My wife has been an indonesian all her life and her family does pretty well. She and her sisters have university degrees. Her sisters both are married, have 2 or 1 kid.

It’s all pretty fine. Labour is very cheap but so is the cost of living. They barely have any old people and a high labour force. Their economy has been booming.

Maybe you should go there

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I’m just not going to work for their pension and I will not have my kid work for their pension

Yeah once was enough for me, I don’t think I want another go at this shit, just delete me from existence

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Idk I think it’s explained by different phenomena. In nature there are two child raising strategies, K & P types (might be different letters sue me). For fully K type parents they produce 1000s of children each reproduction cycle, release them into nature & let statics be the cruel parent to have a few reach adulthood. For fully P type parents they will have just a single child each reproductive cycle, & raise them to maturity. Obviously this is a scale & all animals lie somewhere in-between these two extremes.

Obviously all humans are closer to P type but someone in a poorer region is more likely to live in a less stable region. As such they will follow a more K type parenting style since there is a higher chance of something bad happening to their children resulting in a “waste of evolutionary resources” (no life is a waste but you get the point). In a wealthier region they are more likely to live in a more stable area. As such they will choose to follow a P type parenting style & put a lot of resources into a few children. Since there is a high likelihood of all of their children making it to maturity a few “high value” children is preferred to many “low value” children (nobody is really more valuable bla bla). So rich region parents act more like P type parent & poor region parents act more like K type parents. (Obviously there are more factors but I think this probably has the biggest effect)

Then for people who are struggling & can’t afford to produce one “high value” child they make a logical choice to do it later when they have more resources. Since humans are complicated they can create other values they see are more valuable then children or decide to do something later until having children is no longer a possibility. Either way it results in less children & we are seeing the results on a global scale. (Post note. Obviously I am skipping over the cultural factors like religion & other individuals factors, but on a macro scale people are making these choices unwittingly)

Richer countries tend to have really shitty work life balances though, You need both money to raise a kid and time to do it as well, if both parents are working full time and barely making rent then of course they aren’t going to have kids. Japan and South Korea are perfect examples of this.

Who but common people can effect this change? The elite won’t change anything.

Instead of shooting oneself, why not take a shot at making the world a better place?

There are already three people in this thread who are waiting to die because they don’t like this world. That could be the foundation of a group that turns the world into a better place. They don’t have a use for their mind and body so they are free to dedicate them to a good cause.

Would you allow others to join you in your corner in the world and create a team Cassandra?

It should be easier to form a new team than to change existing teams. Once the new team lives a happy life, the other teams will want to copy it. Without that proof, people prefer to stick to the known misery they can control instead of trying something new.

Change doesn’t come from one person having an idea but from the population picking up an idea. Whatever you support has a bigger chance of improving the world.

Bizarre comment

No, no they won’t

I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.

Generally, people in poorer countries have more children. It’s a necessity for survival. They need the children to care for them in their old age. There is no pension, or Medicare or healthcare or nursing homes. Instead the family shares the load. In wealthier countries, we are meant to pay for 8t in conjunction with available social services and programs.

However, all things being equal, people have less children if they are pessimistic about the future.

if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.

That’s not how things work. In fact, that’s practically the opposite of how things work. Increased access to educational opportunities for women is strongly correlated with lowered fertility rates. It’s a well-known pattern. Or another way to frame it, is that poorly-educated women are more likely to have more children.

Part of the pattern is missing from this picture too - before this baby bust, was the baby boom, and before the baby boom, child mortality was a lot higher. A lot of medical advancements took place around the middle of the 20th century, which resulted in more children surviving to adulthood. Prior to this, people typically had many children because so many of them wouldn’t survive. It takes time for a society to adjust to higher life expectancies, resulting in a period where people continue to have many children just like their own parents did, despite no longer needing to.

However, those high rates don’t last. People adjust to the new health expectations, leading the next generation to have fewer children than the one before.

Add in other factors of a prosperous state, such as educational opportunities and access to comprehensive healthcare (which would include birth control), and it makes sense that “countries where it’s worse” would have more children, and “countries where it’s better” would have fewer. (Check the link above for more explanation. It goes into way more detail.)

I think the mistake you’re making here is that you’re comparing living conditions as they are today.

When you conceive a child today, however, that child is gonna be sentient over a timespan of maybe 80 years, with a significant part of that being decades in the future.

You can guess now that it doesn’t matter how the living conditions today are. It matters how the living conditions in the next decades are going to be.

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