> No one really knows why birth rates are dropping so fast. [...] Many people have theories but if you critically examine them they fall apart.
> [#1] People do not have money for kids. [#2] The Government isn’t Providing pro-natal policies. [#3] This is happening only in societies that are not religious. [#4] Women are working and not having kids.
That seems like an incomplete list.
For example, how about this one: Industrialization lowers infant mortality with better medical care and creates alternate safety-nets to keep old people without kids from dying in a ditch. Gradually culture changes as people adjust to this, and they stop feeling the need for spare-kids as a hedge against death or to have large broods as a retirement plan.
> It feels like we’re permanently entering a time where population will shrink.
Much of the world's population boom in the last century was from lowered infant mortality [0] and people spending more time alive and being counted. [1] It should be no surprise that both of those hit diminishing returns: It is impossible to save more than 100% of the babies, and immortality is a hard problem to solve.
I'm not having kids because I expect the world they would live in by the time they would be adults will be too dystopian. Even more dystopian than it is already.
I opine that we humans increasingly shape our living situation such that it causes friction with our nature, our primitive psychology and biology. This friction causes increasing unhappiness. When I first realized this in my early twenties I was able to vastly increase my happiness (up to a bearable level, luckily) by removing many such man-made unnatural aspects from my life.
However, I expect that the ability to remove oneself from or avoid man-made degeneracies will be extremely difficult or impossible in a matter of decades. Even my unborn children I love too much to force them into that.
Given these expectations I consider it selfish to the degree of evil to have children. Mind, I do not consider it selfish or evil to have children. Only if you do it with the expectation that they will live in a virtual hell.
I do generally enjoy life, spending time with friends and family, working on a project I am passionate about, pursuing interests, making an effort to be healthy. However, I expect that the degeneracy will increase to a point where a person's happiness would be net negative.
I only communicate this consideration to people I am certain of are able to be open for argumentation, despite them probably not sharing the same belief.
In public the only place I have communicated this consideration is right here. Privately I have communicated this consideration with family and close friends. One of these friends has started actively trying to make babies with his girlfriend after we first started discussing this topic. We have discussed it after he started trying. We have a friendly discussion about it, then move on to another topic. I find conversation does not suffer at all. That is, with the people I have carefully chosen to discuss this with. I can imagine conversation would suffer with most people I would strike up a conversation with in let's say a supermarket.
easier said than done; you don't get to shop around for citizenship. it's not like you can just get permanent residency most places by showing up. even with points-based systems like Australia and Canada the level of effort is high and often not guaranteed.
Pro-natal policies are a drop in the bucket compared to the fact that basics like housing costs 10x more than with the previous high-baby-having generations
Price to income ratios before covid were within normal variation, not even 25% higher than normal iirc. Easy to find sources I'm on my phone:) they are a bit higher now but birth rates were low before, too.
Of course the fact that the developing countries/ poorer immigrants / poorer past generations / poorer but religious groups within countries / you name it, have higher rates should make this obvious.
I personally don't have kids because for me, they would be a pointless boring chore. But I guess many fellow coastal bubble dwellers cannot admit it and need a cope ;)
An anecdote, someone from Russia asked me how big our house was when we bought it after getting married. Without going into the details, that was the smallest house we were possibly considering for 2 people, I said 1100sqft. They said, oooh, so you are planning to have many children then, with so much space!
Nope, we are just spoiled ;)
> basics like housing costs 10x more than with the previous high-baby-having generations
Thank you. I'm a millionaire. I want kids. I see no near-term path to having them without their costs rivaling that of financing multi-million dollar boats [1].
The fundamental problem is children are extremely expensive, particularly for the ambitious. (I'm putting aside the enormous liabilities that arise from e.g. one's child being disabled or trans or simply rebellious in some parts of the country.)
Housing costs are much higher, but you still need to live somewhere. An extra bedroom or two isn't a ×10 increase, it's ×1.2.
Even at £200k (allowing some inflation since 2012), that's leveled over two decades. Obviously that blossoms then explodes if you fall into the fashion trap of assuming price means quality, particularly for schooling. But these are largely optional costs. Relocating for better state schooling often also grants more affordable housing, at the cost of commuting. If you're already a million up, there are many option.
Even if that is somehow equivalent to your yacht, if that's the springs-to-mind opportunity cost, do you actually want children? Or would you rather have a boat?
Also the standard of raising kids has risen a lot as well.
It is fairly easy to have a lot of malnourished illiterate children, but people choose to have healthy kids they send to college, which is a lot more time consuming and expensive.
[5] People actually have some agency* and have decided to limit the number of kids they have for the good of everyone else.
[6] People actually have some agency and think dividing the family wealth among a lot of kids is a bad idea.
* Lot of wanna be cargo cult scientists like economists for instance start off assuming people are without agency. Because they think that's what you do with science. They are both wrong and stupid.
I feel like a test case in what is happening even if it's cliche. Wanted to have kids around my late 20s, but had tons of trouble just dating at that time, much less finding a partner. In my mid-to-late 30s, I had multiple people I was seeing request/give ultimatums on timelines of having kids together after they'd decided they like me, but we'd barely started dating (which I obviously couldn't commit to with someone I barely knew). Now I'm over 40 and have no intention of raising children into my 60s just for the sake of checking a box.
I just don't think that many people have life go their way, at the right time, with the right person.
Me and my friend group spanning many countries of people in their 30s-early 40s all have landed on 0, 1 or 2 kids. Median is certainly below replacement rate. I don’t know anyone who has three or more. I don’t think that trend will be coming back. We’ll all become Japan eventually
There are more fertility issues - probably the main cause is that people are having kids like 10-15 biological years older than a generation or two ago. I don’t think that’s the main cause though - or it should be visible in some kind of insane spike in fertility treatments
Well I can't speak for anybody else, but me and my partner are pushing mid to late 30s and simply haven't got there because of cost and lack of financial stability.
It's difficult to impossible to survive on a single income like my parents did to raise me, and the cost of childcare is the same as losing one income regardless.
For better or worse the economy has been reshaped around the assumption of dual income, full time working couples.
You're right. My wife and I have done the math multiple times, and we'd actually -lose- money if she went back to work.
I remember childcare being rather communal in the US, where I lived, as recently as the early 90s. Now that the media and social media has turned everyone against each other, the only way out seemingly is to subsidize child care.
Genuine question, is it possible childcare facilities are being extortionate, or is it generally a low margin industry?
There are a lot of costs increasing that exceed inflation and frankly, exceed fair value exchange, but many of us are caught between a rock and a hard place. Rent is a great example, cars are another. These things aren't true universally, and it seems other countries are able to provide higher quality of life and cheaper services. Are we just being fleeced, are companies expecting more than their fair share?
Well, a support network is one thing. My grandparents certainly babysat me on occasion, but me and my partner are quite far away (over an hours drive) away from any close family. Naturally my parents are also a lot older than my grandparents were as well, so it would be less fair on them.
I really don't think the phenomenon of people having fewer kids or having kids later is a mystery!
When I was growing up in the 80s, working class neighborhood, most wives had a part time job. Whoever was off that day would watch the kids. I remember sitting in random houses with 7 or so other kids, eating mac n cheese or bologna sandwiches, waiting for our moms to come pick us up after work.
As an adult with my own kid now, it would seem such an idea is a pipe dream.
Yeah, the decline in neighbourlyness would be an even more interesting phenomenon to study.
My person hunch is back in the day there was a more "we're all in the same boat" feeling at the street level, where everyone had similar socioeconomic backgrounds whereas now that's not true at all.
In the past, in the UK, everyone living in a road may have had the same landlord (the local council) but now you can have multi-millionaire with a £50K car living next door to someone in an identical house who is renting privately, on housing benefit, taking the bus to their minimum wage job, and struggling to feed their kids.
People are much more willing to give and receive help from their "peers"
I don't think that's the only factor. I think it's also just culture.
I grew up on a street (in the US) where many of my neighbors did have the same landlord as my family, but none of us spoke to each other; they were basically strangers like any other.
I was born in 2003, so this is more recent than the 1980s.
I believe one reason that is rarely talked about is that having children later in life makes you more tired than if you had them in your 20s. In the times when people were having more children, they were having them early. We all now how it is easier to shrug off a sleepless night in your 20s than in your 30s. We use that advantage to stay out drinking more when we are young, but it was probably evolved to help stay up at night when children were crying. So I think our cultural child bearing age is now misaligned from our biological adaptations, it feels exhausting to have children in your 30s
After our first, I felt like I gained superpowers (okay, not super, somehowpowers?). Especially with the lack of sleep. Even a month beforehand, that lack of sleep would have wrecked me. I mean, it still did, but somehow I just no longer cared. With my kid in my arms, the lack of sleep just seemed like a thing that was happening, the anxiety or 'wrongness' about not sleeping was gone. My body for sure still felt the effects. But my mind was cleared of the issues surrounding the lack of sleep. There was my child, needing help of some sort or another, and here I was, the parent. End of story. Gone were the thoughts that a lack of sleep would ever stop me from doing what needed to be done for my kid. Weather that be food, or my job, or groceries, or cleaning, whatever. If my kid needed me to get it done, it just got done, all the complaints in my mind about being too tired seemed, well, childish.
I don't want to denigrate any parent. It's a tough thing to do. And it is exhausting. But, at least for me, once I became a parent, I just stopped caring that I was exhausted. When that screaming pooping little money sucker comes toddling over to you with a huge smile on the face after you walk in the room from work or wherever, all those worries and fears just somehow melt away and you just think to yourself how lucky you are to have any of it.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you think you want to have kids, don't let your lack of energy due to age be a factor. Kids give you the energy.
Children are a long term commitment. Being richer won't necessarily make a person have more children if they are uncertain whether the riches will continue. A $1000/month car, per the article, can be disposed of if things go bad. Children can't (unless you are in a Monty Python movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWWAC5ZMKeM )
The $1000 dollar a month argument is weak though. If I have a job that pays $4000 a month but it requires driving 100km to get there, then a reliable car is a good investment.
Not buying a car and raising kids instead (who require more than $1000 a month) would require me either having a great parental network to fall back on (e.g. parents, a village) or having those kids taken away from me as I fail to meet their needs
(Also the article did not at all address the clickbait title that made me read it. Okay, we will have more pets maybe. Anything else?)
IMHO it is rising individualism triggerred from FOMO from social media where in you believe you still have something left to experience outside in the world and which cannot be done once you have small kids.
Another one probably is how people with kids narrate their experience , where in they mention all the sleepless nights , limitations and costs , without telling about the postive aspects like happinesss , satisfaction and a stronger sense of purpose. Can't blame them given these aspects are very subtle and difficult to tell/narrate.
Yes, this is very true. If you listen to some people you would think that once you have kids your life is basically over. You will never be able to spend any time on yourself anymore.
This is just not true - at least if you refuse to become an extreme helicopter parent.
I have four kids. I had a ~10 year break where I very rarely made it to parties and music festivals, and my life was mostly work and kids. I had a great time and have never regretted my decision to have kids, but there were some things I missed.
Now we start doing these things again, sometimes with the kids, sometimes because the kids are big enough to be alone or because we can afford a babysitter.
Here is one egoistic argument for having kids: the world is going to become very confusing in a decade or two. There will come the time where you can't keep up anymore. Then you will be happy to have somebody that loves you unconditionally that can make decisions for you. I trust my kids way more to take care of me when I am old and confused than any institution or person motivated by money.
I don't think that's a 100% yes or no argument (especially not beforehand( but I'd say I know more parents that are actually really hard to get a hold of since the first kid, as in... you try to work with their schedule and there's nothing and then you basically stop seeing them unless you'd live close by and have kids the same age.
Might be an atypical case here but it's my experience.
Between four and six billion humans seems like a good target.
There were only 2.5 billion in 1950, since then automation has advanced leaps and bounds meaning an advanced lifestyle with fewer workers and less resource drain is entirely possible with a more sustainable population size.
Why? There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited.
Even in densely populated places like Europe there are large areas with low population density.
People are crowding in cities and then complaining that there are too many people.
Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics and nuclear energy. Everything can be recycled given enough energy.
> There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited.
Like the proposed site for Resolution Copper, say?
Nobody there save the people that got pushed aside when Europeans arrived in the US and I guess there's no issue with pushing them on again, treaties are meaningless and 8 billion people need their appliances.
> Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics
Quickly now, just how much additional copper, lithium, vanadium, iron, aluminium, etc do we need to get there?
And once we are there will this be just like building roads to fix traffic only to find that traffic increases to swamp the new roads?
Last question, do you have any actual experience with 800 million tonne per annum resource mining (that's just iron ore mined in my state alone) or is your experience of life limited to ordering stuff and having it turn up?
Your comment has the whiff of Magical Tech thinking to it.
> Your comment has the whiff of Magical Tech thinking to it.
Well, your post has the whiff of malthusian doomerism to it. Look up the Simon-Ehrlich wager. Ehrlich was wrong in every single respect. There are more people, yet they are economically better off. And nothing has run out.
And yet the ideology of Ehrlich and Malthus has prevailed in the west.
We all die eventually, more than a hundred of us every minute. If you want a smaller human population on Earth, there's no need for anything nefarious; just persuade people to lower their fertility rate, then wait a while.
> Another argument is that women are working and do not have time to have kids.
Isn't that a valid argument still (despite his Swiss semi-counter-example)? Many jobs are complicated these days and require education + experience, making it very hard for women who want to work and become economically independent to have kids early in life; when they are most fertile.
I also think his Swiss example is somewhat misleading, since he argues that Switzerland has few women working (56%), and also a low birthrates (1.4). So at least 44% of the women have time to have babies, then Swiss birthrates should be high. But a friend of mine is from Switzerland, and his wife stopped working after they had a child (she has a PhD in biology as well, so highly educated). Schools typically send children home for 3 hours in the middle of the day (lunch/siesta or whatever you want to call it). Somebody has to be home, and that very often ends up being the mother. And after you've been out of the working life for a long period of time, getting back can be difficult. I.e. it could be that one of the reasons the Swiss women are hesitant to have children, is that they know that it will most likely end their career; so the implication could go the other way.
I think the people like myself who really want to have babies are going to have babies one way or another. And it's not a question of "is it right" that they have more, or less, or quite the same stuff that I grew up with -- I didn't grow up with much, and I have even less now than I did then in some important senses, but I love life all the same if not more and I think my kids will too.
And I even think this would be true regardless of whether we were living together in a cramped apartment in the inner city together or a big mansion out in the suburbs. An apartment looks twice as big when you're half the size of an adult. What matters is whether the kids feel like they're loved and cherished and desired, desired to be there, desired to be part of the family.
In my darker moments I wonder if perhaps, when I was younger and less keen on having kids myself, it was because I was myself missing so desperately that last part. But I found it in the arms of my beloved, and I think there are many like me.
It's not costs per se as we see fertility rates drop in tandem with rising wealth.
But indirectly, probably, in the form of raised expectations. You want to give your kids at least what you had as a child, ideally more, and that gets increasingly tied to high costs.
Yet the world population keeps growing [0], the majority of the world's countries have increased the retirement age since the 2010s [1], and there's more measured productivity per worked hour than ever [2], correlated with people having to work less for the same wealth. The Gini index on a macro level hasn't changed much [3], either.
I fail to see why this issue might be "at least as important as global warming".
Peoples , nations, cultures, and civilizations existed with 1/5 of the population 100 years ago. Cultures should adapt to population, not the other way around
This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions. A drastic reduction could cause serious short term issues for humanity (not for any other form of life) but were not here at all, curves are stabilizing around 2kids.
You shouldn't be afraid to let go of the gas pedal on the freeway, the car won't stop straight away. Especially if your speed is exponential for 300 years and everyone know keeping accelerating is gonna harm the majority life conditions.
The issue is that retirement systems are built on a certain assumption of the population pyramid. This will cause very serious political and societal strife as the retired will largely have more political and financial power and the few young will be (attempted) to be bled dry to maintain the system
What is this assumption? The pyramid should look like… a pyramid? Don’t you see the elephant in the room: the population can’t infinitely grow on a finite universe.
GDP, dept, income… anything that is virtual can grow as long as you find a way to describe and write them. Ressources and space can be optimized within the boundary of what the known science let us do and what the humans tolerate.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a future with 100s Billions humans eating delicious and healthy meals made of pure fusion energy in a Saturn orbit cafè. Let’s find out solutions of the problems caused by the current demography before increasing it, otherwise it’s betting our descents future on the retirement system.
>This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions
So the operation succeeds but the patient is dead? The survival of people and cultures trumps GHG emissions. Unless you prefer an empty planet with no GHG emissions.
They are connected though. I know many people under the age of 35 who choose not to have kids because they don't want to bring children into a world threatened by climate change.
Here in Finland, a female child born today has a >50% chance to live to an age of 100. That means our new children will probably still be alive in 2123. The projections for worst-case climate change over that time span are terrifying. You can't blame people for not wanting that kind of future for their children.
If you want people to have more kids in the West, doing something about climate change is part of the solution, not a separate issue.
For every single decade in the 20th century there was some kind of doom hanging over our head.
Imagine deciding to have kids in the 80s where the two superpowers were pointing insane amounts of nuclear weapons at each oter. Or in the 70s when people feared a new ice age. Not to mention 1910 or 1930.
You may say "but this time it is real". The nuclear threat in the 80s was very real as well. As was WW1 and WW2.
Finland has done it's part against climate change. They built a large nuclear power plant, and can run the rest of the economy using PV and wind. Retire ICE vehicles, and then be proud of yourself and be more optimistic.
Even in the worst case scenarios the climate in finland will be just fine...
> I know many people under the age of 35 who choose not to have kids because they don't want to bring children into a world threatened by climate change.
Do you think the majority of people are into that ideology?
Aging population per se isn't a problem, because better hygiene, lower child mortality and enough food creates the same effect.
Lower economic growth doesn't have to be. Fewer people means less supply on workforce means higher wages means higher purchasing power. The existing people would like to be more, but can't afford because of low wages. Fewer people will give them leverage.
Higher purchasing power per person not overall. That would increase the wealth inequality divide and the aging population would suffer as lower and middle class services struggle in favour of high wealth services. We are seeing that in clothing at the moment, high end clothing is doing really well but serves fewer people.
Japan is a country to watch, it has an aging population but historically good support for middle class services through lots of small businesses. If that changes for them it is a bad sign for the West, as we generally have greater wealth divides to begin with.
I'm talking about workers, they are mostly middle and lower class. Your example of higher clothing, it's not the workers who do really well, it's the designers and labels. Wouldn't consider them as workers.
In any oscillating trajectory you’d see exponents above and below 1. Tomorrow’s birth rate is not impacted by today’s. But the fear is that today’s birth rate will continue forever until societal collapse, which seems unlikely.
8 billion people isn't extinction of people and nations, cultures and civilizations went extinct even with and sometimes because of more people. Resources are limited and more people fighting over them leads to war which leads to extinction of nations, cultures, civilization and people.
"Irreversible" feels like an overstatement for a planet that has documented swings in both its temp and atmospheric composition. I'd agree the timescales of changing warming trends is certainly slower than birth rates, though.
Fine, irreversible on a human scale. The last time the earth was this hot (known as the Eemian period) was back when humans just started migrating from northern Africa to the Arabian peninsula, ~125000 years ago.
That's a whole lotta damage done in under 200 years since we industrialized.
I think you may have taken to heart the talking points of those opposed to abortion etc. rather than reality. The pro-choice position held by the majority of people is "available, considered and rare".
Abortion and sexual health services are also not aligned with population decline. If people can't access those services at all then I posit they might be more likely to never want to try for kids. Just a supposition.
Yeah I just read about it on wikipedia and it sounds like you did read it wrong. Doesn't mention homosexuality at all for a start.
> in 1973, Jaffe stated that "the memorandum makes clear that neither I nor the Planned Parenthood Federation of America advocates any of the specific proposals embodied in the table which go beyond voluntary actions of individual couples to space and limit births."
People who eat chocolate ice cream, or order Hawaiian pizza, are incorrect. The proper ice cream is pistachio, and the proper pizza is pepperoni New York Style.
I agree; grammar rules should be abandoned. From now on, I'm going to use the word "less" to mean a larger number of something. If you can't understand me, it's your fault.
One thing I've been considering is the existence of the 401k or basically the Bogle strategy as a whole. Both expect yearly gains over time, due to increasing amounts going into the pools.
But what happens when the elders start drawing down that money, and there isn't a base to replace it?
Going forward, we could actually see such values shrink, I think?
The uber rich aren't Bogleheads, after all.
It's unlikely. As people live longer but want to retire at a similar age to their parents demand for risk assets is going to be even higher in the future.
I mean, as much as interest rates have dramatically risen recently, real yields on 30 year UK government debt (as measured by the inflation-linked gilt yield) are at ~1%. That's just not going to cut the mustard given how little people are able or willing to save in to their retirement fund.
To give you an idea, the difference between a 1% real return and a 4% real return, investing monthly over a 30 year horizon, is having 64% more in retirement.
> No one really knows why birth rates are dropping so fast.
Did anyone think to ASK THE PEOPLE why they choose not to have children? Or that would be too difficult for today's journalists and bloggers?
My case:
1) It's very difficult to raise even one child. It would degrade my quality of life a lot.
2) I hate children. I see around me lots of parents who love being parents and I simply can't understand them. This would probably make me a bad parent.
3) [The main reason.] If I had a child I would want him/her to have a better life than mine. EVERY parent wants that. But that's not possible, because my life is great!
Let me focus on 3), because this explains the difference between countries.
When the parent's life sucks (Africa), there's lots of hope and possibility of a better life for the child.
When the parent's life is great (Europe, America, Japan) with very grim predictions about the future without oil, why would anyone have children?
This article is selectively excluding large chunks of the planet.
It mentions the developed world, but then continues to suggest that birth rates are falling below 2 everywhere when they most certainly are not.
Niger: 6.89
Nigeria: 5.31
Mali: 6.04
Somalia, Chad, DR Congo are all over 6.
There are going to be young people around when you get old, they’re just going to originate from different parts of the world. Assuming you don’t die suddenly then when you get to the end of your life someone is going to have to care for you whether you have children to do that or not.
Is this concerning? I actually worry that the global population is constantly growing and in the future there won't be enough resources for eveybody.
In what ways this is bad for society?
"The United Nations Population Division defines sub-replacement fertility as any rate below approximately 2.1 children born per woman of childbearing age, but the threshold can be as high as 3.4 in some developing countries because of higher mortality rates. Taken globally, the total fertility rate at replacement was 2.33 children per woman in 2003"
You've got a like 1/9 chance of dying by 21 I've heard. It's probably wrong but a decent amount of people die before they are able to have kids so they add a 0.1 to the replacement level.
Ancient, tribal cultures, absolutely raised children in a communal way as you say. There's even a saying, "it takes a village to raise a child..." But I'm not aware of any modern cultures that still do that in reality.
Villages and tribes have typically been composed of people who are related to one another.
So another way of saying this is that the extended family participates in raising children.
Not long ago, children were allowed to roam freely in the neighborhood, walk to and from school, and have some essentially unsupervised time to play and be children. The reason this worked well is because they were known to the neighbors, and at least some of those neighbors were looking out for the children, albeit discreetly and not actively. Me and my sister roamed the neighborhood, and at least one Mom on each block would know who to call if we got into an accident or something. There was a creepy guy who invited us to his hot tub, but my sister wisely turned him down, and nothing more was done.
Furthermore, in an extended family, you'll have grandparents to babysit, and cousins who are peers, and in a family with enough children, you'll have older children effectly supervising the youngest ones, changing diapers, doing basic tasks like that. This happens all the time at church, and I see it. It's a matter of Mom and Dad setting good examples and instilling good discipline.
If instead you have a situation of high divorce rates, single moms and single dads going it alone, everyone lives in a separate little dwelling, we barely know our extended family, we live in neighborhoods full of strangers, we all work two full-time jobs, well your support system will consist of paid child care, if you can find it, and if you can afford it. So children are high-maintenance.
And in a family of one or two children, the children won't be learning the basics of changing diapers and feeding applesauce, so if you do raise children, you're raising children who are unprepared to be parents.
>Not long ago, children were allowed to roam freely in the neighborhood, walk to and from school, and have some essentially unsupervised time to play and be children.
Yeah, I see that almost every day where I live. Young kids even take the subway across the city all by themselves. This is normal life in any decent, developed nation.
You've never been outside the United States, have you?
> Not long ago, children were allowed to roam freely in the neighborhood, walk to and from school, and have some essentially unsupervised time to play and be children.
They still are in most safe modern nations.
> so if you do raise children, you're raising children who are unprepared to be parents.
I would assume because you had massive amounts of money you could treat raising a child like a recreational activity.. and even then i am betting there is a lot of pink glasses looking in the past involved
Those assumptions are incorrect. Ever since I can remember as a little kid I wanted to be a Dad. My first big success came after my last child was born. When my first child was born I had just been laid off and was struggling to make ends meet. My highs in business aren’t even close to my highs as a Dad.
Everyone’s experiences are different and true to them. I’m not trying to tell you that your experience or ideas of raising children should be the same as mine. But I’d be careful assuming that people who don’t think the same way as you about it are delusional or privileged.
I think you turned it into something philosophical about your "highs" but I was talking about the fact about simply how hard it is to look after a child, and how much drudgery and going crazy it involves
this is why i also said having massive amounts of money helps make it one treat it like a recreational activity, like having someone to help clean the house, cook etc
I can’t really relate to your philosophy on this, but it is interesting to me. I enjoyed parenting just as much when I was struggling to make ends meet as I did when I had money.
I am much less wealthy than him and I think the same. Not all things in life are about money. I'd conjecture that there are more important things than money in life.
"Money is like gas on a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on the trip. But you aren't doing a tour of gas stations."
Quoting from memory, so it may not be word for word. And I forget who I stole it from, but plausibly it was someone here. If so, sorry I don't have the source handy to be able to give you proper credit.
But, yeah. I agree with the parent. Money matters, but it's not what matters most. If money is your bottom line, then you are impoverished in a way that more money cannot fix.
I'm going to assume that you don't work, for instance, as a schoolteacher (probably a safe assumption on this site).
How do you think your childhood teachers feel about your attitude (of not being interested in going into the teaching profession)? Lucky for you that they didn't share it, right?
How about working in local government, as a mayor or alderman for instance? Did you ever do that? Lucky for you that someone else did, right?
Do you feel bad for not doing these jobs that are essential for society?
None of those other jobs not being filled would have literally kept me from existing, so the comparison seems strange to me. Yes I'm glad someone became a school teacher to teach me, but my not having the same interest doesn't make universal education of young children impossible, only a small percentage of the population needs to teach to enable that. Same for local government and most other jobs.
My parents forgoing having children, however, literally makes my existence impossible. And practiced on a society-wide level it ultimately leads to the extinction of the human race. Anyone who thinks that humans are better off pursuing their own fulfillment and enjoyment out of life instead of bearing and raising children is some combination of hedonist, nihilist, and misanthrope. And anyone who promotes such views should be shamed for what they are.
This argument does not invalidate the original comment. I think my parents were stupid to have me and could have enjoyed their life better. I think i had two of the top 10 parents worldwide but still, it was a decision made with naivety and stupidity of youth.
On one hand the guys on top are telling us that we're destroying the planet and we should reduce carbon emissions by any means necessary (dont touch their private airplanes and yachts though). On the other hand the same guys are saying we're rapidly going to collapse because we're not birthing enough consumers. Hilarious really
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> [#1] People do not have money for kids. [#2] The Government isn’t Providing pro-natal policies. [#3] This is happening only in societies that are not religious. [#4] Women are working and not having kids.
That seems like an incomplete list.
For example, how about this one: Industrialization lowers infant mortality with better medical care and creates alternate safety-nets to keep old people without kids from dying in a ditch. Gradually culture changes as people adjust to this, and they stop feeling the need for spare-kids as a hedge against death or to have large broods as a retirement plan.
> It feels like we’re permanently entering a time where population will shrink.
Much of the world's population boom in the last century was from lowered infant mortality [0] and people spending more time alive and being counted. [1] It should be no surprise that both of those hit diminishing returns: It is impossible to save more than 100% of the babies, and immortality is a hard problem to solve.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/infant-morta...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy