These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
…
If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
You must log in or register to comment.
We have more than enough people.
Ensuring families have access to Child Healthcare, parents have time to parent their kids, kids have capable and loving parents and communities have programs to ensure the wellbeing of the children is SOCIALISM!
-Pro Life Republicans trying to Save The Children
Rightoids: we need to boost our population
Also rightoids: best we can do is make abortion illegal and encourage teen pregnancy
I agree with most the points others in this thread make about the economy having gotten worse such that it discourages more kids… I have a decent job and if I had a second child I think I would never have a chance at retirement.
I am also curious about rising infertility… My wife and I had go through ivf to even have one child… This after 7 years of trying…
Several of our peers and friends have struggled with this as well… It could just be a coincidence but we only know around 20 other couples outside of work and at least 6 of them have not been able to produce children naturally.
It could be due to microplastics/pollution affecting sperm counts.
First thing I found: https://news.sky.com/story/human-penises-are-shrinking-because-of-pollution-warns-scientist-12255106
Yeah I started suspecting something like find could be impacting younger generations fertility rates as well but most the people I have known had issues on the woman’s end… Like endomitriosis causing blockages etc. I haven’t spent a lot of time researching it myself but I wouldn’t be surprised that not only are we economically disadvantaged but the rampant pollution is also driving lower birth rates for those who even try
My husband and I chose not to have biological children and there are so many reasons for it. It’s not even just one big one - it’s multiple huge ones. Lack of support systems for parents and childcare, finances (we are ok for a couple, but there is no way we could comfortably afford even a single child), healthcare costs alone will break you, the future of this planet is not looking so hot (or rather, VERY hot actually), carbon footprint of another child on the planet is huge, and I refuse to bring in another soul to become a slave for our corporate overlords. And I am not even listing any personal reasons, which there also are - these are just things that are happening in the world overall… and the best the politicians can do is pikachu face that there is no population growth. Because, ya know, 8 BILLION of us is not enough.
As a parent with two kids you are spot on about the financial aspect. Kids get hurt/sick a LOT. Their immunity is still developing, so we ended up in the ER almost several times a year. We had good health insurance, but it still broke our bank because of deductibles.
Woman of childbearing age here. Lots of my friends took another child off the table when Roe fell. Being potentially forced to die and leave your existing children orphaned is a big deterrent, turns out
Plus it just fucking sucks to be a mother these days. Things are a lot more egalitarian than they used to be, but society still expects the uterus-having to take on more of the child caring tasks, and the emotional labor especially tends to still fall disproportionately on women. Our careers suffer, our bodies suffer if we bore (and possibly nursed) the baby/ies, our mental health suffers from the unrelenting societal pressure and neglect, plus all of the other shit that every other parent deals with as well. The women and mothers I know are fed up and so, so tired. (I’m not bitter… not at all… :D)
I love my children to pieces, but if I had seen an older sister go through this I might have opted out of having kids entirely. Two of my sisters have.
Yeah can’t blame the ladies for that one, if I were a woman I’d be mighty tempted to seal up my womb too.
Interestingly this is actually how a lot of men feel about their own procreation. You’re one broken condom away from being beholden to an unwanted child and a selfish mother. It can ruin your life before you’ve even had a chance to start. Hell teenage boys raped by older women have had to pay child support.
I’d love to see this lead into a useful conversation about the rights of both sexes but it has been pretty one-sided so far.
I have 13 kids from five different women but I never get recognized, pat on the back, absolutely nothing. To top it off I’m stuck working for cash. Has anyone thought about fighting for men’s rights?
Wear a condom. Well it’s too late now but NEXT TIME!!
*tax dodging deadbeat rights
When a menial worker complains their menial job doesn’t pay enough. Boomers sing “that’s not a real job” then expect those same people to have kids to support their greed.
Not to mention that when everyone decided they didn’t want to work those jobs, they all threw a fit that no one wanted to work anymore. Wow I can’t believe the industry that “isn’t a real job” full of “unskilled labor” doesn’t have people lining up to work at.
You used to be able to raise kids on that mind of job. Boomers are weird and seem to absorb all information given to them uncritically, so when the narrative changed and retail workers started having to hit food banks, they just rolled with it as if their own past wasn’t real.
You absolutely can pay people to do just about anything including having kids.
Give me a credit card that can pay ALL of my bills and i will both adopt a kid and find someone who wants to have one.
The problem is kids are a huge burden when you can barely afford to live your own life let alone provide and be responsible for another human being
Pay people to retire early and you will see a huge boom in population
Russia going through this right now. Their demo is getting old and is getting worse.
Perfect time to send 100s of thousands of men in the prime of their lives to die in some pointless war.
Just like the socalled “work shortage”, the problem is they aren’t offering nearly enough. That’s it.
Currently in Taiwan, citizens receive 2500 NT per month (i.e. $80 USD) per birth until the child is five years old. That’s a fucking joke.
Yeah there’s no way these programs are coming anywhere near the cost of having kids. Childcare alone is insanely expensive these days.
snort
i think to maintain the population, a couple needs to have to have 2.4 kids or something. there’s no way im doing that it sounds like it sucks. fuck the future of humanity I don’t give a shit
You can actually by making the families cost of living and housing needs affordable on one parents income. One off baby bonus bribes and stuff that governments do will never actually work when both parents have to work themselves Into dust just to make ends meet.
Less people means less waste and less fossil fuel consumption. This is not a bad thing.
but, just hear me out here. We need cheap labor. And they need exponentially more cheap labor, because… like… those profits aren’t going to earn themselves.
So please, take the condom off and start banging so I can get myself an even bigger yacht and turn the head-old thing into a helicopter tender.
-corpo douche, maybe.
It is a bad thing if you live in a country with a robust social system that is paid for through taxes and a below-replacement birth rate.
Like, we don’t need “more” people, but we need to keep the population stable to make sure the disabled and elderly can live well. Because someone has to bear the cost, and we can’t all be Norwegian.
There are lots of people who are willing to endure a dangerous journey in order to become part of a stable, safe society in a country that isn’t torn up by a war or ruled by despots, kleptocrats or terrorists.
Somehow when these people reach to a country desperately trying to grow its population (read: have more workforce and taxpayers), we tend to ostracize them, deny them opportunities, make it hard for them to integrate and generally be hostile towards them on both individual and systemic levels. And then scratch our collective heads why we have problems with the “others”.
Curious species the human is. No wonder the extraterrestials from the Galactic Society never visit us and try their hardest to hide their existence from us😞
“… robots…. We’ll make robots to do all the work. Then we won’t need the stupid poors.”
-rich guys
Sounds like a good reason to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate. You could even have a global proportional tax rate if the will was there.
When you’re looking at recurring expenses like welfare, you need the incoming money to be there as well for the math to work. The wealthy and the corporations aren’t an unlimited pot, particularly at the scale of national welfare. Social security spent 1.5 trillion dollars in the 2023 fiscal year. You could entirely liquidate Apple, pretend that doing so wouldn’t collapse its value, and that would pay for less than two years of Social Security, to say nothing of other welfare programs, and this is just America.
You also have to consider that lower population growth can also result in lower corporate profits, causing there to be less money available for you to tax in the first place. At the scale of an entire country’s population, taxing the wealthy doesn’t go as far as people think.
LOL, we don’t need to liquidate Apple. Current projections are that if NOTHING is done to reform social security, the trust fund will run out in 2033, and we will be able to pay out about 77% of benefits via annual revenues the following year, down to 65% in 2096. The exact percentage varies based on revenue and population trends, but we’re talking about the majority of social security benefits being payable indefinitely, if nothing is done to reform it.
We could fill the gap and keep the trust fund going while paying out 100% of benefits by simply raising the cap for wages subject to the social security tax.
This social security hysteria shows how effective right wing propaganda has been at convincing all of society that government can’t do anything. There are multiple options for saving the trust fund. Congress just needs to pick one and do it. The problem is that half of congress wants the elderly to starve to death.
Removing the cap doesn’t actually solve the problem; it only delays it. Per a Congressional Research Service report, eliminating the cap today would still have the fund be depleted in 2054. You still have to raise the rate or reduce benefits in order to make the numbers work.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32896
That’s to say nothing about how Social Security is objectively a very poor retirement plan and the average person would do much better by simply putting the money into any random total market fund instead, but that’s another topic.
I know no one likes maintenance, but it’s necessary. We reformed social security in 1981. We can do it again now, and we can do it again before 2054. I’d propose eliminating the taxable income cap and means testing benefits before we think about raising the rates or the retirement age again.
That’s to say nothing about how Social Security is objectively a very poor retirement plan and the average person would do much better by simply putting the money into any random total market fund instead, but that’s another topic.
Social Security keeps over 20 million people out of poverty. Frankly, I don’t give a shit about what’s better for people who’ve had the means and the opportunity to save for retirement independently (of which I am one). We’re talking about people who don’t have enough to begin with. If you eliminated social security, assuming employers didn’t just pocket the 6.2% and passed it on to their workers, the working poor would use that money for sustenance, not savings.
To be clear, I’m not actually against removing the cap, means-testing the benefits, or anything else. However, the political will for that sort of thing isn’t really there, especially because it would represent a non-trivial tax increase on the kind of upper middle class vaguely moderate suburbanites that tend to swing elections.
My main qualm is that Social Security simultaneously attempts to be a mandatory government retirement plan and a welfare system and doesn’t do a particularly good job at either of those things. As a retirement plan, pretty much any generic investment plan outperforms it, while at the same time, its ability to be an effective elderly welfare system is hugely hampered by this political perception of it as an “earned” retirement benefit as well as its less than efficient administration.
My main point here is that it’s not accurate to say that there’s just “one weird trick!” that cleanly solves Social Security forever. Even raising or eliminating the cap would come with very significant political pushback from an annoyingly important and temperamental voting block.
That may be a problem… but our global carbon footprint is a much bigger problem, and part of what can help reduce that is reducing the size of the population.
A cursory search suggests that global population is expected to peak sometime around 2090, so an actual reduction in population really can’t be a primary component of our mitigation strategy relative to a general shift towards green energy. By the time we reach that point, we’ve either solved it or solidly doomed ourselves, population be damned.
Don’t argue with economically illiterate people, they’ll never learn.
Eh, depends on the source and intentionality of the illiteracy. I’ve had good conversations with Mr. FlyingSquid before, and I was myself a lot more ignorant in the past. A lot of people genuinely don’t know what they don’t know and believe, for example, that it’s possible to create a UK-style NHS by simply taxing the billionaires and corporations a little bit more. When you see stats about wealth inequality, it’s easy to find yourself believing that they can do essentially anything, and people are bad at intuitively understanding the scale of national populations.
we need to keep the population stable
Then let’s keep it stable at a lower number than it currently is.
Here’s today’s friendly reminder that the economy is made up, and can be redesigned to better serve humanity
reducing work hours in japan lead to a spike in pregnancies. If you want to raise birth rates a 4day work week should be at the top of the list.
People who complain about falling birth rates usually want more humans to cheaply exploit as a resource.
In a world with fewer humans, human life and human labors are more valuable.
We should be celebrating declining birth rates, as infinite growth is not possible in a finite system and most of the existential threats we face are due to population pressures.
I celebrate wildly when anyone brings up the topic. Rude, yes, but it gets the point across.
infinite growth is not possible in a finite system
That’s one of the real problems. Economists and the people in charge have no idea what a successful zero-growth economy might look like. To me it seems pretty obvious. The economy may not grow in GDP or anything, but automation and tech advances mean that people spend less and less time actively working.
Let’s say food production. In the past running a farm required dozens of farm workers. These days with automation one person might be able to do it all by themselves. If current farms produce all the food a country requires, you don’t need more farms, and you don’t need more farmers. No growth is just fine.
If cars are being made more and more safe, and more and more durable, people can go longer between buying cars. That means fewer cars being made, which means “the economy is slowing down”… but that’s a good thing. Unnecessary production is reduced.
Part of the problem is that economies have traditionally been based on borrowing assuming more growth in the future, and having the kids pay for the retirement of the olds. Both those things need to stop. Some borrowing based on things improving in the future is probably smart. Things will probably be more efficient in the future, so there will be more surpluses to pay off debts. But, we shouldn’t be borrowing assuming that the economy is going to keep growing at X% per year. As for retirees, have them pay for themselves. That doesn’t mean you’re assigned a 401(k) at birth and that’s all you get when you retire. But, it does mean that a generation pays into a pension system during their lives, then is paid out of that pension system when they retire. It’s ridiculous to assume that there’s always going to be a pyramid shape to the economy and the big base of the pyramid will support the peak.
A shrinking population wouldn’t be a good thing for humanity if it continued until humanity disappeared. But, it’s unlikely that will happen. What’s probably going to happen is that when the world is less crowded the population will stabilize. The optimum population of the planet might be significantly less than a billion, so it might be that the population growth will go negative for a while.
