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No one has any money for rent, food, or living expenses.
Everyone is overworked.
We're paid pennies compared to CEO's.
Every single company fucks us by raising prices because they can, and our governments do nothing because they haven't worked for the people in decades..
While that is all generally true, the status of most people in developed countries today is better than its ever been in history.
That's what's driving fertility down. People who have access to education, medical care, relative comfort and security have fewer children.
My wife and I are part of a younger generation whose culture revolves around NOT having children until all those things you mentioned are attained. The stress of even having a kid, let alone multiple, is not something we’re going to address until we hit financial security.
And at least in most places of the world, you are unlikely to ever achieve financial security because the government inflates your fiat currency until it's worthless.
I figure it's a combination of problems. I come home from work exhausted and don't want to go out. So I'm at home alone. On the bad side, the work, the stress, the balance of keeping everything because the way the modern world has gone to make it difficult to look for new jobs especially if you lost yours just makes going out difficult.
But that's because to "go out" I'd have to drive half an hour or more away to maybe a bar. And the bar is filled with people who are going to visit said bar.
We're at a point where it's easier to communicate with people hundreds of miles away instead of someone in our neighborhood, and comfortable enough to do it, while stressed enough to not make the attempts. Stack on those that are married, there's the problem of just having enough time of day from both people having to work overtime.
This is in the good economies too! In most of Africa life is even shittier. I can only imagine. Well, is still mostly better than it's ever been. History is cruel, and present but at least % of population living decent is much higher globally. Still, USA richest country in the world and we can't Even get universal healthcare, and instead of aiding homeless domestically, or money for food abroad etc.... We give a genocidal maniac hundreds of billions to play with.
I don't blame anyone for not wanting to have kids in this environment.
Not only that, but with the increasingly credible threat of automation looming, I don't think we should be looking to traditional economic wisdom for advice about labor shortages.
If we run out of resources, the rich will taste good.
Cringe af. Can you please stop with the constant violent rhetoric? This does not solve any problems and instead divides humanity. You will not create a better future by killing more people.
History repeats itself. Unless laws change to reign in the 1% and the billionair class, heads will guaranteeably roll...the question is whether it's sooner or later. It just comes down to a question of how much are people willing to put up with before someone takes matters into their own hands, and that will be the catalyst that causes change. Either others will follow suit, or the laws will get passed to control these people.
We'd have a better present right now if we guillotined rich fucks and their bootlickers.
Don’t kid yourself Richard, If Zuckerberg ever got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you care about!
But seriously, you worry about a divided humanity? We’ve been divided for centuries, and the people at the top aren’t going to willingly step down from their mountain of corpses to slum it with the rest of us.
Yes, my wife and I considered not for environmental reasons. My parents thought we were nuts citing the threat of nuclear war when they were kids and everyone continuing to have kids then. They've come around to understand our hesitation now, mostly, but it was distressing that they couldn't understand , if not agree, with hesitating.
Of course, the environment is just one thing that gives us pause these days. People are crazy. Politicians and the laws they create are (or the dissolution of certain laws is) crazy. Plenty of reasons to pause.
We did have a child, and I do not regret it, but we also have the means to support her and a way to escape the U.S. if things get much worse. Many Americans don't have either option, and no child should be neglected or abused and every child should have a robust support system. I wish we would encourage and educate people on contraception on a grand scale.
My wife travels a lot for work, and I dabbled in genealogy years ago to track down my own birth relatives. By combining the two, my wife and our daughter now have EU passports, and I'm eligible for a long-term visa.
Theoretically I could be eligible for Slovakian citizenship (which is not their EU country) based on my own DNA ties, but that would require some mental gymnastics and a very progressive interpretation of how closed infant adoption affects legal rights.
I am actually very fond of Texas, and I think the idea of it is worth fighting for, and that there's a strain of tolerance and hospitality and diversity here that could be compatible with a much more progressive worldview. I have hope that it can be better than it is. I think any place with people who love it is worth trying to make into the best version of itself, to say nothing of the people who couldn't leave even if they wanted to...
but we're also not going to be the last ones out if we lose that hope.
Replacement level for whom? To sustain the current population? Population growth? Status quo? Corporations?
Not sure any of these things are needed to be sustained at the levels we are currently at.
Someone please explain the detrimental repercussions of not having an equal to or greater than replacement level.
If we didn't rely on constant growth to keep our economy working this would be great news.
Make the world one that people actually want to live in and this won't be a problem
Maybe stop treating the common person like utter dogshit. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
🥳🥳🥳
Why would I want to have kids in this shithole. And I have it pretty darn good, always had enough to eat, roof over my head, relative luxuries. Still would never bring a kid into this world.
Why the fuck would I bring to the world someone to live in this overheating unrestrained capitalist hellscape ? Invisible hand my ass. The invisible hand doesn't seem to stop them from poisoning us with forever chemicals... And so much more. Why would I bring someone to suffer ? They would surely have a worse life than me. Who wants to give that to their kids ? Who ?
Good. A lower population is truthful and beautiful, as my old philosophy professor would say.
Sounds like a problem for governments to figure out
Immigration was always an outsourced bandaid for solving population decline.
Phew. The population needs to be reduced significantly, this will help!
Nothing wrong with that. Let population levels drip until about 2 billion or so. The rest of the worlds biosphere will thank us. Also all of humanity will thank us as life will become a whole lot more livable
An important point for the people cheering lower population - this is way under replacement level. As previous generations die off and this becomes apparent, the fear is a sudden depopulation enough to disrupt some economies, societies. Picture Detroit, many times over (apologies to Michiganders, since I’ve been to Detroit recently and things are finally looking up after half a century of urban blight) but r pivcture infrastructure like Flint, MI water system many time over. Unstable economies and societies are bad for us all
Given that the article is posted on a science site, and people are discussing this on fairly new technology, I also want to point out that science, technology, innovation are all “luxuries” of an expanding population. As we depopulate and an increasing share of resources go toward elderly care, infrastructure, etc, that’s less for science, technology, innovation.
Some economies could use some disruption. I'm all for shaking things up a bit.
We can still eat the rich, right?
Absolutely.
The book analyzes the elements that lead different nations to succeed or fail, in the author's opinion, focusing on demographic, geographic, and historic factors. It asserts that the period from the 1950s to the 2020s represented a peak period of rapid economic development and innovation; meanwhile, the present (2022) and future would be associated with a rather abrupt slowing of such developments. In this view, deglobalization leads to deindustrialization, deurbanization, and even depopulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning