With so few people having children in the Netherlands, it’s kind of crazy to think of a situation where the next generation are substantially siblings.
Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical.
Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical.
Has the Netherlands tried to address its housing crisis first?
In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids.
Everyone spends their fertile years trying to get that well paying job that can get you up the housing ladder or just taps out of the race completely and chooses to not have any kids.
You can't complain people aren't having kids when you're collectively treating them like cash cows, monetizing them so that you can make a bigger return on your housing investment.
It is similar to how little Tim lives with his family in “Willy wonka and the chocolate factory”. Joint family systems are the norm.
Poor people already live in squalor and are packed in like sardines, especially since housing costs keep rising.
How about the rich pay their fair share, or stop stealing money from the poor via wage theft, or stop conspiring to keep wages lower than ever, or how about stop people deciding about housing stopping NIMBYism, or how about putting a ceiling on CEO comp and stock buybacks, or how about dealing with the ever-widening wage gap.
Also, you've obviously never been to at least latin america, as their poverty is so bad they literally risk their lives getting anywhere else.
The mental gymnastics to blame the poor in your comments on this thread are Olympic level.
What is also shown in the case of Charlie’s home is a family that cannot feed themselves and have poor health and have the fewest breadwinners. This is not an example of lean living. This is being needy.
What you need to understand is they are simply shameless, like they feel no shame to be dependent on others to provide for them. Historically people actually had shame, they would feel it hurts their dignity to accept even charity (voluntary donation of money)! But now, people in the West are even happy to take money even forcefully through the tax system. No more dignity, no more shame.
And this behavior is incentivized by our political system and tax system.
More details on this perspective, in my response to him, here:
Meanwhile, in reality land in 2022:
>> The bottom 43% of US income tax filers pay -4.8% of federal income taxes (negative b/c they get a tax refund credit on average because of tax law).
>> The top 10% of taxpayers pay 80% of federal taxes.
But muh “rIcH nEeD tO pAy ThEiR fAiR sHaRe”!!!11
How about the bottom 43% of America actually sacrifices (studies during childhood to actually learn in and out of school + and actually works hard in first job to make good impression and get better job and actually learns on the job + maybe even starts their own company from learnings, all the while being frugal to maximize savings and then invest in a diversified stock index fund to grow savings over time with compound interest, and so on…) to build useful skills and become competitive in the global economy, the way people all around the world take responsibility to do?
Nahhh, way too much hard work!
Better to just waste childhood not valuing education, and then be a goodfornothing at your low-wage job so no one values you (IF indeed you are even capable of getting and holding the low-wage job), and then take your entitled personality that you carefully developed over all those years onto hackernews! (to complain about the small 10% minority who actually lived responsibly and made something of their lives and now pays 80% of federal taxes!)
This system is literally already socialist/communist in philosophy, in the distribution of percent of people paying taxes that sustains the system, but no, even this isn’t good enough. Why? Because of course it’s never good enough for the spoiled brat who is incentivized by the system to always be a spoiled brat, while 10% of the country literally carries them on their back.
Shameless!
You feel no shame to be dependent on others to provide for you. Historically people actually had shame, they would feel it hurts their dignity to accept even charity (voluntary donation of money)! But now, people in the West like you are even happy to take money even forcefully through the tax system. No more dignity, no more shame.
There are a couple of bad answers to this, ranging from making all white collar jobs way more competitive and still forcing now-educated people take menial jobs and be poor; to bringing illegal immigrants in to exploit.
The good answer is to pay good money to less educated people doing somple jobs. Bonus point, they will contribute taxes.
This applies to all people, not just those at the bottom. Yet those at the top keep charging high rates, or NIMBY against building more housing because of the effect of that housing on their quality of life and net worth. When you NIMBY, or charge high rates, you are asking other entities (those at the bottom) to provide you with so much more.
See the Bank of England chief telling everyone they need to accept we're now all poorer otherwise inflation will never stop. Of course, by "us all being poorer" he most likely didn't include the wealthy elites and asset owning class that have made bank these past years and are in no way poorer than before, quite the contrary.
It was the same during covid. "We all need to scarifice to ...." meant something else entirely.
Sometimes I wonder if “demographic transition” in the developed world is nothing more than a side effect of the neoliberal housing policies.
This is not correct. The poorest households are having the most kids. It has clearly little to do with income or housing affordability, even if you found a survey which indicated this. I say this as someone who delayed having a family until I could afford a home, so I have a dog in this fight.
Yeah, society probably will, because those are the people putting energy into preserving and propagating their ideas.
Your country needs more and more numbers in that balance sheet, to funnel into the economic meat grinder, and whether those extra numbers come from your offspring or from someone else's, it's irelevant to them.
People have less relatives to help raise children and grandparents tend to be older. Both parents are also more likely to want and need to work full-time jobs.
I don't know why but here in the UK there seems to be a kind of culture war on parenthood too. Young women who want kids and don't want to work tend to be shamed for this decision, while women who remain single and focus on their careers are celebrated. If people want careers over children, that's fine, but that shouldn't be seen and pushed as the only respectable path by society.
That's only toxic feminism pushing for this narrative but pretty sure it's just a loud minority in certain echo chambers and not a national narrative.
Toxic feminism promotes this idea that having kids and being a caring mother means being a slave of the patriarchy and that freedom and salvation comes at spending their lives trying to compete and beat men at their traditional role as the breadwinner.
The problem is, nature and evolution hasn't built females and males to compete against each other, but to complement each other, for procreation of the species. Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart.
> Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart.
There's no reason to assume that single-mothers weren't common in the past, absent direct paleontological evidence. There's no reason to assume that a supported mother isn't being supported by her blood relatives, while the father of her child(ren) is off doing his own thing (there are actually societies which function this way). And absent very short period of time in the few months immediately around actual childbirth, hunter-gatherer women were probably quite capable of supporting themselves.
Nobody was talking about hunter gatherer societies but you.
Evolution of humans doesn't happen so fast that it doesn't encompass hunter-gatherer cultures (or pre-historic cultures in general, the latest of which were agricultural).
No need to bring up evolution for that.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1345/women-in-the-middl...
> women worked alongside men in the fields and in the medieval guilds as equals or near-equals.
> Throughout the Middle Ages, lower-class women were bakers, brewers, milkmaids, barmaids, artisans, weavers and, primarily, tenant farmers who worked alongside their husbands and children in the fields.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1136/women-in-ancient-c...
> Women of lower status, such as farmer's wives, were expected to work in the fields - especially in regions where rice was cultivated.
> Many women were forced into prostitution in times of drought or crop failure. Women worked in the home weaving silk and caring for the silkworms that produced it. Some were called upon, like men, to perform the labour service which acted as a form of taxation in many periods of ancient China, but this was only in exceptional circumstances. By the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) women had more freedom and were running inns and acting as midwives amongst other professions.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/623/women-in-ancient-eg...
> Women, therefore, were regularly employed as weavers, bakers, brewers, professional mourners, sandal-makers, launderers, basket weavers, cooks, waitresses, or as a "Mistress of the House," known today as an estate owner or property manager. Female brewers and launderers frequently supervised male workers.
Its the number one reason people cite, but if you look at the stats, fertility (and this is also true in the US) drops pretty consistently with income. So, its not really driven by affordability in the simple, direct sense. So, are people lying? Maybe not: stress and precarious conditions often explain within-species shifts further toward r-strategy (produce more offsprinf with lower investment in each) vs. K-strategy (fewer offspring with higher investment). We may just be witnessing that in humans.
It’s why poor people always seem to have more kids. There are other factors but it’s one of the large ones.
Poor people have nothing to loose from having kids, they already live or are used to poor and difficult conditions, but the middle class has the most to loose from bringing up kids as it means a QoL sacrifice and/or more stress of finding a career that enables them to keep the QoL with kids.
For rich people that's not a problem.
I find it hilarious when humans pretend to not understand the reasons for something...
We are not nearly as complex and intricate as we think we are. At least in bulk.