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Don’t worry, Republicans will solve this by banning abortion and birth control nationwide!
They are always thinking of the children.
And legalizing marriage to minors. And outlawing comprehensive sexual education.
A few Republicans also rape and traffic minors just to show how dedicated they are to countering the declining birth rate!
Pizzagate was projection.
A few?
They misspoke. A few don’t.
Only a few do both!
Also, we need to be clear, rape is such a harsh word, it’s not fair to ruin someone’s whole career over a little misunderstanding like consent…
It’s such a steep [word] for 20 minutes of action.
Just a 20 minute whoopsie
Fight against SA protection in the workplace and push more children to work to live? Anything is better than the Great Replacement right? /s
But honestly thinking about what terrible combination of policies.
Okay, so on an actual serious note – Historically, this has actually been the lever that’s been pulled by government in order to control population growth.
The problem is that we’ve grown so much as a society that we now realize that bodily-autonomy is a human right.
There are ways they can promote population growth, if that is something we really want. Better and free school lunches would be a start. Childcare. Pre-K education. Free college. Health-care. And generally a more wealthy middle class.
The biggest reason people are having fewer kids is money.
This 100%. We and many of our peers with a kid are one and done in the current system. But if we could afford college educations for multiple kids, get adequate parental leave, access to early childcare that doesn’t cost an entire paycheck? That would change the decision quite a bit.
But also I’m happy to have fewer kids and let more immigrant and/or refugee families with young kids move here too. Solves the labor shortage and provides a much needed influx of fresh ideas and culture, not to mention getting some folks out of dangerous situations. Somehow all of the people who want to “save the children” are extremely silent on that front when it’s children moving to another country for a better life.
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Uh, yeah, about that. Republicans need to stop thinking so much about children, mmkay?
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“Driven” suggest more than half of total pregnancies, which is not true looking at the graph given above. It was solidly
thirdfourth* in terms of totals, which is still unsettling, but not as pronounced as your comment suggests.*I overlooked 25-29
Who told you that drivers have to be 51%?
That’s not what a driver is. Driver is a general term, ten pregnancies are a driver of total birth rate, as they have impacted total fertility significantly.
Less than 20% of a total is “significant”?
Yes. For example, 60 million people in the US (less than 20% of our total population) is a significant amount of people.
The amount the percentage represents is irrelevant. A billion people could be involved, but if the total is 7 billion, it’s not going to be a significant part of the total trend.
5% can be a driver if it’s having a decent impact on your results. This is kind of a stats 101 thing man. You might even look for those outliers in your results and find a way to specifically exclude them if you find that the information you’re getting is being skewed. Do that too hard and it’s called P-hacking.
“We found that the bottom 5% of respondents were driving results negatively and so excluded the top and bottom 5%.”
Think about it as a literal driver. It’s a driver. It’s not the driver and also half the passengers. You can drive a motorcycle, you can drive a bus, and how much of the occupancy you are of those two things can change dramatically but you’re still a driver.
Obviously even 1 extreme outlier can skew things, but that’s not the case here.
In the terms of your analogy, this is about 3 people out of 20 pedaling a (weirdly long) bike and steered by all of them (somehow). Would you say that group of 3 are driving? Or would you concede it’s the two groups of 6 that are mostly driving the bike?
Yes it is…
When it comes to teen pregnancies, 1 is 1 too many. ~20% is significant.
Yeah, that’s not what I said.
Yeah. Less than 1% would be insignificant. More than 5% is significant, most times. More than 10% is definitely significant.
Not to call out OP, but does anyone have this information in anything other than .png format? There’s no timestamps, hyperlinks, or citations anywhere here. I’d love to send this to other people, but I’m not about to copy-pasta something that could be old or inaccurate.
Not the exact image posted, but this appears to be the source
Fantastic. Thank you!
Here is the paywalled Economist article and an archive that does a poor job of capturing the image.
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they’ll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it’s insane and it’s against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don’t want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don’t destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
Sure, easing into a deflating population over several hundred years is fine but tanking it and ending up with a society having to support a vastly older population ain’t easy either. Better for governments to provide positive reasons to have children but there’s zero chance of that.
We won’t starve our old people, there’s plenty of wealth to go around, it’s just that a tiny portion of the population has stolen it all. Maybe even the average person will have to make some sacrifices if birth rates don’t stay at a certain level but our lifestyles are hugely inflated compared to even 50 years ago.
We can live sustainable lives with a reducing population, our productivity per capita is higher than it’s ever been, we’re all just seeing so little of it.
Instead of Musks and Bezos, instead of all of our creative minds working in advertising and finance, instead of 10 different streaming services, we can have a good quality of life for everyone.
Our economy being efficient is the biggest lie. The economy is only profitable, and it only has good outcomes when those outcomes are aligned with profit. It’s time for a new economy that serves the people
Our government has no issue going into debt for anything and everything they want, aside from social services. The whole concept of a younger generation having to take care of a growing older one means nothing to me. If they care, they can shift their priorities on reckless spending. If they don’t (they dont) then the population can take to the streets and demand they start caring.
We’re going to run into a crisis within our life time whether we like it or not. Within 10-20 years, possibly longer if legislation somehow hampers it, pretty much the entire working class will be unemployable because machine labor will be cheaper and more readily available than any human. Yes, some people will still have jobs, but not the working class.
Long before we have a crisis of too many elderly for the working to care and provide for, we are going to have a crisis of not enough jobs paying a liveable wage for one, let alone a family, because corporations are going to be able to replace large swathes of their workforces with machines that cost less to maintain per unit than minimum wage, so why would they ever hire a person?
I just have to pont out, If you have to have a job, you are working class. It doesn’t matter if it’s a well-paying automation job, you are still working class.
Technically yes, as there are many definitions. But practically, no. Tthe commonly accepted and popular definitions break down with the working class being those without college degrees, those who’se living expenses and day to day expenses is most if not all of their income, where another common definition specifically list unskilled labourers, artisans, outworkers, and factory workers as working class.
My understanding is that it’s more about where people get their wealth and income. Working class primarily gets it from labour. Middle class has a mix of capital and labour income. And upper class / capitalists get it mostly from capital.
Degrees and jobs align with those but don’t define them, as far as I understand it.
Then again in my mind the only distinction worth a damn is “contributor” and “parasite” and so we’re all working class and we should see ourselves as aligned against the individuals and families who have enough wealth that generations of them will never need to work a day in their lives.
I don’t buy this. What will really happen is that the value of anything AI can produce will drop to near zero, this freeing up money to spend on things only humans can provide. And if you think AI can literally do anything a human can? Well at that point, using that AI should be incredibly illegal, as you’re just enslaving a digital person.
Maybe we’ll end up with a weird economy where everyone is employed as teachers, caretakers, mentors, life coaches, fitness instructors, physicians, and any other job that people really would prefer to interact with a human while interfacing with.
Would you let your child be taught by an AI teacher? Not worried about what type of sociopathy that might introduce? No, there are many jobs, specifically those around the growth, development, maintenance, and improvement of human lives that will always be preferable to be done by actual humans. Humans can do the human work, and we can slough the drudgery off to the machines.
I personally think reproductive rights are human rights, every adult should have total personal control over their reproductive choices, I don’t think people who chose to have kids should be punished for the choice, and I don’t think people who do not wish to have children should be likewise punished for not doing so, nor forced in any way or manipulated into having children. I agree that there has to be a lot of improvement for kids who are here right now. That’s an important problem you have to solve first if you want to encourage your population to grow, the outcome must be good now.
I mean yes, children should be an affordable option and please take my tax money to make it practically free. But also I think a lot more people don’t want children than is generally assumed it expected. Just lots of societal pressure pushing vulnerable people to make a decision that’s not necessarily in their best interest.
It’s a deeply felt personal choice, I don’t think people should be manipulated or pressured into it, only that the cost at the very least be at zero so that people can choose based on what matters, their own personal views, and not in their ability to pay for every aspect of a child’s life.
Let’s not pretend the GOP are doing it for the good of humanity…
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture.
For most of history it wasn’t advantageous to have children. People just didn’t have many options, and we were used to babies dying all the time so if we wanted any help in our old age we had to have enough to survive into adulthood.
Where do you base this information from?
E.g. people who had a farm or crafts/trade business usually had children to help and later take over the business. Having children to help at old age is mentioned by yourself.
Sounds quite advantageous to me. Especially when labor is more physically demanding or you need enough people to maintain security like for traders etc.
It’s the reason my grandfather is one of five brothers and seven kids in total. It’s the reason my great-grandfather was the eldest of seven, and my ex-MIL was one of 11 children. They lived on farms and it was a lot cheaper to force your kids to do work than to hire farmhands.
I don’t see where anyone should give two shits how many babies other people are having for their own benefit/detriment.
Macro economics, you need a growing population to do capitalism at all. You can’t have a shrinking consumer base.
Also. If you want to even make it a choice people CAN make, you need to equalize it. We currently punish people for having kids by a upsetting margin, at the very least it should be the same difference, you choose to have a kid, you get appropriate services to make that process at the very least, not a clear negative in all regards.
Thirdishly we are currently getting a very low level of education for our population as a whole, and that’s a BIG problem when you chief exports and economy are build on innovation in computer science, physics, and petrochemicals, we need a population with the education to work and move forward or we fall behind and that’s it. We actually need a highly educated population of we intent to progress as a society with our without capitalism.
Preganté
Dangerops pregonant sex
Pregananant???
starch masks
Will it hurt baby top of his head?
Preganté
Gurlfraynd ain’t had period since she gawt pregat?
My circle is nomal
I like that: it sounds Spanish.
It’s a reference to a meme video of someone reading misspelled Yahoo answer users asking pregnancy questions. It’s quite entertaining.
YouTube Link to the video in question.
Do not quote the old magic to me. I was there when it was written.
I thought it was a reference to the song. YouTube link
That song is actually a reference to the older video that I linked to. It shows the original creator, JT Sexkik as a credit in the beginning.
Thanks, this thread made me wanna revisit it
It’s almost Spanish for “I asked” (pregunté).
Although it’s common for English speakers to mix up the word for ‘embarrassed’ (avergonzado) with ‘pregnant’ (embarazada). Which makes trying to tell someone “I’m embarrassed” even more hilarious!
Nobody expects the teen pregnancy
well that is because shareholders are wetting their pants realizing that with low birth rates they are losing both slaves and customers. Well, jokes on them, it is because of the shitty world they spearheaded (and that we followed)
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I think it’s fine to have kids if you want them but the government trying to get people to have more kids for economic reasons is sickening
Agreed, but I don’t think it’s fine either way. I’m an antinatalist and there is no such thing as an unselfish reason to have a baby.
Found the pro-abortionist.
(For those that don’t get the joke, notice that I didn’t say pro-life or anti-choice. It’s the “flush them all - no exceptions” position.)
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Is everyone having an abortion in your plan, is the selection random; how would this even work?
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Creed thoughts, like the blog?
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I was just asking what are you referencing… It’s not something I’m familiar with it.
Also, you’re the one who replied when I asked someone else a question.
And what then, the human race just dies out? I get the pessimistic feeling, but we may very well be the only sapient species in this galaxy. It would be such a waste to just give up and perish because of momentary hardships.
We are literally sapient stardust, and I’m certainly not going to give up and throw away the efforts and struggles on millions of ancestors just because of some current corporate greed and fascism is in fashion.
We are in no way at risk of dying out from negative population growth. If we start to go down below a few million, then maybe let’s talk.
World population is still increasing, and is set to maybe stabilize in a couple decades. Fingers crossed. If we could (gently, without mass starvation) reduce the population down to a more sustainable level, that is an unmitigatedly good thing.
What might kill us is infertility from pollution or disease, but this won’t do it.
gently, without mass starvation
Even more gently if you want to make sure there’s enough younger people to care for the elderly
A fuckton of people work bullshit jobs that should not exist. We could run the same society with much, much less people working.
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I’n not telling anyone to have kids or not, I’m actually saying that having kids is a personal decision, and society should not care beyond making sure those kids grow up safe in loving families.
Ok, so just make a shitload of people homeless in the meantime?
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The real issue is that we have a rapidly aging workforce and there’s not enough young people to replace them. With the average age of parents raising, the gap is getting larger. In the 50s it was 16 workers for every 1 retired. The 70s, 5:1. That number is now almost 2:1. This is bad. Very bad.
Higher bar for jobs. Lower wage for entry level. Later retiring age. Higher need for migrant and seasonal workers.
Aw, crapitalism will break because line cannot always go up.
Cry me a fucking river. Humanity is a cancer, and we need to be about half our current population. Yeah, we’re not gonna like it when we drop that population. Our kids, my daughter, are going to have it fucking tough. But if we want to survive long term… We gotta stop.
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Says Thanos who did nothing wrong. Really though, it’s not rocket science to understand eternal growth is not a viable strategy. It’s also obvious that the number of people on the Earth now is too much if we want them all to live a comfortable life and not to destroy the planet at the same time. How big should the population be to make things ok longterm? That is open to discussion and depends on many factors, so there’s not just one correct answer.
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Why would bars raise and entry level wages go down if supply is decreasing?
I totally agree with you. I just hate all of these “don’t have kids” arguments from liberal people. It’s not a viable solution, because the fascists and the idiots are gong to have kids. We need at least some sane people to continue on.
But the is all emotional and subjective, I’ll admit that. I’m not really thinking about this topic with a clear head anymore.
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That talking point died decades ago. We have a clear path to reducing our population. Well-off people with access to contraceptives don’t have high birth rates. We can roll back the human birth rate to sub-replacement levels and over time, reduce it.
There will be a problem with increasing population in 2250 or so, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
The moral thing to do is to ensure that all humans have access to clean water and food, contraceptives, and comfortable lives. The population will naturally go down and we can stabilize it over time.
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This is a good read: https://ourworldindata.org/un-population-2024-revision
The new estimated global peak population is 10.3B in 2084. But now, looking at the break down by region, you may be talking about North America? That graph looks wildly 3rd world… If you edit the graph to show US and Nigeria’s 2024 projections side by side it’s samepicture.jpg
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I don’t think it can sustain the current population levels, at our North American standard of living. If we could distribute resources evenly, sure, we could keep everyone alive, but energy consumption, plastic production, all that adds up to an ecological footprint of resource use that isn’t sustainable.
World wildlife levels have gone down dramatically. We’re expanding human life at the expense of all other life. The other life on earth isn’t superfluous: it’s an ecosystem that keeps us alive, recycles our waste, provides our medicines and cultural wealth of all sorts.
We can’t keep our wealthy lifestyle and at the same time tell the poor people of the world that they have to stay poor so that we can remain wealthy.
I mostly agree but I think we could maintain a lifestyle that is near Western levels, but done more efficiently. It wouldn’t be the same lifestyle, but it would be a good one.
I.e.
- dense, walkable neighbourhoods with mixed-use zoning
- trains, trams and electric buses instead of cars
- any job that can be done from home should be mandatory to do from home
- minimal to no meat consumption, especially emissions intensive meat like beef
- economic incentives and disincentives to minimise energy consumption and waste
- circular economies that re-use and recycle most things
- 100% renewable energy production (and eventually, green manufacturing).
Although even with that, it would be an easier job if there is some level of population decline, but I don’t think any encouragement is needed (societies where women are highly educated tend to have declining birth rates).
These are all good measures, but I doubt they would be enough to stop the wildlife decimation.
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We’re upright locusts. Stop stroking your ego and look at the state of the world. Humanity doesn’t justify itself.
Why would I care if the human race dies out? I won’t be here to notice.
Let’s instead focus on not burning the place to the ground during our lifetimes.
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I’m thinking long term as well. Without humans, the universe would be less uncertain.
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Who cares? Without sentients in it, the universe is pointless.
we literally have 8 or 9 billion people dude i think we’re good for now
Oh come on, it’s a #notallmen moment. Lol
When people say “stop having kids”, what they mean is stop having unplanned pregnancies. I don’t think that many people want our literal extinction.
I wish all people would stop having kids. I am all for the voluntary human extinction movement. A very key word is voluntary though, which really just makes it an ideology.
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You don’t have to. Turns out, when you give women the option to not shove a watermelon-sized object through their hoohaws at an age when they’re not ready for it, many of them opt not to!
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Curiously, it worked too well. China is now desperately offering incentives to get people to have more children.
(Okay, I’m just being glib. It’s not clear whether it was the one-child policy that was responsible for the birth-rate crash.)
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I understand that, I’m very aware that my reaction is emotional and subjective. I’m just sick of reading that sentence over and over and over again.
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Really? Why not? You think the impressive development of an intelligent and aware species is important enough to make that same species suffer more and more to the inevitable extinction anyways? Let’s do it now while it’s still partially habitable so that the end isn’t quite as horrific. Your logic makes no sense.
I don’t share this view. Life is an interesting pattern created by matter, but no need to be spiritual about it. If life ceased to exist, no one would be sad about it. Actually a lot of struggle and pain would be over which is positive in my opinion. In practice, we should value quality of life of conscious beings instead of quantity. Having less is better.
i also think people are probably good yes
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Just here to say I feel you and agree with your sentiment.
It was never about stopping abortion. It’s about keeping people in poverty and creating a cycle of uneducated voters that either don’t vote or vote Republican because they don’t know better
The reason why people aren’t having kids anymore isn’t because of abortion, its because: wages are decreasing (accounting for inflation), the cost of living is skyrocketing (yes even accounting for inflation), the cost of owning a home is now far too much for young people, people are working longer and more stressful hours in worse jobs for worse bosses, public areas have been destroyed leading to less in person interaction, online dating is toxic, the internet has given people heightened expectations, an unresolved mental health crisis, and people are finally becoming responsible enough to understand that you shouldn’t have kids you cant afford.
online dating is toxic
I’ve read some good evidence is that this is because women, especially zoomer and millennial women, are considerably more liberal than the men in their peer group. Historically, women have always been more liberal than men, but the difference between them has gotten extreme in the last 10 years. Being a Trump supporter is a deal-breaker for many single women.
Online dating is incredibly toxic for gay men, too, so this isn’t something that can be completely explained by a shift in women’s ideology.
I will take your word for it. I am not involved in any online dating, but am also not gay.
That’s completely reasonable, why would a women date a man who thinks that she doesn’t own her own body (not all but a significant amount of Trump supporters believe that). In addition women are more liberal because primarily their rights have and are being threatened by Trump, furthermore women are more likely to be sympathetic to other minorities who may loose their rights as well. On top of that young conservative men are very often completely delusional in terms of dating expectations. Many of them demand an extremely young person (18-20), demand they be stay at home, demand many children, while not having a job capable of upholding such a lifestyle because they cannot accept that the world we live in is not the same one our grandparents lived in. In addition young conservatives (especially young Trump supporters) tend to have completely unreasonable demands and expectations due to them being terminally online and a very poor understanding of women.
It’s even worse than that. They want women to work full time, keep all the housework done, assume all the work with the child after work, while cooking dinner, washing up, stay looking fantastic, never complain and oh, mow the lawn while I’m playing golf/bball/football on Saturday, and don’t forget Suzie has ballet on Wednesday, Bobby has detention on Friday, and football practice on Saturday.
Not so sure about that. Isn’t Vance advocating for women to strive to be stay at home moms. So you can cut the full time job from that list. His comments about staying in the kitchen would also rule out the lawn and driving anywhere. I think he just wants women to stay home and be there for when their husband wants to see them, and only leave the house when he wants to bring her somewhere.
Probably. I just meant that’s the mindset of certain men in our area. Certain meaning if they want the trad wife but realize a single income isn’t enough. Or whatever else is convenient, I guess. I’m just going by those I’ve known in a concentrated region, not all men are like that and I’m so glad!
I dont get men tbh, or Trump supporters. Im too Transfem to understand them :3
I don’t understand women or Trump supporters so we have something in common.
Great news - the fewer Trumpers who reproduce, the better.
You just listed 6 reasons why people are losing their minds then casually throw out “being responsible enough to not have kids they can’t afford”
Which is if? Everyone’s losing their goddamn minds of people have their shit together? Which is it damn it!!
/S
I forgot that only one thing can be true at once, its actually none of the reasons listed. The true reason is that the 5g radio waves connect with the vaccine autism to produce gay frog chemicals (that are spread by chemtrails in planes piloted by lizard people) so that everyone becomes trans.
/s /j
This makes way more sense
Losing my job and seeing there’s about 100 times more people applying for IT jobs than there are IT jobs made me go from “maybe” to “nah” in the procreation question. Too many people already procreated too many times before me.
I think the 20-24 line is hinting at a bad economy.
You just can’t hear that hint over the hint of the constant torment of the growing lower class
For real. Middle class was a low but comfortable bar back in 1987 when I was born. My parents went above and beyond having two incomes, one of them being a small business. I do essentially the same thing as my mom small business wise, and my wife makes arguably more than my old man dad, but the thought of doubling our starter home (or even moving out of it) just hasn’t crossed my mind.
And we also had kids about three years later on average than my folks did (though compared to my wife’s folks, about five years earlier).
The '90s were fucking awesome (except for the acid rain, shit had me spooked in first grade when they played the laser disc about it).
35-39 maybe just barely made the cut before the start of the collapse. But generally i expect all of them to trend down in the long run
That person and the author of the article obviously suck at reading/understanding graphs. Teen pregnancies did not have a high enough percentage (and it’s good that it went down).
Also, how do you miss the drop in the age range 20 - 24 and the rise in the age ranges above 30. It’s even indicated in the title to “40 is the new 20”.
This is indicative of a bad economy. I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
Or about inequality of income.
Not much of a bet, really. More of a fact.
It’s almost like if people are able to mature enough to make an informed choice, they get a choice.
I have a modest proposal.
Let’s all just skip a generation and no one have kids this time. We can easily start having kids again later with a nice clean slate.
Good idea, right?
Good call! Next gen can have children for our pensions!
Of course, if you outlaw kids, only outlaws will have kids.
Wrong thread. Im drunk
Been there. What are you drinking? I’m sipping on some Bushmills Black (sherry cask). Got a bit project out today. Spent a year writing this beast:
What is that software?
PDF Xchange! It’s fucking amazing. My work switched from Adobe because it does more and costs like $2 a licence vs $150 for Adobe
What is a CKJ unified icograph? And why don’t you have any?
Chinese characters. Presumably they’re not Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
What’s your occupation?
Tbf. Norway has a fertility rate of 1,4 I think. And that is in a country with (compared to many other places) quite generous benefits like a year paid maternity/paternity leave. Relative cheap and abundant kindergartens and a less horrible work situation. Think everyone are feeling the zeitgeist
People want stability before they have kids. Generous government benefits matter little if you’re living in a cardboard box. No one wants to raise a child in a cardboard box. Look up the cost of housing in the Nordic countries. They aren’t the socialist paradise you’re making them out to be.
It’s more nuanced than that. Wages are comparable high, and there are some tax regulations that makes owning less expensive. Renting is still not the norm in Norway. Second+++ apartments/houses are severely taxed in a recent new regulation (incidentally making renting more expensive as they were sold off)
Outside some “metropolitan” areas like Oslo you can find lex expensive homes. But you are correct that prices have started to be our of reach of many, and stability is key for starting a family.
And Norway is by no means a paradise, but it seems more agreeable than the US.
The median household income in Norway is 590,000 NOK. The median total housing expense is about 158,000 NOK. Thus the median Norwegian household is spending about 27% of their income on housing. This is pretty comparable to the US, where the median figure is 26%.
This is the median across the whole population, and of course, for younger people that amount should be higher. Really it seems that the US and Norway are about the same when it comes to housing affordability.
It gets worse however if you look at actual home prices and not just monthly payments. The average home price in Norway is about 5,000,000 NOK.. That means the average home costs about 8.5x the average income. In the US, the median home price is about $430,000., while the median household income is about $77.5k. The average home in the US thus costs about 5.5x the average income.
Homes in the US are cheaper than in Norway, while US incomes are higher. The median household income in Norway is the equivalent of $54,000. Also, the median home in the US is larger than that of Norway.
This is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that US consumers have to pay more out of pocket for healthcare, childcare, and commuting costs than their Norwegian equivalents do. But really, it shows that even after the subsidies, Norway is no more affordable for new parents than the US is. If anything, it’s probably more affordable in the US. Yes, you can always move to a rural area in Norway to get cheaper housing, but you can do the same in the US. People live in those bigger, more expensive, cities because they provide better job opportunities and better salaries.
My real point is that we can’t just point to the more generous welfare state of the Nordic countries as an example for how birthrates can’t be solved with financial incentives. A lot of people like to point to countries with generous welfare states like Norway and say, “look, even countries like Norway, who heavily subsidize healthcare, childcare, and have generous parental leave still have low birth rates!” Typically people who make these arguments want to argue for restricting women’s reproductive autonomy.
But it really does come down to housing. And in both Norway and the US, the cost of homeownership is getting way beyond what people of childbearing age can afford. That is the fundamental problem. There’s something very deep and instinctive about the places we live in. Having a truly stable place to live, ideally a place you own and can easily afford, is the single greatest way to encourage people of childbearing years to have children. People want to provide a stable environment for children to grow up in. They don’t want to live in a place where their landlord could kick them out on a whim. They don’t want to be reliant on a government-subsidized apartment that could be taken away from them tomorrow if eligibility rules are changed. People want either very reliable and affordable rental space or ideally a home they own on their own and can’t be evicted from. That is the kind of stability people seek before they have children.
The world is on fire around us, even in places where it’s only smoldering people don’t want to consign their children to the flames.
