I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
we pay our government to point guns at other people, so that resources become their problem and not ours
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/the-us-urban-popula...
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537490/
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/09/older-mothers...
https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/number-of-americans-who-...
https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/theres-no-mystery-to-americas-fer...
https://ifstudies.org/insights?id=3886
https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-4-projecting-childlessness-a...
Desired family size is still 2.7 kids, and has been stable at that number for over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-ideal-family-s...
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... - SUERF Policy Note, Issue No 197, October 2020
“Talk is cheap, show me the fertility rate.”
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
Birthgap - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc (two hours, but substantiates every assertion I’ve made, provided as an additional supporting citation)
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
U.S. Muslims and Mormons both have a total fertility rate well above replacement (2.2-2.5). https://news.rakwa.com/2025/08/29/muslim-and-arab-fertility-...
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.