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Our total world population has increased BILLIONS in about 4 or 5 decades.
Aside from the issue of elder care/medical infrastructure: why are people concerned at a decline back to the levels in the 1970s/80s?
Because the shifting age pyramid has massive consequences for the whole society…? The most obvious and easy to understand issue is that tons of old people can not live off of a few young people.
So we should have kids for the benefit of old people? Those old people are who fucked up society to where it is now.
I think the problem is that our growth over the last 4-5 decades isn’t sustainable, and now we need to adjust policy to handle the aging population. We shouldn’t grow beyond our means to support ourselves. We’re in a bad place now but making more humans to handle our older population will create the program of needing to make MORE humans to handle those, with our current system, until we run into a resource constraint that will be an even worse situation.
That’s a valid reason and all but I’d also add that life is just very expensive, both parents need to work to make ends meet and lack of time available for child care. If you add housework imbalance you get South Korea level fertility.
There is a pent up demand for kids when looking at “How many do you want?” vs “How many do you have?” but having them is irrational for most people. It takes a long while for parents to become financially secure, usually comes at 30+ years and then you ask one of the parents to take a massive career hit and add 3h of work per day to the schedule.
If the gov really wants babies we really need to reduce work hours to 30/week for both parents.
Where’s the part about impending fascism, 72+hours work weeks, and the housing crisis?
Because I don’t like them and they would ruin my lifestyle
But what if I tell you to have them now because you’ll want them tomorrow? Don’t you want today what you don’t yet want and cannot accurately be predicted to want tomorrow???
If that logic doesn’t work, maybe I can tell you about how miserable my children made me, and then cap my dumbest statement ever with an even dumber “you gotta cuz I had to.”
People need to travel and play GTA6.
People in general always tend to have fewer kids during hard times, whatever they perceive as hard times. But some people clearly keep having them, because the human race still exists even though we’ve always had plagues, wars, famines, etc. They kept having kids through the Ice Age FFS. There’s no point saying people now “aren’t having kids” - of course they are, just not as much as before.
