It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.
Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.
The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
The documentary Idiocracy has some interesting insights into the issue -- it's worth the watch.
I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.
Expecting other societies less egalitarian and less rich than them is pie in the sky thinking.
As this thread happening in a post about machinations by the current regime, the likelihood of it being solved (let alone correctly) borders on near impossible. The only thing that they'll do that will affect this is take away reproductive rights and that will lead to more unplanned births.
Solved meaning achieving replacement rate total fertility rate, not just people having the amount of kids they say they want.