We work too damn much. Two full time working parents is too much for trying to raise kids. We should be able to get by with two part-time parents. Not enough vacations and I don’t get any time...
Exemplary
We work too damn much.
Two full time working parents is too much for trying to raise kids. We should be able to get by with two part-time parents.
Not enough vacations and I don’t get any time with my family on the Holidays. Not that it matters, because neither does my other family members.
I got COVID from my kids, so it was just back to back weeks of burning PTO and sick time.
I look at my food budget, if I don’t grocery shop mid week, I’m burning my cash on delivery fees. But if I’m too tired because I just worked 8 hours and then had to cook dinner and clean my place, what time do I have to run out and shop. God forbid I want some time to play games with my kids.
When the labor movement was at its strongest one of the most important things it won was the 8 hour workday. The idea was 8 hours were supposed to be for work, 8 for sleep, and 8 hours for working...
Exemplary
When the labor movement was at its strongest one of the most important things it won was the 8 hour workday. The idea was 8 hours were supposed to be for work, 8 for sleep, and 8 hours for working on the home and leisure.
Since that time, businesses have chipped away at the remaining 8 hours of time in a laborer’s day. Commute times have ballooned but remain unpaid. Many job types demand “unofficially” that you remain reachable outside of the hours you get paid for. You have a 30 minute lunch time, which is both the absolute minimum legally allowed and during which time you do not get paid.
The executives in major companies are run by people who are exclusively focused on raising profits continuously and there are only two options to do so: improve sales or reduce internal expenditures, and unfortunately for us it’s massively simpler to do the latter and we all suffer for it.
Finances, time, the physical cost of pregnancy on the body, the risk to health and safety while our medical system and our government still refuse to actually treat women, particularly pregnant...
Finances, time, the physical cost of pregnancy on the body, the risk to health and safety while our medical system and our government still refuse to actually treat women, particularly pregnant women, particularly women of color, particularly queer AFAB people as autonomous beings rather than potential incubators?
Yeah. Look I love kids but I don't have time or money, or energy. And I haven't wanted my own kids for a long time. I have nephews and will likely have more. I'm pretty content being the queer auntie (IDK a good non-binary "aunt/uncle" replacement that I like)
Yeah it's wild they're at all surprised by this. Housing market is terrible, the health insurance industry is basically a racketeering scam that doesn't even actually cover all your costs, human...
Yeah it's wild they're at all surprised by this. Housing market is terrible, the health insurance industry is basically a racketeering scam that doesn't even actually cover all your costs, human overpopulation, a dying/dead ecosystem, the replacement of a middle class with a class of penniless peasants begging for scraps from capitalist feudal lord billionaires...
My wife and I would start popping out kids (9 months from) tomorrow if the fed paid off my mortgage and guaranteed lifetime low cost health insurance. Seems like the declining birth rate isn't that big of a deal to them though, so we'll stay child free.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Everything you listed was worse in the 1800s, yet the birthrate was quite high. People back then had no insurance and lived in squalor, yet found it within...
I don’t think it’s that simple. Everything you listed was worse in the 1800s, yet the birthrate was quite high. People back then had no insurance and lived in squalor, yet found it within themselves to have children regardless. I think the issue more has to do with people today not being willing to give up their comfortable lives to have families and deal with the suffering and reward that comes with it. And now I’m starting to sound like my mom. Yuck.
A big factor I believe is the vastly reduced consequences for not adhering to societal norms or succumbing to familial pressures. A lot of kids born in the past century were likely the product of...
Exemplary
A big factor I believe is the vastly reduced consequences for not adhering to societal norms or succumbing to familial pressures. A lot of kids born in the past century were likely the product of their parents “getting with the program” and snapping into the templates that they were expected to rather than out of genuine desire for children.
Overall I think that’s probably a positive thing so long as we can figure out an economic system that doesn’t rely on neverending growth. Yes, someone needs to be raising families to keep the ball rolling, but isn’t it better if the overwhelming majority of children are born to parents who want them and can provide an environment in which they can not just exist, but thrive?
You hit the nail on the head. And many of these kids grew up unloved by checked-out parents who didn't really care once the box was ticked.
A lot of kids born in the past century were likely the product of their parents “getting with the program” and snapping into the templates that they were expected to rather than out of genuine desire for children.
You hit the nail on the head. And many of these kids grew up unloved by checked-out parents who didn't really care once the box was ticked.
There were a couple of factors in the 1800s: For people living in squalid urban conditions, they often had little choice about having kids; rape and prostitution were rampant, and options for...
There were a couple of factors in the 1800s:
For people living in squalid urban conditions, they often had little choice about having kids; rape and prostitution were rampant, and options for preventing or ending pregnancies were few. Unsurprisingly, unwanted children born to the urban poor had low survival rate (they were abandoned, murdered, or neglected-to-death at very high rates). As a consequence, the death rate was higher than the birth rate in squalid urban centers like London; it was only immigration from rural areas that prevented these cities from depopulating.
But for people living in rural areas, which were not so squalid, it was an entirely different matter. There, people had lots of kids and they wanted to have lots of kids. Part of this was to make up for the high rate of child death (although it was certainly nowhere as high as it was in cities), but even after accounting for that, people still very much did not wish to be child free: children were valuable assets. Children could start working at a young age, and they would live with their parents or in-laws for their whole lives.
Today, people who do not want children (or do not want any more children) have options for avoiding giving birth to them in the first place, rather than leaving them to orphanages. And for most people, children are not valuable assets; they are an expensive luxury, more like a family pet than a family employee. A lot of people do not feel that they can financially justify having children. Of those who do, they can usually only justify around 1-3 children, not the 6+ that our ancestors commonly had.
I mean, they also didn't have effective contraception in the 1800s... there was a strong cultural expectation that all women would get married. (not just in the 1800s - until 1974 banks could...
Everything you listed was worse in the 1800s, yet the birthrate was quite high.
I mean, they also didn't have effective contraception in the 1800s...
yet found it within themselves to have children regardless.
there was a strong cultural expectation that all women would get married.
(not just in the 1800s - until 1974 banks could legally discriminate against unmarried women and refuse to open bank accounts or credit cards for them)
and marital rape was legal in the US up until the 1970s (and not fully outlawed until 1993)
if you're looking at historical birthrates, it's important to look at them in the context of the time. women faced enormous pressure to get married, and once married they were just presumed to always consent to sex with their husbands. there would have been a lot of pregnancies that by modern standards were not planned or necessarily desired.
You really cannot ignore women's rights, abortion rights, and access to birth control as fundamental factors when comparing to the 1800s or earlier times. Women can divorce partners, can control...
You really cannot ignore women's rights, abortion rights, and access to birth control as fundamental factors when comparing to the 1800s or earlier times. Women can divorce partners, can control their fertility long term and can hold their own jobs, have their own money, etc. that means the comparison to the 1800s is vastly different.
There is a strong reverse correlation between education level and fertility (in this context meaning number of kids per person). Educated people, as a group, have less kids. There's a similar...
There is a strong reverse correlation between education level and fertility (in this context meaning number of kids per person). Educated people, as a group, have less kids.
There's a similar correlation between education level and religion, which itself has a positive correlation to fertility. Religious people have more kids, and educated people are, on average, less religious.
Education being one of the best among various examples of differences between the 1800's and now that could explain lower birthrates.
Personally, I don't think of lower birthrates as a bad thing. We have enough people that hovering around, or going below, replacement rates is just fine. There will be adjustments to make, but you can't really make the case that the future of the human race is at stake.
The only practical reason for it to be considered a problem is if we believe that endless growth capitalism is the only way societies can thrive. Or if we're just worried that the west can't adjust fast enough and we'll all lose our cushy lives.
I love that more people are deciding not to have kids, parenthood should be one of the most intentional decisions in a life.
Absolutely, infinite growth is unsustainable - whether that's in population or capitalism. I'm a 41-year-old, married and childless person. My wife and I are finally old enough that family members...
Absolutely, infinite growth is unsustainable - whether that's in population or capitalism.
I'm a 41-year-old, married and childless person. My wife and I are finally old enough that family members have quit asking when we're going to have kids, because they never believed the standard 'never' answer when we were younger.
Others have already made some excellent points about the differences from then to now, and they’ve said a lot I agree with, but even putting all that aside: …yes? It’s clear you’ve got mixed...
Others have already made some excellent points about the differences from then to now, and they’ve said a lot I agree with, but even putting all that aside:
I think the issue more has to do with people today not being willing to give up their comfortable lives to have families and deal with the suffering and reward that comes with it
…yes? It’s clear you’ve got mixed feelings on the whole complex question given how you ended the next thought, but at least for me it’s pretty straightforward. I absolutely don’t want to give up the life I live now, and I’m pretty damn certain children would change things for the worse. Making my own life harder for the sake of throwing another new person into that same, harder life seems like a lose-lose?
I dunno, there’s just a kernel of thought there that escapes me. I don’t see creating life as having inherent goodness, or being any kind of moral or ethical imperative. Not to say I subscribe to the extremely-online negativity about children in general either, just that the underlying premise for “people aren’t willing to put in the effort” is an implicit “people should be willing to put in the effort”. To me it’s a morally neutral choice in the abstract, but one to be made with great care lest it fall into the moral negative by bringing a new person into a life where they don’t have what they need to thrive.
Climbing Everest is difficult, expensive, dangerous, and rewarding, but if I made a comment about people not being willing to make sacrifices to do it, they’d look at me like I had three heads.
I think it may be pertinent to mention that while people lived in squalor in the 1800's, they also lived lives where many facets were (at the time) just uncoupled from the economy. Today, you...
I think it may be pertinent to mention that while people lived in squalor in the 1800's, they also lived lives where many facets were (at the time) just uncoupled from the economy. Today, you can't (as easily) make a direct translation from work to reward and simply "skip" the "acquire money" part that is now cemented in-between.
For example; today you're going to run into many problems trying to grow a subsistence garden, especially in an urban environment, in comparison to the 1800's. HOA and city ordinances are going to stop you.
If you send your kids to school in homemade clothes today, there's a nonzero chance CPS will be called on you.
Even trickier: even if you had the know-how to make your own clothes and grow your own food (a rarity today) you likely don't have the time due to the increased expectations for work hours. You simply do not have the time or energy. This fosters a feeling of general helplessness and an unwanted co-dependence upon the system.
Wait, why would anyone call CPS on you for sending them to school in handmade clothes? Chances are they are higher quality than the stuff you buy in the stores, and it’s not likely anyone would...
Wait, why would anyone call CPS on you for sending them to school in handmade clothes? Chances are they are higher quality than the stuff you buy in the stores, and it’s not likely anyone would even notice unless it’s put together particularly badly.
Sorry, for the late reply. It may be higher quality stuff than what's bought in the stores; but that's all irrelevant if "suburbanite Karen" sees it, chances are her sheltered mind is going to...
Sorry, for the late reply.
It may be higher quality stuff than what's bought in the stores; but that's all irrelevant if "suburbanite Karen" sees it, chances are her sheltered mind is going to revert to Hollywood/cartoon logic and think the family is so dirt poor they need a wellness check, either out of pure genuine ignorance, spiteful 4-D chess bullying, or somewhere in-between the two.
It's an incredibly slim chance such a thing would ever realistically happen, but it is a nonzero chance.
At least, that's what all comes to my mind when I think of potential reactions to the idea of handmade clothes. Mostly positive things, save for a few bad actors that can't help but bring more merit to the phrase "....this is why we can't have nice things."
Yeah, but if those factors were the main drivers of this (which, as an American, I would also expect), we wouldn't see such low fertility rates in, say, European countries with a much stronger...
Yeah, but if those factors were the main drivers of this (which, as an American, I would also expect), we wouldn't see such low fertility rates in, say, European countries with a much stronger social safety net. That's the part that surprises me. I would've thought that low-cost childcare, low/no cost higher education, and low/no cost healthcare would make a huge impact on fertility rates. And yet, according to this article, it doesn't.
Yeah but kids don't die as easy anymore. You used to need ten kids to ensure you might have three make it to adulthood. Then, if all ten made it, well fuck you've got a big family now. Humans...
Yeah but kids don't die as easy anymore. You used to need ten kids to ensure you might have three make it to adulthood. Then, if all ten made it, well fuck you've got a big family now. Humans adapted rather quickly to the idea that you don't need to have fifteen kids and, including how much more it costs to raise a kid even just in terms of time, people decided to 'spend' less on kids.
More reliable cars means people buy less cars. More reliable kids, just in terms of overall survival, means people make less kids.
The expectation on parents to be involved has rapidly made parenting a much more costly proposition as well. Can you imagine if I'd charged my kid my hourly rate every time I have to take them to practice, doctor's appointment, etc? Meanwhile, my parents just gave me a key to the house and hoped I was still alive when they got home.
Sort of, the medical/physical aspects are not unique to the US. They may be worse in the US but until you build an artificial womb, every child comes with a permanent physical toll on another...
Sort of, the medical/physical aspects are not unique to the US. They may be worse in the US but until you build an artificial womb, every child comes with a permanent physical toll on another person's body.
I'm not saying that's all, a lack of strong need to have kids to work the family farm or business is another social change. It's a luxury to name and love infants in our societies in way that was just impossible emotionally in the past. It's not any one thing but for me those reasons are so compelling, even if I had cash to spare I wouldn't give birth
Entel, Nuncle, Auncle None of those do much for me and I'm in the "demigender non-binary woman" realm of things so auntie isn't particularly upsetting. They're little so we'll see what happens.
Entel, Nuncle, Auncle
None of those do much for me and I'm in the "demigender non-binary woman" realm of things so auntie isn't particularly upsetting. They're little so we'll see what happens.
There have been a lot of eloquent points made, but I do want to drill down a little more on why women who have a choice are less likely to choose children. There's the obvious issues posed by...
There have been a lot of eloquent points made, but I do want to drill down a little more on why women who have a choice are less likely to choose children.
On a related note, I was listening to an episode of the New York Times' Ezra Klein Show and learned something rather startling. Evidently, a lot of the gender pay gap can be explained by...
On a related note, I was listening to an episode of the New York Times' Ezra Klein Show and learned something rather startling. Evidently, a lot of the gender pay gap can be explained by childbirth. What's especially fascinating about that is that, in lesbian relationships, the woman who bears the child ends up also bearing the costs of the gender pay gap. The career hit is lifelong. And in our capitalist, individualistic culture, that's really hard to ignore.
Interesting, do you have a link? If this correlation is actually causation, that leads me to more questions, especially about relationships where "none" of the partners are bearing the child,...
Interesting, do you have a link? If this correlation is actually causation, that leads me to more questions, especially about relationships where "none" of the partners are bearing the child, adoption, surrogate mother, etc. Is neither of the parents taking the hit in that case, or is there some other mechanism att work. E.g. the lesbian mother bearing the child in the example above, is it the childbearing that is the cause, or is the cause that she is more likely to make sacrifices for her family? Or something else
EZRA KLEIN: I think at this point it is fair to say we simply are using the wrong word for it. So back when I was at Vox, as editor, Sarah Kliff, who was there too, is now at “The New York Times” and is a great health and policy reporter, she did a ton of work on this. And we actually did a Netflix episode about it, and the whole thing. And it’s really a motherhood penalty.
RICHARD REEVES: Right.
EZRA KLEIN: And you could see this in different countries, and you see it in lesbian couples.
RICHARD REEVES: Yes.
EZRA KLEIN: Can you just trace some of that finding?
RICHARD REEVES: Yeah, I actually drew on some of Sarah’s work when I was looking at this. I think it’s really, really excellent work. And that is basically right. I mean, essentially, what you’re seeing is it’s a parenting penalty, I’ll put it that way, because it actually turns out — as you say, we have very good evidence from same sex couples now, et cetera, that it is just this fact of, you have a child. That affects what happens to you in the labor market.
And because that’s mostly women, that’s having this gender effect. So it’s really striking if you look at, like, earnings of men and women in their 20s now are very close, but around the age of 30, something happens. What is that thing — well, duh. And if you look at the charts that I think Sarah and others drew on, from — Kleven has good work in Denmark, but Corinne Low, I think, and others, have work in the US — that it’s still essentially true that for women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite, whereas for men, it doesn’t make a dent.
You just don’t see it, assuming they’re in heterosexual couples. And then what you see from this new data on same sex couples is that it’s really the parent. So among lesbian couples, as I think you alluded to, that the birth parent has suffered this wage penalty. What’s interesting, of course, about lesbian couples is that very often, you can take it in turns to be the birth parent. And so to that extent, within the couple at least, the “pain” of being out of the labor market for a while and losing out in the labor market can be shared.
But in a straight couple, obviously, it’s inevitable that the woman will be the birth parent. And if the birth parent is still the one that’s kind of paying this economic cost in the labor market, we’re still going to see a gender pay gap. And that is largely the reason for the gender pay gap. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean, OK, nothing to see here, then, move on. What it does is it just raises the more interesting question, which is, OK, so why is that then? Why is it that women are taking more time out of the labor market?
Why does parenting have such disparate effects on women and men? Is that really a choice? How far is that choice constrained? Why are the trade offs so hard? How do we make this better? So in a way, it just raises a more interesting question, rather than saying there’s no question here to be answered.
Is this really a big problem? Automation is going to reduce job availability anyway. And fewer people is ultimately better for the environment. My wife and I have decided not to have children...
Is this really a big problem? Automation is going to reduce job availability anyway. And fewer people is ultimately better for the environment. My wife and I have decided not to have children because we don't really want that path for us, but also don't feel any obligation to society to have them.
It is, because retirement (and forced retirement through automation) is expensive. If you'll allow me to be reductionist, it's essentially a Ponzi scheme. Older folks live longer and need to stay...
It is, because retirement (and forced retirement through automation) is expensive. If you'll allow me to be reductionist, it's essentially a Ponzi scheme. Older folks live longer and need to stay afloat longer, so there need to be more people to provide that wealth which means they will require even more people to keep them alive and in a decent financial state.
There's obviously more to it, but this is one of the problems we'll face when we get a very large population (the baby boomers) that will go into retirement without having the birthrate to afford it. Add even more when there's fewer jobs and you have a stew going.
Ah, I forgot about the retirement funding component. I have basically been planning my retirement without taking social security into account, assuming that it won't be there in 30ish years when I...
Ah, I forgot about the retirement funding component. I have basically been planning my retirement without taking social security into account, assuming that it won't be there in 30ish years when I hit that age.
Oh don't worry, there will be a market collapse every 10ish years to keep you on your toes about that savings as well. I used to be pessimistic about Social Security. I still am, but I'm also...
Oh don't worry, there will be a market collapse every 10ish years to keep you on your toes about that savings as well.
I used to be pessimistic about Social Security. I still am, but I'm also pessimistic about 401k's too.
I'll worry about that as I get closer to retirement age. The S&P 500 has continued to average 10% annual growth over it's lifetime, even accounting for market corrections, and including recent...
I'll worry about that as I get closer to retirement age. The S&P 500 has continued to average 10% annual growth over it's lifetime, even accounting for market corrections, and including recent decades. As you get closer to retirement age, the stock market isn't necessarily the best investment vehicle anyways.
Oh my god you're right. The model is pyramid-shaped. Every level (generation) has to contain more people than the one before or the whole thing collapses.
Oh my god you're right. The model is pyramid-shaped. Every level (generation) has to contain more people than the one before or the whole thing collapses.
Blame Republicans for looting Social Security surpluses in the first place. They could fix this problem easily....just remove annual payroll caps on social security taxes, and increase the number...
Blame Republicans for looting Social Security surpluses in the first place. They could fix this problem easily....just remove annual payroll caps on social security taxes, and increase the number of required work credits to qualify for it.
Wages over $160k are not subject to social security taxes. That rule should really just be removed...anybody making more than that isn't suffering from it.
Hell start putting those wealth/estate taxes back in place, using them to fund social security, and it'll help change that familial generational wealth into societal generational wealth.
It doesn't need to be pyramid-shaped population, if we operate under the assumption that all this technological progress was to ease the burden of labor. Otherwise we'd have to admit all these productivity and GDP gains in the face of stagnating populations were mostly an illusion.
I was absolutely shocked the first time my paycheck spiked in October. I actually reached out to payroll to see if there was a mistake. But, no, I had just hit the SS cap for the first time. It...
I was absolutely shocked the first time my paycheck spiked in October. I actually reached out to payroll to see if there was a mistake. But, no, I had just hit the SS cap for the first time. It makes absolutely no sense to me there’s a cap. If anything there should be a cap in the other direction. Don’t start paying into SS if you make less than $x but once you’re over that you never stop paying.
It occurs to me... The Federal tax rate for 2023. Assuming single, wages between $44k and $95k are taxed at 22%. Betwen $95k and $182k 24%. $182k and $231k at 32%. But since everyone below $160k...
It occurs to me...
The Federal tax rate for 2023. Assuming single, wages between $44k and $95k are taxed at 22%. Betwen $95k and $182k 24%. $182k and $231k at 32%.
But since everyone below $160k pays 6.2% SS tax, the de-facto rate for wages over $160k are 18% for $160-182, and 26% for $183-231.
It's insane to me that people pay a lower rate for their earnings between $160-182 than for the earnings between $45-95. At the upper bound, that's only about $4k in taxes for $22,000 in income. But for that 45-95 pay, they pay almost $5k for the same $22k.
And that multiplies further for married households, where the 22% rate holds to $190k. That means they're paying only 16% on the wages between $160-190.
I get the need to subsidize households (the difference between feeding and housing children vs no children is huge), but this really highlights just how much the scales are tipped against the poor.
I had about the same reaction. It's a Ponzi scheme on a societal, or damn near global, scale. It's why immigrants are valuable as replacement for a dropping birthrate, they provide extra manpower...
I had about the same reaction. It's a Ponzi scheme on a societal, or damn near global, scale. It's why immigrants are valuable as replacement for a dropping birthrate, they provide extra manpower for the workforce and directly feed into the endgame by paying taxes. If you don't have enough people, just import them!
Our modern global systems are built largely on a concept of infinite growth and this applies to population too. It's how you get an infinitely bigger customer base and have the working population...
Our modern global systems are built largely on a concept of infinite growth and this applies to population too. It's how you get an infinitely bigger customer base and have the working population to support large retirement pools. However, at some point or another it has to end and we need to figure something else out.
Agreed, and this will force our hand to figure out alternatives to infinite growth. I don't see that as a bad thing. It might be bad for a period of time, but a different system has the potential...
Agreed, and this will force our hand to figure out alternatives to infinite growth. I don't see that as a bad thing. It might be bad for a period of time, but a different system has the potential to be better in the long run.
For you? Probably not. For the Capitalist-class, you better believe it. Automation means they don't have to pay you for your job, they continuie to make huge sums of cash based on it. It's less...
Is this really a big problem?
For you? Probably not.
For the Capitalist-class, you better believe it. Automation means they don't have to pay you for your job, they continuie to make huge sums of cash based on it. It's less control.
But also, much of the effects of substantial population decline aren't going to be happening for quite some time. So by then, there's a lot of harm going on.
My wife and I have decided not to have children because we don't really want that path for us, but also don't feel any obligation to society to have them.
We're the same. Just never been inclined that way and I'm staring into retirement at the ripe old age of 50-53 at this rate. I don't really want to jepodise that when I've got a decent job, that I don't get burnt to death by and I can just think for the future and live now as well.
Kids would cause too many compromises for my life.
I don't think we're that far off from the effects of this. The article says this decline has been going on since 2008. That might seem like it's somewhat recent, but it will be a few short years...
But also, much of the effects of substantial population decline aren't going to be happening for quite some time.
I don't think we're that far off from the effects of this. The article says this decline has been going on since 2008. That might seem like it's somewhat recent, but it will be a few short years until people born in 2008 will be entering the workforce.
In terms of the effect of automation on jobs and wages, it will be difficult to quantify. It will depend on how many (and what type of) jobs are lost to automation, compared to the decrease in people entering the workforce and a larger number than that exiting the workforce.
It's a problem because for our current economy and government systems to work the way it does it requires there to be a bigger working force then not. If it comes too close to not enough people...
It's a problem because for our current economy and government systems to work the way it does it requires there to be a bigger working force then not. If it comes too close to not enough people working and there's a lot of people pulling resources without putting anything back in the system starts to collapse because there's not enough being made or produced to sustain everyone. You're right that automation alleviates that however all those people that used to work and pay taxes are no longer doing that so that's all lost tax revenue which our government needs to function. Unless legislation is passed to tax companies for using automation to recoup that loss, highly unlikely as companies will fight tooth and nail against it, the government won't have enough taxes coming in to do what it normally does.
As the article observes… Others have raised the very important question of who pays for the retirement of the elderly. But there is the question also of who will actually care for the retired?...
As the article observes…
Recently, however, declining fertility has stoked anxieties around the world, as leaders face down the prospect of slowing growth and aging populations. Fewer births do have real consequences for how families and societies operate. In 2010, for example, there were more than seven family members available to care for each person over the age of 80; by 2030, there will be only four. An aging society also means fewer workers in key industries and fewer people paying into programs like social security.
Others have raised the very important question of who pays for the retirement of the elderly. But there is the question also of who will actually care for the retired? Assuming we had the political will to tax the companies benefiting from broad automation (which is no guarantee), unless that automation also includes advanced robot caretakers, there simply won't be anyone to actually work at the retirement villages we are going to need.
I think that depends on which jobs ultimately get automated and to what level. Presumably if you reduced or eliminated common, easily automatable positions like retail/grocery, warehousing and...
I think that depends on which jobs ultimately get automated and to what level. Presumably if you reduced or eliminated common, easily automatable positions like retail/grocery, warehousing and fast food, that's millions of jobs that could shift to future services that are more difficult to automate like healthcare.
There are a lot of people who can handle a job in a warehouse/retail/etc who absolutely could not handle wiping grandma's bottom/calming down grandpa when he's throwing a fit/letting less than...
There are a lot of people who can handle a job in a warehouse/retail/etc who absolutely could not handle wiping grandma's bottom/calming down grandpa when he's throwing a fit/letting less than modern opinions roll off their back. Elder neglect and abuse is already an issue in care homes when the workers ostensibly have a desire to be in the field; it'll be worse if more people are forced to work there because it's the only job in town.
There are also people who could handle it, if they were paid a comfortable wage to do so, but currently those jobs don't pay a comfortable wage. I'd like to see those wages increase and reasses...
There are also people who could handle it, if they were paid a comfortable wage to do so, but currently those jobs don't pay a comfortable wage. I'd like to see those wages increase and reasses the situation.
Yeah, people who can do jobs like that well are saints. It's really not for everyone. Already, living in a retirement home is supposed to be incredibly depressing and demoralizing. I can't imagine...
Yeah, people who can do jobs like that well are saints. It's really not for everyone.
Already, living in a retirement home is supposed to be incredibly depressing and demoralizing. I can't imagine how much worse it would be if the people working there wanted to be there even less than the people who do the job now.
That’s one of the less directly talked-about topics related to lower birth rates and an inverting population pyramid. If we need 50 healthcare workers per 1000 people over 65, but we only have 1...
That’s one of the less directly talked-about topics related to lower birth rates and an inverting population pyramid. If we need 50 healthcare workers per 1000 people over 65, but we only have 1 (or even 10) for every 1000, that will lead to a major decline in quality of care, unless you counter it with labor conscription (which would make the elder abuse problem worse).
I think this recurring question about why fertility rates are falling and what governments can do to stop it is interesting for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that I think is always...
I think this recurring question about why fertility rates are falling and what governments can do to stop it is interesting for a variety of reasons.
But one of the things that I think is always missing is a question of why fertility rates were higher in the past and why they are higher in developing countries. Is it just access to effective family-planning? Is it simply that, if you give women access to future that doesn't just consist of motherhood, birth rates will collapse?
And not that it just has to be one thing. It could be a whole confluence of factors. But what's interesting is how pervasive the drop in fertility rates is across many developed countries. The fact that this article implies that generous social programs don't seem to move the needle significantly was especially surprising to me. I know that, for my wife and me, the primary reason we only had one child was economic. We might have had a second child if we had had access to affordable, high quality childcare and didn't have to worry about future costs like college. But according to this article, that's not enough for most people. (And I can't say I blame people — having kids can be hard, particularly when they're young and doubly so if parents are doing it all on their own.)
This is a huge reason, of many, I believe. We have two little kids under 6. It's hard to make time for ourselves, but we're able to do it because we're very lucky that my Sister in Law lives 8...
This is a huge reason, of many, I believe.
We have two little kids under 6. It's hard to make time for ourselves, but we're able to do it because we're very lucky that my Sister in Law lives 8 minutes away and recently my Mother In Law moved 5 minutes away. Even just having the MIL go from 25 minutes to 5 made an enormous difference in the help we receive from her.
My own parents and sibling are 45-50 minutes away and we end up seeing them maybe once a month and almost never asking for help from them because of the distance.
I can't imagine how my own parents did it with two kids and no family nearby. Granted, it was the 80s, but it's no wonder they're constantly at each other's throats and seem miserable.
It seems the answer then is to do absolutely everything possible to encourage work from home. Sure, there are a good number of jobs that can't be done from home. But the kinds of jobs people move...
It seems the answer then is to do absolutely everything possible to encourage work from home. Sure, there are a good number of jobs that can't be done from home. But the kinds of jobs people move cities for? With the exception of manufacturing, those are largely jobs that can be done from home. Companies hiring white collar workers who insist on working from an office should have to pay a massive tax penalty for that preference. Corporate leaders who demand employees return to the office are making our entire society pay for the little ego boost they get from seeing their drones in cubicles. It's killing the birth rate, impoverishing the populace in commute costs, and it's destroying the environment.
Do you make employees come in to an office for a role that could easily be done from home? You should have to pay a 50% tax surcharge for their wage to the state for all the extra costs you are dumping on society.
Corporate leaders like work from home because work, for them, is more about an ego boost than it is actual work and earning a living. Once you get to the CEO level, you already have more money than you can ever need. At that point, you're only really working because you think you are the second coming of Christ, you get a weird ego boost out of seeing other people fawn over you, you're a sexual predator and want to be able to coerce sex out of your minions, or all of the above. This is why there's been such a push back against work from home. The sociopaths at the top don't see work like ordinary humans do, and they're largely pursuing it for power and ego reasons. Work from home is great for productivity, great for the bottom line, great for employees, and great for the environment. The only people it harms are sociopaths who have a need to see people grovel at their feet on a daily basis. The primary downside of work from home is that it robs these psychopaths of their ego boost.
So I say we tax the hell out of them for the privilege. Do you force your employees to come in to the office so you can coerce sex from them? Well while we don't have a great track record of stopping that, at least we can make you pay handsomely for the privilege. Hire an employee for $50k? You'll have to pay an extra $25k of payroll tax if you're going to force them to come to the office.
Let's start making the sociopaths pay for the destruction they're causing to our society and planet. Tax the hell out of white collar work done inside offices.
I think this is a bit missing the forest for the trees. I don't disagree that RTO is at odds with the world we live in, but I don't think that simply having WFH will solve things. We need to also...
It seems the answer then is to do absolutely everything possible to encourage work from home.
I think this is a bit missing the forest for the trees. I don't disagree that RTO is at odds with the world we live in, but I don't think that simply having WFH will solve things. We need to also have a much wider cultural shift back towards communal living, especially living close to people. I used to live 5 minutes from my friends + BF. Now they live 25 min away by car, and the friction difference in interacting with them is colossal.
We will need to change our societies to become much denser and closer together. We will need to have the people we rely on be just a few minutes walk away if we are going to have positive replacement rates. WFH is going to be a big part of it, especially in the short term as we have to cope with housing crises, but it's not the last word.
People are more insular now too, even when living in the same community; density will not solve this. I've been on my Neighborhood board in some capacity for the last 4 years, no one comes. Sure...
People are more insular now too, even when living in the same community; density will not solve this. I've been on my Neighborhood board in some capacity for the last 4 years, no one comes. Sure everyone has something to bitch about and expects us to do something about it, but they don't bother to come build bridges with the few neighbors that do come.
Same goes for the PTA at my kids school: last meeting was myself, my wife, the president and the principle.
I'm not religious, but I've helped the church in my community with some projects and their parish priest has said the same thing: no one comes to church or church functions.
We've spent the last 15 years or so isolating ourselves in our little bubbles online, no one wants to come out and participate in the rest of the world. Life (in the US) has become a zero sum game and if you're not working towards bettering yourself and your family at the cost of everyone else, you're losing.
People are so concerned with getting ahead and "hustling" that they don't have the bandwidth to go to a community meeting. It's extra work for no obvious, tangible, monetary gain and they're already stretched to the limit trying to make sure they and their family win the game.
This is indeed a rather large issue. We had three kids but lived an hour away from one side of the family and 12 hours away from the other, which basically meant my wife was a stay at home mom or...
This is indeed a rather large issue. We had three kids but lived an hour away from one side of the family and 12 hours away from the other, which basically meant my wife was a stay at home mom or on rare occasions we hired a babysitter and once in a blue moon the hour away grandparents came in to look after the kids for a break. It worked, but that was back when a family could live (very frugally) on one salary. Not likely going to happen in todays economy.
Now the situation is reversed and we have one set of grandkids that are 30 minutes away and the others are 12 hours away. So we can indeed help out with one set but very difficult with the others. The fact that our family has all sought out our current locations, largely due to jobs, means that the village is pretty dispersed and we cant easily be a direct help, even when we want to be.
There is qualified daycare available and several of our family are involved in that service, but it's not the equivalent replacement for the family village.
Yes, much of the issue has to do with how precariously balanced the financial situations of many who are parents or those who would be are or would become by adding kids, combined with the near...
Yes, much of the issue has to do with how precariously balanced the financial situations of many who are parents or those who would be are or would become by adding kids, combined with the near unavoidable time-poverty that being a parent entails.
The former of those is particularly problematic in the US. Many families are just one string of unfortunate events from being out in the street. Why would anybody who’s doing alright without kids (or with the number they have already) want to put themselves in such a risky position?
I know that economic factors weigh heavily on people's decisions regarding both whether or not to have children as well as how many children to have. I often wonder if that's the case in...
I know that economic factors weigh heavily on people's decisions regarding both whether or not to have children as well as how many children to have. I often wonder if that's the case in developing countries, too. When you have no social safety net, children become your retirement plan. When you work in subsistence farming, children become your laborers. Perhaps it's excessively cynical to view it in that lens, but I still wonder how much those things play into the large families we see in developing countries. Today and in the past.
To be honest, receiving 60% of wage for a couple of years and then taking care of the kids for twenty more years while being at an disadvantage under the current economical system still seems like...
To be honest, receiving 60% of wage for a couple of years and then taking care of the kids for twenty more years while being at an disadvantage under the current economical system still seems like a hard move to make.
If we don't manage to get rid of capitalism rat race, at some point either people are enslaved and bred or they plain and simple demand to be compensated for the full expense of taking care of "future workers" and the whole selfishness dystopia will come to it's logical HR conclusion.
My opinion on climate change is that a child I might have in North America today is so much better off than billions of people already alive today. Finances are a different matter, but hesitance...
My opinion on climate change is that a child I might have in North America today is so much better off than billions of people already alive today. Finances are a different matter, but hesitance around climate change is more about the disappointment of a relative decrease in quality of life than us passing some unacceptable absolute quality of life threshold.
It's interesting that it changed the timings of births but not the number of planned children. Five or ten years ago, no amount of financial incentives would have convinced me to have a child. But...
It's interesting that it changed the timings of births but not the number of planned children. Five or ten years ago, no amount of financial incentives would have convinced me to have a child. But now that I've changed my mind on that, I feel like there's a certain amount of money that would make me want to go from 1 to 2, or 2 to 3, or way more than 3. Maybe it's because I don't have multiple children, but I feel like the biggest step is from 0 ->1.
That said, I'm male. I don't have to carry it for 9 months. My wife may have different opinions on being a baby factory no matter how much money the government throws at her.
Ha, I’ve actually found the reverse to be true for my wife and I. 0 to 1 was such a monumental upending of our day-to-day lives that it pales in comparison to “adding another bird to the cage” as...
Ha, I’ve actually found the reverse to be true for my wife and I. 0 to 1 was such a monumental upending of our day-to-day lives that it pales in comparison to “adding another bird to the cage” as a co-worker of mine so eloquently described having multiple kids. That “oh shit” moment when your newborn is beside you in the hospital room and you realize you’re now forever responsible for another human life hit me like a ton of bricks the first time around in a way that the second didn’t.
Of course, one is easy mode compared to corralling two kids, but when they play together it feels like a week-long luxury cruise vacation even if it’s really only a few minutes — no family nearby to help, so we cherish any respite. I imagine things will get easier as far as having to be “on” all the time with them and surely others will get more difficult to compensate as is life.
Strictly anecdotally, time is the biggest factor for us. We could afford a child and have the space. But with our work schedules we don't have the time we'd want to dedicate to a child. I think...
Strictly anecdotally, time is the biggest factor for us. We could afford a child and have the space. But with our work schedules we don't have the time we'd want to dedicate to a child. I think previous generations had more social pressure to have children and so made compromises to get it done. But I don't want to have a kid and only have 2-3 hours a day of contact. I need changes in work expectations before I'm ready to be a father.
I also think that previous generations had more time to dedicate to raising children as well as less need of that time. Lives were run in a way where taking care of children was built into daily...
I also think that previous generations had more time to dedicate to raising children as well as less need of that time. Lives were run in a way where taking care of children was built into daily existence in a way it just isn't anymore.
If you have a farm 50+ years ago and extended family all living within a short distance of one another then having children is not the same type of experience as if you have an apartment and children in the city today. Both parents would likely be more present and around, relatively young children could still be helpful with daily necessary tasks and chores, you have extended family to help supplement for child care, and likely your life goals and anchors of meaning are heavily intertwined with having children in a way that ours just aren't anymore.
It's a much different experience and calculation overall when it comes to having kids.
It's just not enough money. While I was working in China, my coworkers with children had a good laugh when they heard of the cash bonuses for extra births. They then ranted about the actual costs...
It's just not enough money. While I was working in China, my coworkers with children had a good laugh when they heard of the cash bonuses for extra births. They then ranted about the actual costs of supporting a child until the child can be independent, gets married, or both.
There are two major reasons why I decided to not have children: I feel far too much uncertainty about the future. I foresee society becoming far less stable and more dangerous over time, due to a...
There are two major reasons why I decided to not have children:
I feel far too much uncertainty about the future. I foresee society becoming far less stable and more dangerous over time, due to a variety of factors (the climate being the big one). I don't want to put my hypothetical children through that.
I don't live near my family, and my partner and I both work. We'd be relying heavily on childcare, which is both very expensive and also not the way I would want to raise my kids.
We want one kid. I work less than 20h per week and we both have good income so I would be happy to be the main caretaker. The world is collapsing, but I refuse to let the fuckers win and stop...
We want one kid.
I work less than 20h per week and we both have good income so I would be happy to be the main caretaker.
The world is collapsing, but I refuse to let the fuckers win and stop having kids while capitalists destroy the world. It is what they want. They want me gone.
That said, I am already 37 and my wife is 29 and we still don't own a house because the prices are absurd. We don't want to have a kid if we don't own a house first. The clock is ticking.
I understand that this might seem generous to some people, but I'm not surprised this didn't work. This is far to little to even convince couples who are on the fence about starting a family. Many...
In 2009, after decades of falling birth rates, it began offering six months of paid parental leave, reimbursed at 60 percent of a new parent’s salary — then recently increased that share to 80 percent. The government has introduced a cash benefit and a tax break for parents of young children, and has invested in child care centers.
I understand that this might seem generous to some people, but I'm not surprised this didn't work. This is far to little to even convince couples who are on the fence about starting a family. Many Euro countries have double (any metric in that sentence), and are still below replacement rate.
Anything below a year at full salary (capped for high income) is not enough, ideally with time for the other parent on top. Anything below a daycare spot that is de-facto guaranteed is not enough.
Anything less than a year is laughable and daycare costs in the US are ridiculous. Absolutely brutal in the US. Assuming you can find a spot at all. We paid $1800 a month for daycare in a...
Anything less than a year is laughable and daycare costs in the US are ridiculous. Absolutely brutal in the US. Assuming you can find a spot at all.
We paid $1800 a month for daycare in a slightly-high-but-not-really-high-at-all-cost-of-living city for pre-school. That’s for a relatively high-end daycare with organic food and some other value added stuff like a living wage and benefits for staff. We paid $300 per month for a really, really nice daycare for the same kid in a different country.
Not pay in theory or based on articles. Actually paid.
And while I’m fine sacrificing my personal time, finances, etc. for my kids. And while I worked through my concerns about global warming, microplastics, sustainability, etc. before we had them. And while I embraced a belief that the world will need people to solve our problems and I should do my best to educate the next generation, teach them about why this all matters, and then support them no matter what they decide to do.
When I was a baby (prior to President Clinton really turning the screws on welfare payments,) my mom was able to live frugally on welfare and care for me full time. It wasn't a lot of money, but...
When I was a baby (prior to President Clinton really turning the screws on welfare payments,) my mom was able to live frugally on welfare and care for me full time. It wasn't a lot of money, but it enabled her to live an ok life and care for a kid. Once welfare was tightened, she put me into a preschool program and returned to work, and very definitely didn't have the time or capacity to have & care for another kid.
If we really want people to bear children for the state, we've got to have programs that ensure that they actually can do that work. Just offer them the median wage for their city plus an additional amount per kid, and people will line up to be full time parents.
3,664,292 children were born in the USA in 2021. If we wanted to pay each child-bearing parent $50,000 a year for four years for them to be parents until the kid could enter preschool, that would cost... $732,858,400,000 a year, or 120 times the current national budget.
Maybe it's not worth it to pay parents to feed new people into the machine of modern productive society. Maybe it's better to just import adults from elsewhere where it's cheaper to produce them.
We work too damn much.
Two full time working parents is too much for trying to raise kids. We should be able to get by with two part-time parents.
Not enough vacations and I don’t get any time with my family on the Holidays. Not that it matters, because neither does my other family members.
I got COVID from my kids, so it was just back to back weeks of burning PTO and sick time.
I look at my food budget, if I don’t grocery shop mid week, I’m burning my cash on delivery fees. But if I’m too tired because I just worked 8 hours and then had to cook dinner and clean my place, what time do I have to run out and shop. God forbid I want some time to play games with my kids.
Raising kids in the US sucks.
When the labor movement was at its strongest one of the most important things it won was the 8 hour workday. The idea was 8 hours were supposed to be for work, 8 for sleep, and 8 hours for working on the home and leisure.
Since that time, businesses have chipped away at the remaining 8 hours of time in a laborer’s day. Commute times have ballooned but remain unpaid. Many job types demand “unofficially” that you remain reachable outside of the hours you get paid for. You have a 30 minute lunch time, which is both the absolute minimum legally allowed and during which time you do not get paid.
The executives in major companies are run by people who are exclusively focused on raising profits continuously and there are only two options to do so: improve sales or reduce internal expenditures, and unfortunately for us it’s massively simpler to do the latter and we all suffer for it.
Also only one parent had to work that in order to support an entire family of 4+ and still live a relatively comfortable life.
Finances, time, the physical cost of pregnancy on the body, the risk to health and safety while our medical system and our government still refuse to actually treat women, particularly pregnant women, particularly women of color, particularly queer AFAB people as autonomous beings rather than potential incubators?
Yeah. Look I love kids but I don't have time or money, or energy. And I haven't wanted my own kids for a long time. I have nephews and will likely have more. I'm pretty content being the queer auntie (IDK a good non-binary "aunt/uncle" replacement that I like)
Yeah it's wild they're at all surprised by this. Housing market is terrible, the health insurance industry is basically a racketeering scam that doesn't even actually cover all your costs, human overpopulation, a dying/dead ecosystem, the replacement of a middle class with a class of penniless peasants begging for scraps from capitalist feudal lord billionaires...
My wife and I would start popping out kids (9 months from) tomorrow if the fed paid off my mortgage and guaranteed lifetime low cost health insurance. Seems like the declining birth rate isn't that big of a deal to them though, so we'll stay child free.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Everything you listed was worse in the 1800s, yet the birthrate was quite high. People back then had no insurance and lived in squalor, yet found it within themselves to have children regardless. I think the issue more has to do with people today not being willing to give up their comfortable lives to have families and deal with the suffering and reward that comes with it. And now I’m starting to sound like my mom. Yuck.
A big factor I believe is the vastly reduced consequences for not adhering to societal norms or succumbing to familial pressures. A lot of kids born in the past century were likely the product of their parents “getting with the program” and snapping into the templates that they were expected to rather than out of genuine desire for children.
Overall I think that’s probably a positive thing so long as we can figure out an economic system that doesn’t rely on neverending growth. Yes, someone needs to be raising families to keep the ball rolling, but isn’t it better if the overwhelming majority of children are born to parents who want them and can provide an environment in which they can not just exist, but thrive?
You hit the nail on the head. And many of these kids grew up unloved by checked-out parents who didn't really care once the box was ticked.
There were a couple of factors in the 1800s:
Today, people who do not want children (or do not want any more children) have options for avoiding giving birth to them in the first place, rather than leaving them to orphanages. And for most people, children are not valuable assets; they are an expensive luxury, more like a family pet than a family employee. A lot of people do not feel that they can financially justify having children. Of those who do, they can usually only justify around 1-3 children, not the 6+ that our ancestors commonly had.
I mean, they also didn't have effective contraception in the 1800s...
there was a strong cultural expectation that all women would get married.
(not just in the 1800s - until 1974 banks could legally discriminate against unmarried women and refuse to open bank accounts or credit cards for them)
and marital rape was legal in the US up until the 1970s (and not fully outlawed until 1993)
if you're looking at historical birthrates, it's important to look at them in the context of the time. women faced enormous pressure to get married, and once married they were just presumed to always consent to sex with their husbands. there would have been a lot of pregnancies that by modern standards were not planned or necessarily desired.
Many women were pregnant or breastfeeding constantly (sometimes the latter reduces the odds of the former). It just wasn't an option not to be.
You really cannot ignore women's rights, abortion rights, and access to birth control as fundamental factors when comparing to the 1800s or earlier times. Women can divorce partners, can control their fertility long term and can hold their own jobs, have their own money, etc. that means the comparison to the 1800s is vastly different.
There is a strong reverse correlation between education level and fertility (in this context meaning number of kids per person). Educated people, as a group, have less kids.
There's a similar correlation between education level and religion, which itself has a positive correlation to fertility. Religious people have more kids, and educated people are, on average, less religious.
Education being one of the best among various examples of differences between the 1800's and now that could explain lower birthrates.
Personally, I don't think of lower birthrates as a bad thing. We have enough people that hovering around, or going below, replacement rates is just fine. There will be adjustments to make, but you can't really make the case that the future of the human race is at stake.
The only practical reason for it to be considered a problem is if we believe that endless growth capitalism is the only way societies can thrive. Or if we're just worried that the west can't adjust fast enough and we'll all lose our cushy lives.
I love that more people are deciding not to have kids, parenthood should be one of the most intentional decisions in a life.
Absolutely, infinite growth is unsustainable - whether that's in population or capitalism.
I'm a 41-year-old, married and childless person. My wife and I are finally old enough that family members have quit asking when we're going to have kids, because they never believed the standard 'never' answer when we were younger.
Others have already made some excellent points about the differences from then to now, and they’ve said a lot I agree with, but even putting all that aside:
…yes? It’s clear you’ve got mixed feelings on the whole complex question given how you ended the next thought, but at least for me it’s pretty straightforward. I absolutely don’t want to give up the life I live now, and I’m pretty damn certain children would change things for the worse. Making my own life harder for the sake of throwing another new person into that same, harder life seems like a lose-lose?
I dunno, there’s just a kernel of thought there that escapes me. I don’t see creating life as having inherent goodness, or being any kind of moral or ethical imperative. Not to say I subscribe to the extremely-online negativity about children in general either, just that the underlying premise for “people aren’t willing to put in the effort” is an implicit “people should be willing to put in the effort”. To me it’s a morally neutral choice in the abstract, but one to be made with great care lest it fall into the moral negative by bringing a new person into a life where they don’t have what they need to thrive.
Climbing Everest is difficult, expensive, dangerous, and rewarding, but if I made a comment about people not being willing to make sacrifices to do it, they’d look at me like I had three heads.
I think it may be pertinent to mention that while people lived in squalor in the 1800's, they also lived lives where many facets were (at the time) just uncoupled from the economy. Today, you can't (as easily) make a direct translation from work to reward and simply "skip" the "acquire money" part that is now cemented in-between.
For example; today you're going to run into many problems trying to grow a subsistence garden, especially in an urban environment, in comparison to the 1800's. HOA and city ordinances are going to stop you.
If you send your kids to school in homemade clothes today, there's a nonzero chance CPS will be called on you.
Even trickier: even if you had the know-how to make your own clothes and grow your own food (a rarity today) you likely don't have the time due to the increased expectations for work hours. You simply do not have the time or energy. This fosters a feeling of general helplessness and an unwanted co-dependence upon the system.
Wait, why would anyone call CPS on you for sending them to school in handmade clothes? Chances are they are higher quality than the stuff you buy in the stores, and it’s not likely anyone would even notice unless it’s put together particularly badly.
I cannot think of a reason unless they were truly not providing the function of clothes.
Sorry, for the late reply.
It may be higher quality stuff than what's bought in the stores; but that's all irrelevant if "suburbanite Karen" sees it, chances are her sheltered mind is going to revert to Hollywood/cartoon logic and think the family is so dirt poor they need a wellness check, either out of pure genuine ignorance, spiteful 4-D chess bullying, or somewhere in-between the two.
It's an incredibly slim chance such a thing would ever realistically happen, but it is a nonzero chance.
At least, that's what all comes to my mind when I think of potential reactions to the idea of handmade clothes. Mostly positive things, save for a few bad actors that can't help but bring more merit to the phrase "....this is why we can't have nice things."
In the 1800s they didn't have reliable birth control. Some people had access to some kind of condom but they weren't rubber.
Yeah, but if those factors were the main drivers of this (which, as an American, I would also expect), we wouldn't see such low fertility rates in, say, European countries with a much stronger social safety net. That's the part that surprises me. I would've thought that low-cost childcare, low/no cost higher education, and low/no cost healthcare would make a huge impact on fertility rates. And yet, according to this article, it doesn't.
Yeah but kids don't die as easy anymore. You used to need ten kids to ensure you might have three make it to adulthood. Then, if all ten made it, well fuck you've got a big family now. Humans adapted rather quickly to the idea that you don't need to have fifteen kids and, including how much more it costs to raise a kid even just in terms of time, people decided to 'spend' less on kids.
More reliable cars means people buy less cars. More reliable kids, just in terms of overall survival, means people make less kids.
The expectation on parents to be involved has rapidly made parenting a much more costly proposition as well. Can you imagine if I'd charged my kid my hourly rate every time I have to take them to practice, doctor's appointment, etc? Meanwhile, my parents just gave me a key to the house and hoped I was still alive when they got home.
Sort of, the medical/physical aspects are not unique to the US. They may be worse in the US but until you build an artificial womb, every child comes with a permanent physical toll on another person's body.
I'm not saying that's all, a lack of strong need to have kids to work the family farm or business is another social change. It's a luxury to name and love infants in our societies in way that was just impossible emotionally in the past. It's not any one thing but for me those reasons are so compelling, even if I had cash to spare I wouldn't give birth
I've heard of "Entel" or "Pibling" before. Have you heard of others?
Entel, Nuncle, Auncle
None of those do much for me and I'm in the "demigender non-binary woman" realm of things so auntie isn't particularly upsetting. They're little so we'll see what happens.
There have been a lot of eloquent points made, but I do want to drill down a little more on why women who have a choice are less likely to choose children.
There's the obvious issues posed by pregnancy and childbirth, but there are deeper societal issues as well. Women in heterosexual relationships can expect to do a greater amount of chores than their partner, even when both of them work. Adding children into the mix will just make that worse. Furthermore, in their careers women are penalized for becoming a parent, while men get a bonus. It's hardly surprising women aren't keen on becoming parents when they're literally punished for it, along with all the many other issues involved.
On a related note, I was listening to an episode of the New York Times' Ezra Klein Show and learned something rather startling. Evidently, a lot of the gender pay gap can be explained by childbirth. What's especially fascinating about that is that, in lesbian relationships, the woman who bears the child ends up also bearing the costs of the gender pay gap. The career hit is lifelong. And in our capitalist, individualistic culture, that's really hard to ignore.
Interesting, do you have a link? If this correlation is actually causation, that leads me to more questions, especially about relationships where "none" of the partners are bearing the child, adoption, surrogate mother, etc. Is neither of the parents taking the hit in that case, or is there some other mechanism att work. E.g. the lesbian mother bearing the child in the example above, is it the childbearing that is the cause, or is the cause that she is more likely to make sacrifices for her family? Or something else
Here's a transcript of the episode where that was brought up.
The part in question:
Thanks! Looks like they also have some further questions.
Is this really a big problem? Automation is going to reduce job availability anyway. And fewer people is ultimately better for the environment. My wife and I have decided not to have children because we don't really want that path for us, but also don't feel any obligation to society to have them.
It is, because retirement (and forced retirement through automation) is expensive. If you'll allow me to be reductionist, it's essentially a Ponzi scheme. Older folks live longer and need to stay afloat longer, so there need to be more people to provide that wealth which means they will require even more people to keep them alive and in a decent financial state.
There's obviously more to it, but this is one of the problems we'll face when we get a very large population (the baby boomers) that will go into retirement without having the birthrate to afford it. Add even more when there's fewer jobs and you have a stew going.
Ah, I forgot about the retirement funding component. I have basically been planning my retirement without taking social security into account, assuming that it won't be there in 30ish years when I hit that age.
Oh don't worry, there will be a market collapse every 10ish years to keep you on your toes about that savings as well.
I used to be pessimistic about Social Security. I still am, but I'm also pessimistic about 401k's too.
I'll worry about that as I get closer to retirement age. The S&P 500 has continued to average 10% annual growth over it's lifetime, even accounting for market corrections, and including recent decades. As you get closer to retirement age, the stock market isn't necessarily the best investment vehicle anyways.
Oh my god you're right. The model is pyramid-shaped. Every level (generation) has to contain more people than the one before or the whole thing collapses.
Blame Republicans for looting Social Security surpluses in the first place. They could fix this problem easily....just remove annual payroll caps on social security taxes, and increase the number of required work credits to qualify for it.
Wages over $160k are not subject to social security taxes. That rule should really just be removed...anybody making more than that isn't suffering from it.
Hell start putting those wealth/estate taxes back in place, using them to fund social security, and it'll help change that familial generational wealth into societal generational wealth.
It doesn't need to be pyramid-shaped population, if we operate under the assumption that all this technological progress was to ease the burden of labor. Otherwise we'd have to admit all these productivity and GDP gains in the face of stagnating populations were mostly an illusion.
I was absolutely shocked the first time my paycheck spiked in October. I actually reached out to payroll to see if there was a mistake. But, no, I had just hit the SS cap for the first time. It makes absolutely no sense to me there’s a cap. If anything there should be a cap in the other direction. Don’t start paying into SS if you make less than $x but once you’re over that you never stop paying.
It occurs to me...
The Federal tax rate for 2023. Assuming single, wages between $44k and $95k are taxed at 22%. Betwen $95k and $182k 24%. $182k and $231k at 32%.
But since everyone below $160k pays 6.2% SS tax, the de-facto rate for wages over $160k are 18% for $160-182, and 26% for $183-231.
It's insane to me that people pay a lower rate for their earnings between $160-182 than for the earnings between $45-95. At the upper bound, that's only about $4k in taxes for $22,000 in income. But for that 45-95 pay, they pay almost $5k for the same $22k.
And that multiplies further for married households, where the 22% rate holds to $190k. That means they're paying only 16% on the wages between $160-190.
I get the need to subsidize households (the difference between feeding and housing children vs no children is huge), but this really highlights just how much the scales are tipped against the poor.
I had about the same reaction. It's a Ponzi scheme on a societal, or damn near global, scale. It's why immigrants are valuable as replacement for a dropping birthrate, they provide extra manpower for the workforce and directly feed into the endgame by paying taxes. If you don't have enough people, just import them!
Our modern global systems are built largely on a concept of infinite growth and this applies to population too. It's how you get an infinitely bigger customer base and have the working population to support large retirement pools. However, at some point or another it has to end and we need to figure something else out.
Agreed, and this will force our hand to figure out alternatives to infinite growth. I don't see that as a bad thing. It might be bad for a period of time, but a different system has the potential to be better in the long run.
For you? Probably not.
For the Capitalist-class, you better believe it. Automation means they don't have to pay you for your job, they continuie to make huge sums of cash based on it. It's less control.
But also, much of the effects of substantial population decline aren't going to be happening for quite some time. So by then, there's a lot of harm going on.
We're the same. Just never been inclined that way and I'm staring into retirement at the ripe old age of 50-53 at this rate. I don't really want to jepodise that when I've got a decent job, that I don't get burnt to death by and I can just think for the future and live now as well.
Kids would cause too many compromises for my life.
I don't think we're that far off from the effects of this. The article says this decline has been going on since 2008. That might seem like it's somewhat recent, but it will be a few short years until people born in 2008 will be entering the workforce.
In terms of the effect of automation on jobs and wages, it will be difficult to quantify. It will depend on how many (and what type of) jobs are lost to automation, compared to the decrease in people entering the workforce and a larger number than that exiting the workforce.
It's a problem because for our current economy and government systems to work the way it does it requires there to be a bigger working force then not. If it comes too close to not enough people working and there's a lot of people pulling resources without putting anything back in the system starts to collapse because there's not enough being made or produced to sustain everyone. You're right that automation alleviates that however all those people that used to work and pay taxes are no longer doing that so that's all lost tax revenue which our government needs to function. Unless legislation is passed to tax companies for using automation to recoup that loss, highly unlikely as companies will fight tooth and nail against it, the government won't have enough taxes coming in to do what it normally does.
As the article observes…
Others have raised the very important question of who pays for the retirement of the elderly. But there is the question also of who will actually care for the retired? Assuming we had the political will to tax the companies benefiting from broad automation (which is no guarantee), unless that automation also includes advanced robot caretakers, there simply won't be anyone to actually work at the retirement villages we are going to need.
I think that depends on which jobs ultimately get automated and to what level. Presumably if you reduced or eliminated common, easily automatable positions like retail/grocery, warehousing and fast food, that's millions of jobs that could shift to future services that are more difficult to automate like healthcare.
There are a lot of people who can handle a job in a warehouse/retail/etc who absolutely could not handle wiping grandma's bottom/calming down grandpa when he's throwing a fit/letting less than modern opinions roll off their back. Elder neglect and abuse is already an issue in care homes when the workers ostensibly have a desire to be in the field; it'll be worse if more people are forced to work there because it's the only job in town.
There are also people who could handle it, if they were paid a comfortable wage to do so, but currently those jobs don't pay a comfortable wage. I'd like to see those wages increase and reasses the situation.
Yeah, people who can do jobs like that well are saints. It's really not for everyone.
Already, living in a retirement home is supposed to be incredibly depressing and demoralizing. I can't imagine how much worse it would be if the people working there wanted to be there even less than the people who do the job now.
That’s one of the less directly talked-about topics related to lower birth rates and an inverting population pyramid. If we need 50 healthcare workers per 1000 people over 65, but we only have 1 (or even 10) for every 1000, that will lead to a major decline in quality of care, unless you counter it with labor conscription (which would make the elder abuse problem worse).
I think this recurring question about why fertility rates are falling and what governments can do to stop it is interesting for a variety of reasons.
But one of the things that I think is always missing is a question of why fertility rates were higher in the past and why they are higher in developing countries. Is it just access to effective family-planning? Is it simply that, if you give women access to future that doesn't just consist of motherhood, birth rates will collapse?
And not that it just has to be one thing. It could be a whole confluence of factors. But what's interesting is how pervasive the drop in fertility rates is across many developed countries. The fact that this article implies that generous social programs don't seem to move the needle significantly was especially surprising to me. I know that, for my wife and me, the primary reason we only had one child was economic. We might have had a second child if we had had access to affordable, high quality childcare and didn't have to worry about future costs like college. But according to this article, that's not enough for most people. (And I can't say I blame people — having kids can be hard, particularly when they're young and doubly so if parents are doing it all on their own.)
This is a huge reason, of many, I believe.
We have two little kids under 6. It's hard to make time for ourselves, but we're able to do it because we're very lucky that my Sister in Law lives 8 minutes away and recently my Mother In Law moved 5 minutes away. Even just having the MIL go from 25 minutes to 5 made an enormous difference in the help we receive from her.
My own parents and sibling are 45-50 minutes away and we end up seeing them maybe once a month and almost never asking for help from them because of the distance.
I can't imagine how my own parents did it with two kids and no family nearby. Granted, it was the 80s, but it's no wonder they're constantly at each other's throats and seem miserable.
It seems the answer then is to do absolutely everything possible to encourage work from home. Sure, there are a good number of jobs that can't be done from home. But the kinds of jobs people move cities for? With the exception of manufacturing, those are largely jobs that can be done from home. Companies hiring white collar workers who insist on working from an office should have to pay a massive tax penalty for that preference. Corporate leaders who demand employees return to the office are making our entire society pay for the little ego boost they get from seeing their drones in cubicles. It's killing the birth rate, impoverishing the populace in commute costs, and it's destroying the environment.
Do you make employees come in to an office for a role that could easily be done from home? You should have to pay a 50% tax surcharge for their wage to the state for all the extra costs you are dumping on society.
Corporate leaders like work from home because work, for them, is more about an ego boost than it is actual work and earning a living. Once you get to the CEO level, you already have more money than you can ever need. At that point, you're only really working because you think you are the second coming of Christ, you get a weird ego boost out of seeing other people fawn over you, you're a sexual predator and want to be able to coerce sex out of your minions, or all of the above. This is why there's been such a push back against work from home. The sociopaths at the top don't see work like ordinary humans do, and they're largely pursuing it for power and ego reasons. Work from home is great for productivity, great for the bottom line, great for employees, and great for the environment. The only people it harms are sociopaths who have a need to see people grovel at their feet on a daily basis. The primary downside of work from home is that it robs these psychopaths of their ego boost.
So I say we tax the hell out of them for the privilege. Do you force your employees to come in to the office so you can coerce sex from them? Well while we don't have a great track record of stopping that, at least we can make you pay handsomely for the privilege. Hire an employee for $50k? You'll have to pay an extra $25k of payroll tax if you're going to force them to come to the office.
Let's start making the sociopaths pay for the destruction they're causing to our society and planet. Tax the hell out of white collar work done inside offices.
I think this is a bit missing the forest for the trees. I don't disagree that RTO is at odds with the world we live in, but I don't think that simply having WFH will solve things. We need to also have a much wider cultural shift back towards communal living, especially living close to people. I used to live 5 minutes from my friends + BF. Now they live 25 min away by car, and the friction difference in interacting with them is colossal.
We will need to change our societies to become much denser and closer together. We will need to have the people we rely on be just a few minutes walk away if we are going to have positive replacement rates. WFH is going to be a big part of it, especially in the short term as we have to cope with housing crises, but it's not the last word.
People are more insular now too, even when living in the same community; density will not solve this. I've been on my Neighborhood board in some capacity for the last 4 years, no one comes. Sure everyone has something to bitch about and expects us to do something about it, but they don't bother to come build bridges with the few neighbors that do come.
Same goes for the PTA at my kids school: last meeting was myself, my wife, the president and the principle.
I'm not religious, but I've helped the church in my community with some projects and their parish priest has said the same thing: no one comes to church or church functions.
We've spent the last 15 years or so isolating ourselves in our little bubbles online, no one wants to come out and participate in the rest of the world. Life (in the US) has become a zero sum game and if you're not working towards bettering yourself and your family at the cost of everyone else, you're losing.
People are so concerned with getting ahead and "hustling" that they don't have the bandwidth to go to a community meeting. It's extra work for no obvious, tangible, monetary gain and they're already stretched to the limit trying to make sure they and their family win the game.
This is indeed a rather large issue. We had three kids but lived an hour away from one side of the family and 12 hours away from the other, which basically meant my wife was a stay at home mom or on rare occasions we hired a babysitter and once in a blue moon the hour away grandparents came in to look after the kids for a break. It worked, but that was back when a family could live (very frugally) on one salary. Not likely going to happen in todays economy.
Now the situation is reversed and we have one set of grandkids that are 30 minutes away and the others are 12 hours away. So we can indeed help out with one set but very difficult with the others. The fact that our family has all sought out our current locations, largely due to jobs, means that the village is pretty dispersed and we cant easily be a direct help, even when we want to be.
There is qualified daycare available and several of our family are involved in that service, but it's not the equivalent replacement for the family village.
Yes, much of the issue has to do with how precariously balanced the financial situations of many who are parents or those who would be are or would become by adding kids, combined with the near unavoidable time-poverty that being a parent entails.
The former of those is particularly problematic in the US. Many families are just one string of unfortunate events from being out in the street. Why would anybody who’s doing alright without kids (or with the number they have already) want to put themselves in such a risky position?
I know that economic factors weigh heavily on people's decisions regarding both whether or not to have children as well as how many children to have. I often wonder if that's the case in developing countries, too. When you have no social safety net, children become your retirement plan. When you work in subsistence farming, children become your laborers. Perhaps it's excessively cynical to view it in that lens, but I still wonder how much those things play into the large families we see in developing countries. Today and in the past.
To be honest, receiving 60% of wage for a couple of years and then taking care of the kids for twenty more years while being at an disadvantage under the current economical system still seems like a hard move to make.
If we don't manage to get rid of capitalism rat race, at some point either people are enslaved and bred or they plain and simple demand to be compensated for the full expense of taking care of "future workers" and the whole selfishness dystopia will come to it's logical HR conclusion.
For us it's finances and the thought of bringing a child into a world to suffer from a climate (among others) crisis
My opinion on climate change is that a child I might have in North America today is so much better off than billions of people already alive today. Finances are a different matter, but hesitance around climate change is more about the disappointment of a relative decrease in quality of life than us passing some unacceptable absolute quality of life threshold.
That's completely fair. I appreciate your point of view
It's interesting that it changed the timings of births but not the number of planned children. Five or ten years ago, no amount of financial incentives would have convinced me to have a child. But now that I've changed my mind on that, I feel like there's a certain amount of money that would make me want to go from 1 to 2, or 2 to 3, or way more than 3. Maybe it's because I don't have multiple children, but I feel like the biggest step is from 0 ->1.
That said, I'm male. I don't have to carry it for 9 months. My wife may have different opinions on being a baby factory no matter how much money the government throws at her.
0 -> 1 isn't bad. 1 -> 2 is an enormous leap. Can't speak to any higher than that.
Ha, I’ve actually found the reverse to be true for my wife and I. 0 to 1 was such a monumental upending of our day-to-day lives that it pales in comparison to “adding another bird to the cage” as a co-worker of mine so eloquently described having multiple kids. That “oh shit” moment when your newborn is beside you in the hospital room and you realize you’re now forever responsible for another human life hit me like a ton of bricks the first time around in a way that the second didn’t.
Of course, one is easy mode compared to corralling two kids, but when they play together it feels like a week-long luxury cruise vacation even if it’s really only a few minutes — no family nearby to help, so we cherish any respite. I imagine things will get easier as far as having to be “on” all the time with them and surely others will get more difficult to compensate as is life.
Strictly anecdotally, time is the biggest factor for us. We could afford a child and have the space. But with our work schedules we don't have the time we'd want to dedicate to a child. I think previous generations had more social pressure to have children and so made compromises to get it done. But I don't want to have a kid and only have 2-3 hours a day of contact. I need changes in work expectations before I'm ready to be a father.
I also think that previous generations had more time to dedicate to raising children as well as less need of that time. Lives were run in a way where taking care of children was built into daily existence in a way it just isn't anymore.
If you have a farm 50+ years ago and extended family all living within a short distance of one another then having children is not the same type of experience as if you have an apartment and children in the city today. Both parents would likely be more present and around, relatively young children could still be helpful with daily necessary tasks and chores, you have extended family to help supplement for child care, and likely your life goals and anchors of meaning are heavily intertwined with having children in a way that ours just aren't anymore.
It's a much different experience and calculation overall when it comes to having kids.
It's just not enough money. While I was working in China, my coworkers with children had a good laugh when they heard of the cash bonuses for extra births. They then ranted about the actual costs of supporting a child until the child can be independent, gets married, or both.
There are two major reasons why I decided to not have children:
We want one kid.
I work less than 20h per week and we both have good income so I would be happy to be the main caretaker.
The world is collapsing, but I refuse to let the fuckers win and stop having kids while capitalists destroy the world. It is what they want. They want me gone.
That said, I am already 37 and my wife is 29 and we still don't own a house because the prices are absurd. We don't want to have a kid if we don't own a house first. The clock is ticking.
I understand that this might seem generous to some people, but I'm not surprised this didn't work. This is far to little to even convince couples who are on the fence about starting a family. Many Euro countries have double (any metric in that sentence), and are still below replacement rate.
Anything below a year at full salary (capped for high income) is not enough, ideally with time for the other parent on top. Anything below a daycare spot that is de-facto guaranteed is not enough.
Anything less than a year is laughable and daycare costs in the US are ridiculous. Absolutely brutal in the US. Assuming you can find a spot at all.
We paid $1800 a month for daycare in a slightly-high-but-not-really-high-at-all-cost-of-living city for pre-school. That’s for a relatively high-end daycare with organic food and some other value added stuff like a living wage and benefits for staff. We paid $300 per month for a really, really nice daycare for the same kid in a different country.
Not pay in theory or based on articles. Actually paid.
And while I’m fine sacrificing my personal time, finances, etc. for my kids. And while I worked through my concerns about global warming, microplastics, sustainability, etc. before we had them. And while I embraced a belief that the world will need people to solve our problems and I should do my best to educate the next generation, teach them about why this all matters, and then support them no matter what they decide to do.
Daycare is fucking expensive.
When I was a baby (prior to President Clinton really turning the screws on welfare payments,) my mom was able to live frugally on welfare and care for me full time. It wasn't a lot of money, but it enabled her to live an ok life and care for a kid. Once welfare was tightened, she put me into a preschool program and returned to work, and very definitely didn't have the time or capacity to have & care for another kid.
If we really want people to bear children for the state, we've got to have programs that ensure that they actually can do that work. Just offer them the median wage for their city plus an additional amount per kid, and people will line up to be full time parents.
3,664,292 children were born in the USA in 2021. If we wanted to pay each child-bearing parent $50,000 a year for four years for them to be parents until the kid could enter preschool, that would cost... $732,858,400,000 a year, or 120 times the current national budget.
Maybe it's not worth it to pay parents to feed new people into the machine of modern productive society. Maybe it's better to just import adults from elsewhere where it's cheaper to produce them.