- cross-posted to:
- politicalhumor@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalhumor@lemmy.world
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What declining population problem? Do you mean the lack of low wage workers to do their grunt work problem?
It takes a village and they took away the village. Two working spouses can’t raise children on their own.
I mean you can, you just have no life.
Source: My life.
In my home country, Portugal, with a per-capita GDP (PPP) which is a bit more than half that of the US (though less unequal, so the median isn’t quite as bad) which is a safe and very touristic EU country, there is a huge house prices bubble a large component of which is foreign “investors” so prices have been pulled totally out of reach for most locals.
The impact on birth rates was huge since people are leaving their parent’s homes much later (average was at 34 last I checked), getting married later, having children later, having fewer children (as they can’t afford a bigger house and kids are expensive) and, worse, young people have been leaving in droves (for example, half of University graduates just leave the country, especially since by being in the EU they have freedom to live and work anywhere in it).
Worse, the country already had the or one of the most aged populations in Europe, so this is going to fuck the country up big time in 10 to 20 years’ time, as even if the country imports immigrants to make up for the population shortfall, they’re not going to have the same average qualifications as the ones leaving (plus the country spending almost €100k per university graduate in their Education to get them there only to lose half of them and replace them with people with half as much schooling is ridiculously bad political management), especially considering that the kind of immigrants with higher education in in-demand areas can generally get work visas to pretty much anywhere and won’t be coming here.
All of that shit was incentivised by politicians in several ways, most notably Golden Visas in exchange for €500k housing “investments” and a refusal to properly regulate AirBnBs (so for example in Lisbon 10% of residential units became AirBnBs), so this kind of bullshit we see in this meme is exactly what we’ve been getting, the latest measure being giving tax benefits for young people to buy houses, which does nothing to address excessive house prices (in fact Economically such incentives tend to hold up and even pump up prices) and hilariously given their average salaries a Portuguese youth would be far better off moving to next door Spain paying full taxes there than staying here even with those tax benefits (and if they went further away their salary could treble or even quadruple).
It’s interesting to see that in this Portugal was just ahead of the trend and the same kind of problem is starting to happen in wealthier nation which for example are unlikelly to suffer from a braindrain.
I don’t know if this really applies here. While lack of a living wage blocks many choices in life, is there anything specific for kids?
If you want more kids (and we do), you need to make those choices easier.
- paid paternal/maternal leave
- affordable universal healthcare
- affordable childcare
- affordable housing
- pre-k education - why is this not public school?
- school lunches - not just to help feed a family but to simplify getting multiple people ready in the morning, yay Massachusetts
- affordable college - a handful of states are fixing this, yay Massachusetts, but what about the rest?
I know that’s more complicated than simply a living wage, but we’ve built a society that makes children more difficult, in many ways. If we want to encourage kids, we need to stop doing that
Why do we want more kids? Obviously we need some, but why is a population decline a bad thing?
Look at Korea, look at Japan. Look at China. Low birth rates can easily get “stuck” at low rates by social and generational inertia. You can’t just tell people to have more kids but it can take generations to change habits. Think of it like melting ice sheets: by the time the problem is apparent, it may be a tipping point where you just can’t recover. It will be informative to see what happens to China especially. They very rapidly went from the most populated country to stabilizing, and soon to drop, potentially quickly. It’s done a great job of bringing its citizens into the modern era very quickly but part of that was based on immense labor advantage. What happens when they don’t have cheap labor, when retiring people suddenly outnumber workers, when they don’t have enough children to keep schools open, when they can’t afford the infrastructure built to support a billion people? Picture Detroit, but at the scale of China. Detroit is finally recovering but it took a long time to get this far
It’s easy to argue that a smaller population would be better, especially in some of the more crowded or overtaxed regions, but a suddenly smaller or much smaller would clearly not be. For me, I’m afraid of economic disruption leading to misery and violence. But most of all I’m afraid of losing humanity’s future. Science, technology, innovation, arts, are all positive values that accelerate with larger populations. We don’t want to drop far enough or fast enough to lose those. We don’t want to be stuck in stagnation and never figuratively grow
US, specifically, has room and resources for many more people. Aside from our profligate resource usage, we can have more, in contrast with more crowded populations that are already beyond local carrying capacity.
All I’m saying is robots don’t make a scene at the grocery store when you won’t buy them a box of type 2 diabetes.
This isn’t meant as a brag, but me and my wife focused on our work and had kids later in life. I fully respect those that don’t want kids, but my daughter is the best thing to ever happen to me, and despite having great salaries for my country I still often worry about childcare costs, leaving my child in subpar daycare, who will look after her in case of accidents, places to live where she’ll be safe, etc. This is from a position of privilege, so I have absolutely no idea how people manage without the privilege that has been afforded to me.
It feels like for many the choice to not have children is one of practicality, and that is the most criminal aspect of modern life. Again, fully respect those that don’t want kids, but for those that do that simply cannot do so because despite contributing to society through full-time work they fear an inability to safely raise a child - while billionaire cunts swan along with megayachts and a dozen homes across the world.
I fear that simply paying a living wage isn’t enough, especially with rising costs everywhere. There needs to be support at all levels, from tax breaks for those that need it, to viable healthcare and childcare options that aren’t deemed a safety risk…as well as a living wage for a FAMILY.
Same here. Having kids is the best part of my life but it hasn’t been easy. I also had kids later so we were established in a home and with two well above average incomes, so we were better prepared for it than most people are. But it’s tough. We got through that and successfully raised two kids we can be proud of, although now we’re fighting the final boss: college expenses.
Honestly, I don’t know how people without our level of privilege do it: society creates challenges at every turn to block you from doing your best for them. How can we be surprised that few people choose that?
You know they really want “slavery” to win out and come back as an option. Crippling debt can only go so far, and can’t really force people to be their servants. The trick is to devalue the value of life, also known as having more babies but more traditionally known as overpopulation.
Just do what you did in the past. Bring in a bunch of foreigners.
That’s how most of the whites got to North America… By boat.
I could say the same about the Africans, but their circumstances were less… Voluntary.
It needs to be more complicated. We need massive land reform, and we need a liberal lowest ladder rung. A poor person should have access to a stable home and transportation. That means if you live near a population center, your property needs to be rezoned to house more people like with New York brownstones, or Paris apartments. That also means, right-to-own without digital caveats, because without ownership over all goods, there is no second hand market, and the most disposable aspect is this culture’s long term future as a result. Transportation must be as cheap as possible for the poor. Not some deadly e-bike. The lowest end cars can not have ridiculous features and authoritarian Orwellian government tech. It must be as cheap as possible.
Oh, is this why they want to ban porn? “Every sperm is scared” sort of thing?
What are they scared of? I assume life.
incel sperm, scared of an egg, putting it on a pedestal and at the same time mocking it. Full of insecurity that they can never be the one, just gives up and stops swimming
*Republicans struggling to solve the declining population crisis.
Stats in countries where wealth distribution is less of an issue prove otherwise, the only way you’re making people have more babies is by getting rid of women rights, I don’t feel like pulling up all the numbers again but it’s the second time I’m having to correct the “if people had more money they would have more kids” theory on Lemmy.
The second the pill becomes legal birthrate drops, the second abortion becomes legal birthrate drops, the second women start working birthrate drops. So do you want these things to become illegal again?
Finland was under population renewal rate in the early 1900s. At the moment in rich countries the people who have the most kids are those with the lowest income because it means they don’t have access to preventive means, they would stop having kids if they could afford it. Developing countries see their birthrate go down the richer they get as well.
I’ll share that one because it’s easy to find:
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/1037268/crude-birth-rate-uk-1800-2020/If we go back a little further we see a much bigger fall in birthrate before women’s rights. Without looking too deeply one could argue it’s related to the process of industrialisation.
https://localhistories.org/a-timeline-of-womens-rights-uk/
Here’s the same chart for the USA. One very fair argument is that the fall in child mortality means you don’t need to have as many children to replace the ones that died.
You’ve completely changed your comment so now my first reply doesn’t make sense.
That drop coincides with what? Women going to work, which is a form of women right. Do you want to prevent women from working?
You can also see it reached a floor then started dropping again when women acquired more rights even before life started becoming unaffordable (as can be seen in my Canadian graphics as well).
Also, look at birthrate in Scandinavian countries where wealth is much better distributed and social programs are plentiful. Hell, in Canada itself the province of Quebec has the best social programs for parents and birthrate is one of the lowest.
People are oversimplifying the question because they’re mad at the current economic situation and they like to pretend that it’s the only reason they don’t want a family, but if we look at the whole portrait it’s clear that the question is much more complex than that.
Yep, sorry! I did change the comment.
Why did women go to work, was it so they could buy more things, to support their family … I don’t know.
Perhaps it offered a better life then living off the land.
Women would have worked in the home before having the ‘right’ to work in a factory…
Again, that ignores the fact that rich people (who don’t have to work) have less kids and that’s been the case for ages, it just so happens that rich women have access to education and contraceptives and that’s been the case for over a hundred years.
You’d have to provide some data about not having to work and birthrates. According to table 2, by far the largest proportion of births is to those who are unclassified. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/articles/anoteonchildbearingbysocioeconomicstatusandcountryofbirthofmother/2016#births-by-socio-economic-status-and-age-of-mothers
However it doesn’t distinguish between being wealthy, on benefits or perhaps being a student!
This paper suggests that a fall in birth rate amongst wealthier people coincides with the industrial revolution. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44289704?seq=1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
It’s a very well known and studied phenomenon.
That’s GDP of the country, and is not related to the number of children born to parents who don’t have to work. It states that rich countries have a lower birth rate.
ignores the fact that rich people (who don’t have to work) have less kids
I never suggested it’s a good idea to reduce women rights, I’m saying that the reason birthrate was higher in the past and is higher in some places at the moment is because women didn’t/don’t have rights, it has nothing to do with income.
Also, about your first point, I already covered that when I mentioned that those who are poor tend to have more kids than those who have the means to easily afford to have them. Hell, poor people have more kids than rich people who could stop working.
It’s not about money or access to child care or social programs, it’s about choice. When they’re given the choice the vast majority of people don’t want a family big enough for the population to renew itself, you’ll find exceptions (I’ve got two colleagues who have four children each) but the average will still be under 2.1 if people can easily prevent unwanted pregnancies. There’s nothing new to it either as I showed and if you look at historical data in first world country it’s always the same pattern (no matter the quantity of social programs to help parents or the amount of parental leaves that they get) and we’re seeing that pattern repeat itself in developing countries.
People just don’t want kids if they can help it.
People just don’t want kids if they can help it.
Maybe that is the “Great Filter” that will end our society but I don’t think anyone has entirely demonstrated that. up to now higher birth rate is related to women specifically not having choices or high infant mortality, but that doesn’t mean we need to go back to that nor that those are the only possibilities
Many people do want kids, so if we as a society want to encourage more children, we need to make that choice easier rather than more difficult. We need to support those people and their choices. We all need to take responsibility for all of our future. It does “take a village” and our society needs to find a way to recreate that and still respect human rights, for the sake of all of our future
Again, people are acting like the USA is the only country that exists and ignoring all other States where having kids is much easier and where the birthrate is the same or lower.
US is at 1.66, Finland at 1.46. Finland offers much better social services and safety nets and socioeconomic equality than the USA, it also means women with more education, better access to abortion (even though the number of abortions is decreasing because they’re not necessary in the first place if people have access to contraceptives, which they do in Finland), better access to a profession…
The more equal women are to men, the less kids they have… and I mean, why would people expect anything else? They’re the ones who take care of the majority of the tasks related to raising children, given the choice they would rather have the same quality of life as men and get to do stuff for themselves instead of living for someone else!
They’re the ones who take care of the majority of the tasks related to raising children
Great! Seems like you have good ideas for next steps!
Yep, and people are already doing it including me, stop having kids.
People just don’t want kids if they can help it.
Perhaps, or people think more before having kids (also contraception makes it easier to prevent pregnancy in the first place)
