographics. That is, after all, why I chose that article over something discussing the Great Replacement, as if it were real (to be clear, it is not).
Make housing dirt cheap, including multifamily buildings with enough bedrooms to have a family in
Declining birth rate is not a problem that requires fixing, it is a mercifully wise collective decision by intelligent creatures who’ve become educated and aware enough of their place in the biosphere to recognize the destructive effects of their own overpopulation. The idea that declining birth rate is decidedly NOT economic - lower birth rate does not arise among the poor and uneducated in the world.
There is no problem in today’s world that would be mitigated by increasing birth rate. I live in a region where there is a burgeoning elderly population and sometimes people say - we need more young people in this economy! But that does not mean that having more babies here is any help: by the time they are adults, the wave of excess elderly people will be gone. Economic crises are far more immediate than generational solutions - if a region lacks workers, economic forces are more effective to relocate workers than biologically growing new ones. Of course, governments often fail to anticipate needs and adjust migration policies in a timely way, or housing policies, or other such issues that create barriers contrary to the economic forces.
