Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
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Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
Just because you don't like the hypothesis doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6749621
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14758
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6257058
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04575
The dopamine and devices hypothesis has been picking up steam.
It is entirely possible that our modern pleasure technology has short circuited our evolutionary drive to have children.
We have too many easy ways to not be bored. That throws a wrench into the biological algorithm.
We've been poor and resource constrained throughout history, yet we've always managed to have children. What is the one thing that has changed?
Smartphones and internet and YouTube and online gaming and porn and social media.
That's why the babies have disappeared.
Fun killed babies.
Yes, next question
1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.