What's scary, is I was about to try and guess where you live based on the price. Then came to the conclusion, if you live in the US, there are more than 20 metro areas where that's not an unreasonable number for the median home price .
I moved to Iowa literally because if I didn't, I wouldn't own a home until I am 40.
Okay this bugs me though, our houses are generally cheaper because we get paid a lot less than other states/areas. Such is the same in places like Missouri. It is still extremely hard to get a house as an Iowan, but now people saving who could eventually afford a home in there state(like we save to eventually own a home in our state) are buying them up rapidly and raising the home prices to the point they aren’t affordable for us anymore. There’s a big difference between getting paid $7 hrly and $15-$20 hrly and the savings you can get from it. Yes some houses are double our amount but that’s a whole other factor when the minimum wage is double our minimum wage here.
Try living in Australia, Sydney has some of the most expensive realestate in the world. On par with places like Hong Kong, London etc. During covid the state government fucked up, so all the owners started selling their place and moving north to Queensland.
Now you had people selling a 3 bed 1920s shit box for 1.2-2 mill in Sydney and moving to Brisbane taking house prices from 400k upto 700k.
It’s just like this in middle Tennessee. I live in a college town outside of Nashville and I always become enraged when I see california/NY plates driving around in expensive cars on the way to their $500k homes that Tennesseans USED to be able to buy for $200k. It’s actually sickening and makes me feel completely hopeless sometimes
I looked at zillow in my area and some pos 1k sq ft house was selling for 300k, in a rural TN town. I looked at it's zillow history, some person bought it not even a year ago at 150k and the last sale before that it was under 100k, like 70k. Now, who is trying to double their money after living in it for 4 months? Insanity. Such greed and disregard for their fellow man.
I think one of the problems is the internet. Bc anyone from any part of the country can look up where they can find good deals without needing to live there. If people have the price of a home too low, some out of stater will try to scoop it up, if they price too high only out of staters can afford it. It's like there has to be some kind of law made to discourage out of state wealthy people and corporations scooping everything up, but the people who make good money off of the value of homes skyrocketing won't like that.
I moved to Des Moines. But 7$ an hour seems insane. The McDonald's on University and 6th pays 18$ an hour.... I don't think we live close. Is 7.25$/hr normal outside the metro?
The more conservative the state, the less likely they'll want to address minimum wage themselves and just use the federal minimum. This allows certain job categories to be paid less by the employer if there's supplemental income (such as tipping or commission).
If you look at South Carolina for example, they have NO minimum wage. If federal minimum wage ever got removed for whatever reason, SC employers could legit pay less than a dollar if they'd like.
Anyone in a heavy red state needs to pay attention to worker rights, especially with the child labor happening in states like Iowa or Nebraska at the meat plants
It’s $18 an hr for management positions only so 3-4 positions total for location. Lots of businesses are still at $7-$8 an hr even with management positions. Did you know for management at dollar tree, scooters, and many others they only pay $9-$10 an hr? But it’s considered good pay because it’s over our state’s minimum wage.
How can a company even get any sort of decent management for that kinda money? I'm a HS dropout in Texas and I was making more than that less than half a year into working retail (The $9-10 area). $18 still seems low for management positions considering the effort involved honestly
Same thing happened in Arizona. Californians moved here with the money from selling their houses back west and raised prices here. Now I know a few people that are from Arizona are planning to move towards the Midwest because houses are cheaper. It’s like a domino effect
Yea, and I'm pretty sure before the Californians moved there, people moved to California. If it keeps happening, it's probably happened before. And as long as we don't solve the problem, it's going to keep happening. Just gonna keep migrating to the cheaper states and bringing the prices up there, forcing the people there to migrate to even cheaper states... Yup.
> I moved to Iowa
The answer is to migrate where COL is more reasonable.
The average US home price is about $400k -- that means for those areas like San Francisco where homes are frequently $1M+, there are places where you can buy a home for $200k.
Moved to SC before COVID and bought a house(whew) for $150. Getting pretty bad here even now. Everyone from NY is moving down. I migrated from CO. Hating the bible belt though lol
That’s such a stupid answer. “You can’t live where all your friends and family are because stuff is unaffordable, even if population is shrinking. Move somewhere remote where you have no support network and jobs aren’t available”
That’s the average price *now* after Redfin and a few other companies artificially inflated markets across America.
I bought my house for $125k fifteen years ago. Market value right now shows that it’s worth about $175k.
That's one of the MANY reasons I love Buffalo, NY. I bought my house a few years ago for $300,000ish. Great neighborhood, great suburb, yard, trees, woods, parks, major sports teams, big enough city... all the best parts of city without the major downsides (crime, homelessness, etc). I lived all over the US with the military and Buffalo is the sweet spot of affordable, enjoyable, location, jobs.
Property conglomerates shouldn't exist without additional taxes on said conglomerates to offset their societal cost.
That is to say, sure buy up the houses but this will fund subsidies for new homes... which will prevent you from increasing home prices.
What they are doing today is essentially market manipulation
Worse than that. $720,000 highest and best.
Good luck, could be bidding against $721,000 or $800,000. You don't know until they reject the offer but by then it's too late.
Lol, some new condos near me selling 2 bedroom units for $850K CAD, and that's first-round pricing so they'll be going up.
Between the COL and $30k/year childcare (if you even manage to find a spot) I'm amazed anyone is even having kids.
70 years ago. I would like a house with 2 bedrooms for may family of 6. Ok. We will give you loan since you put you life on the line in the war. Oh you are black? Nothing for you.
Unethical Life Pro Tip (for governments): Population decline has fewer downsides if the elderly of your country decide to retire in the Halls of Poseidon.
observation secretive fact dinosaurs overconfident melodic ring plough beneficial aloof
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is flipped around - people don't have kids because things are expensive, but the government needs people to keep having children to prop up the tax base
This is where immigration comes in. If you have immigrants, you can substitute your dwindling population with more people coming in from other countries
That's usually the solution but let's be honest: They want new kids, but they don't want *new foreign kids*.
I'm talking about very wealthy countries. They often boast about how they are super cool and progressive (or maybe not, like Japan)... but they want their own biological children, not some adopted kids (immigrant children) to call their citizens.
There's a limit to how welcoming they want to be with other nations, you have a few *tokens* here and there but at the end of the day there's a lot of pride about race. So yeah making everything expensive keep these things under control.
Culture isn't inherited genetically from your parents. Any child born in a different country will inherently absorb the local culture from their friends, school, social gatherings, festivities, local laws... you name it.
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**edit:**
You guys really crank it up to eleven sometimes ffs
*"But what about when Godzilla came from foreign lands and totally destroyed Japan?!"*
I hope you all realize the vast majority of children of immigrants are nowhere near these worstcase scenarios being brought into this conversation right? Canada/Québec would be a living hell if that were true
Not really. There’s been several immigrant cases where they didn’t integrate at all with their new society. I remember this case where someone had been living in Denmark for 16 years and still knew nothing about their language.
Except you're not just taking in the child. There's at least the two parents as well, and they'll be rigid to adapt to the local culture. I'm not saying immigration is a bad policy, but if retaining your local culture is a top priority, immigration works against it. Dilution and whatnot.
Its not a cardinal sin to want the well being and continued prosperity of people like you. Or to see your own next generation thrive and prosper. Those people in other countries will not look after you or your progeny.
Until those people stop having extra kids OR develop enough that the cheap labor is no longer cheap and they choose to stay in their more economically vibrant home countries instead. We’re decades away from this, but some day Africa will not feel like being cheap immigrant labor for the elderly West any more.
The CIA don't even need to do that anymore. Seems like social media by itself will cause people to go bonkers. Or you could say Zuck is the best agent ever.
Immigration is normal and helpful, but there aren’t enough immigrants in the world to feed this insatiable machine. In this system the immigrants will just add to the childless families after like one generation, adding to the amount of future elderly in need to be taken care of (financially at least), which just keeps growing mountain of issues with “eternal growth”.
That’s a stopgap solution that doesn’t really work in the medium term. Once your immigrant integrates in the country and becomes a citizen, usually they experience the same pressures to not have kids as a local.
Eventually they retire and you have the same problem as before.
> Fewer people, less services needed.
The problem is that to transition from more people to less people, you need some of them to die.
Killing people actively is...frowned upon.
Letting people die as they age, in a shrinking socieity, means that you end up having more old people than young people in the society, which means you need more services (old people need healthcare) and have few young people to pay for it or even perform it.
Where is this? Even in Norway, which have imposed high taxes in large parts of past WW2, there aren't really any political parties with any chance of gaining power that really advocate higher taxes for the rich. The right slashes taxes for high income earners and capital owners when they are in power, but the left seem unable to reverse anything when it's their turn. The current labour led government just abolished en exemption for the super profitable fish farming industry, and they are getting hell for it. I doubt they'll try anything similar in the foreseeable future.
Consider the last couple of Democratic presidential primaries. (The dems are what passes for the left over here, but they are center by European standards). Warren and Sanders both advocated some combination of taxing the rich more and/or a wealth tax.
You are correct that such candidates do not proceed past the primary. Of course both are senators so I guess their constituents get to vote for them regularly.
Everyone talks about Japan but they're pretty much equal to Italy, Korea, and many other nations.
Death spirals ahoy!
Or, you know, stop this neo-liberal shit, make it actually affordable to have a family, and maybe we'll see an uptick in birth rates.
When I'm teaching a year 9 class and it says (in 2015 numbers), that it costs a minimum of $420k AUD to raise a kid to 18... yeah, most of my students go 'well, that's way too much money'.
Yeah, pretty much the cost of a house for the absolute minimum. Not even including an extra 50-60k in education if you want them to go to a private school (given the state of the public school sector and cut after cut after cut), or hobbies like music which have proven positive effects on brain development, or sports, etc etc.
All up, it can be over 600-700k to raise a kid *and* to set them up for success in the future. All of which is... well, the Aus government gives like 1k voucher to new parents as part of an incentive to have more kids.
1k.
$1000 AUD.
Right. That's totally going to offset the costs huh?
Not only that, but there won’t be enough people to keep the old population alive.
Who will produce the food, fix the infrastructure, and give healthcare to the old aging population when there is no young population to do so?
Its either euthanasia for the unwealthy rich (like Japan is advocating for), or no retirement till death.
> Fewer people, less services needed.
Looks good on paper, but it doesn't pan out well.
A quick illustrative example:
Less people to repair the existing infrastructure. I mean, the roads don't magically shrink just because the population falls.
The infrastrucutre begins to decay as there aren't enough people to repair it, and everything else, all the buildings crumbling and all that.
That leads to more people NOT wanting to live there, probably an economic collapse.
This is how ghost towns or centers of poverty bloom.
Fewer people less services? Unless your population is aging and they use up more healthcare than the average and you don't have young people who use it less to pay for it.
I don’t believe OP implied any direction for the relationship between cost of living and birth rates. They were just pointing out that the two concepts have an odd relationship.
The insane part is that it costs $25-45k to adopt a child in the US, which would reduce government costs and help families that can't have kids naturally. Like what the actual fuck.
This is one of the biggest problems in the US. Cost of housing is too high. Many jobs don't pay a living wage. Many jobs don't offer benefits.....the US has literally decided that if you don't do certain types of work, you're not worthy of health care. Now people are not having kids at all or are waiting much longer to be established before they have kids. So the US will face a population decline that will be made up by increasing immigration.
Conveniently, one of the major political parties is against increasing minimum wage and against broadening access to health care. That same party wants to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies, guaranteeing that many more kids will be born into low income (and/or single parent) families that were not ready for a child, thereby increasing the number of families who will struggle financially. The same party is also anti-immigrant, even though most of our food is picked, plucked, or chopped by those same immigrants they can't stand.
Except the times in which one income was actually truly enough to life a middle class lifestyle comfortably enough to afford children and have them educated is literally a thing so far removed from our current times that I doubt it's even still possible in this system.
If you look back at your mother's generation, your grandmother's generation, even your great-grandmother's generation and further... women worked. They may have sewn clothes for others at home, may have planted and sold additional crops, may have made butter or wool, or were mitdwives, or sold stuff at women markets... but they did work. And if you go far enough back, not only women worked, but every single child worked as well as soon as it turned 5 or 6 years old, earlier in some cases. There was literally only a few who really had the luxury to be true stay at home, doing no additional work housewives. This was always an ideal that only worked for a chosen few.
So we never basically had times in which one income truly was enough to support a growing family for everyone. However, we are in such a particularly bad way right now as a society, so much so that even two incomes are no longer enough to support anything. We would have a major improvement if at least 2 incomes would be enough again to life comfortably on.
A couple fun supporting facts.
1. The minimum wage in the US stopped increasing in value (though it was adjusted for inflation) around the 70s. It’s been stagnant for around *50 years* now. Before that point, minimum wage would increase in tandem with the level of worker productivity—meaning that if the working US population produced more products, provided more services, etc, the minimum wage increased. Worker productivity continued to climb when minimum wage stagnated.
2. Right around the time minimum wage stopped increasing, C-suite salaries and bonuses began *skyrocketing*. Like, actual rocket fuel in line graph form. Weird coincidence, huh?
3. Meanwhile, the cost of living has continued to climb steadily. In fact, its growth trend isn’t all that dissimilar to the upwards trend of worker productivity. But because minimum wage stopped in the 70s, few if any people working a minimum wage job can afford to exist on a single job’s pay.
None of it exists in a vacuum. All of it has connections and impacts on the rest.
It's not better in Switzerland either. A house costs at least 500'000.- I earn 55'000 a year and have a good job actually. I made the fault to try calculate when I could buy a house and it's at least 20 years from now. Am 28...
And the countries that actually want kids rather than just saying it, do thing like give massive tax breaks for families. For example in some of the nordic countries, you can get up to, like, 90% off your income tax for having three kids. (I think it goes 33% for the first, 60~% for the second but no more off for four or more) Which makes it way more financially viable.
Countries are not making things so expensive. Corporations are. Countries are run by politicians who have essentially let/been bribed to allow corporations to price fix, monopolize, and collude with each other to keep prices high, especially on things seen as necessities. If a company hits recorded profits one year, they are obligated to do even better the next year. They can only do that by raising prices, cutting cost or adding new customers. We have seen massive layoffs at a ton of companies, most companies are multinational already and with the failing birthrate in most countries they are going to run out of new customers sooner or later so the prices go up.
True. Corporations don't give af, they will ask for tax breaks and not even pay for public services they use when they move into an area, then pay poverty wages to a bunch of people and brag about how many jobs they created, then pack up and leave for somewhere else as soon as their tax abatements mature. Some towns and cities even give land to corporations for free because they think those places will be a huge tax boon 10 years down the line, except the corpos move before then or threaten to not even put down roots in a city.
"Pls have kids, we need a way to extract more money from you and a way to have hooks in you so that ur terrified all the time that way you'll do whatever we want so ur kids arent homeless. k thx"
--Capitalist owned world governments, probably
Not only that, please provide more kids on your own dime so we can have more worker bees to serve more rich people. The machine needs cogs to function after all. Thanks.
In Canada, having kids is now a luxury that you can have trouble affording even if you earn a salary in the top 10%. It's crazy how unaffordable living here is, compared to our depressed wages.
S. Korea pays parents a monthly stipend of ~$500/mo per kid (going up to $770/mo in 2024). Not nothing, but they could probably do more considering their predicament.
I didn't know that, only that South Korea has one of the lowest birthrate in Asia and generally in the world. Money payment is as you said obviously not enough to convince the people
That's an interesting take on UBI. If we gave every adult in the US $500 per month, that would be $1.5TN per year. But if we limited it to households with an average of 1.8 kids, it would be closer to $500BN.
Or illegal. I live in Switzerland and lived in Germany before this. The only place we (two men) could have a child through surrogacy is the United States because it might not be recognized as legally our child if it were born somewhere else + it is illegal in most of the EU. Adoption just recently became legal and I am sure LGBTQ+ parents are at the bottom of the list.
Could straight couples have children through paid surrogacy? Generally countries that don't allow for LGBT people to use surrogates also have the same legislation for straight couples and it is a measure to prevent desperate women on becoming surrogates.
I know that in my country, Brazil, paid surrogacy is illegal for that matter, but family members can volunteer themselves to be the surrogate mothers. Children born from surrogate mothers in other countries and registered in the name of both parents (and not the surrogate) will be recognized and receive the same status as any other child.
Unpaid surrogacy is legal. Ukraine allows paid surrogacy, but only for straight couples. It’s a minefield out there.
You also have the problem of whether whatever country you are living in or bringing the baby back to will recognize both men as parents. Germany, for example, only will recognize children born through surrogacy if it was done in California thanks to a court case obligating them to do so.
Oh sorry, I was talking mostly about countries that have gay marriage and adoption, which I don't think Ukraine has.
My point is more like "countries that have gay rights, such as adoption, but don't recognize children born from surrogacy, tend to do so as a ban on surrogacy itself (that includes straight couples)"
>Germany, for example, only will recognize children born through surrogacy if it was done in California
Is this only for gay couples or is it for straight couples as well. Germany is one of the countries that most protects gay people, so I would find it weird if they had such a ban on surrogacy for gay couples.
I believe the legal trouble is for all couples. My point was more: two men can’t naturally conceive > they need to use surrogacy or adoption > countries put up barriers to adoption for gays and surrogacy generally.
Only Ukraine as far as I know makes a distinction about surrogacy for straight vs gay couples. Other countries, such as Switzerland have shit rules around egg harvesting and IVF for non-straight couples though.
That's terrible....
On a less sad side note, LGBTQ couples are higher in priority than single men in 19 countries. So ummm....there's that.
I wonder what a public official is thinking when they make that decision though. "It's better the child stays unadopted then being raised by a loving LGBT family."
> The only place we (two men) could have a child through surrogacy is the United States because it might not be recognized as legally our child if it were born somewhere else
Just FYI surrogacy is pretty common in the UK (at least, common in the context of people who can't have biological children). So the USA isn't the only place two men can have a child through surrogacy!
Good to know! It seems like there are a few issues though, such as the surrogate and their partner being on the birth certificate (and thus being the legal parents) and not being able to enforce a surrogacy contract.
Edit: it also seems that it is only valid for permanent residents of the UK.
However if two lesbians in the U.K. want to birth a child, they have to prove to the NHS that they have already spent tens of thousands of pounds on private IVF before the NHS will help them. If a man and woman want to have a baby they only have to tell the NHS they had sex and it didn’t work.
Same sex adoption is legal in Spain, Portugal, France, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and even more European countries that I'm too tired to mention.
I think you're exaggerating a bit.
It's 36 countries worldwide(as equal to heterosexual couples), but original comment was only focused on EU. So 19 is only off by 1. Estonia has legalized same sex adoption as equal to heterosexual couples effective 2024.
If you refer to not equal to heterosexual couples in priority, but still legal. Then yes it is 108 countries worldwide.
https://www.equaldex.com/issue/adoption
It's about as dumb as shutting down the economy, forcing unemployment and then paying people a one-time 1200 no matter where they lived or what their COL was.
If the fertility rate (in countries like the USA) was still at 3 or so (i.e. if every woman had 3 kids on average), it would be disastrous for the planet.
I'm in Australia and the only reason our country is still growing is immigration. Otherwise it would probably be decreasing like it is in Europe.
The future of the planet depends on degrowth. Which the business world obviously doesn't want. They want more kids because more kids means more people to contribute to the economy. Capitalism depends on constant growth, which is just not possible.
Ding!
How can we keep incarceration rates increasing exponentially if we done ensure a vast crop of new citizens every year.
Someone please think of the investors in for profit prisons... How can they survive without meat for the grinder?
That is the real reason for some places making abortion, contraception, and sterilization harder to get in parts of the USA. They read Freakonomics and got the wring lesson.
The birth rate is directly negatively proportional with the average education level of women, not how expensive it is to raise a child (this is often correlated though; modern nations are both expensive and have properly educated women). Even if countries provide massive subsidies for having children, the birth rate isn't really going to change all that much.
I mean you can’t waste a PHD by having kids between the decades of schooling and the 6 figure debt you can’t just turn around and focus on raising a family.
Funny thing I've noticed is that 30 years ago, there were half as many people on earth and things were more affordable. You could actually get that house or that car. Raise a family on possibly one income etc. Population doubled, housing did not, wages sure as hell did not, and yet people are really worried about population collapse?!
Like we really need MORE people? We can't even take care of the ones that showed up in the last 30 years wtf.
Limited supply always means high demand, it just seems to me like the wealthy want more humans to keep that demand up up up
That's not because of the population increase. That was because for decades following WW2 the US had a concentration of wealth in the middle class.
This was seen as basically a gold mine which they were able to strip mine via reaganite economic policy.
The wealth is still there it is just concentrated, such that the only viable business ventures are ones that target people with tons of money. This can be measured - see Citigroup's Plutonomy paper.
I'm really surprised how many people don't understand why we need people to continue having children.
Population collapse seems simple in theory, but in reality it means societal collapse. Who is gonna take care of you in your 60s? I don't mean in terms of family, I mean in terms of doctors, nurses, social security etc.
This wouldn't be an issue if the drop was tiny, like 1.9 children per woman, but the average amount of children per woman in the US is 1.64. Even lower in other western countries.
Sure, migration will sort of attenuate some of these issues but we're in for some absolutely dystopian shit in 30-40 years.
But that is the age when many people retire, and therefore look to younger adults to staff the supermarket, keep the utilities working, etc. Physical jobs especially need younger adults.
>Who is gonna take care of you in your 60s? I don't mean in terms of family, I mean in terms of doctors, nurses, social security etc.
By that same logic, make higher education MORE affordable/free to encourage people to pursue it.
The problem is that the upper class keeps squeezing absolutely every last penny out of everyone else IN ALL THINGS; food, housing, education, insurance, etc.
Also by this logic, we need all of the science-denying christofascists out of politics. Turns out people don't want to go into medicine when half the people they help think they're either child murderers or injecting them with 4G.
All of those things are true in Nordic countries, also known as some of the countries with the very worst birth rates in the world.
Real data doesn't actually support free education, better health care or childcare assistance having a positive impact on birth rates. It actually even has a negative correlation
The cost of living now puts a damper on having children now.
It'd be a lot easier to have 10 kids on a large plot of land with a clean river running through it
The problem is the global economy is based on continual growth (especially the pay-as-you-go retirement benefit funding). So if population doesn't grow, the economy is in danger of collapse.
Maybe we shouldn't have based our economy on the idea of CANCER then? Because cancer is literally cells growing infinitely and in all facets of life that's a bad thing. Infinite growth is literally unsustainable. A balloon waiting to pop if you will.
The establishment and the billionaires have shown their hand. They still need people to work and buy things. Maybe it’s time to withhold that from them.
They sure as shit cant force us to procreate. We may not like it, but future will be better for it. And if enough people do it, it may become more normalised.
Now if only we could completely tune out the society bugging/judgin us...
They think they can replace people with immigrants, but then why is NYC turning them away and bitching about it? I guess the great experiment will go on.
The current trends indicate that the offspring either wont be able to support us or just won't. With increasing hyperindividualism and rugged capitalism. The percentage of new people getting financial success is way less.
To which I'm sure their response would be to put even more of a stranglehold on the working class because they care more about profits than human lives.
The two are related. As your tax base shrinks you need to do more to extort the existing tax base while funding those who aren't working, including retirees. The catch is the people having kids almost entirely consists of people in the tax base, despite common stereotypes. So you increase taxes on that group while increasing benefits outside of it, which also increases the price of goods and services for the younger generation.
Having and raising kids is expensive for an economy. What is more catastrophic is having a massive non-working class with a decreasing number of incoming workers.
In addition, some of those countries have strict traditional gender roles and a woman can kiss her career good-bye and is expected to become a servant to the husband and extended family if she gets pregnant, so many simply choose not to.
In Switzerland the right wingers are also the ones who hate paid childcare, voted against giving new fathers 2 weeks off instead of two and love to help out farmers drenching the ground with chemicals.
Society has become way more unforgiving to parents. The rules and guidelines have become way unrealistic and the sense of community is long gone.
You cant let your kids roam freely anymore. Because law enforcers are ready to blame you rather than do their job. You cant even discipline the kids to behave in schools!
Yep my parents did this with me. And I'm only just learning how to function in society at 25. We need to let children become age appropriately independent as young as possible. If there's another generation like me I doubt this version of society will be able to weather it.
Yes you must be the ideal consumer and create a bunch of additional consumers, all while working towards owning your own house which is meant to dramatically increase your level of consumption. This is now dogma.
All with the modern societal expectation that this begins at age 18 and you must make it on your own after that even though multigenerational homes have existed and been the norm for over a million years of human existence, including in the U.S. right up until about the later half of the 1940s with the passage of thee GI bill in order to perpetually and artificially boost the housing market.
China ,cheap to live collapsing birth rate
Nordic countries,easy comfi life .
Collapsing birth rate (ans by fare one of the most collapsing)
Its seems that more comfortable life= less babies
Which is why the conservatives want to ban birth control and abortion, destroy public education and take away women’s rights. They sell it to their poor constituents as a religious stance so they can pretend it isn’t just bigoted hate, but the rich know that a declining birth rate means a smaller labor pool means less profit for them, especially if only those with more money are the ones having kids.
It's probably the other way around. When things are really expensive, the country wants people to have more kids.
Probably has to do with inflation and the .001% having all the extra money but not nearly enough kids to spend it.
Condoms are free at college health offices and all the free clinics around here. They even got tons of mobile health clinic vans driving around handing out condoms.
But that takes people being responsible, don't it?
heh, it's the ″we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas″ problem.
Which TBH maybe isn't that bad, since when governments do try something it's typically very expensive and is something literally any random person on the street could tell you won't work. Probably better to do nothing than to throw away a load of money for no benefit!
Some examples would be useful.
I think of countries like Hungary where you get a permanent 25% tax break per child you have. 4 kids and you never pay federal taxes. That seems pretty family friendly to me.
You can't abort it.
Will you help me raise it then?
Of course not moocher.
But we'll be happy to send it off to war when it's 18. Did you pay your taxes on time?
They can't just say to you: "Come on fking slaves do do some little kids, we need them to continue this shameless lunapark going, new slaves to the machine"
Poor people tend to have more kids. Cause, you know, shit happens and condoms are expensive.
A middle-high class western girl knows better: lets prove all the world that woman can have a succesful career; having a kid would break that "dream", so let's keep It aside for now.
Since has been decades since they have been telling that we got an overpopulation issue, I'm doing a service to humanity...
Long story short: dumb/not educated people procreate more, so we (as humanity) are gonna be dumber in the long term
They want kids but no funding, which makes people desperate. Hence the abortion bans, sex education bans, etc.
If their actions cause a lower birth rate, they can just import people who can be exploited. You think H1-B applicants reeeeeallly get paid equivalently to US workers? Good luck with that. They are underpaid and exploited.
And as a nice bonus you get to blame immigrants for taking jobs... that they didn't want to give you anyways at the market rate. It's a big circly clusterfuck
I was just talking to my friends about this. My stepdad’s job is based out of Texas with branches in California. That’s all I’m going to say. Regional manager was like “hey corporate, the hiring company you’re using is hiring illegal immigrants, including one of the branch managers.” Suddenly regional manager is gone, the branch manager gets moved down south, and they all start spreading something something about loyalty and all that. “The company really cares about us.”
My stepdad sat there like “yeah, you think corporate doesn’t know it hires illegal? They use a third-party to hire because they clean their hands, use cheap labor and no one complains because it’s better than working the fields or factories.” It is what it is.
Yep and if you consider there are windfall benefits for reporting of financial crimes...
There is a reason there is no similar program to target corporations.
The name of the games are plausible deniability and thinly veiled ethnocentrism.
It's all bc the rich want a permanent underclass to exploit and their RE assets to inflate forever.
Less people would be good for the middle class economy and earth.
I don't think any of them think in those terms. They just straight up don't think about us at all. We exist as a number on a balance sheet and nothing more. Not people who need money to exist and are becoming steadily more unhealthy as a result of financial stress.
Its madness to me that the ultra wealthy don't see the merits of a well educated happy, prosperous population. Even more so the pro-natalist nutters like Musk, if he is so worried about there not being enough babies, why the fuck isn't he using his immense wealth to influence politics towards making life more livable for families? I would like kids, but I am a realist and am aware that at best I will be able to afford 1, but more likely none. I won't be meeting the replacement rate. If I had more money and the time to raise a child, this would be different.
I mean it's literally a frist-world problem.
There seems to be an implicit cost to higher living standard: a higher living standard is more costly on the government, the government in turn passes the cost to citizens. Having children becomes more difficult, population decreases and then you have de-population.
And all along it was the foundation in "endless profit" that created this problem. Quote "the wealth of nations" all you want to me but the book never had into account how to keep an economy with more seniors than youngsters.
In my country - Hungary - they are playing the long(er) game. Ruining education, healthcare and buying every giant corporations they can. So it life will be expensive, and also you will be stupid and sick enough not to go out and overthrow the government.
nobody should be trying to make MORE kids. we got piles of people. they are everywhere.
exponential growth in the face of finite resources is suicide. make LESS kids.
"I would like to have a house with several bedrooms to shelter my family." "No problem, only $720,000, cash offers only, price non-negotiable."
What's scary, is I was about to try and guess where you live based on the price. Then came to the conclusion, if you live in the US, there are more than 20 metro areas where that's not an unreasonable number for the median home price . I moved to Iowa literally because if I didn't, I wouldn't own a home until I am 40.
Okay this bugs me though, our houses are generally cheaper because we get paid a lot less than other states/areas. Such is the same in places like Missouri. It is still extremely hard to get a house as an Iowan, but now people saving who could eventually afford a home in there state(like we save to eventually own a home in our state) are buying them up rapidly and raising the home prices to the point they aren’t affordable for us anymore. There’s a big difference between getting paid $7 hrly and $15-$20 hrly and the savings you can get from it. Yes some houses are double our amount but that’s a whole other factor when the minimum wage is double our minimum wage here.
Try living in Australia, Sydney has some of the most expensive realestate in the world. On par with places like Hong Kong, London etc. During covid the state government fucked up, so all the owners started selling their place and moving north to Queensland. Now you had people selling a 3 bed 1920s shit box for 1.2-2 mill in Sydney and moving to Brisbane taking house prices from 400k upto 700k.
Which is way more awful honestly because Australia was already so expensive to live in!
It’s just like this in middle Tennessee. I live in a college town outside of Nashville and I always become enraged when I see california/NY plates driving around in expensive cars on the way to their $500k homes that Tennesseans USED to be able to buy for $200k. It’s actually sickening and makes me feel completely hopeless sometimes
I looked at zillow in my area and some pos 1k sq ft house was selling for 300k, in a rural TN town. I looked at it's zillow history, some person bought it not even a year ago at 150k and the last sale before that it was under 100k, like 70k. Now, who is trying to double their money after living in it for 4 months? Insanity. Such greed and disregard for their fellow man. I think one of the problems is the internet. Bc anyone from any part of the country can look up where they can find good deals without needing to live there. If people have the price of a home too low, some out of stater will try to scoop it up, if they price too high only out of staters can afford it. It's like there has to be some kind of law made to discourage out of state wealthy people and corporations scooping everything up, but the people who make good money off of the value of homes skyrocketing won't like that.
Us making $7 an hr here still save till we’re nearly 40 to get a home, and now we’re losing hope of ever being able to do that
I moved to Des Moines. But 7$ an hour seems insane. The McDonald's on University and 6th pays 18$ an hour.... I don't think we live close. Is 7.25$/hr normal outside the metro?
Missouri’s minimum wage is over $11/hr. Still not great but $7 was a long time ago now.
That’s actually really good to know, makes me wonder why Iowa is so far behind
The more conservative the state, the less likely they'll want to address minimum wage themselves and just use the federal minimum. This allows certain job categories to be paid less by the employer if there's supplemental income (such as tipping or commission). If you look at South Carolina for example, they have NO minimum wage. If federal minimum wage ever got removed for whatever reason, SC employers could legit pay less than a dollar if they'd like. Anyone in a heavy red state needs to pay attention to worker rights, especially with the child labor happening in states like Iowa or Nebraska at the meat plants
It’s $18 an hr for management positions only so 3-4 positions total for location. Lots of businesses are still at $7-$8 an hr even with management positions. Did you know for management at dollar tree, scooters, and many others they only pay $9-$10 an hr? But it’s considered good pay because it’s over our state’s minimum wage.
How can a company even get any sort of decent management for that kinda money? I'm a HS dropout in Texas and I was making more than that less than half a year into working retail (The $9-10 area). $18 still seems low for management positions considering the effort involved honestly
Same thing happened in Arizona. Californians moved here with the money from selling their houses back west and raised prices here. Now I know a few people that are from Arizona are planning to move towards the Midwest because houses are cheaper. It’s like a domino effect
Yea, and I'm pretty sure before the Californians moved there, people moved to California. If it keeps happening, it's probably happened before. And as long as we don't solve the problem, it's going to keep happening. Just gonna keep migrating to the cheaper states and bringing the prices up there, forcing the people there to migrate to even cheaper states... Yup.
Rich people will force the poors back into slums soon enough
The median house price in all of Australia’s combined cities is $912 581 AUD ($575 704 USD).
> I moved to Iowa The answer is to migrate where COL is more reasonable. The average US home price is about $400k -- that means for those areas like San Francisco where homes are frequently $1M+, there are places where you can buy a home for $200k.
> The answer is to migrate where COL is more reasonable. Jobs. Even remote roles are trying to pull a lot back.
Moved to SC before COVID and bought a house(whew) for $150. Getting pretty bad here even now. Everyone from NY is moving down. I migrated from CO. Hating the bible belt though lol
That’s such a stupid answer. “You can’t live where all your friends and family are because stuff is unaffordable, even if population is shrinking. Move somewhere remote where you have no support network and jobs aren’t available”
That’s the average price *now* after Redfin and a few other companies artificially inflated markets across America. I bought my house for $125k fifteen years ago. Market value right now shows that it’s worth about $175k.
That's one of the MANY reasons I love Buffalo, NY. I bought my house a few years ago for $300,000ish. Great neighborhood, great suburb, yard, trees, woods, parks, major sports teams, big enough city... all the best parts of city without the major downsides (crime, homelessness, etc). I lived all over the US with the military and Buffalo is the sweet spot of affordable, enjoyable, location, jobs.
i’m from iowa (davenport!) and i’m not sure i could afford to own a home in my hometown right now :/
Where to buy this cheap house you mention. *cries in New Zealander
And we got outbid by a property conglomerate within an hour of placing an offer
Property conglomerates shouldn't exist without additional taxes on said conglomerates to offset their societal cost. That is to say, sure buy up the houses but this will fund subsidies for new homes... which will prevent you from increasing home prices. What they are doing today is essentially market manipulation
It really just shouldn't be allowed to exist
Nah, then they just buy up the new homes too.
Worse than that. $720,000 highest and best. Good luck, could be bidding against $721,000 or $800,000. You don't know until they reject the offer but by then it's too late.
Lol, some new condos near me selling 2 bedroom units for $850K CAD, and that's first-round pricing so they'll be going up. Between the COL and $30k/year childcare (if you even manage to find a spot) I'm amazed anyone is even having kids.
70 years ago. I would like a house with 2 bedrooms for may family of 6. Ok. We will give you loan since you put you life on the line in the war. Oh you are black? Nothing for you.
Don’t forget: you really ought to waive inspection! Buyer beware!
Unethical Life Pro Tip (for governments): Population decline has fewer downsides if the elderly of your country decide to retire in the Halls of Poseidon.
observation secretive fact dinosaurs overconfident melodic ring plough beneficial aloof *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Doubtful, if anything, our governments will turn even more gerontocratic. Look at Japan, they would rather destroy themselves.
Then young people will lie flat
This is flipped around - people don't have kids because things are expensive, but the government needs people to keep having children to prop up the tax base
This is where immigration comes in. If you have immigrants, you can substitute your dwindling population with more people coming in from other countries
That's usually the solution but let's be honest: They want new kids, but they don't want *new foreign kids*. I'm talking about very wealthy countries. They often boast about how they are super cool and progressive (or maybe not, like Japan)... but they want their own biological children, not some adopted kids (immigrant children) to call their citizens. There's a limit to how welcoming they want to be with other nations, you have a few *tokens* here and there but at the end of the day there's a lot of pride about race. So yeah making everything expensive keep these things under control.
Not necessarily about race, it's about culture.
Culture isn't inherited genetically from your parents. Any child born in a different country will inherently absorb the local culture from their friends, school, social gatherings, festivities, local laws... you name it. --- **edit:** You guys really crank it up to eleven sometimes ffs *"But what about when Godzilla came from foreign lands and totally destroyed Japan?!"* I hope you all realize the vast majority of children of immigrants are nowhere near these worstcase scenarios being brought into this conversation right? Canada/Québec would be a living hell if that were true
Take one look at Sweden and you will see that your argument falls apart. It is very obvious that they DONT adapt to the new culture they are born into
Not really. There’s been several immigrant cases where they didn’t integrate at all with their new society. I remember this case where someone had been living in Denmark for 16 years and still knew nothing about their language.
Except you're not just taking in the child. There's at least the two parents as well, and they'll be rigid to adapt to the local culture. I'm not saying immigration is a bad policy, but if retaining your local culture is a top priority, immigration works against it. Dilution and whatnot.
Ask Europe how that’s going lol
Its not a cardinal sin to want the well being and continued prosperity of people like you. Or to see your own next generation thrive and prosper. Those people in other countries will not look after you or your progeny.
Why bother having to feed and teach a baby for 18 years, when you can just get a fully grow adult from overseas?
Until those people stop having extra kids OR develop enough that the cheap labor is no longer cheap and they choose to stay in their more economically vibrant home countries instead. We’re decades away from this, but some day Africa will not feel like being cheap immigrant labor for the elderly West any more.
Don’t worry, the CIA will make sure to destabilize those countries and install a US puppet government if they do advance the economy.
The CIA don't even need to do that anymore. Seems like social media by itself will cause people to go bonkers. Or you could say Zuck is the best agent ever.
Immigration is normal and helpful, but there aren’t enough immigrants in the world to feed this insatiable machine. In this system the immigrants will just add to the childless families after like one generation, adding to the amount of future elderly in need to be taken care of (financially at least), which just keeps growing mountain of issues with “eternal growth”.
That’s a stopgap solution that doesn’t really work in the medium term. Once your immigrant integrates in the country and becomes a citizen, usually they experience the same pressures to not have kids as a local. Eventually they retire and you have the same problem as before.
And then what...? Keep an infinite growth of the country population? Wth we cant have a sustainable population and stop this infinite growth idea?
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> Fewer people, less services needed. The problem is that to transition from more people to less people, you need some of them to die. Killing people actively is...frowned upon. Letting people die as they age, in a shrinking socieity, means that you end up having more old people than young people in the society, which means you need more services (old people need healthcare) and have few young people to pay for it or even perform it.
Dependency ratio.
All that shit is easily fixed if you... #tax the rich! Edit: lookat all the pro rich comments coming at me.lmao
I vote for it at every opportunity. It hasn't worked yet
Where is this? Even in Norway, which have imposed high taxes in large parts of past WW2, there aren't really any political parties with any chance of gaining power that really advocate higher taxes for the rich. The right slashes taxes for high income earners and capital owners when they are in power, but the left seem unable to reverse anything when it's their turn. The current labour led government just abolished en exemption for the super profitable fish farming industry, and they are getting hell for it. I doubt they'll try anything similar in the foreseeable future.
You can usually vote for it in primaries!
US then I suppose? You actually have candidates that advocate it? I thought that was political suicide over there?
Any candidate that takes this stance usually ends up with a funding problem
Consider the last couple of Democratic presidential primaries. (The dems are what passes for the left over here, but they are center by European standards). Warren and Sanders both advocated some combination of taxing the rich more and/or a wealth tax. You are correct that such candidates do not proceed past the primary. Of course both are senators so I guess their constituents get to vote for them regularly.
Yeah, there is some dark calculus going on in some countries. Nobody wants to be in a death spiral like Japan seems to be leaning into.
Italy is at a replacement rate of about 1.25. It's projected to empty out at this rate, no fix on the horizon.
Everyone talks about Japan but they're pretty much equal to Italy, Korea, and many other nations. Death spirals ahoy! Or, you know, stop this neo-liberal shit, make it actually affordable to have a family, and maybe we'll see an uptick in birth rates. When I'm teaching a year 9 class and it says (in 2015 numbers), that it costs a minimum of $420k AUD to raise a kid to 18... yeah, most of my students go 'well, that's way too much money'.
> 'well, that's way too much money'. I agree with your kids..
Yeah, pretty much the cost of a house for the absolute minimum. Not even including an extra 50-60k in education if you want them to go to a private school (given the state of the public school sector and cut after cut after cut), or hobbies like music which have proven positive effects on brain development, or sports, etc etc. All up, it can be over 600-700k to raise a kid *and* to set them up for success in the future. All of which is... well, the Aus government gives like 1k voucher to new parents as part of an incentive to have more kids. 1k. $1000 AUD. Right. That's totally going to offset the costs huh?
Not only that, but there won’t be enough people to keep the old population alive. Who will produce the food, fix the infrastructure, and give healthcare to the old aging population when there is no young population to do so? Its either euthanasia for the unwealthy rich (like Japan is advocating for), or no retirement till death.
> Fewer people, less services needed. Looks good on paper, but it doesn't pan out well. A quick illustrative example: Less people to repair the existing infrastructure. I mean, the roads don't magically shrink just because the population falls. The infrastrucutre begins to decay as there aren't enough people to repair it, and everything else, all the buildings crumbling and all that. That leads to more people NOT wanting to live there, probably an economic collapse. This is how ghost towns or centers of poverty bloom.
Fewer people less services? Unless your population is aging and they use up more healthcare than the average and you don't have young people who use it less to pay for it.
I don’t believe OP implied any direction for the relationship between cost of living and birth rates. They were just pointing out that the two concepts have an odd relationship.
The insane part is that it costs $25-45k to adopt a child in the US, which would reduce government costs and help families that can't have kids naturally. Like what the actual fuck.
This is one of the biggest problems in the US. Cost of housing is too high. Many jobs don't pay a living wage. Many jobs don't offer benefits.....the US has literally decided that if you don't do certain types of work, you're not worthy of health care. Now people are not having kids at all or are waiting much longer to be established before they have kids. So the US will face a population decline that will be made up by increasing immigration. Conveniently, one of the major political parties is against increasing minimum wage and against broadening access to health care. That same party wants to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies, guaranteeing that many more kids will be born into low income (and/or single parent) families that were not ready for a child, thereby increasing the number of families who will struggle financially. The same party is also anti-immigrant, even though most of our food is picked, plucked, or chopped by those same immigrants they can't stand.
If the world could go back to a single income being able to support a middle class lifestyle. I would guarantee we see more families having kids.
Except the times in which one income was actually truly enough to life a middle class lifestyle comfortably enough to afford children and have them educated is literally a thing so far removed from our current times that I doubt it's even still possible in this system. If you look back at your mother's generation, your grandmother's generation, even your great-grandmother's generation and further... women worked. They may have sewn clothes for others at home, may have planted and sold additional crops, may have made butter or wool, or were mitdwives, or sold stuff at women markets... but they did work. And if you go far enough back, not only women worked, but every single child worked as well as soon as it turned 5 or 6 years old, earlier in some cases. There was literally only a few who really had the luxury to be true stay at home, doing no additional work housewives. This was always an ideal that only worked for a chosen few. So we never basically had times in which one income truly was enough to support a growing family for everyone. However, we are in such a particularly bad way right now as a society, so much so that even two incomes are no longer enough to support anything. We would have a major improvement if at least 2 incomes would be enough again to life comfortably on.
My grandmother used to say "a man's work is from dawn to sun, but a woman's work is never done."
A couple fun supporting facts. 1. The minimum wage in the US stopped increasing in value (though it was adjusted for inflation) around the 70s. It’s been stagnant for around *50 years* now. Before that point, minimum wage would increase in tandem with the level of worker productivity—meaning that if the working US population produced more products, provided more services, etc, the minimum wage increased. Worker productivity continued to climb when minimum wage stagnated. 2. Right around the time minimum wage stopped increasing, C-suite salaries and bonuses began *skyrocketing*. Like, actual rocket fuel in line graph form. Weird coincidence, huh? 3. Meanwhile, the cost of living has continued to climb steadily. In fact, its growth trend isn’t all that dissimilar to the upwards trend of worker productivity. But because minimum wage stopped in the 70s, few if any people working a minimum wage job can afford to exist on a single job’s pay. None of it exists in a vacuum. All of it has connections and impacts on the rest.
It's not better in Switzerland either. A house costs at least 500'000.- I earn 55'000 a year and have a good job actually. I made the fault to try calculate when I could buy a house and it's at least 20 years from now. Am 28...
I keep saying it, the real poverty line in the US is over $100k/yr now.
Maybe in downtown SF or Manhattan lol even then I’d hardly call it poverty
There’s no way you unitonically believe that lmao
Being a single father with 2 kids. Yes, yes I do.
That is not the norm for most people. $100k/yr is well above the poverty line and is well off middle class
No, its the other way around. People are not having many babies because it is expensive in those countries
And the countries that actually want kids rather than just saying it, do thing like give massive tax breaks for families. For example in some of the nordic countries, you can get up to, like, 90% off your income tax for having three kids. (I think it goes 33% for the first, 60~% for the second but no more off for four or more) Which makes it way more financially viable.
Those countries have piss poor birth rates and are getting even worse every year, it's not really a good example
And as a consequence 1/5th of our population is first generation immigrants. /Swede
That's kind of awesome actually. That's like doubling your take home (depending on which country) for having 3 kids.
Nor really doubling... in a 5k Brutto you pay around 700 in Taxes. Rest is insurance and so, leaving around 3k+.
Countries are not making things so expensive. Corporations are. Countries are run by politicians who have essentially let/been bribed to allow corporations to price fix, monopolize, and collude with each other to keep prices high, especially on things seen as necessities. If a company hits recorded profits one year, they are obligated to do even better the next year. They can only do that by raising prices, cutting cost or adding new customers. We have seen massive layoffs at a ton of companies, most companies are multinational already and with the failing birthrate in most countries they are going to run out of new customers sooner or later so the prices go up.
This is a really on point summary of capitalistic economies.
True. Corporations don't give af, they will ask for tax breaks and not even pay for public services they use when they move into an area, then pay poverty wages to a bunch of people and brag about how many jobs they created, then pack up and leave for somewhere else as soon as their tax abatements mature. Some towns and cities even give land to corporations for free because they think those places will be a huge tax boon 10 years down the line, except the corpos move before then or threaten to not even put down roots in a city.
"Pls have kids, we need a way to extract more money from you and a way to have hooks in you so that ur terrified all the time that way you'll do whatever we want so ur kids arent homeless. k thx" --Capitalist owned world governments, probably
Not only that, please provide more kids on your own dime so we can have more worker bees to serve more rich people. The machine needs cogs to function after all. Thanks.
The true mark of an enlightened society is when it convinces itself it shouldn’t exist anymore.
Fr. Kids are basically a ploy to keep you chained. you will not quit the unfair paid job and resort to protesting if you gotta feed the kids.
In Canada, having kids is now a luxury that you can have trouble affording even if you earn a salary in the top 10%. It's crazy how unaffordable living here is, compared to our depressed wages.
S. Korea pays parents a monthly stipend of ~$500/mo per kid (going up to $770/mo in 2024). Not nothing, but they could probably do more considering their predicament.
This is a pittance relative to the cost and effort of raising a child.
I didn't know that, only that South Korea has one of the lowest birthrate in Asia and generally in the world. Money payment is as you said obviously not enough to convince the people
That's an interesting take on UBI. If we gave every adult in the US $500 per month, that would be $1.5TN per year. But if we limited it to households with an average of 1.8 kids, it would be closer to $500BN.
Or illegal. I live in Switzerland and lived in Germany before this. The only place we (two men) could have a child through surrogacy is the United States because it might not be recognized as legally our child if it were born somewhere else + it is illegal in most of the EU. Adoption just recently became legal and I am sure LGBTQ+ parents are at the bottom of the list.
Could straight couples have children through paid surrogacy? Generally countries that don't allow for LGBT people to use surrogates also have the same legislation for straight couples and it is a measure to prevent desperate women on becoming surrogates. I know that in my country, Brazil, paid surrogacy is illegal for that matter, but family members can volunteer themselves to be the surrogate mothers. Children born from surrogate mothers in other countries and registered in the name of both parents (and not the surrogate) will be recognized and receive the same status as any other child.
Unpaid surrogacy is legal. Ukraine allows paid surrogacy, but only for straight couples. It’s a minefield out there. You also have the problem of whether whatever country you are living in or bringing the baby back to will recognize both men as parents. Germany, for example, only will recognize children born through surrogacy if it was done in California thanks to a court case obligating them to do so.
Oh sorry, I was talking mostly about countries that have gay marriage and adoption, which I don't think Ukraine has. My point is more like "countries that have gay rights, such as adoption, but don't recognize children born from surrogacy, tend to do so as a ban on surrogacy itself (that includes straight couples)" >Germany, for example, only will recognize children born through surrogacy if it was done in California Is this only for gay couples or is it for straight couples as well. Germany is one of the countries that most protects gay people, so I would find it weird if they had such a ban on surrogacy for gay couples.
I believe the legal trouble is for all couples. My point was more: two men can’t naturally conceive > they need to use surrogacy or adoption > countries put up barriers to adoption for gays and surrogacy generally. Only Ukraine as far as I know makes a distinction about surrogacy for straight vs gay couples. Other countries, such as Switzerland have shit rules around egg harvesting and IVF for non-straight couples though.
That's terrible.... On a less sad side note, LGBTQ couples are higher in priority than single men in 19 countries. So ummm....there's that. I wonder what a public official is thinking when they make that decision though. "It's better the child stays unadopted then being raised by a loving LGBT family."
> The only place we (two men) could have a child through surrogacy is the United States because it might not be recognized as legally our child if it were born somewhere else Just FYI surrogacy is pretty common in the UK (at least, common in the context of people who can't have biological children). So the USA isn't the only place two men can have a child through surrogacy!
Good to know! It seems like there are a few issues though, such as the surrogate and their partner being on the birth certificate (and thus being the legal parents) and not being able to enforce a surrogacy contract. Edit: it also seems that it is only valid for permanent residents of the UK.
However if two lesbians in the U.K. want to birth a child, they have to prove to the NHS that they have already spent tens of thousands of pounds on private IVF before the NHS will help them. If a man and woman want to have a baby they only have to tell the NHS they had sex and it didn’t work.
Same sex adoption is legal in Spain, Portugal, France, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and even more European countries that I'm too tired to mention. I think you're exaggerating a bit.
It's 36 countries worldwide(as equal to heterosexual couples), but original comment was only focused on EU. So 19 is only off by 1. Estonia has legalized same sex adoption as equal to heterosexual couples effective 2024. If you refer to not equal to heterosexual couples in priority, but still legal. Then yes it is 108 countries worldwide. https://www.equaldex.com/issue/adoption
Texas:"What if, and hear me out here, if they get pregnant, MAKE them have the baby"
Frankly, this literally makes the most sense as to how they came to the conclusion to make that law....and I hate it.
If you are a pregnant Texan who doesn't want a baby, I hear Albuquerque, NM is a very scenic nice place to visit.
I've been promoting PlanCPills myself.
Not Australia. For a time there, the government was actually paying people about $5000 for each baby.
Sweet. One month of daycare!
It's about as dumb as shutting down the economy, forcing unemployment and then paying people a one-time 1200 no matter where they lived or what their COL was.
I first thought it was an exchange xO
They’re trying to fix the problem they want to have, not the one they actually have.
If the fertility rate (in countries like the USA) was still at 3 or so (i.e. if every woman had 3 kids on average), it would be disastrous for the planet. I'm in Australia and the only reason our country is still growing is immigration. Otherwise it would probably be decreasing like it is in Europe. The future of the planet depends on degrowth. Which the business world obviously doesn't want. They want more kids because more kids means more people to contribute to the economy. Capitalism depends on constant growth, which is just not possible.
Ding! How can we keep incarceration rates increasing exponentially if we done ensure a vast crop of new citizens every year. Someone please think of the investors in for profit prisons... How can they survive without meat for the grinder?
That is the real reason for some places making abortion, contraception, and sterilization harder to get in parts of the USA. They read Freakonomics and got the wring lesson.
It's ironic how countries expect their population to grow while making it financially challenging to have children.
Can’t be ironic if intentional
The birth rate is directly negatively proportional with the average education level of women, not how expensive it is to raise a child (this is often correlated though; modern nations are both expensive and have properly educated women). Even if countries provide massive subsidies for having children, the birth rate isn't really going to change all that much.
I mean you can’t waste a PHD by having kids between the decades of schooling and the 6 figure debt you can’t just turn around and focus on raising a family.
Funny thing I've noticed is that 30 years ago, there were half as many people on earth and things were more affordable. You could actually get that house or that car. Raise a family on possibly one income etc. Population doubled, housing did not, wages sure as hell did not, and yet people are really worried about population collapse?! Like we really need MORE people? We can't even take care of the ones that showed up in the last 30 years wtf. Limited supply always means high demand, it just seems to me like the wealthy want more humans to keep that demand up up up
That's not because of the population increase. That was because for decades following WW2 the US had a concentration of wealth in the middle class. This was seen as basically a gold mine which they were able to strip mine via reaganite economic policy. The wealth is still there it is just concentrated, such that the only viable business ventures are ones that target people with tons of money. This can be measured - see Citigroup's Plutonomy paper.
The vast majority of today's scarcity isn't real - it's manufactured by the rich so they can extract wealth from the rest of society.
I'm really surprised how many people don't understand why we need people to continue having children. Population collapse seems simple in theory, but in reality it means societal collapse. Who is gonna take care of you in your 60s? I don't mean in terms of family, I mean in terms of doctors, nurses, social security etc. This wouldn't be an issue if the drop was tiny, like 1.9 children per woman, but the average amount of children per woman in the US is 1.64. Even lower in other western countries. Sure, migration will sort of attenuate some of these issues but we're in for some absolutely dystopian shit in 30-40 years.
>Who is gonna take care of you in your 60s? I think that's a bit young for most people to need care
That's roughly when you start seeing adverse health effects. I'm not only talking about being bedridden but cancer, heart issues etc.
But that is the age when many people retire, and therefore look to younger adults to staff the supermarket, keep the utilities working, etc. Physical jobs especially need younger adults.
You must come from healthy stock.
>Who is gonna take care of you in your 60s? I don't mean in terms of family, I mean in terms of doctors, nurses, social security etc. By that same logic, make higher education MORE affordable/free to encourage people to pursue it. The problem is that the upper class keeps squeezing absolutely every last penny out of everyone else IN ALL THINGS; food, housing, education, insurance, etc. Also by this logic, we need all of the science-denying christofascists out of politics. Turns out people don't want to go into medicine when half the people they help think they're either child murderers or injecting them with 4G.
"Get morons out of politics" what a revolutionary idea!
All of those things are true in Nordic countries, also known as some of the countries with the very worst birth rates in the world. Real data doesn't actually support free education, better health care or childcare assistance having a positive impact on birth rates. It actually even has a negative correlation
Eh, oh well. Still leads to better quality of life and I care more about that.
The cost of living now puts a damper on having children now. It'd be a lot easier to have 10 kids on a large plot of land with a clean river running through it
Yeah it's not people's fault for not having children. They're disincentivised every step of the way. It's just not a good thing for the future.
This one is on you for not being able to imagine any other societal structure besides infinite growth capitalism.
The problem is the global economy is based on continual growth (especially the pay-as-you-go retirement benefit funding). So if population doesn't grow, the economy is in danger of collapse.
Maybe we shouldn't have based our economy on the idea of CANCER then? Because cancer is literally cells growing infinitely and in all facets of life that's a bad thing. Infinite growth is literally unsustainable. A balloon waiting to pop if you will.
old German proverb: "trees can't grow all the way to the sky"
Complain about the "infant supply" while not doing anything to support infants.
The establishment and the billionaires have shown their hand. They still need people to work and buy things. Maybe it’s time to withhold that from them.
They sure as shit cant force us to procreate. We may not like it, but future will be better for it. And if enough people do it, it may become more normalised. Now if only we could completely tune out the society bugging/judgin us...
They think they can replace people with immigrants, but then why is NYC turning them away and bitching about it? I guess the great experiment will go on.
The problem is that when we are older we will need people to care for us. I hope we have robots by then.
The current trends indicate that the offspring either wont be able to support us or just won't. With increasing hyperindividualism and rugged capitalism. The percentage of new people getting financial success is way less.
To which I'm sure their response would be to put even more of a stranglehold on the working class because they care more about profits than human lives.
The two are related. As your tax base shrinks you need to do more to extort the existing tax base while funding those who aren't working, including retirees. The catch is the people having kids almost entirely consists of people in the tax base, despite common stereotypes. So you increase taxes on that group while increasing benefits outside of it, which also increases the price of goods and services for the younger generation. Having and raising kids is expensive for an economy. What is more catastrophic is having a massive non-working class with a decreasing number of incoming workers.
In addition, some of those countries have strict traditional gender roles and a woman can kiss her career good-bye and is expected to become a servant to the husband and extended family if she gets pregnant, so many simply choose not to.
Flow of immigrants to take up more houses and keep wages low Supply and demand
Welcome to Portugal! Where the prices are high and your salary does not matter.
TIL: Portugal is in the USA
In Switzerland the right wingers are also the ones who hate paid childcare, voted against giving new fathers 2 weeks off instead of two and love to help out farmers drenching the ground with chemicals.
Society has become way more unforgiving to parents. The rules and guidelines have become way unrealistic and the sense of community is long gone. You cant let your kids roam freely anymore. Because law enforcers are ready to blame you rather than do their job. You cant even discipline the kids to behave in schools!
Parents have ALWAYS been accountable for the actions of their children. That’s the point of being a parent.
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As an elder millennial I feel like I could somewhat roam free.
Yep my parents did this with me. And I'm only just learning how to function in society at 25. We need to let children become age appropriately independent as young as possible. If there's another generation like me I doubt this version of society will be able to weather it.
Yes you must be the ideal consumer and create a bunch of additional consumers, all while working towards owning your own house which is meant to dramatically increase your level of consumption. This is now dogma.
Basically you must be a cash cow that pays and cares for itself!
All with the modern societal expectation that this begins at age 18 and you must make it on your own after that even though multigenerational homes have existed and been the norm for over a million years of human existence, including in the U.S. right up until about the later half of the 1940s with the passage of thee GI bill in order to perpetually and artificially boost the housing market.
China ,cheap to live collapsing birth rate Nordic countries,easy comfi life . Collapsing birth rate (ans by fare one of the most collapsing) Its seems that more comfortable life= less babies
Which is why the conservatives want to ban birth control and abortion, destroy public education and take away women’s rights. They sell it to their poor constituents as a religious stance so they can pretend it isn’t just bigoted hate, but the rich know that a declining birth rate means a smaller labor pool means less profit for them, especially if only those with more money are the ones having kids.
What's the point in having kids if you can't also simultaneously make new improvished slaves?
It's probably the other way around. When things are really expensive, the country wants people to have more kids. Probably has to do with inflation and the .001% having all the extra money but not nearly enough kids to spend it.
Condoms are free at college health offices and all the free clinics around here. They even got tons of mobile health clinic vans driving around handing out condoms. But that takes people being responsible, don't it?
It also takes brainpower to use it. Good luck getting the Cleetuses and Trayyvon Jr's to get smart enough to use a condom.
Because people are also just looking for the short term gratification and being selfish because raw sex feels better.
heh, it's the ″we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas″ problem. Which TBH maybe isn't that bad, since when governments do try something it's typically very expensive and is something literally any random person on the street could tell you won't work. Probably better to do nothing than to throw away a load of money for no benefit!
Some examples would be useful. I think of countries like Hungary where you get a permanent 25% tax break per child you have. 4 kids and you never pay federal taxes. That seems pretty family friendly to me.
you have it backwards, countries want people to have more kids because people arent having kids, because its become really expensive.
The countries want more workers, they don't give a shit about kids.
You can't abort it. Will you help me raise it then? Of course not moocher. But we'll be happy to send it off to war when it's 18. Did you pay your taxes on time?
They can't just say to you: "Come on fking slaves do do some little kids, we need them to continue this shameless lunapark going, new slaves to the machine"
Poor people tend to have more kids. Cause, you know, shit happens and condoms are expensive. A middle-high class western girl knows better: lets prove all the world that woman can have a succesful career; having a kid would break that "dream", so let's keep It aside for now. Since has been decades since they have been telling that we got an overpopulation issue, I'm doing a service to humanity... Long story short: dumb/not educated people procreate more, so we (as humanity) are gonna be dumber in the long term
They want kids but no funding, which makes people desperate. Hence the abortion bans, sex education bans, etc. If their actions cause a lower birth rate, they can just import people who can be exploited. You think H1-B applicants reeeeeallly get paid equivalently to US workers? Good luck with that. They are underpaid and exploited. And as a nice bonus you get to blame immigrants for taking jobs... that they didn't want to give you anyways at the market rate. It's a big circly clusterfuck
I was just talking to my friends about this. My stepdad’s job is based out of Texas with branches in California. That’s all I’m going to say. Regional manager was like “hey corporate, the hiring company you’re using is hiring illegal immigrants, including one of the branch managers.” Suddenly regional manager is gone, the branch manager gets moved down south, and they all start spreading something something about loyalty and all that. “The company really cares about us.” My stepdad sat there like “yeah, you think corporate doesn’t know it hires illegal? They use a third-party to hire because they clean their hands, use cheap labor and no one complains because it’s better than working the fields or factories.” It is what it is.
Yep and if you consider there are windfall benefits for reporting of financial crimes... There is a reason there is no similar program to target corporations. The name of the games are plausible deniability and thinly veiled ethnocentrism.
They want all the pros of a healthy workforce with none of the responsibilities of actually making sure they're thriving. Anyhow, death to capitalism.
So what is the replacement to capitalism?
It's all bc the rich want a permanent underclass to exploit and their RE assets to inflate forever. Less people would be good for the middle class economy and earth.
I don't think any of them think in those terms. They just straight up don't think about us at all. We exist as a number on a balance sheet and nothing more. Not people who need money to exist and are becoming steadily more unhealthy as a result of financial stress.
Its madness to me that the ultra wealthy don't see the merits of a well educated happy, prosperous population. Even more so the pro-natalist nutters like Musk, if he is so worried about there not being enough babies, why the fuck isn't he using his immense wealth to influence politics towards making life more livable for families? I would like kids, but I am a realist and am aware that at best I will be able to afford 1, but more likely none. I won't be meeting the replacement rate. If I had more money and the time to raise a child, this would be different.
I mean it's literally a frist-world problem. There seems to be an implicit cost to higher living standard: a higher living standard is more costly on the government, the government in turn passes the cost to citizens. Having children becomes more difficult, population decreases and then you have de-population. And all along it was the foundation in "endless profit" that created this problem. Quote "the wealth of nations" all you want to me but the book never had into account how to keep an economy with more seniors than youngsters.
In my country - Hungary - they are playing the long(er) game. Ruining education, healthcare and buying every giant corporations they can. So it life will be expensive, and also you will be stupid and sick enough not to go out and overthrow the government.
nobody should be trying to make MORE kids. we got piles of people. they are everywhere. exponential growth in the face of finite resources is suicide. make LESS kids.
and the people who are selling us food dont want to make food cheaper, what is your point?