News

Are you serious?

This shithole country I live in. We have funds to create a gestopo and ice camps here in the US and there's no real support for new parents.

Birth rate is, as inconvenient a truth that it is, inversely proportional to education and the liberty of women. You'd be hard pressed to give any developed nation that has a high birth rate.

They don’t want babies. They want robots.

Well, they want slaves. And they're still figuring out which direction to go

Inequality is the primary factor. If people making $150k to $200k can reasonably conclude that having children would be a burden on their future economic prospects (in an already uncertain future), they will decide against it. $50k to $75k is probably more in the "fuck it, we might as well have more sources of potential labor and income and maybe a subsidy or two since we're already at this point", and people making $400k or above have nothing to fear from child expenses.

If you're looking at people in developed countries where more kids doesn't necessarily mean more labor, the difference can also be somewhat explained by religion and quality of life concerns. Extremely religious people in the us, who tend to be less educated and have lower incomes, may not believe in contraception and believe that "god will provide". That may sound like an exaggeration, but I personally know someone with 7 kids who cannot afford to feed them but thinks that they will go to hell if they use condoms and denying their husband is also a sin somehow. They just talk about how god intended for their family to struggle. That's not a mindset you generally see in high income families.

The other factor is quality of life (and yes, education). If you're making enough to afford a home and a good education for 1-2 children, you may be looking to give your child a good life and a good springboard for their future. If you know that no matter what you do, you will never be able to afford a college education for your child, then that makes having a child "less expensive" in that regard. You know you won't be able to afford sports or extracurricular activity equipment, or new clothes, so while a family earning more may spend a smaller percentage of their income on any single child, the resources they are expecting to be able to provide them increase. A lot of low income families may have the approach that if a child is fed they've done the thing. Check mark on parenting for the day. If that's the approach to parenting then it's less resource intensive than a more involved approach that some high income families may have. I want to be clear that this is not a moral failing or some kind of judgement being passed. I think a lot of people don't realize the day to day of very low income families. There are still people in the US raising families with no access to electricity or even running water. They have a very different background and understanding of what a family looks like. I don't think they are inherently evil for having more kids and being unable to provide for them in the way others may expect, but I also think that's not an excuse to allow children to live in unsafe conditions. I legitimately believe that if we had better education in low income and rural areas that you'd see this disparity drop, as they learn the different options education can provide and strive to ensure their own children get the best education and support possible.

I think you understand this pretty well. For educated people parenting is a choice. They wait for the right moment in the career, they make sure they will be able to provide their children with everything they may need and that their kids will have optimal conditions for growth and development, they consider their other passions and projects and weight them against having kids.

Uneducated people simply have kids and don't really give it a second thought. You have kids, you feed them some junk food, give them phone to play with and that's it. You're a happy family.

A lot of that might also be location based. Where I am right now we're paying ~1700/mo for daycare. Wife got a job for nearly double our current combined income (for 260k) so moving to Boston, daycare going to ~3000/mo and housing going from 2k/mo to looking at 6-10k/mo. It almost feels like a paycut...but at least driving should become more optional.

I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids.

The child tax credit makes a huge difference. It's something like $6k per kid per year when they're under the age of 8 I think it was? When you're only making around 40-50k per year, an extra 8-10k each tax season is a huge opportunity to improve your finances. I knew one family that had 3 or 4 kids, probably made about 40k per year, they'd stop paying their electricity bill during the winter because the utility can't legally disconnect you from your heating source in the winter then pay off the debt each tax season.

Additionally many of our social safety net programs are based on family income, with the income threshold increasing as family size increases, so a family making 50k a year with 1 kid might not qualify for food assistance, but a family making 50k a year with 3 kids probably will. Medicaid also will cover fulltime childcare in many states, further negating the financial hurdles of having kids, and once the kids are old enough you can have the older kids babysit the younger ones further reducing costs (of course parentification is very pervasive in this way!) there's a lot of hurdles that this funding can bypass (then of course put parents in a tight spot that they have to figure out when a new technicality is added to kick them off of these benefits)

Because now is the best time to be alive, ever. I could take you back 100, 200, 500, 1000, or 5000 years ago and things just get shittier and shittier the further back we go yet people kept having kids.

From a pragmatic point of view?

"In a time of dragons, raise dragon slayers."

Those fighting for a better future now will get old. Thankfully, so will those seemingly-immortal bastards ruining that future.

We need future generations, educated and supported and prepared to take up the mantle.

As Bruce Lee put it: "Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to overcome a difficult one."

We need to come back around to the idea that we are here for a bigger purpose than to be comfortable and happily wither, as even ~~if~~ when we are victorious, someone needs to maintain the solemn responsibility to keep evil at bay, because it will try again.

We all want our children to be happy and healthy and safe. But we also must prepare them to bear the same responsibility we do. Part of resistance and war against the principalities and powers and forces of darkness in this world, is to make sure righteous ideals live on.

Try not to dwell in the "woe is me" narrative. Today's younger generation has some challenges, but thinking "this is the worst any generation has ever had it by far" is total bullshit.

Yes.

You can't let them explore on their own to build independence and confidence without CPS being called on you.

When kids misbehave in public, all the boomers get their panties in a wad. My parents get flustered when the grandkids get loud playing together in a back bedroom.

Getting kids launched well in life, with some chance of adult prosperity, requires thousands and thousands of dollars in private clubs/ competitions/ tutoring/ schools/ etc - the highly competitive nature of the US economy has reached down into elementary aged children at this point. Where I live, people even pay for tutoring to get their children into GT programs.

Generally declining birthrates and specifically the disappearance of the middle class are almost inevitable in late-stage capitalism (the stage where outward expansion is complete, so capitalists must turn their gaze inward and increase exploitation at home). Although, let's be clear, everyone except the capitalist loses in this scenario, and it will hurt people who are currently in poverty much harder than it will the middle class who are only beginning to drown.

But there isn't some conspiracy making this happen. It is only the machinery of the system that makes true the statement, "If I don't, someone else will."

I'm sure many of the educated oligarchs know that this is how the system works. It's why they're all building bunkers. It doesn't need a shadowy cabal in a smoky room, though. Profit inventivizes all.

The plan is dead for a long time now. Capitalism only works if the working poor population gets renewed. They lost track of the plot and focused too much on wealth growth. Now we are in the late stage of capitalism. The stage where it no longer works but they'll pretend it does until it collapses under their feet.

That stage might take decades though, most of us won't enjoy what comes next.

The plan is to pillage the wealth of the local population via insane asset prices and extreme rentierism around essentials such as housing and then when the amounts being returned by the pillaging and exploitation start to slow down due to the impact from decades of lower birthrates because of living in such a dystopia, importing young adults from countries with higher birth rates - i.e. immigrants - and have far-right political forces funded by the very people pillaging the country loudly blame said immigrants for the feeling of life getting worse and even pain that most people feel as consequence of the pillaging of the country.

Certainly this is what I've seen in multiple countries in Europe.

The plan is to move all the money to the top 0.1%. Low birthrate is just a side effect of that. The plan was always to fill in the gaps in workforce with illegal immigrants who are cheaper and easier to steal money from. Currently I'm not sure what the plan is. Robots? Abandon manufacturing altogether?