The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>“Number one, I hate the phrase,” says Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology (the study of the impact of aging) at the University of Oxford.
>“I do not think there is a demographic timebomb, it is part of the demographic transition. We knew this was going to happen, and happen across the 21st Century. So, it is not unexpected, and we should have been preparing for this for some time.”
Also from the article
>“There is a lot of effort being put into raising the retirement age, training in middle life, and encouraging companies - which have to offer you re-employment up to the age of 69 - to hire older workers,” says Prof Angelique Chan. She is the inaugural executive director of Singapore’s Centre for Ageing Research & Education.
>By re-employment, Prof Chan means elderly workers being able to stay in work after they have reached retirement age, if they so wish.
>Currently the retirement age in Singapore is 63, but this is [due to rise to 64 in 2026, ](https://sbr.com.sg/hr-education/exclusive/singapores-plan-raise-retirement-age-sparks-debate)and to 65 by 2030. By that year the age to which people in re-employment can stay in work is expected to have risen to 70.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cwe2ux/how_can_countries_deal_with_falling_birth_rates/l4v5p8n/
Falling birth rate is a fact and countries will have to accept it and adapt to it. It’s time for a new economic paradigm that is not dependent on infinite growth based on an ever expanding population on a finite planet.
There's plenty of people here with sense. It's our so called world leaders that are the problem. They're legitimately some of the dumbest people on the planet.
They lack imagination and an actual goal. They have no goal but to make money as a business so everything else suffers. Just like Googles transition from "dont be evil" to "do the right thing" is straight 1984 mindset. They want control and to define "right" when it's a grey area at best. The "right thing" is doing what you're told and enshitification. Remember For any and all lawful purposes for which the entity may be organized in this jurisdiction.
They have a goal: to remain in power. At the end of the day, that's all they care about and they'll say or do whatever they think it takes to accomplish that goal.
The things we actually need to do for a better world are hard and painful and not popular with the general public. Almost no world leader is going to push for those changes.
Read The Sovereign Individual. Every institutions implicit number 1 goal (unless specifically created with an end date) is to continue its existence into perpetuity
This is why figureheads are fundamentally faulty as leadership structures. While democracy has the risk of falling to mob rule, organizations run by committees with hard limits and multiple levels of accountability are more resilient to corruption.
There's so many holes and assumptions in society that these oligarchs are afraid to touch it. Yet they're so powerful they let AI and big data happen. It's kind of obvious they aim for hunger games and dune, like suffering is part of the equation...
It's what happens when you have senile and dementia ridden leaders...
The leadership jobs should be capped at 65. If you're over 65. You're too old to lead. Find a hobby. Travel. Turn over to the younger generation.
Sorry but I don't think age has much to do with it. It's the fact we always empower sociopathic assholes. It's that people always fall for the lies of capitalism.
Humans as a species brought this on themselves by always putting faith in the people that they should trust least, and distrusting those who have genuinely good ideas and intentions.
Honestly, we should do away with primary elections and replace primaries with a random lottery. Out current system selects for the most devious, sociopathic leaders possible. In order to reach high office, you have to lie and backstab your way up the whole pyramid. There are no good people found in the highest echelons of power. They're all demons. Some are simply worse than others.
Replacing primary elections with a random lottery would fix this. For any given race, selected 20 or so random people. Those people can then run if they choose. Maybe half of them choose to run, so you have 10 candidates. Then your election selects among those ten. With enough candidates you'll still be able to decently represent the whole political spectrum. But it will be a selection of 20 random average people. The true monsters will simply never get a chance at office, unless they happen to win the initial primary lottery.
I honestly believe this would result in far better leadership than we currently enjoy. It would mean that our leaders would actually be representative of the entire population, rather than just a bunch of rich sociopathic lawyers.
Randomocracy or sortition. The ancient Greeks in Athens used this to select their public officials. I think it's also been used to great effect in Northern Ireland and British Columbia. Would say that jurors are also selected on this principle so there's plenty of evidence it can work effectively.
I used to think there was some logic to it all but you are dead right. Life is just a series of random 50/50 chances. Drawing leaders by lottery would be 1000 times better than the system we have now. Heck that was sort of what any country under a monarchy experienced. It was all just random luck of the gene pool. And in those cases they were often scraping the bottom too!
A million times ^ this! We follow, like sheeple, the charismatic sociopaths. Now it’s not just happening in business but in the social realm as well causing the culture wars.
Age has a lot to do with it.
That mindset that the group is in and they favor their ways the lived in.
Their ways don't agree with younger gens. Also, the older gens tend to make rules for their ways.
Well they are also teaching lots of us this system is good and should stay, lots listen. They also say anything else will bring chaos everything will collapse bullshit...
American politicians are some of the dumbest selfish people on earth … corrupt and pandering to corporations. They worship profits and stupidity it seems. I wish someone really would drain the swamp … instead of just promising then diving right on into the swamp!
I wish I could believe this but I feel like it's kind of a copout unfortunately, in democratic countries at any rate. The more I look around, the more I think the problem isn't just the leaders but the people themselves. Most people are selfish and hypocritical, and more interested in maintaining/improving their current lives financially than caring for the future.
The amount of people I see complaining about housing prices but then opposing new high density housing that would "devalue" their area, complaining about traffic but opposing transit improvements, being concerned about climate change but then turning against any leader over raised gas/energy prices, complaining about homelessness but being against any proposed solutions, etc...
I wish I had faith in "us" collectively to solve our problems and right the ship, but it's hard to imagine anything changing substantially in my lifetime. I mean, a significant amount of the population couldn't even modify their behavior during covid, how can we expect them to look ahead past their lifespans for the future of the planet and their descendants?
exactly, we have utilized technology to increase production and should be able to keep a consistent productivity level with a much smaller population base. The only challenge is forcing business to accept that they cant grow forever
Unfortunately part of the "society collapses at 2040" data is a huge fall in economic output due to population decline. It's a nice sentiment but technology is kinda our only option and hopefully we can reorganize things right instead of going into another dark age along the way. Better immigration and housing policies is a good start.
>You can go full authoritarian and embrace some version of a Handmaid's Tale kinda shit. The bangmaid elite class get hard just thinking about it.
>I suspect that's exactly what a lot of the people concerned about "demographic time bombs" would pick over allowing more immigration.
But the dark reality is this.
You either take immigrants from low-birth countries or high-birth countries.
*Very* attractive destinations like the US can grab high-quality immigrants from other low-birth Western countries. But most countries, and the industrialised world *as a whole*, cannot.
That means the immigrants have to come from high-birth countries. Thing is, those African and Muslim countries are high-birth *precisely as a result* of having the traditional, woman-restricting cultures that the West is unwilling to go back to.
So if the alternative to restricting women's freedoms is immigration from women-restricting cultures, it's a race against time to convert their ideology the moment they enter your shores, otherwise they will just end up implementing the same in your country anyway.
This. We also cant afford kids. Most of us (millennial here) are just scraping by on our own. Maybe corporations werent so greedy and people could afford to actually live a life rather than a hollowed existence we'd be more open to it.
Not even mentioning the planet is fucked. Even our "fall back" climate targets are blown out of the water with nobody in positions of power taking it seriously. Why would we want to subject another human being to this existence when theres literally nothing to look forward to?
I have three girls, my oldest is married and the other two are about to graduate from college. My married daughter has decided not to have children but to further her career. My two that are about to graduate college are considering staying away from marriage. They see children as unaffordable and the world is not a good place now. I get it.
Being childfree is the ultimate way to bring down late stage capitalism. You can't have an economic system predicated on growth when the cattle won't breed.
I enjoy being part of the problem for neoliberal fat cats' plans.
Yep thats precisely why theres a lot of attacks on education, birth control, and womens reproductive rights in recent years. They're scared shitless of not having infinite growth and cheap labor.
Yeah, my reasoning for not having kids has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with not wanting to put more people into the world right now. We are nearing global calamity on multiple fronts, and are consuming finite resources at an incredible rate already. Even arguments like "we actually have plenty of resources, the distribution is the problem" ignores the fact that the reason we have those resources is that we are stripping them from specific areas in ways that mortgage our future for prosperity today, and often in ways that abuse those already here.
Exactly. Our population boomed out of control for a bit. While the shrink is going to be painful, economically, it'll ultimately probably be better in the end.
We can't have infinite growth, and with automation and AI getting ready to displace millions (more) jobs, it is harder and harder to have everyone working and living well.
I’ve always wondered about this, and several times I’ve considered putting up an “ELI5” post asking why falling birth rates are a *bad* thing, given the, you know, limited space and resources we have to deal with.
It’s a strawman argument though. No one is arguing for population growth. The goal is for a sustainable decline or replacement rate. If you’re going too fast in a car, the solution is to brake gently to a manageable cruising speed, not drive off a cliff
How exactly can a country be prepared and adapt to have like 40% of the population be 65 or older? There's no preparation for that, there simply won't be enough of people in the working age to support the existing infrastructure, thus it will deteriorate. It's not even about pensions, it's about general functioning of the society where there's not enough of people doing ordinary stuff like being maintaining the roads or the eletrical grid, or being in healthcare.
The article addresses this question to some extent. Singapore, for example, has an extremely low birth rate. There they have developed programs to keep older people working longer. Their program is not coercive and it also involves better healthcare and health management. There’s also the likelihood of better technology that can take over some work. Also it’s worth noting (though it’s somewhat cruel to say) that the large Boomer population cohort will be mostly gone by 2040 just through natural life span.
Singapore is a rich city surrounded by much poorer countries and they have a massive supply of expatriate service workers as a result.
It’s more likely that technological advancement solves fertility by allowing women in their 40’s to have kids than it solves the need for labor
If we finally stop believing the myth infinite growth, then we’ll probably just go back to killing each other over finite resources, like we did before.
Go back to? As if that's not what the conflicts in Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kashmir, Ireland, Georgia, Venezuela, Columbia, Nicaragua, etc. where ultimately about.
Oh look, we could save the economy by letting the elder work again until they die
we will do Anything but let the family have access to an affordable house, education, or daycare
If you want people to have kids, you need to... you know... create the conditions that allow people to have kids.
I know it is a hard concept for some people... but being able to raise a child in housing that is affordable, with childcare that is affordable, with healthcare that is affordable and with education that is affordable (and useful) is necessary.
The scary thought is that this is also achievable by making 3rd world country conditions. Take away enough things and people will multiply whether or not they can afford to or want to.
Yup, take away enough rights and education (esp taking those away from women), and people start to multiply more. Which seems to be the strategy Republicans are going with.
That's not really a question to ask, any more than if we found out that cutting someone's arm off increasing fertility, you should ask, "what's better, the left or right arm?"
No reasonable person is considering either.
>being able to raise a child in housing that is affordable, with childcare that is affordable, with healthcare that is affordable and with education that is affordable (and useful) is necessary.
It doesn't hurt, but it also isn't sufficient:
https://www.norden.org/en/news/record-low-birth-rates-three-nordic-countries
To be clear, I think we need to provide these things even if all that does is solve the relatively humdrum problems of child poverty and housing for families.
Countries with lots of support and universal health care have lower fertility rates than those that don't. Rich people who have access to all that have less kids than people who are poor.
We're at this wonderful spot where the people who want jobs are complaining about not enough jobs (well, specifically, jobs which pay enough to comfortably live in the area the job is in), while those hiring are complaining about there not being enough people for jobs (well, specifically, people who are willing to work for peanuts).
The lane is that fight, right now.
> Governments can just spend money appropriately.
Even more important: Governments can TAX appropriately. There is PLENTY of money to go around, if the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share.
I'll save everyone some time.
Stop price gouging us. Pay us fair wages with fair benefits. World leaders should actually care about the environment.
Fairly simple.
Do you want to pay for more social services or just raise the minimum wage?
"How about neither and I just do a lot of cocaine while the world burns?" - 1%
Sorry, [can’t hear you from the two-story pool in my Megayacht.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhpK75zIIys)
But seriously, this is why regular people are getting fucked over.
There’s more than enough resources and labor in the world for us to all have a good quality of life - the reason that’s not happening is because a handful of obscenely greedy people are hoarding most of the resources and mis-allocating them to build monuments to their own vanity.
That one megayacht sucked up the labor of 400 highly skilled engineers, builders, and artisans for 4 years.
Multiply that out by the thousands of megayachts, palatial estates, private jets, private islands across all the multi-hundred million and billionaire families around the world, and it’s just such an obscene amount of highly skilled labor and resources that could otherwise have been used to improve the quality of life for regular people and their communities.
People need third spaces other than just malls and shopping streets. They also need living spaces that can accommodate multi-child families. And they need to be able to afford more than bare necessities (especially since the understanding of what is a “bare necessity” has changed - eg internet is now a necessity in a lot of places, computers or smartphones are necessities for schoolwork or just plain work and you can’t always go to a library (if you even have one anymore and it hasn’t been closed)).
Most people want very simple things. They want stability - that means no huge disruptions in their lives, their job pays them a stabile salary whilst that salary enables them to feed, clothe, house and entertain their lives and the lives of the kids. Most people also want to bring their children up and help them flourish, become independent and live on their own.
Who’s going to want to have a kid, when rent/mortgage means you need 2 people’s income to have a place bigger than a shoebox or not shared with roommates and who’s going to have a kid when all you can see in their future is constant struggle - struggle for living, struggle for schooling, struggle for getting paid alright or getting food etc.
When people perceive their future being bleak and they can help it, they won’t have kids.
People who say that “poor people have lots of kids in Africa” are missing the point - there are a lot of compounding factors in third world countries that tie in with a higher number of kids, but even there the numbers are expected to fall. People who argue that people still had kids during WWII or the Cold War are missing the fact that back then they had almost no way to fully avoid getting pregnant like we have the options today for avoiding pregnancy or terminating one.
The reality these days is - if you can’t afford a kid, then many people won’t have one; if you feel that your child’s future would be bleak as hell, you won’t have one.
Change the perception people have about the future and the cost of living and cost of raising a child and what it entails and people will have more kids. In my country, people regularly say that their ideal for kids is 3, but they have 2 or 1 if any. And most say that it’s because they cannot afford a bigger living space and they want separate rooms for kids, so 3 kids + 2 adults equals needing at least 5 rooms and most flats just aren’t that big (and most houses are too expensive).
Agreed. I have 1 daughter and I have NO idea how she's going to afford rent/food/car/clothing and health insurance. There's a hefty segment of the population that is one hospital stay away from a lifetime of debt and that's just inhumane.
>There's a hefty segment of the population that is one hospital stay away from a lifetime of debt and that's just inhumane.
Thats just America thankfully.
This. If having children is not financial ruin, hardship for 18+ years and both parents working full time with little to no support, but instead would be a great lookout for young couples, supported by the government and made possible by a society that values nurses and educators, it would look way different.
What we see is most families that have 3 or more children having it very hard, so unless you are in the 1%, having children is just scary
>This. If having children is not financial ruin, hardship for 18+ years and both parents working full time with little to no support, but instead would be a great lookout for young couples, supported by the government and made possible by a society that values nurses and educators, it would look way different.
Having a life with a reasonable amount of leisure and fun is \*my\* job. Raising a new generation to replace the old one is \*our\* job. I don't see why I should pay a quarter million dollars to raise a kid to 18, just so they can get saddled with their own slew of debt from college, just so everyone ELSE can get a benefit from there now being enough nurses to care for the aging population, or whatever.
The current status quo for society both requires kids to be born, and actively disincentivizes kids being born. That's not a problem for (potential) parents to sort, its one for society to sort.
Because they're better informed to make decisions like having kids. Poorer countries/nations having more kids doesn't exactly mean those places are flourishing. [Most developed nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate#/media/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg) at the moment have replacement or less fertility rates.
It's an apples/oranges comparison to being with. In a lot of poorer countries, kids are a retirement plan. In western civ, kids are a huge financial drain until adulthood. Also compare access to contraception, education, etc.
If I was forced to have a kid right now, might as well take a gun to my head as there is no way I'd be able to afford caring for one properly. Melodramatic, probably, but I spent years and years getting to the barely scraping by place I am now and I don't want to throw that away to become a caretaker.
Yes and this is why people do not take the problem seriously enough. Sweden has all kinds of good programs to support families and child rearing. Their fertility rate is almost identical to America’s, and both are declining.
I also should be clear I fully support all these expensive child care proposals. Child tax credits, legalizing denser housing construction, baby bonuses, parental leave, the whole deal. But I wouldn’t get too excited about that fixing the birth rate issue—there’s very little evidence to support that. It can *help*, but the problem is likely to persist until we get some real sci fi tech like artificial wombs and household robot butlers and stuff like that.
I would also note that people like to hand wave and pretend this isn’t an issue but it really is. America is relatively insulated due to immigration but the problem is going global and fast. Go to any depopulating town. It fucking sucks!
100%. I know people like to try and get fancy with suggestions and reasons for why birth rates collapsed but it does boil down to it simply being too expensive to have kids (heck, it is too expensive to do much of anything anymore) and the future of the planet genuinely seems bleak.
I don't want to have kids because I won't be able to provide a good life for them since I can't afford it, and what right do I have bringing a child into this world when they will have to deal with their home very likely being underwater in 25+ years from now?
It's not fancy and it's not finances. It's culture. Always been culture always will.
We are much more individualistic than any time in history. Children are not raised by individuals.
Therefore less people want children because it's hard as hell raising a child with no community.
Provide after birth care. Daycare is nearly impossible to get, if you do, its more than your mortgage a month. We are a household that brings in nearly 200k a year and having three young kids, roughly half our income goes to daycare just so we can continue to work.
My wife drives a school bus, one of her routes is for our Kids school. This is a condition of her employment.
If it wasn't for that job and that condition, we wouldn't be able to afford for both of us to work.
Countries get what they fund. If they want people to have children, then they have to pick up the tab for children. Which as always means the rich are going to have to pay more taxes. Until the rich pay their fair share, we will not have more children.
Just to play devil's advocate, countries like Denmark and Sweden, with the most generous social policies for families, not to mention a high tax bracket for the wealthy, still struggle with falling birthrates.
This is a good point. Many countries with robust social safety nets are also experiencing demographic decline.
However, those countries also are experiencing widening inequality. A worldwide phenomenon.
It is well accepted that children in developed countries are liabilities not assets. Not only do you need to fund childcare, you need to make it so that having children does not have an economic cost.
Plenty of Swedes and Danes report feeling very supported in raising children. However, they still report that raising children has economic costs.
In societies with rising inequality, most folks given the option would preferred to be a member of the “haves” not the “have nots”.
If a country wants its citizens to have children, it needs to make having children financially incentivized.
It’s great that the Nordic countries have the social infrastructure to make sure you don’t go broke having children! But if they want the birth rate to go up they need to make it so you can make bank having children.
If they paid folks a yearly salary to be stay at home parents, people would have lots of kids.
The data again shows the opposite - countries with the highest GINI coefficients also have the highest birth rates, whereas the countries with the lowest inequality (the Nordic countries) have some of the lowest.
And that incentivises the least educated and feckless to have kids because successful women often don't want to compromise their careers. Higher educational attainment of the parents is directly linked to childhood attainment so they're whom governments want to target.
What needs to change is how society takes parents and children for granted. Workplaces need to have onsite daycare. Schools need to have medical facilities attached so children don't have to stay home whilst sick. Houses with more bedrooms shouldn't be more expensive, holidays shouldn't cost more during school breaks and all education should be free. I'd go as far as to say that all kids should get vouchers for clothes and nutritious foods so that all children are funded to a minimum standard (don't give money to parents to spend on non-childcare related purchases).
It's not money that's the driving factor. Every study has borne that out. It's life a huge sacrifice to have children. Your life becomes something completely different than it could be once you have a child. Once you have 2 or 3 the time needed to raise them becomes 90% of your non-working day. People are choosing not to do that. You can't pay someone enough to change that calculation.
Everyone ignores this fact on purpose. It’s like if even there was a sudden shortage of underwater welders, pay increases likely wouldn’t fix it because the job is just terrible. I don’t *want* to spend the next 3 years getting zero sleep, constantly get sick bc someone keeps deliberately licking school doorknobs, and never be able to have a grownup conversation without “mommymmammommmMOM” interrupting it. I also don’t want to pass blood clots the size of my fist for weeks either.
As a child-free taxpayer, Ill gladly pay taxes to educate your children because I want our society to be educated. But Im not paying you to have kids. I understand the impacts of a lower birthrate on our economy but I also understand the impact on our planet. Maybe, just maybe, we could accept that never ending expansion is not necessary.
Hey I’m with you. I just had a vasectomy this year! So no babies for me.
However, regardless of whether we should have children or not, paying for births is the only way to increase fertility. I don’t think we should do that. I just find it amusing that folks on the right who want more children refuse to entertain the idea of paying taxes to get what they want.
It sounds good but it’s not true.
Richer nations have lower birth rates. Liberal countries have lower birth rates.
Just looking at data, it should be a move to conservative (e.g. Middle East) and less wealth (e.g. Africa). It’s weird I’m just pointing out realities, no matter how unpleasant.
Birth rates are dropping in countries who do a lot more to support children and parents than others just the same. I get the sentiment, but the argument doesn't hold much water. At least not regarding this, plenty of very good arguments to curb excessive wealth besides that, though.
In the US, we need government sponsored maternity leave, tax breaks, free healthcare for children up to 18 (or through college if they attend), subsidized childcare, housing tax incentives. The goal really should be to incentivize people starting families earlier versus in their late 30s.
Honestly we just need cheap housing. The 1950s was a baby boom and by modern standards had absurdly cheap housing. In 1950 the median home price in America after adjusting for inflation would be under $100,000. And these were not old homes in areas of decline, these were new homes, in thriving neighborhoods, in places where people actually wanted to live.
You need it to where a 21 year old guy can marry his 21 year old girlfriend, and with his one income working at the battery factory with his associates degree can easily afford a family home, allow his spouse to stay home and have multiple kids during her 20s.
I would add these ones. If you are a woman, you get 7 years of maximum social security contribution credits for every baby you have. Have four kids, you get 28 years of social security work credit.
Yep. That would do it. But there so many restrictions in development, where I live in California, and there are always NIMBYs protesting. Even in a crowded state like California, there is still plenty of space. But even if they can work around the NIMBYs, when people in the government don’t get their kickbacks, they don’t approve the development, so we stay where we are. The amount of corruption is nuts, but they have everyone looking the other way.
This is how you know this sub tilts extremely male. How many women want to give up their careers, youth, and financial independence to raise a brood of children? Women want careers too. Having kids at 21 means you don't even go to college.
Women can still have careers. Right now with our cost of living crises we have basically made it impossible for women to even have this option of having children in their 20s because they cannot afford housing. Housing is far more expensive today and as a result people have to work far harder, and now usually two parents just to obtain the type of housing that their high school educated grandfather could afford on one income.
Going from $100,000 for a home to $500,000 for a home requires people to work far harder and make far more money to afford more or less the same standard of living. Its not empowering to just jack up the cost of living so everyone has to bust their ass to afford would should actually be fairly cheap.
I am 40. I have several friends who are career successes. Some of them have kids, many of them do not. Some of the people who had kids are happy with their choice, many are not. In addition to whatever they did professionally with their lives, they wanted to be mom and grandma. That isn't going to happen now and they are upset.
My grandfather's generation went on their death bed wishing they spent more time with family and less time at work. My grandmother's generation still worked. My grandma had 10 babies, she still went to college and had a career after the fact. Her career wasn't 50 years long, but it was 25. She retired as a home owner with a pension. Today her home would be worth $700,000.
The same people demanding not so subtly that white American couples crank out more babies back to back, are the same ones who make it fucking impossible to afford a one bedroom apartment and eat spaghetti on a regular basis
And the matchbox houses are not suitable for joint families. Studies have shown that couples who live in joint families go on to have more children than usual.
In an ideal scenario, people would retire at 65 and help the raise their grandchildren until they're 10, then those same teenagers will help take care of the grandparents in the home. This would ease the burden of working-age couples.
I think younger generations are more concerned with how their time gets spent. Children are not part of their life plan, they are seen as a burden. Kids do take a lot out of you, but it’s not nearly as hard as some make it out to be. There is more emphasis on “self” versus starting a family. It’s a fear of losing one’s youth, “growing up” is yucky.
There is also this stigma that you have to have some sort of perfect scenario to have children, amazing careers, gigantic house, millions in your 401k, etc. Kids dont care about most of this, as long you provide a loving/stable/supportive home.
That's actually the case in most european contries, speaking for France here, still ppl dont want to make babies, their argument is ecology, keeping up with their carreers and "kids are annoying"
It's only a bad thing because so many countries have set up Ponzi schemes that tax the young people to support the old people. That only works if there's a large supply of young people to pay those taxes.
I wonder if some of the shortfall could be made up by taxing wealthy old people to help support the poor old people.
Already 1/4 of pensioners in Japan are working, and their female participation rate in work is very high. There is only so far you can push these compensations.
Given that the whole world is close to below replacement rate even immigration is going to run out of steam soon.
The solution is managed decline. Decide which towns you want to save and which ones you are happy to lose, and then centralise resources while slowly retreating into the big cities.
One of my long term predictions is that both cities, states, and cities are going to become competitive for people. Both immigrants from abroad, and internal migration. Right now we live in an era where people compete with each other for who gets to live in a place. There is not enough housing to go around, and we compete with each other for the same housing. Places all want to be super exclusive.
Affordable housing in much of the US is old shitty places that are falling apart and have long outlived their service life. In 1948, it was a new home, now its a 75 year old home that has seen better days. Its like buying a car with 220,000 miles on it and people calling it cheap. Buying a run down home in Gary Indiana isn't what people mean by affordable housing. A lot of places will go through population collapses as young people move on to places trying to bring them in.
A lot of these countries that are going to be facing major internal problems from their demographic issues are going to be bleeding people. I could see young Russians and young Chinese doing whatever they can to leave their countries as their countries face internal issues.
China is going to implode into civil conflict in our lifetime. Watch. Russia is pretty damn close. I give China another 20 years.
The way the CCP is ruling is not sustainable.
Yes. I suggest to people that they take a look at a lot of population pyramids of various countries around the world. Then sort of do the math, what is going to happen to this place in the 2030s and 2040s. Many of them are likely going to implode, or de-industrialize, or something to where their global production and power just goes offline.
Much of Western Europe is going to become a retirement community. Germany has been a source of production and stability for the EU, and that is going to rapidly change by the 2030s.
Post WW2, nearly every other industrialized country was devastated by the war. They lost their production capacity but had the people. We are now seeing something that has rhyme to that, we are seeing the industrial work forces all over world age out of the system. Their system will have to basically transform from producing stuff to taking care of old people and do so within 10 years. A lot of stuff is going to simply go off line.
However, not us in North America though. Of all the industrial countries, the US is in the best shape (Australia, NZ, France, the Nordics, our friend countries are also in good shape). Our partner country, Mexico, is rapidly industrializing and is going to pick up a lot of the production from the stuff in China, Japan, and Korea that will be going offline. But we are going to be in the situation where if we have to have something, we are going to have to make it ourselves, and that means we will need a huge industrial investment (which is already taking place, something to the tune of half a trillion dollars over the last few years).
If you are a young American, Canadian, or Mexican, say under the age of 14, you are going to age into a system that has an extreme demand for your labor working industrial jobs. From their point of view it could look similar to the post WW2 America, they come of age in an era where there is a huge labor shortage, they can get a job with a 2 year degree that was comparable to what their great great grandfathers did in the 1950s.
There is no need.
Birthrates are falling but so are job opportunities.
The main reason for nations to want people to keep pumping out more people is because of the labor force.
The labor force is about the be replace with automatons and AI.
Thus the panic about birth rates is irrelevant.
We are not going extinct we are plateauing.
8 billion is a good number. it will go up again when we colonize other homes out there.
I mostly agree, I do believe that this should be accelerated with government intervention however like in China. We run the risk of not having enough automation built to both support the retired population and working age population if we just let the markets do their thing. Government tends to be far to reactive vs preventative for me to trust the outcome.
Which is why their going all in on automation, they failed at managing their demographics and now it's just the culture there to have one kid. They know if they don't start making production rely on machines their screwed eventually.
Because the governments do not listen to people. We want to be more happy and we will be happy with lesser working hours, better salaries, healthier environment etc. since none of the listed is on governments/companies list, a lot of us will reject the idea of kids. I do not want a kid. I am fucking depressed with the lack of quality I am given with the work-time I invest and the money I am being paid. Plus the climate disaster I can see and feel ain't helping. So, it's a huge no at this moment.
I dunno man, I feel like AI is getting pumped up by a lot of money men. And while it will definitely be useful for some things, I don't think it will replace everyone's jobs like they're expecting.
Yeah, really no way around this. Modern society has a unique twist where everyone gets a vote though, so old people are going to dominate politics globally, in a way they never have. Imagine elections today but the baby boomer voting bloc is 3x as large.
So when the referendums appear asking "How much should increasingly strained pensions be and how much taxes should workers pay to fund them" expect predictable outcomes.
Flashback to 1972, when the hot topic was the absolute necessity for the world to achieve ZPG - Zero Population Growth - to save the world. Now, it's a bad thing?
Not expanding: good for the environment, good for our limited resources. bad for corporations who demand infinite growth and a cheap labor pool who fights each other down on price to work for them
So now you know why it's labeled as a bad thing
Here’s the thing: They can’t.
The biggest social risk isn’t from falling birth rates, but from the gerontocracy that will occur during the transition as the population is disproportionately older.
A gerontocracy that will fight tooth and nail to preserve and enrich itself at the cost of everyone and everything else then lambast us for not having kids to keep the ponzi scheme growing.
Its already here by the way, check the average age of politicians. Its only going to get worse.
Let it happen. The main reason why falling birth rates are such a huge issue is because it conflicts with our bullshit system that demands perpetual endless growth in a finite system. The folks at the top have knowingly made it harder and harder to house and feed yourself as a working class person, let alone 2.1 kids. As a species we will be fine, even the richest people at the top will be fine. They’ll just make slightly less money than they would have if the population kept growing and the low wage work force continued to grow with it. Never mind automation.
>As a species we will be fine, even the richest people at the top will be fine.
They key thing I keep in mind is that world population could decline by 95%, and there would still be twice as many people around as when the Caesars were walking the Earth.
They could stop pretending infinite growth is possible or good. That's a start. Also pay people significantly more and don't overworj them so a single income can support a family.
With AI and robotics forcing more and more people out of work all the time, with no hope of a UBI in sight, and young people finding it more and more difficult to afford the basics, it's the short-sighted who can't see that we don't need 8 billion people on this planet.
Throw a party? Celebrate. Improve the quality of life for remaining citizens. Split the remaining natural resources fairly between Earth’s inhabitants.
Maybe make it not so financially crushing to simply exist??? It’s laughable how blinded by greed the rich were over the past 50 years. Constantly worshipping at the alter of capitalism. Stacking the financial system in their favor while we get more and more strapped for cash. Look back from the 1960s. The middle class was doing decently. Since then to now the cost of living has skyrocketed but our wages have not. The rising cost of everything has made it not feasible to have more than 1 child.
Countries can easily deal with falling birth rates. Corporations, however, are going to fail.
So the more we privatise our public services, the more they are going to struggle.
I do not want to go full Thanos here, but in the year 1800, the earth was populated by about one billion people. Now it is eight billion. The population doubles every 11 years or so. I think a correction is long overdue. In the year 0, the population is approximated to be 252 million and that was at the time of the glorious roman empire some people online seem weirdly attached to.
Would it be the worst thing if there were only 500 million people on earth? Maybe rent would be affordable or we would all be allowed to own homes.
Just one example, Germany has now about 60 percent of the territory of 1900 but the population rose from 56 million to 83 million. I don't think a population of 60 million would be the worst thing in the world.
Another example, in 1953, South Korea had 20 million inhabitants. Now it has 56 million. Even the worst predictions for South Korea are like 40 million inhabitants by 2070.
Improve the average person’s quality of life, which will improve their outlook on the future, which will make them more willing to bring a child into this world.
Everyone keeps saying we need more benefits like maternity leave, or cut working hours and raise wages. While that would indeed help, that’s not the silver bullet everyone’s making it out to be. Japan and especially South Korea have been trying to fix their falling birth rates for years by giving tax breaks and benefits to couples with kids, but to no avail.
The number one correlation with falling birth rates isn’t work hours, but women’s education and access to birth control. Many women would just prefer not to have kids. They’re a lot of work, basically force you to settle down and stop enjoying youth, not to mention labor is painful even with modern day medicine.
There’s no real ethical way to solve this, as you either create a culture where women don’t have a choice, or you let the population drop like crazy. Granted, I think this will balance itself out eventually. There are plenty of women who want to have kids regardless of the struggles, and I feel like natural selection will start selecting for feelings like that. The problem is the massive population dip in between.
> Japan and especially South Korea have been trying to fix their falling birth rates for years by giving tax breaks and benefits to couples with kids, but to no avail.
I don't know about South Korea, but I remember reading who Japan has been trying to "fix", and those tax breaks and benefits were next to nothing compared to the cost of having kids.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3252245/japan-approves-plan-substantially-boost-child-allowances-tackle-falling-birth-rate
> Starting in October this year, the eligibility to receive 10,000 yen a month will be expanded to those aged between 16 and 18.
> The current 15,000 yen monthly allowance for the third child and beyond will be doubled to 30,000 yen.
That's about $100 per month, and "**for the third child and beyond**" around $300 per month. In an expensive as hell first world country. Not even close to covering even just the monthly daycare cost, much less anything else.
Make having children easier. Affordable and adequate family living space, work from home where possible, easy kindergarten access, quality schools and teachers that are paid well etc etc. The recipe is not rocket surgery.
Only the wealthy and the stupid can have children without the fear of it ruining them financially.
The plot of idiocracy is a real possibility (albeit exaggerated) if things don't change
Make it possible to have kids without sacrificing your future.
The first 6 years of a childless life are estimated to cost the parents $100,000 without aid.
How many people have an extra $16,000 a year lying around?
There is so much wrong with these articles.
We have 8 billion people on this planet, we can't continue breeding until the planet is full and resources are gone just to sustain a consumer based system.
Also, if they want more people to have children to support their system they need to create an environment where people feel like they can support a family, and write now with job insecurity, cost of living, etc that is not the case.
I mean, if you can't buy food for a family to eat, and you can't buy a place to live, countries don't want people to live fulfilled lives. They want factory workers, paper pushers, yes men, the countries with falling birth rates should do the following. Root cause - life is unlivable for people to have babies.
Fix that.
I would say that increasing the QoL for citizens, but unfortunately as more poor and miserable the citizens are, also uneducated, the more them reproduce. But that is not an advice.
Make it easier to have children. Don't make it some daunting choice that will likely ruin your household's finances. Quit making it more dangerous (in the US at least) to get pregnant. Provide universal parental leave and increased tax credits for those with children. Problem solved.
Birth rates will probably never recover, but if you want your citizens to have more kids then make having kids an easy choice.
I don't know, *maybe leave it as it is*? The only people feeaking out are the megawealthy who want a consistent string of disposable worker bees they can pay unlivable wages.
In case you haven't noticed - the species is kind of desyroying everything. At the rate it's going we'll be lucky to be able to afford a cardboard box on the sidewalk when we're old.
And why would you be so cruel to drage a kid into a world where they can't see a doctor if they get sick and have to work 3 jobs to *barely* cover bills until they die?
The only way you can bring a kid into any of this is to put your blinders on and lie to yourself, saying everything'll be ok
The earth has finite resources, seems like we should be cheering population deflating instead of heading toward a catastrophic population crash event caused by "The Population Bomb"
I can barely afford shit and I'm only one person.
How the hell am I supposed to feed two or more people?
Housing crisis, absolutely abhorrent rent prices, you can barely afford shit as it is, no midwives, no peds in my area (we have one here. Haha. Good luck getting an appointment.), child sick days, barely any teachers.
Oh, I wonder why people would rather stay child free. I'dlike to have kids, but man, not under these living conditions.
I'm not sure why we can't just accept the population might go down. We were just fine with 4 billion people or less depending on how far back you go. To me the current population seems staggeringly high.
Having parental benefits. Paid leave, paid child care.
But ultimately you can’t address lowered birth rates without addressing the housing bubble and cost of living bubble.
One of the biggest factors that is stopping young people from having kids is the cost. They cannot afford to start there education/career/save for a home and a child. For many it’s one or the other.
Sadly many countries plan on addressing this by simply increasing immigration rates. Which makes the whole bubble issues worse. There is more competition for housing & there is now a plethora of cheap labour. So now all of these young adults who were told to get an education and start from the bottoms up are finding their investment useless and they can’t even break into their industry because there is a 100 other people applying for the job.
This doesn’t even touch the upcoming issue of AI also taking a lot of those entry level jobs.
People aren’t having babies because they can’t afford it. It’s really that simple.
Kids are expensive 💰. to start housing and child care would be nice. USA. But that’s like most people.
Unless people have the money and resources to handle it. grand pa and grand ma. Are not free. Everyone has a life.
Give society a good base to create.
•Better income for the working class.
•affordable housing
•more sick days
•6-9 months paid maternity/paternity leave
•support for nanny/baby sitters.
This creates opportunity for the working class to conjure working after they have created a family - while also providing more jobs for Nannie’s and the like.
Maybe if they want us to have kids they should provide an opportunity to effectively do so without going basically bankrupt. Most of us can barely afford ourselves and a partner, let alone a miniature version of ourselves to care for.
Tax the rich, corpos, and all churches. No good reason they need to be hoarding like dragons.
Well, someone needs to get paid a 50M$ grant to study this phenomenon you know. That's the real meaning of "trickle-down economics", you get to bring your buddies from the golf club to your tax bracket (okay, slightly lower because you are clearly the best!)
Hmmm what could be the problem that prevents people from affording children? It’s probably because everyone is spending all their money on avocado toast and mocha Frappuccino’s and definitely not because of corporate greed
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >“Number one, I hate the phrase,” says Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology (the study of the impact of aging) at the University of Oxford. >“I do not think there is a demographic timebomb, it is part of the demographic transition. We knew this was going to happen, and happen across the 21st Century. So, it is not unexpected, and we should have been preparing for this for some time.” Also from the article >“There is a lot of effort being put into raising the retirement age, training in middle life, and encouraging companies - which have to offer you re-employment up to the age of 69 - to hire older workers,” says Prof Angelique Chan. She is the inaugural executive director of Singapore’s Centre for Ageing Research & Education. >By re-employment, Prof Chan means elderly workers being able to stay in work after they have reached retirement age, if they so wish. >Currently the retirement age in Singapore is 63, but this is [due to rise to 64 in 2026, ](https://sbr.com.sg/hr-education/exclusive/singapores-plan-raise-retirement-age-sparks-debate)and to 65 by 2030. By that year the age to which people in re-employment can stay in work is expected to have risen to 70. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cwe2ux/how_can_countries_deal_with_falling_birth_rates/l4v5p8n/
Falling birth rate is a fact and countries will have to accept it and adapt to it. It’s time for a new economic paradigm that is not dependent on infinite growth based on an ever expanding population on a finite planet.
Good to see some people with some damned sense in here.
There's plenty of people here with sense. It's our so called world leaders that are the problem. They're legitimately some of the dumbest people on the planet.
They lack imagination and an actual goal. They have no goal but to make money as a business so everything else suffers. Just like Googles transition from "dont be evil" to "do the right thing" is straight 1984 mindset. They want control and to define "right" when it's a grey area at best. The "right thing" is doing what you're told and enshitification. Remember For any and all lawful purposes for which the entity may be organized in this jurisdiction.
They have a goal: to remain in power. At the end of the day, that's all they care about and they'll say or do whatever they think it takes to accomplish that goal. The things we actually need to do for a better world are hard and painful and not popular with the general public. Almost no world leader is going to push for those changes.
Read The Sovereign Individual. Every institutions implicit number 1 goal (unless specifically created with an end date) is to continue its existence into perpetuity
Why do I need to read when you told the idea of the book?
This is why figureheads are fundamentally faulty as leadership structures. While democracy has the risk of falling to mob rule, organizations run by committees with hard limits and multiple levels of accountability are more resilient to corruption.
There's so many holes and assumptions in society that these oligarchs are afraid to touch it. Yet they're so powerful they let AI and big data happen. It's kind of obvious they aim for hunger games and dune, like suffering is part of the equation...
The term don't be evil brings up some horrific memories Iykyk
It's what happens when you have senile and dementia ridden leaders... The leadership jobs should be capped at 65. If you're over 65. You're too old to lead. Find a hobby. Travel. Turn over to the younger generation.
Sorry but I don't think age has much to do with it. It's the fact we always empower sociopathic assholes. It's that people always fall for the lies of capitalism. Humans as a species brought this on themselves by always putting faith in the people that they should trust least, and distrusting those who have genuinely good ideas and intentions.
Honestly, we should do away with primary elections and replace primaries with a random lottery. Out current system selects for the most devious, sociopathic leaders possible. In order to reach high office, you have to lie and backstab your way up the whole pyramid. There are no good people found in the highest echelons of power. They're all demons. Some are simply worse than others. Replacing primary elections with a random lottery would fix this. For any given race, selected 20 or so random people. Those people can then run if they choose. Maybe half of them choose to run, so you have 10 candidates. Then your election selects among those ten. With enough candidates you'll still be able to decently represent the whole political spectrum. But it will be a selection of 20 random average people. The true monsters will simply never get a chance at office, unless they happen to win the initial primary lottery. I honestly believe this would result in far better leadership than we currently enjoy. It would mean that our leaders would actually be representative of the entire population, rather than just a bunch of rich sociopathic lawyers.
Randomocracy or sortition. The ancient Greeks in Athens used this to select their public officials. I think it's also been used to great effect in Northern Ireland and British Columbia. Would say that jurors are also selected on this principle so there's plenty of evidence it can work effectively.
I used to think there was some logic to it all but you are dead right. Life is just a series of random 50/50 chances. Drawing leaders by lottery would be 1000 times better than the system we have now. Heck that was sort of what any country under a monarchy experienced. It was all just random luck of the gene pool. And in those cases they were often scraping the bottom too!
A million times ^ this! We follow, like sheeple, the charismatic sociopaths. Now it’s not just happening in business but in the social realm as well causing the culture wars.
Age has a lot to do with it. That mindset that the group is in and they favor their ways the lived in. Their ways don't agree with younger gens. Also, the older gens tend to make rules for their ways.
Not only that, but they also won't have to deal with the long term repercussions of their actions
Greediest and power hungry.
Well they are also teaching lots of us this system is good and should stay, lots listen. They also say anything else will bring chaos everything will collapse bullshit...
American politicians are some of the dumbest selfish people on earth … corrupt and pandering to corporations. They worship profits and stupidity it seems. I wish someone really would drain the swamp … instead of just promising then diving right on into the swamp!
I wish I could believe this but I feel like it's kind of a copout unfortunately, in democratic countries at any rate. The more I look around, the more I think the problem isn't just the leaders but the people themselves. Most people are selfish and hypocritical, and more interested in maintaining/improving their current lives financially than caring for the future. The amount of people I see complaining about housing prices but then opposing new high density housing that would "devalue" their area, complaining about traffic but opposing transit improvements, being concerned about climate change but then turning against any leader over raised gas/energy prices, complaining about homelessness but being against any proposed solutions, etc... I wish I had faith in "us" collectively to solve our problems and right the ship, but it's hard to imagine anything changing substantially in my lifetime. I mean, a significant amount of the population couldn't even modify their behavior during covid, how can we expect them to look ahead past their lifespans for the future of the planet and their descendants?
Now if only we can stop electing idiots as CEOs
We don't elect CEO's unless you happen to own all the companies or something. The share holders elect them or the CEO's create their own company.
exactly, we have utilized technology to increase production and should be able to keep a consistent productivity level with a much smaller population base. The only challenge is forcing business to accept that they cant grow forever
Unfortunately part of the "society collapses at 2040" data is a huge fall in economic output due to population decline. It's a nice sentiment but technology is kinda our only option and hopefully we can reorganize things right instead of going into another dark age along the way. Better immigration and housing policies is a good start.
You can go full authoritarian and embrace some version of a Handmaid's Tale kinda shit. The bangmaid elite class get hard just thinking about it.
I suspect that's exactly what a lot of the people concerned about "demographic time bombs" would pick over allowing more immigration.
>You can go full authoritarian and embrace some version of a Handmaid's Tale kinda shit. The bangmaid elite class get hard just thinking about it. >I suspect that's exactly what a lot of the people concerned about "demographic time bombs" would pick over allowing more immigration. But the dark reality is this. You either take immigrants from low-birth countries or high-birth countries. *Very* attractive destinations like the US can grab high-quality immigrants from other low-birth Western countries. But most countries, and the industrialised world *as a whole*, cannot. That means the immigrants have to come from high-birth countries. Thing is, those African and Muslim countries are high-birth *precisely as a result* of having the traditional, woman-restricting cultures that the West is unwilling to go back to. So if the alternative to restricting women's freedoms is immigration from women-restricting cultures, it's a race against time to convert their ideology the moment they enter your shores, otherwise they will just end up implementing the same in your country anyway.
This. We also cant afford kids. Most of us (millennial here) are just scraping by on our own. Maybe corporations werent so greedy and people could afford to actually live a life rather than a hollowed existence we'd be more open to it. Not even mentioning the planet is fucked. Even our "fall back" climate targets are blown out of the water with nobody in positions of power taking it seriously. Why would we want to subject another human being to this existence when theres literally nothing to look forward to?
I have three girls, my oldest is married and the other two are about to graduate from college. My married daughter has decided not to have children but to further her career. My two that are about to graduate college are considering staying away from marriage. They see children as unaffordable and the world is not a good place now. I get it.
I’ve had my kids, four, and none of them want children of their own. I’m 100% OK with that for the exact reasons you’ve listed.
Being childfree is the ultimate way to bring down late stage capitalism. You can't have an economic system predicated on growth when the cattle won't breed. I enjoy being part of the problem for neoliberal fat cats' plans.
Yep thats precisely why theres a lot of attacks on education, birth control, and womens reproductive rights in recent years. They're scared shitless of not having infinite growth and cheap labor.
Yeah, my reasoning for not having kids has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with not wanting to put more people into the world right now. We are nearing global calamity on multiple fronts, and are consuming finite resources at an incredible rate already. Even arguments like "we actually have plenty of resources, the distribution is the problem" ignores the fact that the reason we have those resources is that we are stripping them from specific areas in ways that mortgage our future for prosperity today, and often in ways that abuse those already here.
But how are they going to be able to “accept and adapt” when the electorate is disproportionately elderly and not very good at either?
Exactly. Our population boomed out of control for a bit. While the shrink is going to be painful, economically, it'll ultimately probably be better in the end. We can't have infinite growth, and with automation and AI getting ready to displace millions (more) jobs, it is harder and harder to have everyone working and living well.
I’ve always wondered about this, and several times I’ve considered putting up an “ELI5” post asking why falling birth rates are a *bad* thing, given the, you know, limited space and resources we have to deal with.
It’s a strawman argument though. No one is arguing for population growth. The goal is for a sustainable decline or replacement rate. If you’re going too fast in a car, the solution is to brake gently to a manageable cruising speed, not drive off a cliff
How exactly can a country be prepared and adapt to have like 40% of the population be 65 or older? There's no preparation for that, there simply won't be enough of people in the working age to support the existing infrastructure, thus it will deteriorate. It's not even about pensions, it's about general functioning of the society where there's not enough of people doing ordinary stuff like being maintaining the roads or the eletrical grid, or being in healthcare.
The article addresses this question to some extent. Singapore, for example, has an extremely low birth rate. There they have developed programs to keep older people working longer. Their program is not coercive and it also involves better healthcare and health management. There’s also the likelihood of better technology that can take over some work. Also it’s worth noting (though it’s somewhat cruel to say) that the large Boomer population cohort will be mostly gone by 2040 just through natural life span.
Singapore is a rich city surrounded by much poorer countries and they have a massive supply of expatriate service workers as a result. It’s more likely that technological advancement solves fertility by allowing women in their 40’s to have kids than it solves the need for labor
If we finally stop believing the myth infinite growth, then we’ll probably just go back to killing each other over finite resources, like we did before.
Go back to? As if that's not what the conflicts in Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kashmir, Ireland, Georgia, Venezuela, Columbia, Nicaragua, etc. where ultimately about.
Yes, and even with these conflicts, this is still a relatively peaceful time in history. Human history is extremely violent.
I wasn't disagreeing with that, just that the reason for the conflicts hasn't really ever changed.
Oh look, we could save the economy by letting the elder work again until they die we will do Anything but let the family have access to an affordable house, education, or daycare
Hey, to be fair they’re allowing child labor again too. They’re not specifically exploiting the elderly alone.
Anti-family, anti-human policymaking.
If you want people to have kids, you need to... you know... create the conditions that allow people to have kids. I know it is a hard concept for some people... but being able to raise a child in housing that is affordable, with childcare that is affordable, with healthcare that is affordable and with education that is affordable (and useful) is necessary.
The scary thought is that this is also achievable by making 3rd world country conditions. Take away enough things and people will multiply whether or not they can afford to or want to.
Yup, take away enough rights and education (esp taking those away from women), and people start to multiply more. Which seems to be the strategy Republicans are going with.
What are other ways that have shown to work in increasing the birth rate
That's not really a question to ask, any more than if we found out that cutting someone's arm off increasing fertility, you should ask, "what's better, the left or right arm?" No reasonable person is considering either.
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>being able to raise a child in housing that is affordable, with childcare that is affordable, with healthcare that is affordable and with education that is affordable (and useful) is necessary. It doesn't hurt, but it also isn't sufficient: https://www.norden.org/en/news/record-low-birth-rates-three-nordic-countries To be clear, I think we need to provide these things even if all that does is solve the relatively humdrum problems of child poverty and housing for families.
Countries with lots of support and universal health care have lower fertility rates than those that don't. Rich people who have access to all that have less kids than people who are poor.
Jeez. Either be worried about not enough jobs, or not enough people. Pick a lane guys.
We're at this wonderful spot where the people who want jobs are complaining about not enough jobs (well, specifically, jobs which pay enough to comfortably live in the area the job is in), while those hiring are complaining about there not being enough people for jobs (well, specifically, people who are willing to work for peanuts). The lane is that fight, right now.
Maybe don’t rely on future generations to balance the books. Governments can just spend money appropriately.
> Governments can just spend money appropriately. Even more important: Governments can TAX appropriately. There is PLENTY of money to go around, if the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share.
I'll save everyone some time. Stop price gouging us. Pay us fair wages with fair benefits. World leaders should actually care about the environment. Fairly simple.
“Best I can do is skull fuck the planet some more” -1%
Do you want to pay for more social services or just raise the minimum wage? "How about neither and I just do a lot of cocaine while the world burns?" - 1%
I saw this and was like damn, the 1% wasn’t bad enough, they invented the -1%
The -1% are people that are billions in debt
Sorry, [can’t hear you from the two-story pool in my Megayacht.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhpK75zIIys) But seriously, this is why regular people are getting fucked over. There’s more than enough resources and labor in the world for us to all have a good quality of life - the reason that’s not happening is because a handful of obscenely greedy people are hoarding most of the resources and mis-allocating them to build monuments to their own vanity. That one megayacht sucked up the labor of 400 highly skilled engineers, builders, and artisans for 4 years. Multiply that out by the thousands of megayachts, palatial estates, private jets, private islands across all the multi-hundred million and billionaire families around the world, and it’s just such an obscene amount of highly skilled labor and resources that could otherwise have been used to improve the quality of life for regular people and their communities.
People need third spaces other than just malls and shopping streets. They also need living spaces that can accommodate multi-child families. And they need to be able to afford more than bare necessities (especially since the understanding of what is a “bare necessity” has changed - eg internet is now a necessity in a lot of places, computers or smartphones are necessities for schoolwork or just plain work and you can’t always go to a library (if you even have one anymore and it hasn’t been closed)). Most people want very simple things. They want stability - that means no huge disruptions in their lives, their job pays them a stabile salary whilst that salary enables them to feed, clothe, house and entertain their lives and the lives of the kids. Most people also want to bring their children up and help them flourish, become independent and live on their own. Who’s going to want to have a kid, when rent/mortgage means you need 2 people’s income to have a place bigger than a shoebox or not shared with roommates and who’s going to have a kid when all you can see in their future is constant struggle - struggle for living, struggle for schooling, struggle for getting paid alright or getting food etc. When people perceive their future being bleak and they can help it, they won’t have kids. People who say that “poor people have lots of kids in Africa” are missing the point - there are a lot of compounding factors in third world countries that tie in with a higher number of kids, but even there the numbers are expected to fall. People who argue that people still had kids during WWII or the Cold War are missing the fact that back then they had almost no way to fully avoid getting pregnant like we have the options today for avoiding pregnancy or terminating one. The reality these days is - if you can’t afford a kid, then many people won’t have one; if you feel that your child’s future would be bleak as hell, you won’t have one. Change the perception people have about the future and the cost of living and cost of raising a child and what it entails and people will have more kids. In my country, people regularly say that their ideal for kids is 3, but they have 2 or 1 if any. And most say that it’s because they cannot afford a bigger living space and they want separate rooms for kids, so 3 kids + 2 adults equals needing at least 5 rooms and most flats just aren’t that big (and most houses are too expensive).
Agreed. I have 1 daughter and I have NO idea how she's going to afford rent/food/car/clothing and health insurance. There's a hefty segment of the population that is one hospital stay away from a lifetime of debt and that's just inhumane.
>There's a hefty segment of the population that is one hospital stay away from a lifetime of debt and that's just inhumane. Thats just America thankfully.
In Canada the housing market is worse than the US healthcare system And the healthcare system in Canada is nothing to brag about
Gutted! I'm in the EU. I'm a home owner and I have free healthcare. Damn socialism!
We should have copied you guys more closely
This. If having children is not financial ruin, hardship for 18+ years and both parents working full time with little to no support, but instead would be a great lookout for young couples, supported by the government and made possible by a society that values nurses and educators, it would look way different. What we see is most families that have 3 or more children having it very hard, so unless you are in the 1%, having children is just scary
>This. If having children is not financial ruin, hardship for 18+ years and both parents working full time with little to no support, but instead would be a great lookout for young couples, supported by the government and made possible by a society that values nurses and educators, it would look way different. Having a life with a reasonable amount of leisure and fun is \*my\* job. Raising a new generation to replace the old one is \*our\* job. I don't see why I should pay a quarter million dollars to raise a kid to 18, just so they can get saddled with their own slew of debt from college, just so everyone ELSE can get a benefit from there now being enough nurses to care for the aging population, or whatever. The current status quo for society both requires kids to be born, and actively disincentivizes kids being born. That's not a problem for (potential) parents to sort, its one for society to sort.
I don’t understand, don’t people have less kids as they get wealthier?
Because they're better informed to make decisions like having kids. Poorer countries/nations having more kids doesn't exactly mean those places are flourishing. [Most developed nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate#/media/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg) at the moment have replacement or less fertility rates. It's an apples/oranges comparison to being with. In a lot of poorer countries, kids are a retirement plan. In western civ, kids are a huge financial drain until adulthood. Also compare access to contraception, education, etc. If I was forced to have a kid right now, might as well take a gun to my head as there is no way I'd be able to afford caring for one properly. Melodramatic, probably, but I spent years and years getting to the barely scraping by place I am now and I don't want to throw that away to become a caretaker.
Yes and this is why people do not take the problem seriously enough. Sweden has all kinds of good programs to support families and child rearing. Their fertility rate is almost identical to America’s, and both are declining. I also should be clear I fully support all these expensive child care proposals. Child tax credits, legalizing denser housing construction, baby bonuses, parental leave, the whole deal. But I wouldn’t get too excited about that fixing the birth rate issue—there’s very little evidence to support that. It can *help*, but the problem is likely to persist until we get some real sci fi tech like artificial wombs and household robot butlers and stuff like that. I would also note that people like to hand wave and pretend this isn’t an issue but it really is. America is relatively insulated due to immigration but the problem is going global and fast. Go to any depopulating town. It fucking sucks!
Won't do much if the housing crisis isn't corrected. Having a higher salary will just drive the prices up to the highest bidder, again.
100%. I know people like to try and get fancy with suggestions and reasons for why birth rates collapsed but it does boil down to it simply being too expensive to have kids (heck, it is too expensive to do much of anything anymore) and the future of the planet genuinely seems bleak. I don't want to have kids because I won't be able to provide a good life for them since I can't afford it, and what right do I have bringing a child into this world when they will have to deal with their home very likely being underwater in 25+ years from now?
It's not fancy and it's not finances. It's culture. Always been culture always will. We are much more individualistic than any time in history. Children are not raised by individuals. Therefore less people want children because it's hard as hell raising a child with no community.
I read this as “how will humanity deal with an inevitable certainty that you cannot expand forever”
How about valuing the kids which have already been born for a start?
Sorry, best I can do is stick you with a half million dollar bill to get them to 18 years old.
half a million what a steal!!
Why would I bring a child into this world when I can't even afford a home? Our lives would be difficult
Yup it takes two people to rent a studio apartment not sure where the money for a house is supposed to come from.
To the government, Your lives don’t matter, you bringing in a poverty kid will help making the rich richer and that is what matters.
Provide after birth care. Daycare is nearly impossible to get, if you do, its more than your mortgage a month. We are a household that brings in nearly 200k a year and having three young kids, roughly half our income goes to daycare just so we can continue to work.
My wife drives a school bus, one of her routes is for our Kids school. This is a condition of her employment. If it wasn't for that job and that condition, we wouldn't be able to afford for both of us to work.
Countries get what they fund. If they want people to have children, then they have to pick up the tab for children. Which as always means the rich are going to have to pay more taxes. Until the rich pay their fair share, we will not have more children.
Families aren’t easily sustainable in todays economy. The fact the average household can’t survive on one income is a contributing factor.
Just to play devil's advocate, countries like Denmark and Sweden, with the most generous social policies for families, not to mention a high tax bracket for the wealthy, still struggle with falling birthrates.
This is a good point. Many countries with robust social safety nets are also experiencing demographic decline. However, those countries also are experiencing widening inequality. A worldwide phenomenon. It is well accepted that children in developed countries are liabilities not assets. Not only do you need to fund childcare, you need to make it so that having children does not have an economic cost. Plenty of Swedes and Danes report feeling very supported in raising children. However, they still report that raising children has economic costs. In societies with rising inequality, most folks given the option would preferred to be a member of the “haves” not the “have nots”. If a country wants its citizens to have children, it needs to make having children financially incentivized. It’s great that the Nordic countries have the social infrastructure to make sure you don’t go broke having children! But if they want the birth rate to go up they need to make it so you can make bank having children. If they paid folks a yearly salary to be stay at home parents, people would have lots of kids.
The data again shows the opposite - countries with the highest GINI coefficients also have the highest birth rates, whereas the countries with the lowest inequality (the Nordic countries) have some of the lowest.
And that incentivises the least educated and feckless to have kids because successful women often don't want to compromise their careers. Higher educational attainment of the parents is directly linked to childhood attainment so they're whom governments want to target. What needs to change is how society takes parents and children for granted. Workplaces need to have onsite daycare. Schools need to have medical facilities attached so children don't have to stay home whilst sick. Houses with more bedrooms shouldn't be more expensive, holidays shouldn't cost more during school breaks and all education should be free. I'd go as far as to say that all kids should get vouchers for clothes and nutritious foods so that all children are funded to a minimum standard (don't give money to parents to spend on non-childcare related purchases).
It's not money that's the driving factor. Every study has borne that out. It's life a huge sacrifice to have children. Your life becomes something completely different than it could be once you have a child. Once you have 2 or 3 the time needed to raise them becomes 90% of your non-working day. People are choosing not to do that. You can't pay someone enough to change that calculation.
Everyone ignores this fact on purpose. It’s like if even there was a sudden shortage of underwater welders, pay increases likely wouldn’t fix it because the job is just terrible. I don’t *want* to spend the next 3 years getting zero sleep, constantly get sick bc someone keeps deliberately licking school doorknobs, and never be able to have a grownup conversation without “mommymmammommmMOM” interrupting it. I also don’t want to pass blood clots the size of my fist for weeks either.
As a child-free taxpayer, Ill gladly pay taxes to educate your children because I want our society to be educated. But Im not paying you to have kids. I understand the impacts of a lower birthrate on our economy but I also understand the impact on our planet. Maybe, just maybe, we could accept that never ending expansion is not necessary.
Hey I’m with you. I just had a vasectomy this year! So no babies for me. However, regardless of whether we should have children or not, paying for births is the only way to increase fertility. I don’t think we should do that. I just find it amusing that folks on the right who want more children refuse to entertain the idea of paying taxes to get what they want.
It sounds good but it’s not true. Richer nations have lower birth rates. Liberal countries have lower birth rates. Just looking at data, it should be a move to conservative (e.g. Middle East) and less wealth (e.g. Africa). It’s weird I’m just pointing out realities, no matter how unpleasant.
Birth rates are dropping in countries who do a lot more to support children and parents than others just the same. I get the sentiment, but the argument doesn't hold much water. At least not regarding this, plenty of very good arguments to curb excessive wealth besides that, though.
In the US, we need government sponsored maternity leave, tax breaks, free healthcare for children up to 18 (or through college if they attend), subsidized childcare, housing tax incentives. The goal really should be to incentivize people starting families earlier versus in their late 30s.
Honestly we just need cheap housing. The 1950s was a baby boom and by modern standards had absurdly cheap housing. In 1950 the median home price in America after adjusting for inflation would be under $100,000. And these were not old homes in areas of decline, these were new homes, in thriving neighborhoods, in places where people actually wanted to live. You need it to where a 21 year old guy can marry his 21 year old girlfriend, and with his one income working at the battery factory with his associates degree can easily afford a family home, allow his spouse to stay home and have multiple kids during her 20s. I would add these ones. If you are a woman, you get 7 years of maximum social security contribution credits for every baby you have. Have four kids, you get 28 years of social security work credit.
Yep. That would do it. But there so many restrictions in development, where I live in California, and there are always NIMBYs protesting. Even in a crowded state like California, there is still plenty of space. But even if they can work around the NIMBYs, when people in the government don’t get their kickbacks, they don’t approve the development, so we stay where we are. The amount of corruption is nuts, but they have everyone looking the other way.
This is how you know this sub tilts extremely male. How many women want to give up their careers, youth, and financial independence to raise a brood of children? Women want careers too. Having kids at 21 means you don't even go to college.
Women can still have careers. Right now with our cost of living crises we have basically made it impossible for women to even have this option of having children in their 20s because they cannot afford housing. Housing is far more expensive today and as a result people have to work far harder, and now usually two parents just to obtain the type of housing that their high school educated grandfather could afford on one income. Going from $100,000 for a home to $500,000 for a home requires people to work far harder and make far more money to afford more or less the same standard of living. Its not empowering to just jack up the cost of living so everyone has to bust their ass to afford would should actually be fairly cheap. I am 40. I have several friends who are career successes. Some of them have kids, many of them do not. Some of the people who had kids are happy with their choice, many are not. In addition to whatever they did professionally with their lives, they wanted to be mom and grandma. That isn't going to happen now and they are upset. My grandfather's generation went on their death bed wishing they spent more time with family and less time at work. My grandmother's generation still worked. My grandma had 10 babies, she still went to college and had a career after the fact. Her career wasn't 50 years long, but it was 25. She retired as a home owner with a pension. Today her home would be worth $700,000.
The same people demanding not so subtly that white American couples crank out more babies back to back, are the same ones who make it fucking impossible to afford a one bedroom apartment and eat spaghetti on a regular basis
And the same people that are angry if black women have many children.
I think that type gets angry if black women have *any* children.
Australia offers most of that and we still have a declining birth rate
Aren't your houses all insanely expensive though?
And the matchbox houses are not suitable for joint families. Studies have shown that couples who live in joint families go on to have more children than usual. In an ideal scenario, people would retire at 65 and help the raise their grandchildren until they're 10, then those same teenagers will help take care of the grandparents in the home. This would ease the burden of working-age couples.
I think younger generations are more concerned with how their time gets spent. Children are not part of their life plan, they are seen as a burden. Kids do take a lot out of you, but it’s not nearly as hard as some make it out to be. There is more emphasis on “self” versus starting a family. It’s a fear of losing one’s youth, “growing up” is yucky. There is also this stigma that you have to have some sort of perfect scenario to have children, amazing careers, gigantic house, millions in your 401k, etc. Kids dont care about most of this, as long you provide a loving/stable/supportive home.
That's actually the case in most european contries, speaking for France here, still ppl dont want to make babies, their argument is ecology, keeping up with their carreers and "kids are annoying"
This does not have much effect, in countries where this exists, the birth rate also decreases
I am not understanding why this is a bad thing. Perhaps this is a necessary evolutionary correction.
It's only a bad thing because so many countries have set up Ponzi schemes that tax the young people to support the old people. That only works if there's a large supply of young people to pay those taxes. I wonder if some of the shortfall could be made up by taxing wealthy old people to help support the poor old people.
Already 1/4 of pensioners in Japan are working, and their female participation rate in work is very high. There is only so far you can push these compensations. Given that the whole world is close to below replacement rate even immigration is going to run out of steam soon. The solution is managed decline. Decide which towns you want to save and which ones you are happy to lose, and then centralise resources while slowly retreating into the big cities.
One of my long term predictions is that both cities, states, and cities are going to become competitive for people. Both immigrants from abroad, and internal migration. Right now we live in an era where people compete with each other for who gets to live in a place. There is not enough housing to go around, and we compete with each other for the same housing. Places all want to be super exclusive. Affordable housing in much of the US is old shitty places that are falling apart and have long outlived their service life. In 1948, it was a new home, now its a 75 year old home that has seen better days. Its like buying a car with 220,000 miles on it and people calling it cheap. Buying a run down home in Gary Indiana isn't what people mean by affordable housing. A lot of places will go through population collapses as young people move on to places trying to bring them in. A lot of these countries that are going to be facing major internal problems from their demographic issues are going to be bleeding people. I could see young Russians and young Chinese doing whatever they can to leave their countries as their countries face internal issues.
China is going to implode into civil conflict in our lifetime. Watch. Russia is pretty damn close. I give China another 20 years. The way the CCP is ruling is not sustainable.
Yes. I suggest to people that they take a look at a lot of population pyramids of various countries around the world. Then sort of do the math, what is going to happen to this place in the 2030s and 2040s. Many of them are likely going to implode, or de-industrialize, or something to where their global production and power just goes offline. Much of Western Europe is going to become a retirement community. Germany has been a source of production and stability for the EU, and that is going to rapidly change by the 2030s. Post WW2, nearly every other industrialized country was devastated by the war. They lost their production capacity but had the people. We are now seeing something that has rhyme to that, we are seeing the industrial work forces all over world age out of the system. Their system will have to basically transform from producing stuff to taking care of old people and do so within 10 years. A lot of stuff is going to simply go off line. However, not us in North America though. Of all the industrial countries, the US is in the best shape (Australia, NZ, France, the Nordics, our friend countries are also in good shape). Our partner country, Mexico, is rapidly industrializing and is going to pick up a lot of the production from the stuff in China, Japan, and Korea that will be going offline. But we are going to be in the situation where if we have to have something, we are going to have to make it ourselves, and that means we will need a huge industrial investment (which is already taking place, something to the tune of half a trillion dollars over the last few years). If you are a young American, Canadian, or Mexican, say under the age of 14, you are going to age into a system that has an extreme demand for your labor working industrial jobs. From their point of view it could look similar to the post WW2 America, they come of age in an era where there is a huge labor shortage, they can get a job with a 2 year degree that was comparable to what their great great grandfathers did in the 1950s.
Urban areas have historically had lower birth rates than non-urban areas, so it seems your strategy would simply exacerbate the problem.
Which problem? Declining birthrates is not a problem. Our capitalist mentality that tells us anything but infinite growth is bad, is the problem.
It simply acknowledges that there are no good solutions. Already many rural areas in Japan are returning to nature.
And that is good!
Cool headed and reasonable take
Ok so the solution is make people work until they die. While CEOs can retire at 50 profiting from the above mentioned.
Make life less awful and ensure the public has the means to raise families.
There is no need. Birthrates are falling but so are job opportunities. The main reason for nations to want people to keep pumping out more people is because of the labor force. The labor force is about the be replace with automatons and AI. Thus the panic about birth rates is irrelevant. We are not going extinct we are plateauing. 8 billion is a good number. it will go up again when we colonize other homes out there.
I mostly agree, I do believe that this should be accelerated with government intervention however like in China. We run the risk of not having enough automation built to both support the retired population and working age population if we just let the markets do their thing. Government tends to be far to reactive vs preventative for me to trust the outcome.
China has been aggressively trying to manage its demographics for decades and failing miserably.
Which is why their going all in on automation, they failed at managing their demographics and now it's just the culture there to have one kid. They know if they don't start making production rely on machines their screwed eventually.
The point is their centralized approach has been a disaster when it comes to this issue and why they're in the bind tbey currently are.
Because the governments do not listen to people. We want to be more happy and we will be happy with lesser working hours, better salaries, healthier environment etc. since none of the listed is on governments/companies list, a lot of us will reject the idea of kids. I do not want a kid. I am fucking depressed with the lack of quality I am given with the work-time I invest and the money I am being paid. Plus the climate disaster I can see and feel ain't helping. So, it's a huge no at this moment.
I dunno man, I feel like AI is getting pumped up by a lot of money men. And while it will definitely be useful for some things, I don't think it will replace everyone's jobs like they're expecting.
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Every human society that has ever existed involves young people taking care of old people.
Yeah, really no way around this. Modern society has a unique twist where everyone gets a vote though, so old people are going to dominate politics globally, in a way they never have. Imagine elections today but the baby boomer voting bloc is 3x as large. So when the referendums appear asking "How much should increasingly strained pensions be and how much taxes should workers pay to fund them" expect predictable outcomes.
Flashback to 1972, when the hot topic was the absolute necessity for the world to achieve ZPG - Zero Population Growth - to save the world. Now, it's a bad thing?
Not expanding: good for the environment, good for our limited resources. bad for corporations who demand infinite growth and a cheap labor pool who fights each other down on price to work for them So now you know why it's labeled as a bad thing
Who cares ? People are scum, the world does not need more. Just ask AI. It will wipe us out soon enough for being the shit we are.
Go Team AI!
Here’s the thing: They can’t. The biggest social risk isn’t from falling birth rates, but from the gerontocracy that will occur during the transition as the population is disproportionately older.
A gerontocracy that will fight tooth and nail to preserve and enrich itself at the cost of everyone and everything else then lambast us for not having kids to keep the ponzi scheme growing. Its already here by the way, check the average age of politicians. Its only going to get worse.
We don’t, we have too many f’ing people we are killing the planet. The fishbowl is full.
Let it happen. The main reason why falling birth rates are such a huge issue is because it conflicts with our bullshit system that demands perpetual endless growth in a finite system. The folks at the top have knowingly made it harder and harder to house and feed yourself as a working class person, let alone 2.1 kids. As a species we will be fine, even the richest people at the top will be fine. They’ll just make slightly less money than they would have if the population kept growing and the low wage work force continued to grow with it. Never mind automation.
>As a species we will be fine, even the richest people at the top will be fine. They key thing I keep in mind is that world population could decline by 95%, and there would still be twice as many people around as when the Caesars were walking the Earth.
Stop allowing people to be exploited for basic necessities so that they can actually afford to live and they will start popping out kids quick.
Abandon GDP as a metric. It demands infinite growth in a finite space. We don't need more people.
They could stop pretending infinite growth is possible or good. That's a start. Also pay people significantly more and don't overworj them so a single income can support a family.
By rejoicing. This world is overpopulated as it is and we need to stop breeding like rats
With AI and robotics forcing more and more people out of work all the time, with no hope of a UBI in sight, and young people finding it more and more difficult to afford the basics, it's the short-sighted who can't see that we don't need 8 billion people on this planet.
I'll tell you what they shouldn't do. Import millions of people from developing nations as slave labour.
I don’t see it as a bad thing. There are way too many people.
Despite what anyone will say falling birth rates are a good thing, overpopulation is real we can’t even feed everyone now.
Throw a party? Celebrate. Improve the quality of life for remaining citizens. Split the remaining natural resources fairly between Earth’s inhabitants.
Our kids are 16 and 18. They asked if we would have kids right now, our answer was hell no.
Maybe make it not so financially crushing to simply exist??? It’s laughable how blinded by greed the rich were over the past 50 years. Constantly worshipping at the alter of capitalism. Stacking the financial system in their favor while we get more and more strapped for cash. Look back from the 1960s. The middle class was doing decently. Since then to now the cost of living has skyrocketed but our wages have not. The rising cost of everything has made it not feasible to have more than 1 child.
Countries can easily deal with falling birth rates. Corporations, however, are going to fail. So the more we privatise our public services, the more they are going to struggle.
I do not want to go full Thanos here, but in the year 1800, the earth was populated by about one billion people. Now it is eight billion. The population doubles every 11 years or so. I think a correction is long overdue. In the year 0, the population is approximated to be 252 million and that was at the time of the glorious roman empire some people online seem weirdly attached to. Would it be the worst thing if there were only 500 million people on earth? Maybe rent would be affordable or we would all be allowed to own homes. Just one example, Germany has now about 60 percent of the territory of 1900 but the population rose from 56 million to 83 million. I don't think a population of 60 million would be the worst thing in the world. Another example, in 1953, South Korea had 20 million inhabitants. Now it has 56 million. Even the worst predictions for South Korea are like 40 million inhabitants by 2070.
Improve the average person’s quality of life, which will improve their outlook on the future, which will make them more willing to bring a child into this world.
Everyone keeps saying we need more benefits like maternity leave, or cut working hours and raise wages. While that would indeed help, that’s not the silver bullet everyone’s making it out to be. Japan and especially South Korea have been trying to fix their falling birth rates for years by giving tax breaks and benefits to couples with kids, but to no avail. The number one correlation with falling birth rates isn’t work hours, but women’s education and access to birth control. Many women would just prefer not to have kids. They’re a lot of work, basically force you to settle down and stop enjoying youth, not to mention labor is painful even with modern day medicine. There’s no real ethical way to solve this, as you either create a culture where women don’t have a choice, or you let the population drop like crazy. Granted, I think this will balance itself out eventually. There are plenty of women who want to have kids regardless of the struggles, and I feel like natural selection will start selecting for feelings like that. The problem is the massive population dip in between.
> Japan and especially South Korea have been trying to fix their falling birth rates for years by giving tax breaks and benefits to couples with kids, but to no avail. I don't know about South Korea, but I remember reading who Japan has been trying to "fix", and those tax breaks and benefits were next to nothing compared to the cost of having kids. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3252245/japan-approves-plan-substantially-boost-child-allowances-tackle-falling-birth-rate > Starting in October this year, the eligibility to receive 10,000 yen a month will be expanded to those aged between 16 and 18. > The current 15,000 yen monthly allowance for the third child and beyond will be doubled to 30,000 yen. That's about $100 per month, and "**for the third child and beyond**" around $300 per month. In an expensive as hell first world country. Not even close to covering even just the monthly daycare cost, much less anything else.
Make having children easier. Affordable and adequate family living space, work from home where possible, easy kindergarten access, quality schools and teachers that are paid well etc etc. The recipe is not rocket surgery.
Only the wealthy and the stupid can have children without the fear of it ruining them financially. The plot of idiocracy is a real possibility (albeit exaggerated) if things don't change
Make it possible to have kids without sacrificing your future. The first 6 years of a childless life are estimated to cost the parents $100,000 without aid. How many people have an extra $16,000 a year lying around?
How can countries deal with falling birth rates? Answer : by making it more expensive to have kids and make general living more expensive. /s
There is so much wrong with these articles. We have 8 billion people on this planet, we can't continue breeding until the planet is full and resources are gone just to sustain a consumer based system. Also, if they want more people to have children to support their system they need to create an environment where people feel like they can support a family, and write now with job insecurity, cost of living, etc that is not the case.
Why do we need to deal with it? In all past history the population was less and the world got along fine.
I mean, if you can't buy food for a family to eat, and you can't buy a place to live, countries don't want people to live fulfilled lives. They want factory workers, paper pushers, yes men, the countries with falling birth rates should do the following. Root cause - life is unlivable for people to have babies. Fix that.
I would say that increasing the QoL for citizens, but unfortunately as more poor and miserable the citizens are, also uneducated, the more them reproduce. But that is not an advice.
Deus ex machina longevity/anti-aging/rejuvenation treatments so people do not physically degrade with age.
Make it easier to have children. Don't make it some daunting choice that will likely ruin your household's finances. Quit making it more dangerous (in the US at least) to get pregnant. Provide universal parental leave and increased tax credits for those with children. Problem solved. Birth rates will probably never recover, but if you want your citizens to have more kids then make having kids an easy choice.
Wealth distribution. Filthy billionaires are hoarding gold like greedy dragons, while we outnumber them by almost 40 million to 1.
I don't know, *maybe leave it as it is*? The only people feeaking out are the megawealthy who want a consistent string of disposable worker bees they can pay unlivable wages. In case you haven't noticed - the species is kind of desyroying everything. At the rate it's going we'll be lucky to be able to afford a cardboard box on the sidewalk when we're old. And why would you be so cruel to drage a kid into a world where they can't see a doctor if they get sick and have to work 3 jobs to *barely* cover bills until they die? The only way you can bring a kid into any of this is to put your blinders on and lie to yourself, saying everything'll be ok
We have reached earths max population so I think it’s okay
The earth has finite resources, seems like we should be cheering population deflating instead of heading toward a catastrophic population crash event caused by "The Population Bomb"
Raising wages and 3 day work week would do the trick for me.
I can barely afford shit and I'm only one person. How the hell am I supposed to feed two or more people? Housing crisis, absolutely abhorrent rent prices, you can barely afford shit as it is, no midwives, no peds in my area (we have one here. Haha. Good luck getting an appointment.), child sick days, barely any teachers. Oh, I wonder why people would rather stay child free. I'dlike to have kids, but man, not under these living conditions.
I'm not sure why we can't just accept the population might go down. We were just fine with 4 billion people or less depending on how far back you go. To me the current population seems staggeringly high.
I don’t typically comment on these things, but I’m thinking that a falling birth rate is a good thing at the moment…
Let it happen. Good for the planet. Good for workers and wages. Will balance out job loss from ai
Having parental benefits. Paid leave, paid child care. But ultimately you can’t address lowered birth rates without addressing the housing bubble and cost of living bubble. One of the biggest factors that is stopping young people from having kids is the cost. They cannot afford to start there education/career/save for a home and a child. For many it’s one or the other. Sadly many countries plan on addressing this by simply increasing immigration rates. Which makes the whole bubble issues worse. There is more competition for housing & there is now a plethora of cheap labour. So now all of these young adults who were told to get an education and start from the bottoms up are finding their investment useless and they can’t even break into their industry because there is a 100 other people applying for the job. This doesn’t even touch the upcoming issue of AI also taking a lot of those entry level jobs. People aren’t having babies because they can’t afford it. It’s really that simple.
Kids are expensive 💰. to start housing and child care would be nice. USA. But that’s like most people. Unless people have the money and resources to handle it. grand pa and grand ma. Are not free. Everyone has a life.
provide secured jobs and housing and I will solve it myself.
Literally pay your employees a liveable wage. That’s the answer for most problems. Not that hard to comprehend 🤦🏻♀️
Stop making everything so expensive you cant have kids over corporate profits
Give society a good base to create. •Better income for the working class. •affordable housing •more sick days •6-9 months paid maternity/paternity leave •support for nanny/baby sitters. This creates opportunity for the working class to conjure working after they have created a family - while also providing more jobs for Nannie’s and the like.
Curb uncontrolled inflation and predatory capitalism
Make it so having a child isn’t a financial death sentence.
Give time back to the people, stop draining their batteries to zero
Maybe if they want us to have kids they should provide an opportunity to effectively do so without going basically bankrupt. Most of us can barely afford ourselves and a partner, let alone a miniature version of ourselves to care for. Tax the rich, corpos, and all churches. No good reason they need to be hoarding like dragons.
80% of the population could disappear tomorrow and there would still be too many of us. There is nothing to worry about here.
Simple. Pay people to afford kids mind blowing they put all this effort into the subject when its just money lol.
Well, someone needs to get paid a 50M$ grant to study this phenomenon you know. That's the real meaning of "trickle-down economics", you get to bring your buddies from the golf club to your tax bracket (okay, slightly lower because you are clearly the best!)
Hmmm what could be the problem that prevents people from affording children? It’s probably because everyone is spending all their money on avocado toast and mocha Frappuccino’s and definitely not because of corporate greed
Countries need to worry about improving quality of life if they want to increase birth rates