Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
Nations are deploying baby bonuses, subsidised childcare and parental leave to try to reverse a rapidly declining fertility rate – largely to no avail
We don't need a higher birth rate .... we need a better quality of life for everyone.
It's almost like if people had free time, a positive outlook on life, and resources to live comfortably that babies would be a natural outcome.
Yeah, Hans Rossling had a cool tes talk about the direct correlation between family sizes and access to healthcare. If the life expectancy goes up, family sizes go down. The talk
Now we have reached a point where the system in a lot of countries works against the forever growth as people need to work work work and don't see a future for themselves, let alone for a family.
Hopefully not.
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that as long as global population is going up, we're having too many, not too few. Once it levels off we may have to think about whether we want to degrow the population or just leave it.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if by the 2080s, "peak human" according to the quoted estimate, Brave New World baby factories are an option should we need them.
The issue is growth rates are wildly different among different areas and cultures. The population in some places is dropping precipitously which will cause economic problems, especially around elder care.
While I agree that a gradual population reduction would be beneficial, rapid declines will increase human suffering and should be avoided.
Once it levels off we may have to think about whether we want to degrow the population
The problem is this is one of those long term things that people have a hard time understanding. By the time you see it level off, it’s decades too late to change things. Let’s not make the same mistake as we continue to do with climate: instead of putting it off until it becomes a crisis let’s make small changes now so the crisis doesn’t happen.
We definitely can’t grow population forever and are likely beyond a sustainable population already, but let’s try for a smooth leveling off and soft landing rather than flying off a cliff and crashing into the rocks
I’m so glad I didn’t selfishly pull my unborn children out of perfectly peaceful nonexistence and into this horrid timeline.
"I love my unborn children far too much to bring them into this dumpster fire of a society."
My parents were pestering the wife and I about when we're going to give them grandbabies. Hit em with that line a few years ago, and they haven't brought it up since.
The idea of having a kid in today's world just seems cruel.
I don't know. Do we really need to replace another 8.2 billion people, does that line really need to go up?
No, but we also don’t want that line to suddenly plummet either.
Think of it this way: birth rate of one is half replacement value and most developed countries are there. We’re already having half the children we need to stay level but it’s not obvious because of the larger generations still living. In 20 years, that half population will half yet again, one quarter the children to level off. Then those older generations age out, and you get larger generations replaced by multiple halvings. For example if you live three generations, then at the end of your life, the population is only 1/8 what it was. Obviously it won’t be this simple and many things could affect birthrate but I find this trend frightening for humanity’s future. We’re not talking lower population but facing the possibility of a crashing population
The birthrate BS is already being used as reasons for controlling women. The only down fall is Religious nut bags and Republican assholes losing control over the other sex.
A better way of life automatically equals the natural number of children. There's no need for another 9 billion people. There is a very strong need of a better life for 8 billion of us.
Maybe we don't need more people in the world?
good luck with the greedy little fuck twat corporations believing that their workers exist solely for the purpose of making their owners richer
The world population has nearly doubled in my lifetime. That's not sustainable. We need to build systems that promote and function within a state of equilibrium.
The first publishing of "Limits to Growth" suggested that if immediate actions were done to curtail growth and use of resources, the world could possibly in many decades peak and then come back down to a sustainable flat line. That was in 1970. 54 years ago we may have had a chance - although the research didn't include many things not known to them, including the impact of climate change that was already underway and just not obvious (the ocean was buffering much of the effects for a long time).
My non-scientific opinion is that crossing the line of hunter-gatherer to agriculture was the real point of no return. We gained a lot from that, but it also sealed our path and fate. Finding the rich energy source of petroleum was the final accelerant.
We simply need money.
Give me 3x my finances and I'll have 2 kids.
Edit: There appears to be a significant lack of education in this comment thread.
not if the cost goes up 3x to. give me enough for a house and yard and reliable car or make reliable transit where the house is and enough for the family to eat healthy with some spoilage treat behavior and get them standard stuff like a laptop and have decent chance for a good educaton and in my case make me 30 years younger.
Money is not enough, especially if both parents have to work. At least as importantly, most of us no longer have the support of extended family and communities, or the ability to have a stay at home parent to help make it work and those are equally important
The article covers that. So far handout policies have only given a transient spike in births.
That doesn’t mean they don’t work. It could also mean they weren’t enough or they targeted the wrong things. With the future of our entire society at stake, surely we can spend more than a slightly better tax deduction.
I love my kids, but everything is more expensive, more time consuming, requiring more coordination with more people. Plus how will you find people who want to have kids if they can’t even spend time with them, to help them grow and develop, and discover the world?
If we just tripled everyone's finances, all it would do is cut purchasing power by a third.
2 billion was perfect. Let's get back to that and stay there.
Oh, someone else who read 'The Ministry for the Future'?
mmmm smells like something that quickly leads to eugenics. the amount of people currently alive isn't an issue. declining birth rates are. we can't rely on an expanding population forever, but until we can declining birth rates will be an issue.
Is an high birthrate actually a good thing?
For the planet? No. For capitalism, yes.
Hard to have infinite growth without infinite growth.
Governments needs more slaves and army conscripts, hurry up and have more children
This exactly.
Without unemployment, without bullshit jobs and with automation, we could probably do all we do today just 1 billion people worldwide, no?
No. The world population has doubled in my lifetime. While I agree that’s too much, I see much faster scientific, medical and technology progress than ever before. I see more chance to be dreamers and explorers, more chances to build a better society. There’s more art, more freedom, and ever higher quality of life. We have been doing much better with more people.
I don’t know what an ideal number would be, but I expect it’s more than half the current population
Why do you think all that good stuff is due to more people rather than just technological advancement yielding faster technological advancement? The person tending to an ever growing landfill isn't an essential component of modern life. The well-functioning landfill might be, but the person is just moving trash around. Replace them with a robot and the trash still gets moved around, will no reduction in art, freedom, or QoL.
I still think that has not been because we have more people producing. It is because there is a lower fraction of poverty. There is no point in having more people while there are still people living in misery.
Society at large says weath, career, possessions and vacations are the most important thing. Those are all easier without children.
Things would be a lot different if household and caring tasks would be seen as important and not just some unpaid chore to be dumped on women. If instead of business class it would be family class to give those traveling with
chickenchildren the best seats.But that is unthinkable in a capitalistic system.
I would always travel with chicken if that was the case!
Chicken class is best class
They could they're just not willing to do what would be required.
fuck
Well, this would increase birthrates ! /joke
Putting aside economical aspect, western civilisation in order to sustain itself, requires on average little above 2 children per household (can't find the link to the study). Such number would provide enough "man power" to replace aging work force and would keep society going forward. This is the perfect world scenario. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and there's nothing current governments can do to change it. It would require a lot of work, money and time and no government will risk long term investment because it won't give much votes.
All the Neo-Malthusian BS in this thread, holy crap. The "overpopulation is the problem" has got to be one of the best ways for governments, corpos, and the rich to deflect attention from their failures and excesses. Hands down even better than the "personal carbon footprint" propaganda.
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earth has a resource distribution/use efficiency issues right now; the rich are greedy and wasteful.
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don't want to have kids? Fine, don't! Kids deserve parents that want them, and you deserve your autonomy to live your life as more than a means to an end for demographics.
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if governments addressed the resource hoarding and waste, more people who want to have kids would have them because they would have enough to have a good quality of life and standard of living, and we would also have addressed things like climate change and dystopic corpo control.
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Maybe we need more fucking and less babies. Fucking makes people happy for nearly free, just the price of condoms. To continuously depopulate, we would want to have deathbed parties for old fucks, or parties at the morg.
Maybe another pandemic? And we just ignore all we learned and we go around spitting on every door knob?
The depopulation plan it's going smooth..
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/global-birthrates-dropping