Can’t complain about less kids and have policies which make raising kids a risky financial and life decision.
We gotta do a better job at providing for the kids we already have.
Your points about how we must do better to make having kids less financially risky are excellent however. Better parental leave and tax incentives would help.
If you’re looking for an excuse to not have a kid, you’ll find one. There’s a cultural element too.
I'm not sure I want to give up my landhouse for a six-story building in which I share a place with hundreds... just because of "having children".
debatable if that has changed
Having no kids is simple very easy life without any bigger problems.
Procreating is our only purpose, as a life form.
Therefore, even if procreating is our only purpose, we can still ponder what the point of doing so actually is. Since we are intellectual beings, we can decide whether it's a logical decision or not, so that we don't end up no-ops either. I've seen friends and family members where kids are born to teen parents, who then have kids as teens, who then have kids as teens, and so on. Those are the equivalent of the moths, those teens have not had the chance to grow and achieve more, they were simply procreating to procreate, and they could not get out of poverty as their entire life was only dedicated to sustenance. Personally, their lives were very sad to me.
Finally, do not fall for the fallacy of appealing to nature, as just because something is natural does not mean it is moral. Many animals will forcefully mate with one another or eat their prey alive, that does not mean that humans must do the same. So too for procreation.
I agree that there are plenty of reasons to not have kids. and also that plenty of people probably shouldn't have kids from a moral calculus; though importantly it's not our calculus to dictate.
In any case i still say that having kids for the sake of humanity is a Just reason to have kids. Problems and all. Humanity is basically a huge injection of problems and chaos. What else are we going to do.
the lack of people who openly talk about regretting having kids as that's not socially acceptable
I used to feel like that... until I had children. It is an experience that can't be understood until you live through it. We can use words to try and describe it, but to a non-parent it will sound like a "nebulous sense of pride and accomplishment" because of how far removed it is from their past experiences. It's like trying to use words to explain music to a person who has never felt it.
You won't find answers to this by trying to rationalize it, because you can't know what it's like until you experience it, if you ever do.
You do you, my friend. I could no possibly have less at stake here, one way or another.
Have a nice day.
In contrast, you cannot put the baby back inside if you don't like it, so to speak, and your earthly concerns are much more affected than some nebulous concept of hell that may not even come to pass should you choose a good god.
It’s like buying a 1M dollar without seeing it and having someone tell you “you’ll love it when you cross the threshold because I did with my house!”
Not saying it didn’t happen to you or your experience is invalid. But extrapolating your experience to everyone else feels dismissive about the doubts they are expressing.
The child's soul, whole, grows... whilst your damaged soul whithers. Evidence of this can be seen by the zombie like appearance new parents have, still coping with this horrible loss.
As time passes, you become more accustomed to this loss, and it becomes like Stockholm syndrome. You eventually like it, embrace it, concoct wild fantasies about how great the experience is. It is your own mind defending you from the horror, and more importantly, you wish this same fate upon others.
Don't believe them. Don't trust them! Keep, cherish, protect your soul.
I am not extrapolating my experience to everyone. I'm pointing out that the vast majority of people who have children find it a positive experience.
Lastly, I'm not dismissing their feelings, I am reassuring them that they are very common indeed.
How do you know this?
But that is not what I'm saying, is it? I'm saying that having doubts before having kids is very common, and that they dissipate once you actually become a parent.
Having children is an adventure for which you can never be prepared. Every parent takes a leap of faith and does the best they can, regardless of how much or how little confidence they had. That's it.
I would be more concerned about the ability of somebody to raise a child if they didn't feel apprehensive, because that would suggest they underestimate how much effort it is going to take.
I completely get where you are coming from. I was the partner who didn't want children at all. I didn't want the responsibility, the loss of freedom and the financial burden.
We then had a child and any doubts I could have had dissipated: I now knew with absolute certainty that I did NOT want to raise children. No room for doubt whatsoever. I struggled with anger, depression and grief of my previous lifestyle.
A few years later I'm perfectly satisfied with not one but two kids. We would have a third if we were young enough.
All of this is to say: it is a life-changing experience and no amount of doubt or certainty before the fact can prepare anybody for the reality of it. Thus, people overthink it in my opinion.
Do or do not have kids, but let's not pretend that any of us knows what they are getting into until they are in the middle of it. Your priorities in life and your very own identity changes.
That's fine for you but what about society?
A few western societies are below the child replacement rate.
How do these places keep their society and social programs going without growing the tax base with new births?
Are immigrants expected to move in and have their own children to insure the tax base stays stable?
Yes that one. The same one with pyramid scheme social programs.
My main concern is who will pay for pensions and health care when my working generation is old?
Most social programs are insolvent or virtual ponzi schemes where CURRENT workers pay for TODAY'S beneficiaries.
Thus we need immigrants AND native babies at greater the replacement rate to insure the scheme does not stop.
* This does not mean "exactly one full time income", aka "woman, get in the kitchen". There are many desirable options between "one traditional full time male earner" and "two people working a combined 90 hours of paid employment". Also doesn't necessarily mean all the trappings of an affluent Western lifestyle, big suburban home with two new cars on the drive, foreign vacations every year etc.
Remote sounded good back in 2021, but with the return to office push, it is a struggle to have quality of life today.
Our priorities have changed but some want to be able to have everything without compromise.
It's getting better - especially since the pandemic - but most jobs are not remotely flexible enough to deal with school hours or sick children. Nursery is insanely expensive in most countries. I really think a mortgage style option would make a lot of sense here because it's a ton of money for a short time. Or, just make it free like some countries do (and the Tories pretended to do in the UK).
Life still assumes only one parent will work. Our school regularly schedules meetings and events in the middle of the day at short notice and expects that will be fine.
Does this impact parent's earning potential? Absolutely. I cannot find a single day on my calendar where my wife and I had an solid block of 8 hours to focus on work. It just doesn't happen. Thankfully I have flexible work hours otherwise it would be literally impossible. As it stands, it's merely exhausting and unsustainable.
Almost. They want the same lifestyles that their parents had growing up. I do blame the housing market for this. If you rent for the rest of your life, nothing will stop your rent from increasing and your wages from stagnating, and those two lines will cross at some point. With kids it's sooner. The only security you can have is to own a home to guard against any future price gouging.
I know an older couple, same age as my parents, they take their entire family on vacations and have a very nice house. They talk about how when they started out they made their own furniture out of paper mache.
My parents had a similar lifestyle, things were not easy then either.
There is a mountain of good enough cheap products now due to global supply chains, but you have to stuff them into a tiny flat/apartment.
Sitting on a papier-mâché chair in a well sized home is by far the better situation.
But what about women who want families or want both?
What can western societies do to encourage these women to have at least 2 children?
We need taxpayers or these social benefits will be gone in a century or sooner.
Remember this [1] picture? Related: the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to explode further. Average age there is, according to the google infobox [2], 18.8.
In other words: US-internal policies are not going to move the needle on world population much.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Valeriep...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+age+sub+saharan+afri...
Housing can actually be fairly affordable in Europe. Berlin until about 5 years ago had incredibly affordable housing for such a nice city…then it simply got more popular until that wasn’t the case anymore. Tokyo would have similar problems if its population wasn’t actually shrinking now (as are Nagoya and Osaka), since it’s a nice place to live, and housing isn’t very restricted beyond having to rebuild everything every 30 (SFH) to 50 (apartments) years.
San Francisco should look like Hong Kong or Tokyo. If you want a quaint small town move to a quaint small town. World cities are not small towns and trying to contain them to preserve their “character” just leads to affordability crises and homelessness among other problems.
If Detroit suddenly became a hot place to live and it wasn’t upzoned the same problems would start happening there.
My point is that, with few exceptions, housing is always expensive in places that are popular. If you want affordable housing, turn your city into Cleveland, don’t turn it into Hong Kong.
What if one of the most powerful politicians alive doesn't get to make this particular decision? She'll be so disenfranchised!
You mean to rent?
What about people who want to buy a home, have space, and have generational wealth?
You are unlikely to find that in Berlin or any major western city.
The only places to buy withing reach of the middle class are tens to hundreds of KMs out of these cities.
Berlin, and may I add Vienna, are anomalies. Vienna's population peaked in 1910. Berlin's population peaked in 1943. They were both capitals of an empire at their peak time. Then they became less important, and their population decreased. Now they have been in a very unique situation with their new population growth, because they already were designed for a larger population.
You can't generalize from Berlin and Vienna to other, more normal, cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Vienna.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin#/media/File:Berlin_popu...
It's been getting a bit more expensive due to Chinese students and also people moving north from England but it's still very affordable compared to most places.
You will not stop the artificially high cost of housing without addressing that root cause.
Tax incentives help, but where Americans need federal assistance is in paid time off, college tuition assistance (self and children) , and retirement. I'm not talking about social security when I say retirement. What I mean is there needs to be incentives for companies to do better than just 401ks. Public sectors are still enjoying pensions, perhaps a tax incentive would help, but I do not necessarily have a solution there. Only a very subjective view of the problems from my perspective.
Main reason seems to be that young people in advanced societies simply don't want children because the alternate childless lifestyle seems very appealing in 20s and 30s, costs of raising kids are privatized while benefits are socialized (welfare programs funded by taxes on the working generation).
But yeah, the problem is that some people want to live in their houses with a backyard, those evil villains that don't see the advantage of living in a pigeon home for further capitalistic enhancement of the lives of fat-cat developers.
Everything that exists deserves to perish. The capitalistic leviathan can never be stopped, neither questioned. What do those small folks in the path of progress think they are?
This will not work for as long as we keep building neighborhoods that require the use of cars or make biking/walking unsafe. America also lacks a comprehensive public transportation system.
I wish the problem was money. We have been looking for a kindergarten for our daughter (~5 years old) for 2.5 years now in southwestern Germany. At one point we sued the local district as children are legally entitled to a place in kindergarten. We settled out of court and the district now pays us ~300 EUR/month for a nanny who sometimes watches her together with 5 other kids (very unreliable, and the children are all under 3 years old, so hardly suitable playing partners). Winning the case wouldn't have made any difference, there simply aren't enough kindergarten teachers available. In our suburb, there are around 120 children in kindergarten age, and the waiting list has over 50 children on it. She has been on this waiting list since March 2021. She also has no chance of getting a place in a neighboring city / suburb, because local residents are always preferred. We often joke that it was easier to buy a car in East Germany than to get a kindergarten place here. We have pretty much given up at this point, and my wife had to stop working. Ironically, she is a social education worker, so exactly the profession that is in very short supply.
Is the situation similar in Germany? It strikes me that if a teacher can’t afford a reasonable life with their own family, then it’s unlikely the education system is sustainable.
Are you saying that middle class people are less able to afford children because they pay too much in taxes? Really? Taxes are a primary consideration, not the cost of housing and education?
So there seem to be systematic incentives that skew the desire to have kids.
We should work towards counteracting those systemic incentives, by making it easier for middle class, educated people to have kids (an example would be % tax breaks for each child, which would be more money for middle class people).
Yes, and we should also reduce poverty as well, no? So that we can make it easier for currently-poor to have kids as well?
Thanks for sharing that with us. Now we know that you are a member of the group that we are talking about here (the middle class and rich). Maybe you can shed some light on how members your demographic actually think about having children.
So, am I wrong? Are you avoiding having children primarily because you pay too much in taxes to afford them, and not for some other reason?
Are you saying that poor people who have children are implicitly irresponsible for having had children? That seems to be what you are saying.
As a general rule, don't we want everyone to have kids—including poor people? What do poor people have to do to have kids "responsibly", in your view?
So to answer the question of whether poor people should have children: No, they should not. Absolutely no child deserves to knowingly live a destitute life if it can be helped.
The apparent concern that these comments show for the well being of children is misdirection and rationalization, hiding the true intent behind anti-natalist perspectives, which are fundamentally eugenicist in nature.
At their foundation, these comments presume that there are people who deserve to have children, and that there are people that do not—in other words, that there are children that deserve to be born, and that there are children that do not deserve to be born.
Poverty is just a proxy for other qualities that would be much too controversial to articulate explicitly.
And I think you misrepresent the potential harm. Anti-natalists don't just want to forgo having children. Many anti-natalists also want to discourage or prevent other people from having children. In fact, I'm sure many people making anti-natalist comments here do intend to have children themselves—they just want to discourage or prevent other people they find undesirable from having kids.
My differing opinion is that it's irresponsible to opt-in to raising a child if you lack the facilities to care for your basic needs, with a bit of margin. If one minor setback risks putting you on the street, and you have no support structure at all, probably don't try and get pregnant. You should be able to provide their basic needs until they can provide their own. That's it, except that income/expense pressure is intense enough now, in many areas, that meeting those requirements can be even more difficult than it might have been with an above-average income than in previous decades.
If the viewpoint you promote was common anytime in history humanity would not exist today.
> So the bottom 50% of the population as measured by wealth or income should not have children, according to you?
If that means world where kids are presented with equal opportunity for happiness - then yes. To give you an example: whole class goes on a trip for X sum, one child's parents can't afford that trip. What is moral to do in this case?
Taking children to the same trips and giving them all the same toys does not give them equal opportunities, due to natural differences of abilities and interests the children have.
I myself was a child who very often had to stay at home when my class went to cinema or to play computer games. I never would even consider to want to have one less sibling in exchange for going to more trips. In fact i would happily give most of what i had as a child in exchange for having one more brother. After all the best memories are not from expensive things, but from reading a book, or playing together with toys made from simple sticks and newspaper.
If your answer to your question is that, if a child can't go to a trip with the rest of the class then that child is better to not exist at all, then your system of beliefs is immoral and abhorrent. And it is a good thing that such a system of beliefs also leads people holding it to not reproduce and by that select such horrible thinking out of population.
> Moral thing is for the child that doesn't have enough money to not go on that trip. It is a valuable lesson that to get something useful from other people you need to do something useful for them first. The difference of what you did and what you took is the money you have.
Child doesn't have enough money?! What are you even talking about?
> I myself was a child who very often had to stay at home when my class went to cinema or to play computer games. I never would even consider to want to have one less sibling in exchange for going to more trips. In fact i would happily give most of what i had as a child in exchange for having one more brother. After all the best memories are not from expensive things, but from reading a book, or playing together with toys made from simple sticks and newspaper.
And what about single children families?
> If your answer to your question is that, if a child can't go to a trip with the rest of the class then that child is better to not exist at all, then your system of beliefs is immoral and abhorrent. And it is a good thing that such a system of beliefs also leads people holding it to not reproduce and by that select such horrible thinking out of population.
I love how all of your message is focused on kid, like parents are just passive observers in all of this.
Keep searching for the boogeyman who wants kid to not exist, and not horrible parents to not procreate.
Either way, none will be able to convince another as it's impossible to provide whole life context to one another. Maybe if we had more extended chat in real life we'd be able to come to some conclusion together, but definitely not on a forum with limited time and limited text.
Yes child has the amount of money that parents are able to provide.
> Keep searching for the boogeyman who wants kid to not exist, and not horrible parents to not procreate.
Why do you think that not being able to send a child to school trip with the rest of the class makes one a "horrible parent"? Not providing child with a sibling is a significantly worse thing.
> I love how all of your message is focused on kid, like parents are just passive observers in all of this.
Parents are trying to give their kid as good a life as possible, and having several siblings gives more opportunities in life and better life overall, than being a single child and having more toys, trips, etc.
What you are saying is basically equivalent to selling one child in order to buy a toy like the neighbour has for another.
But also this:
> All kids should have equal opportunities.
That's your rationale for your position? Your position does not follow from your rationale. Even if only median-or-above families have children, that won't create equal opportunities. That will just make the children of median families the poorest children, with the fewest opportunities.
So your position doesn't follow, even from your stated moral standard.
(Your stated moral standard is also far from self-evidently correct. But even accepting your standard, your position still doesn't follow. What follows is forced wealth equality.)
even the poorest people in US and Europe live _unreasonably_ comfortable lives.
Unless your family is very well to-do, you likely only have to look back 2-3 generations on yourself (or anyone) to find parents who don't meet that line. Are you saying the vast majority of humanity are irresponsible parents, or do you believe this to be a new standard that must be followed?
I am not sure how this is a controversial point? If you cannot properly take care your children, don't have one. It doesn't matter if its poverty, mental health or anything out of your control. Obviously, that is not to say that poverty is their fault but we have better standard of how much suffering a child should suffer.
> If you cannot properly take care your children, don't have one.
OK, so poverty prevents a person from "properly" taking care of children? Would you say that poor people able to take care of their children, but only "improperly"?
What, might I ask, is the minimum acceptable level of income that a couple should have before having children? What do they do, those hard-working, upright and moral couples who don't make enough money to meet your standard? Should they live their whole lives childless, and die alone?
In fact, the other commenters were conflating these two things, which I wanted to point out. I agree that they should not be conflated.
> If one is poor but can provide the proper nutrition and housing to a child, then great, have them, but if not, then no, I don't believe it is controversial or offensive to say that it would be better for them to not have a child. Child abuse is a big problem for a reason.
The right decision for an individual couple to make is not the same as the right policies and practices for society to implement.
There are people who are unsuitable for having children, but that number is vanishingly small (or at least it should be). Everybody else just needs support, resources, and instruction.
It might be better for a couple that does not have support, resources or knowledge to forgo having children. Whenever that happens, though, it is a tragedy for humanity. The rest of us should find ways to support families that are otherwise lacking, so that having children is the best option for them.
Yes, my bad. Being poor does not mean that you are automatically immoral for having children. But I clarified further that poverty is one of the variables in that judgment. Let's not pretend that being poor have no bearing on what the children will experience.
The whole tone of your message, talking about child as a passive thing that you conceive for the sake of making parents “not alone” already speaks a lot about how much you give a shit about whether A KID would be happy being born into this family.
In which family did you grow up? Pops and moms were happy campers with middle class income?
My point is that a hard-working, upright and moral couple that wants a child should have one even if they are dirt poor, and shouldn't stop themselves because they don't have money. If the child ends up being unhappy in that environment purely as a result of the lack of money, then that is society's failing—our failing—not a failing of the parents'. We haven't done our duty to help this couple raise a happy family.
> In which family did you grow up? Pops and moms were happy campers with middle class income?
This is a strangely personal comment. Is this argument very personal for you? Is there something about your own life that makes you want to deny life to others?
I think we’re discussing this from different dimensions. You’re talking from some abstract concept of family and society relationship and I’m talking from a real word experience of growing up poor. It sucks, big time. So don’t start rationalizing suffering of millions growing up poor as “we’ve failed them, oh well, back to the drawing board!”
Your mistake is thinking that the goal of life is to minimize suffering. But that is completely wrong, only result that this goal can lead to is complete elimination of life.
The goal of life is maximizing complexity, divercity, and capacity of life.
The amount of suffering i had to experience was completly justified because i had a chance to grow up and improve the lives of others. I happened to be lucky enough to realize that chance, but my parents had no way to know beforehand if i would be successful or not, that's why they were right to try.
Someone who didn’t grow up poor will never understand this.
It's better that they not have kittens, than their kittens be born and starve to death.
With people, it takes even longer and more suffering to die of poverty than one first winter.
I'll go a step further and share my personal belief that no one should have kids.
Children, while traditional, are nevertheless (and this fact seems to be inconvenient to many) optional. Every human has the choice available to them to not have children.
Children a century ago had a high likelihood of dying before they were 5. Now, that risk is greatly diminished.
At the same time, the standard of living has greatly increased across the board for rich and poor.
I am sorry that you had a bad childhood. Future generations of children, even the poor will have it better.
> Children a century ago had a high likelihood of dying before they were 5. Now, that risk is greatly diminished.
I think our misunderstanding of each other comes from having different standards of what's considered good for child and what not.
> I am sorry that you had a bad childhood. Future generations of children, even the poor will have it better.
I never said that I had a bad childhood.
> My point is that a hard-working, upright and moral couple that wants a child should have one even if they are dirt poor, and shouldn't stop themselves because they don't have money. If the child ends up being unhappy in that environment purely as a result of the lack of money, then that is society's failing—our failing—not a failing of the parents'. We haven't done our duty to help this couple raise a happy family.
This is such a ridiculous point. Hypothetical children do exists because they will be when its enacted upon. For example, if a couple keep giving birth KNOWING that their children will suffer, are they not responsible for their children suffering?
Sure, it is not their fault that the children suffers. Perhaps because they have bad genes, stuck in a warzone, lives in an awful country, have mental health issues, cannot provide for their children, or whatever. The fact is still that they KNOW this hypothetical children will suffer.
Imagine if we are able to write an executable that will startup a simulation where it will simulate a universe with maximum suffering. I have compiled the program, its right there to be executed. Is it immoral to execute this binary? Yes of course it is. Similarly, if I KNOW that having a child right now, given all the circumstances that I am in, whether its my fault or not, will cause this potential child to suffer, then I am immoral.
This greatly trivialises the reality of poverty.
People aren't poor by choice; they're often poor through situations that are beyond their control.
To also suggest they're not allowed to have children because of these factors beyond their control is tantamount to an injustice.
Nobody's stopping them, but it's still an irresponsible and terrible idea. We know that having children in poverty in the US leads to terrible health and educational outcomes for the children, just like we know that having children if you have extra chromosomes leads to terrible health and educational outcomes for the children.
If you believe that poverty is truly outside of individual control, the situations are analogous.
Life isn't fair, but that doesn't make responsible == irresponsible.
Extra chromosomes don't come about due to unjust political choices being made on behalf of parts of the electorate.
Poverty is generally outside of the control of _those who suffer it_ largely because money brings power.
Those without money naturally have less.
Consider your views carefully, because at present they're definitely not worth reproducing.
If you are impoverished (and thus unable to meaningfully effect change in the system that impoverished you) it is irresponsible and bad to have children because the outcomes for those children will be bad.
You may decide that this state of affairs is bad, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still bad today to make an individual choice to have children in poverty.
Yes. Not implicitly, explicitly. That’s how I was born and suffered for 20 years until I earned my way out of poorness.
> What do poor people have to do to have kids "responsibly", in your view?
If you can’t give your kid what other parents can (and I’m not talking about obscene gifts, just basic activities such as going to clubs, or attending social places) - you shouldn’t have kids.
What if you can give them positive things that money can't buy?
Do all rich kids get the benefit of wisdom, experience, compassion, joy?
Lots of kids grow up sitting alone with the TV and eating bologna. Lots of parents want tutors and sports equipment and musical instruments, and crucially: free time to spend with their kids.
They also want to minimize the impact of that on their other dreams, and if the impact is too high, they'll at least try to wait.
Certainly having children on a shoestring budget involves a lot more struggle than most care to risk, and if someone is thoughtful enough to hold off on having kids until they feel they’re financially ready they probably want their kids to have a rich childhood.
So more accurately, what’s unaffordable is the ability to eliminate economical risk while providing for children to the desired degree. People don’t want to be one disaster away from being out on the street and/or to be giving their kids a barebones childhood.
Kids are a sacrifice regardless of social class. Even rich people deal with the costs of raising children.
And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.
There is nothing new under the sun.
[1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>
Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness.
Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich.
I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.
Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization
If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner.
If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.
eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-...
and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills.
It's explained in the article that you linked. Some women did take the medicine to induce an abortion, but they did not do that with Hildegard's aid or assent.
There is a helpful discussion around this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/q88veb/is_this...
You mean raising lord’s kid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur
> I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.
Why are so focused on porn? Modern life is amazingly diverse with activities: jumping with parachute, sports, dancing, games, science clubs, I could go in forever. Maybe instead of lamenting try to actually do something except for jerking off and writing ansible for 9 hours?
From the link to wikipedia you sourced:
> A majority of historians[citation needed] have concluded that the idea is a myth and that all references to it are from later periods.
Also from the wikipedia link you sourced:
> Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries gave the historical basis of the "right of first night" a good deal of attention.[clarification needed][37] Historians David M. Walker and Hector McKechnie wrote that the right might have existed in medieval Europe,[7][53] but other historians[who?] have concluded that it is a myth, and that all references to it are from later periods.[54][8] Over time, the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Larousse encyclopedias dramatically changed their opinion on the topic, moving from acceptance to rejection of the historical veracity of the idea.[55] French writer Louis Veuillot wrote a book in 1854 disputing its existence.[56] After an exhaustive historical study, German jurist Karl Schmidt concluded in 1881 that it was a scholarly misconception.[37] After Schmidt, many of those who believed in the existence of the custom based their opinions on anthropological studies of tribal societies, though according to W. D. Howarth, this was a misguided argument because of the disparity between the tribal societies and medieval European society.[57]
What do I have? What do I want? How can I beat use the former, to achieve the latter? Those are the questions of practical importance.
If you want to be able to go to a pub, you have to allow for one to be built within walking distance. The absolute worst thing about American suburbs is that they have decided to enforce puritanical idiocy by not interspersing pubs with houses, which mean the DUI rates are ridiculous. And the places in the US where this is not the case are the most expensive, in a turn that surprises no-one.
As for Ansible, I think I'd rather do the farm labour, to be frank.
The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.
Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.
I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points).
I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots?
This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies.
I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change.
What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.
I can understand holding either of those views, but not both at the same time. Why do you expect immigrants from a culture that produces a surplus of people (and pressure to immigrate) to have a lesser/better effect on your culture than the offspring of native religious "sects"?
>(the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration.
Immigration is not a single problem to be for or against. It's a complex problem that can help us resolve our population growth problems or it can destroy our societies(there are examples of both).
The key differences between the "good" immigration and the "bad" immigration are: the good is usually, but not always legal and the bad is usually but not always illegal.
Other things that matter a lot are the purpose why people immigrate(escaping an actual war going to closest safe place, trying to better one's economic situation by gaining a skill that allows one to work in a more developed economy or going with an intent of gaming the benefit system and living off that), the desire to integrate once the immigrants gets there and the actions the host state does to encourage that (example of bad: put immigrants all in social housing together creating no incentive to learn the host country's language etc, example of good: distribute migrants evenly across the entire country requesting each local gov to provide few units of social housing that are not right next to each other),and finally one of the major ones :the ease of gaming the benefit system. I personally have met people that had their children registered for benefits in 3 countries and the entire family living off that (Germany, Denmark and Netherlands I believe.). I heard in Germany an unemployed immigrant gets more in benefits that he (because it is a he 99% of time) could hope to earn in any unskilled job. This doesn't promote integration and asimilation. It promotes people who go to work being called suckers by their peers.
So yes, there is good immigration (all the people that immigrate legally, or are fleeing a genuine war next door) and there is the bad (all the desperate people that were sold a dream of a life without having to work by living off benefits, then they pay people's smugglers and if they manage to survive the trip they realise this life is not going to be as good as they thought).
So yes, I propose we increase legal, skill based immigration, we encourage integration and assimilation a lot more, and we have expulsion as a penalty for crime. Furthermore, we actually protect our borders, and we enforce the border enforcement by the countries on route, so the illegal immigration goes down to a manageable level. And where people in source countries are really suffering we help these countries over there.
I only glanced over the problem. The ne would have to write a book on the subject to properly cover it. However, seeing first hand examples of good and bad immigration in many countries such as the UK, Germany, France and Poland I believe calling all immigration bad is equally silly as calling it all good.
I propose instead: deporting citizens who were sold a dream of a life without having to work by living off benefits?
In this awful world you want to live in, why should people born in one place get to screw me over while people born in other don't? There's nothing special about Greg from down the street, let's throw him down a well to drown if he's not benefiting me
I'm not quite sure why you equate deporting someone who crossed the border illegally, because he thought he can live there without having to work, with "throwing Greg from down the street into a well"? We already have systems in place where people can demonstrate that if they are indeed in danger of loosing their life they will be granted asylum.
You're confusing people that are genuinely in danger (escaping war or persecution) with people that just want to better their economic situation illegally.
Are we sure about this because a shortage of workforce leading to a shortage of services makes sense but the same doesn’t hold for goods I don’t think?
E.g. I don’t really see myself going to a robot physiotherapist for example. I can’t see how productivity improvements (capital investment in automation for example) can universally improve service production - there are some cases for sure but plenty of gaps.
On the goods side, i don’t care if my TV was made by a robot rather than a craftsperson. As i understand it, the energy and labour required to produce comparable goods today is less than yesterday.
As i understand it, services have gotten relatively more expensive over time as goods have done the opposite. These costs I’m led to believe can be seen as a proxy for labour costs since labour is often the most expensive part and as production volume increases the cost to produce a good tends towards the cost of its material inputs.
Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it.
When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation.
The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.
I don't disagree with your claim that last generation's housing policies have caused serious problems, but the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States.
The fact that when you inherit property from a deceased relative, you're also hit with a 15% inheritance tax that year, to be paid in cash, helps. Suddenly holding onto that $700,000 Helsinki condo for the kiddos starts to look like it might do more harm than good.
https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/p...
Ultimately I hold out hope that Finland will continue down its path of very common remote work, allowing even mid-career professionals to live wherever they want in this beautiful country. We're all in this together.
This is because US housing was already insanely cheap by comparison globally. Just as you say housing is cheap outside Helsinki...outside NYC/SF/LA, housing in the United States is even cheaper.
Even today, the average US house is 40% cheaper than the average Finnish house. [1] And US incomes are on average 25% higher. AND taxes are 15% lower on average in the US.
Meaning the price-to-net income ratio is almost 2X for Finnish real estate vs. US real estate.
[1] As of 2023, average price per sq meter in Finland is 2800 USD. Average price per sq meter in the US is 1800 USD.
My memory tells me that's not what it felt like when I lived in the US. by your stats I'd have expected my US rent to have eaten closer to 15% than 30% of my take home pay, like it does here, at least if the rents were a competitive enough market to track closely with mortgages. But that's not what I remember ever happening, nor did I spend most of my life in major metros -- my adult working life was almost entirely in Madison, WI, which is about the size of my current Tampere. Rent ate up about 30% of my take home in both places. The apartment I currently rent is bigger than the apartment I rented back there as well, although it is a little older.
I'd expect to have felt the pinch of such a vast price to net income ratio difference in my rent, at least a little bit. So... why haven't I? I have about as apples-to-apples a comparison as it is reasonable to make, right down to them both being heavy student towns.
Looking at this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer... - none of the top 10 countries seem to have great daycares or comprehensive parental leaves or generous social safety nets.
> women want careers too
Ding ding ding. This seems to be the dominant factor when looking at countries with the lowest fertility.
Diving deeper into the birthrates of "developed" countries, it seems a big chunk of babies are born to immigrants. Germany - 25% [1], USA - 26% of kids under 18 have at least 1 immigrant parent[2]
[1] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
The funny thing is that thanks to a somewhat successful career in tech, I could afford them more than the average family in my area can. But that doesn’t matter - I’ve conditioned myself to not want them, and I don’t regret not having them one tiny bit.
I participated in a mentoring program where I worked with younger people entering tech careers. It was mind blowing to hear them talk about children as being impossibly expensive while we had just discussed negotiation of their six-figure offer letter a few days prior. It’s like the reality of having kids got distorted and twisted and exaggerated so much on sites like Reddit that they all lost touch with reality and instead cemented the idea that kids were impossible for them.
If you’ve “conditioned yourself to not want them” then that’s a really weird place to be. That implies that you did maybe want them at some point and overrode that via “conditioning” based on facts that turned out to be untrue (that you couldn’t afford them). If I was in your shoes, I’d be taking a long, hard look at what other life assumptions you’ve been “conditioned” out of from exposure to false narratives and internet exaggerations.
Maybe kids are not for you, but I’ve seen enough very happy parents into even their 40s who started out thinking they never wanted kids until they finally re-evaluated how they arrived at that conclusion and realized it was the result of bad inputs. If you know the key inputs were false, maybe re-run that whole decision process again with a clean slate and some accurate facts. You might be surprised.
Lots of tech folks live in low fertility areas where nobody has kids. So strange ideas just persist.
* Having and raising children is expensive (both financially and otherwise) regardless any factor(s). Any parent will corroborate this.
* I do not find life worth foisting upon a new individual; life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.
* Related to the above, I refuse to make my children be witnesses to my inevitable death. I am in that phase of life where I must deal with the eventual passing of my parents, and that is fucking hell. I do not wish this experience upon anyone, and to that end I refuse to have children because to do so means I wish this hellish experience upon them.
* Children as a concept is hypocritical: On the one hand I am responsible for their well-being and that implies I can and will and should have a say in their life; on the other hand they are independent individuals whom I cannot violate, and I refuse to impose my will upon them anyway because that is not my place.
* I find the entire notion of a family far too bothersome for my life. I do not need nor want a spouse whom I won't ever understand anyway and whom I will grow to resent. I do not need nor want children whom I won't ever understand anyway and whom will grow to resent me. I do not need nor want familial relations which will all be concentrated bullshit. I do not need nor want any of that noise in my life, I desire peace and tranquility.
The life has a way to handle this: children. Not saying you should but just saying that having children makes passing of the parents a bit less hellish. Will not make it easy but children forces us to be in the present and in the local now and contemplate less about about the extended family or past.
Just to clarify: it will be extremely immoral and unethical to have children just to alleviate this. And damaging in so many ways. I am just presenting a side effect here.
I’m a parent, I disagree. I might have thought in my 20s that having kids is expensive, but in my 30s I make so much money that is not an issue. Buying a house, that is expensive :)
> I do not find life worth foisting upon a new individual; life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.
Have you spoken to a therapist recently? You might be depressed. From my point of view, life is beautiful and challenges make it interesting.
This is a very deep and philosophical question, I think its perfectly reasonable for people who are not depressed to still come to the conclusion that they don't want to create more life since life itself is too difficult. Even in a best case scenario of being born to a rich, loving family in some prosperous democracy you still have to deal with yours and everyone you loves mortality.
I think there's another interesting issue that may be going on - people postpone having kids more and more, many start seriously considering it in their late 30s. That's an age where most people also start feeling the squeeze of midlife - ill parents you need to take care of, sometimes your own health starting to decline a bit etc. It's not surprising some people give up on kids.
Rural Appalachia is one example.
I assume this was the reference point for that comment:
> life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.
Which gets at a question I often have for those in these threads - what would you do if you had a child who was so depressed that they're unable to live independently?
Perhaps the optimal path for people who feel that way is to enjoy the good parts until it comes to an end?
When Douglas Adams said that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is "42", it was pretty obvious that he was saying that the entire question is just absurd.
Enjoying what time is left is indeed my goal, and perhaps what a stoic or existentialist would tell you as well. It has not been easy though.
It’s like a ‘guns for all’ policy.
Euthanasia should be allowed only after 18-36 months of therapy sessions.
Guns should be allowed for all that aren't criminals and/or mentally ill.
If you come from or live in a western country, you have no idea how good your life is.
And how you have to make up problems because real problems have been done away by your society.
Real poor people in Asia and Africa would give anything to be poor people where you live.
You're contradicting yourself. I'm a dad of two. Kids are extremely expensive and the largest expense is needing a large enough house in an area with good schools (UK here). That alone adds extra hundreds of thousands to your cost of living.
My 2 cousins grew up in a one-bedroom flat of 50m2.
On the other hand, I would have wanted a larger flat / house even if I remained childless and/or single.
Schooling in the UK is indeed a fuckup of epic proportions that I luckily don’t need to get involved with, but homeschooling is an option, right? The alternatives are getting better and better, with improved technology etc.
Uhh are you okay?
My goal is to lead a peaceful, tranquil life and when the time comes for my passing to leave as little as possible behind in my wake. Ideally I hope to not suddenly die in a freak incident, so I can relinquish or otherwise destroy my personal possessions prior to my passing.
If nobody notices I ever existed after I pass, I am satisfied.
When my partner in a childless relationship gets asked “but why?” when she says she doesn’t want children, her answer is this: “would you have asked the same question, had I said I want them?”
and then they didn't survive for the next generation. If that is okay with a society, nature will simply replace that society with another one.
Combination of the latest trends of the past few decades (contraception, individualism, nuclear families) goes against the natural design for the sustenance of our species. Nature doesn't have morals and is pretty ruthless, so if a sub-species doesn't want to have kids, it will cease to exist and will be replaced by the one who values kids.
South Korea will be an interesting example to watch - whether they reverse their course and start valuing kids as a society, or they might get replaced by immigrants or are taken over by the neighboring countries. Nothing good or bad inherently with either option because life is meaningless anyway.
Women in every rich country have fewer children than they desire:
https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility...
If it was a good deal, women would have more children than they want because the economics were right
> whenever civil protection and economic freedom gives them any semblance of a choice, the number of children they get goes way down.
Which is clearly falsified by the link I posted.
I certainly agree with you that the economics of raising children is not right in western countries, but this still doesn't deter women from wanting more children than they're having, so I don't think it's at all fair to say that fewer are willingly choosing to have them.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. The impact on health is transitory and most women recover just fine after birth. Social life can actually get better when it expands to other parents. Career? I guess if your goal is to grasp the golden ring that's true.
But my god, surely our lives have more meaning than living as long as possible, maintaining the social life we had in our 20's as long as possible, and dedicating our lives to our careers.
Yikes, I'm not sure how accomplished and how satisfied with my life I'd be if I got to my 90's and successfully fulfilled those goals. I'd feel rather empty to me honest.
But this opinion seems very common on social media. It's like there is no worthy goal in life beyond optimizing health, eating at trendy restaurants and becoming CEO.
The world has always “been ending”. Look back at any period in the last couple of centuries and you’ll find doomsayers. They were wrong.
But hey maybe the world will get worse overall, but it’s not like humans haven’t suffered through worse. And just because times are tough it doesn’t mean you can’t have a fulfilling life with human connections being a key part to that fulfillment.
Dont have kids if you don’t want to but I’m not going to put my life on hold because maybe the world will get crappy.
Like I said, don't have kids if you don't want to. Nobody should.
But the idea the world is doomed and your offspring are destine for a life of misery isn't really based on reality.
The way I look at it though, the desire to have children comes from societal and self conditioning too. For the majority of people, building a nuclear family is what they see all around them, and few ever really question whether or not their desire comes from the fact that it seems like the default and it would be too hard to go against the grain.
I don’t have the drive to have children. Maybe I would have if I saw it as more of a possibility earlier on in life, but I think we underestimate how much of that drive actually originates from outside forces for many people.
My father had me when he was 50 so I didn’t feel like I was too old. Ended up having 3 and wouldn’t trade them for anything. For all the hardship there is such an overwhelming joy that also comes with children that I’ve never found anywhere else.
I quite like the idea that when it is about vision or meaning of life we should carefully make the learning or setting in stone kind of process harder. I think when young we are very biased to see the world in some way as we are biased to see it in some other way at 50.
Not trying to convince you to revisit specifically the decision about children. Just sharing my own learning
A lot of young people have done exactly that because a childless lifestyle seems much more appealing. Particularly for women who have to sacrifice their careers as well.
I'm in my 40's and when I was born my parents had newspapers, radio and 3 channels on the TV. The channels stopped airing content after midnight. They'd have been bored to death if they didn't have kids.
This will probably be an unpopular comment, but I think this is true for every generation, and is a simple byproduct of having young people earning comparatively low salaries compared to people who have been working for a decade or two already.
I'm in my 40s now, and while I'd have loved to buy a house in my 20s, I couldn't afford it until my 30s. At the time, I thought it was very unfair that all the housing I wanted was priced just out of reach of the maximum mortgage I could get, but a decade of pay rises later, and I could just afford to get on the property ladder but I had no spare money left over each month, and another decade later my mortgage costs were a relatively small fraction of my income and I have a comfortable lifestyle now.
I think the only difference with the current generation of youngsters is that they are far more vocal about it, whereas my generation just accepted it as part of life and quietly put up with it.
It's pretty much the same that every generation of teenagers believes their parents couldn't possibly understand how unfair life is, until a decade or so later, when they've grown up a bit more and realise that they've become the same as their parents after all.
Median salary 2022 was £33k. Median house price was £265k; over 8 times the median salary.
Not controlled for interest rates or changes in the tax codes, nor the increases in student loan debts.
Looking at: https://www.propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk/property-statist...
The average price in Q4 1999 was £75k, the average price in Q3 2007 was £184k, the average price in Q3 2022 was £273k (the last two are the peaks), the average price in 2023 has already started to dip. So, in 8 years prices went up 145%, and in the following 15 years prices went up 48%.
I bought in the latter half of that first spike I mentioned, and anecdotally, while I was looking but still unable to afford anything (ultimately, it was only possible when my bank changed their rules and afford 4x salary rather than 3x), prices in the area I was looking rose 50% in the 6 months prior to buying my house. In the years since then, its value has only increased by a little over 50%.
Looking further back, the previous peak was in 1989 at £62k. 10 years earlier in 1979 the average price was £19k, a rise of 226%.
So, this isn't a recent phenomena, what's recent is that people are more vocal in complaining that they can't afford to get on the property ladder. My point is that it's always been tough, but if people who can't afford now keep saving then in a few years they'll find their savings and wage increases will let them catch up with the house price plateau.
I think the only difference we've seen so far is that the last plateau wasn't very flat, and after an initial drop, prices have continued to increase but slower than inflation.
People had nothing after ww2 yet had a lot more kids. We are way richer now in comparison so the cost of kids is really a bad argument to make.
The problem today is a 2 full-time salaried income is required to be able to afford a decent standard of living for a family, whereas even as late as the 80s it was feasibly to raise a family on a single median income.
Granted, it'd be hard on a single median income today, but if you're making two, three times median - in your 20s - it should be doable. And that's everyone on a six figure tech salary, to start off with.
I think it's more likely to be expectation inflation. People in 2023 just wouldn't be satisfied to live the life people were satisfied to live in 1950.
A thought experiment could be: - There are people that earn 100kpa and people that earn 50kpa - Both kinds of people think they "need two incomes to live these days" - Obviously the 100kpa people could ditch a whole income and live at the level of the two 50kpa people -- but they wouldn't choose to, they'd rather have the lifestyle of a 200kpa household
> Median home prices increased 121% nationwide since 1960, but median household income only increased 29%.[0]
[0] https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist... (That’s from where I quoted, but there’s plenty of sources. More available upon request)
You don't need to buy a house to be able to live. And no, people are not poorer if you consider all factors. That's a crazy argument to make. No human living in 2023 would want to live with 1950 standards.
Agree.
> No human living in 2023 would want to live by 1950 standards.
Also agree.
But that neither of those things are relevant for the argument.
You don’t need a house to live, but it provides stability, which is a huge part of the decision of having children.
- low taxes
- a workplace with women in it
- a birth rate that exceeds the replacement rate
Do you want a workplace with women in it? You have to subsidize workplaces giving huge benefits to them if/when they decide to have kids, to the degree that you essentially fire a money cannon at the gender pay gap.
Do you want a birth rate that exceeds the replacement rate? You have to subsidize people trying to get pregnant, people who are pregnant, and people who have kids. Welcome to dropping (more) money bombs on the health care sector and the child care sector.
This is the bare minimum. You also generally need regulations to force businesses to give adequate leave and flex policies, health care benefits (many plans don't cover pregnancy/birth, believe it or not), etc. You also have a huge labor problem when it comes to day care and schooling. You also have a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing for families near any kind of job at all.
I used to live in a small provincial "city" of 150.000, 250km from the country's only big city. People often mocked it was the graveyard of ambition. But to me it really felt like that. I hated living there so much.
If remote work is a possibility, or big cities decentralize a bit, that makes sense.
We've seen during COVID, if people can move from San Francisco and keep their jobs, they will do it.
A new generation can already choose from way too many offers, which will be even more expanding as the larger generation ages out and needs more care.
Continuing the trend, junior educated talent will be in such demand that economically, I see no choice than rising prices for their service. Which will in turn triggering inflation and devaluation of existing assets. Additionally, remote work options (held in place by the shortage for talent) will continue to significantly eat into ever increasing city density, and the population plateau — which in developed countries already is a decline — will empty many apartments as well.
The only effect left is rising inequality through inheritance. Slap a hard 90% inheritance tax on any "set for life" money above 2 million USD to finance the rest of society and you're fine.
Just my 2 cetn.
Most careers don't pay enough to only require a single/1.5 income family.
Most people are hijacked by keeping up with the Jones's.
At least in democracies (many of the large metro hubs are not in democracies).
The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury.
Of course it might be nice to be sitting at the wheel of a Rolls Royce, but we might be sitting there in rags and tatters, and gaunt with hunger, after having squandered enormous amounts of labor, capital, and costly materials that could have been put to better use elsewhere. That doesn’t happen in a market economy because most of us take one look at the price tag on a Rolls Royce and decide that it is time for another Toyota.
The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.
Reality doesn’t change when the government changes price tags. Talk about “bringing down health care costs” is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them.
Hidden costs continue to take their toll— and it is often a higher toll than when these costs are freely transmitted through the marketplace.
Maintaining birth rates (unlike buying cars manufactured abroad) would likely have a pretty good return on investment for society as a whole, that's a key aspect. Universal healthcare could produce more healthcare per dollar than private insurance and so on.
> we would not be a richer country as a result.
In the case of Rolls Royces, certainly not. In the case of e.g. subsidized daycare or universal healthcare, it all depends on how "rich" is being measured.
Capitalism doesn't care about families. The only thing capitalism cares about is consumption. So it doesn't really matter if you have 10 kids or no kids, as long as you're consuming, the system is happy. This is of course great if you're the kind of person who never wanted kids to begin with.
The problem however is that Capitalism is short-sighted. It doesn't care about future consumption, just consumption right now in the moment. So inevitably capitalism face issues sustaining itself when there are less people around in the future to consume, as well as sustain all existing debts.
Look at countries where population growth is negative. The economies have stagnated.
Children are essential to capitalism.
I guess feudalism would increase fertility given that feudal lords need more serfs to tend their land.
With that said if I had to propose an idea, I would provide money to people to have children. Have the state subsidise it. Provide stay at home mums with a decent income. Fundamentally however, that will create all sorts of issues, because it doesn't change the fact that money still controls society.
Fundamentally, I think the issue is that society no longer has a set of values to propel it forward. In the past, I think values were an extension of nation (and whatever culture that entailed). Now, that value is money. Which is creating all the distortions we're seeing today.
An alternate phrasing, "women work for anti-birth employers and women can't find trustworthy fathers."