These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

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.

  • @[email protected]
    5•2 years ago

    Are you seriously claiming that we’re done with equality in the workplace (positions, salary, respect)? No? Then stop misrepresenting what I said as some neanderthal spiel. We need daycare to give people options. Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.

    • @[email protected]
      3•2 years ago

      Kids need to be able to see both parents represented and succeeding in the workplace.

      Why so they want to be some corporate slave for labor, fuck off

      • @[email protected]
        1•2 years ago

        You raise another good point. Some people are simply not cut out for raising kids. Or interacting with normal people, for that matter.

    • @[email protected]
      5•2 years ago

      Are you seriously claiming that we’re done with equality in the workplace

      Can you make a point without a straw man? I said nothing of the sort.

      And I don’t disagree with your point about daycare; I think people need options, but I disagree with your point about online relationships being dopamine-equivalent to “real” relationships, personally. I’d LOVE to have a family but I have neither the space nor the money to have kids.

      Personally I think communal child raising should be more normalized; I think children experiencing many different and at times contradictory viewpoints is good for their development of critical thinking. But I don’t presume to fully know the solution to lose birth rates. I DO however claim that whatever financial incentives are being given, they aren’t enough.

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 years ago

        You’re correct that my comment was not inclusive. That was not intentional on my part and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. However, this is a distraction from the main point.

        It was not a strawman. I was making a statement about how society is right now, not how it should be. “men can be house spouses”, etc is true but until we have better workplace equality and in absence of daycare, the vast majority of prospective families are going to do some very simple budget math to figure out who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent. It is exactly the “kitchen” crap from years gone by but with some populist indirection to avoid calling it that.