The global baby bust | The Gray Area

My company said "we are a familly" so I don't need children.

I don't want the birth rate to recover. I think the world has more pressing issues to deal with first.

We need to give the environment a rest. To me, the upsides of population stagnating or slightly decreasing outweigh the negatives.

As a father of 2, I work in HR and my wife is a doctor, the cost of having kids is absolutely astronomical.

Both the financial cost and the personal cost, in the sense of time invested into driving kids to places etc at the expanse of hobbies, traveling, leisure etc that you have to give up.

We love our kids to bits, but both my wife and I agree that if we could go back in time we would have skipped having kids altogether.

I think the proliferation of the concept of the "atomic family" has been the greatest mistake.

The old adage "Takes a village to raise a child" absolutely applies. In the past much of the burdens (in the sense of time) of raising kids was outsourced to the community. Grandparents, uncles, neighbors (kids could just do things by themselves with the remote adult supervision of the community).

Now it's all on the immediate parents. And in places like the US where there's basically no parental leave, and often almost all of the weight of parenting is simply dumped on the mother, it's not surprising people say, pass even if they can financially afford kids.

Countries in the global south have resources. They are just being stolen by multinational corporations.

I keep people talking about lower birthrates, but I never understood why is it an issue.
There was a boom on birthrates with the Industrial Revolution, the drop was bound to happen one day. Add to that the fact that the 1% is boasting that they won't need the lower classes to work for them in the future because they will have AI robots, so why should anyone today have a child if their future is to be unemployed and homeless?

animals in captivity don't breed

When billionaires are telling you "you'll own nothing and be happy" while pressing us to work longer hours for lower wages… exactly where is the money and time to HAVE children? You see this exemplified in South Korea and Japan, where your average weekly working hours is 70h, and in extreme cases, for certain jobs, 120 hours a week. There is literally a phenomenon in Japan called "death by overwork" that the Japanese government is tracking. And you wonder why the country has a birthrate hovering around and below 1 per woman?

"Welcome my son... Welcome to the machine "

And maybe it’s the natural reaction to the huge population explosion that resulted from reducing infant/child mortality? Once upon a time people had to have large families to ensure some offspring stood a reasonable chance to reproduce.
Instead of worrying about birth rates, might it not be better to worry about the planet’s carrying capacity and ensuring that every human being has a decent life?

Funny how no countries that claim to have this issue are trying to fix it by looking back in time to an era when their population was on a healthy rise. In America's case, maybe it's because they know they can't bring back the era of a man being able to afford a house and take care of his wife and 3 children off of his salary from being a simple grocery store clerk. Make it that easy again for us to support a family and you'll get your rising birth rate.

We can't afford children. Next question.

Metarial conditions play a huge role. Just look at how income and wealth inequality continue to accelerate as living standards for the majority drop.

The air is literally getting toxic and we can't afford rent. As a guy, I'm getting that vasectomy and enjoying nature while it's still not too much of a luxury to do so

Has nothing to do with a bachelor’s degree

It can all be summarized by the statement, "people can't have the number of children they want."

In agrarian societies, having more children could contribute to a family's economic prosperity, as children could gradually participate in productive activities such as working in the fields, doing household chores, or caring for younger siblings.

In the post-industrial era, however, having children now often involves significant financial costs and long-term investment.

Because decades of the ruling class enabling "just a little more corruption" has created a terminally dysfunctional society that is failing in just about every measurable metric.

Because we can't afford to live

I'm too busy maximising shareholder value and being a cog in the machine of capitalism.