The question is really whether or not two income households are unquestionably a good thing, to which the answer seems like a strong "No". Even without the birth rate issue I struggle to conceive of mechanism by which it isn't a vicious circle of more people entering the workforce, driving incomes down (and driving the cost of scarce resources like certain housing up), forcing more households to become two income to keep up with no obvious benefit for anyone but the people doing the employing.
Sure it is. Unless men start having babies, then women working and the birth rate consequently decreasing is a women-centric issue.
This presumes zero-sum. That is, it presumes that this growth of the workforce does not affect the total productivity. If instead, more people working means more productivity, then part of that productivity can go to paying wages.
Whether this increase of productivity actually goes towards wages is difficult to say. I think that most of the recent productivity increase have been to the benefit of investors rather than labor.
But you can still construe the problem both ways, is it women increasingly working outside the home that society takes as an unhealthy unquestionable good or men almost exclusively working outside the home which has been taken as good (or at least normal) since time immemorial.
And it's the same thing with the solution, if we come to the conclusion that somebody should take a smaller part in the workforce to help correct the birth rate and other problems two income households produce, the historical role of women in "creating" the problem doesn't imply they should be the ones to go.
People in all sorts of relationships adopt or otherwise have children. Folks die during childbirth. And while men cannot physically give birth, I've met plenty that enjoy child-rearing. If it were possible with my spouse and I, I'd happily work while he stays home. (He legally has to support me due to immigration laws). My ex stayed home while I worked, though to be fair, he was on disability. I do not have children (and have no plans to), but we have discussed adoption of an non-infant/toddler child (along with their siblings if they have any). While I see plenty of reasons for one of us to take parental leave, I don't see any reason why that would absolutely have to be me instead of him.
People were raised by their grandparents when I was young. Maybe the problem isn't within the nuclear family but with the idea that it's desirable to move in a different city to your parents, or even that it's an imposition to live with your parents while your children are young.
1. We get real scientific input on whether or not it has to be women that stay home with children. And research leans towards two parents spending time with children as being good, not just the mother figure. Also, a safe and secure environment with decently happy parents helps - which seriously doesn't mean women need to stay home unless by choice.
2. When science can figure out whether or not a parent needs to be at home all the time. Right now, it seems that the reason a parent needed to be home was because keeping house took a lot more time than it does now. Parents spend more quality time with children and more time in general than they did years ago, though. Science leans towards "quality" time being important (which is leanient) instead of a parent always being there.
3. When birth rates actually correlate with women working. There are lots of reasons birth rates decline. Not enough security, money, access to medical care, and so on will make rates decline as will one person in the partnership working too much to have the energy for sex. Poor women have had babies for centuries, though, and worked outside the home for those centuries at different times. All that is really needed to make sure the work isn't affecting birth rate is to have decent policies around this and make sure folks can afford safe child care.
It may be worth to invest into all sorts of cultural programmes to make having kids cool again.
I see some local news talking about some minor labor shortages with convenience stores and whatnot, but opening up BBC or CNN you'd think Japan is on the brink of absolute collapse due to being underpopulated with only 120 million people on a tiny, mountainous, barely arable archipelago.
This isn't the cause of two-income households because Japan is quite broadly one-income households...? This is almost entirely irrelevant to two-income household discussion. (I'm not decided personally how I feel about it, merely pointing out this specific comment is making 0 sense to me)
Having more people is better for us on net because it gives us more human capital and allows us to develop technologies that pay off at scale.
As the world population has grown, our society has gotten wealthier on a per-capita basis, and we still have more than enough food to go around.
It’s not true that overpopulation is happening or that increased population is a negative phenomenon.
They already have more pensioners than children being born. The same trend can be seen in virtually every single developed country. We are soon to going to not be able to afford to pay these pensioners if there are not enough people paying taxes. Hopefully you don't actually think pensions are somehow grown on trees.
Yes, we can print the money and the world won't end. There's not some automatic hyper-inflation that happens when money is minted. There's so much around already you see.
Think of cash as points in a game. If we keep playing games, racking up points, the points don't necessarily become worthless. They may change a little as confidence varies.
It's not about the imaginary points. Its about the goods and services. Goods depend, these days, mostly on automation which isn't going away. So little problem there.
That leaves services. Yes, they depend entirely on human capital. So we're going to have to automate, train assistance animals, or use technology to do away with the need. Especially among the elderly who traditionally require more services.
One can look at Germany's perspective on migrants as a direct consequence of that (more people working and contributing to the social fund means less of threat of the social structures hitting insolvency).
Though, there's no banners saying, "because of 'x', this is 'y'," one can still derive the subtext from the concerns that the nations are voicing.
So, all of this was just a long-winded way to say that it is a bit disingenous to say that people are complaining about falling birth-rates but it is still a valid concern for many countries - even if they don't come out and explicitly say it.
[0] - https://www.thelocal.se/20190216/hungary-family-plan-reeks-o...