[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
https://baptistnews.com/article/remember-the-first-goal-of-p...
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of the destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
Why have Danes turned against immigration?
...
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
...
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
If there is such a labour shortage, what explains the layoffs?
Also the lack of knowledge about the existence of the fantastic and generous H-2A visa for farm workers is maddening.
Why a debate - we are not allowing enough immigrants, VISA class is just hiding that fact.
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.
Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.
I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot.
---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled -----
yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
a) make younger female family members do all the work
b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity.
People say "Oh, but GDP isn't everything" - but it's correlated with almost everything good, so might as well be.
At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.
The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
> Capitalist Economics: "Humans only value things monetarily." Sociology: "Uh, I don't..." Capitalist Economics: "Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus." Sociology: "Uhhh, Psy, can you help?" Psychology: "That's not how humans..." Capitalist Economics: "ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!" Physics: drops teacup
Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
The article "The End of Children" (published in The New Yorker, March 2025) explores the global phenomenon of plummeting fertility rates, examining why traditional explanations and policy solutions are failing to reverse the trend. Here is a summary of the key points: * Economic Support Isn't Enough: The article challenges the popular liberal argument that fertility decline is primarily caused by economic insecurity or a lack of childcare. It points out that Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden—which offer generous parental leave, "baby boxes," and flexible work cultures—still face declining birth rates similar to or lower than the U.S. Even in places where childcare is free (Vienna) versus expensive (Zurich), fertility rates often remain identical. * The "Achievement Culture" Trap: The definition of "affording" a child has inflated significantly. In many wealthy, educated circles, raising a child now implies providing a suite of expensive advantages—individual bedrooms, travel sports, private lessons, and organic diets. This "intensive parenting" model means working mothers today actually spend more time on active childcare than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations, making the prospect of parenthood feel overwhelming. * Political and Educational polarization: There is a widening fertility gap based on politics and education. Democrats and those with higher degrees are significantly more likely to be childless. This is partly attributed to the extended time required for education and career establishment, pushing childbearing to later years when it is biologically more difficult. * Failed Government Interventions: The author highlights various aggressive attempts by governments to boost birth rates, such as Hungary's tax exemptions for mothers of four and South Korea's numerous "happiness projects" and subsidies. Despite spending fortunes, no modern nation has successfully reversed a low fertility rate back to replacement levels. * A Shift in Meaning: The article concludes with a philosophical reflection on how children have transformed from a natural part of life into "variables" in a high-stakes lifestyle choice. They are increasingly viewed through the lens of identity and personal fulfillment, leading to a culture where parents fear judgment and non-parents fear being seen as selfish, intensifying the anxiety around having children at all.
"Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."
We certainly take advantage of things like free preschool; but if we look at it objectively (and ignore benefits to the child) it consumes more time than if we didn't use it - getting him ready, walking him to school, picking him up, etc. Since it's free, we look at "time spent" and it's something like 2-3 hours spent to "get" 3 hours.
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
Childcare in/around Zurich is (was 2 years ago) 2500 - 3000 CHF / month (lower prices after ~18 months). This is and isn't expensive. The list prices are high, but so are salaries (and taxes are low), and this is cheaper than rent (for 1 kid). Not subsidized.
In Slovenia, the full price is about 700 EUR / month, subsidised up to 77% by the government (i.e. by high-earners, effectively a double-progressive taxation with already high taxes).
What you get for that price in Zurich? A lot! Kindergarten starts at 3 months and can take care of kids for the whole work day (7am-18pm). Groups are tiny and lots of teachers - 3 adults per 12 kids. Groups are mixed age as well, which I think are preferable. You also get a lot of flexibility - e.g. half-days (cheaper) or only specific days per week (e.g. Mon-Thu). Jobs are equally adaptable, a lot of people work 80% (so Friday free, spend with kid(s)).
In Slovenia, the situation is much worse. 2 teachers per 12 or even 20 kids (after age 4), age-stratified groups, childcare finishes at 5pm (but start at 6am, if someone needs that...). Children are only welcome after 11 months of age. No flexibility at all. This is all for public childcare - we also looked at private, but generally you pay more (1000+ EUR) but get ... not much more. Maybe nicer building (not even), but groups are equally large (IMO biggest drawback).
So as far as childcare is concerned, Switzerland is IMO much better.
But where Switzerland fucks you, is elsewhere. As mentioned, tax is low, so that's a plus. But there's minimal maternity leave (hence kindergarten starts at 3 months). If women can, they take more time off work, but not everyone can. What I wrote above about "kindergarten" only applies until 4 years of age, after which "preschool" starts, which is government-funded and hence free. Well, "free". It ends at 12pm after which you need to move your kid back into private childcare if you have a job. After that, school starts, which has a lunch break around 12pm as well - children are supposed to eat lunch at home - which again isn't really compatible with 2 working parents.
I'm not in Switzerland any more so I don't know how people actually manage when kids start school...
At 4k-1st you often have shortened hours, so if you're a working parent you need to arrange for transportation or be able to take long lunches, etc to move children from one place to another.
This "gap of annoyance" happens right about when you'd naturally be looking at a second or third kid as a possibility - I wonder how much effect it has on people.
I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.
Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.
I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.
(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)
There are plenty of longitudinal studies from various geographies, which I would summarize as “childcare subsidies increase birth rates in some contexts, but the effects are complex and depend on program specifics.” E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2917182/ and https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-07...
---
The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.
1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.
Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.
2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).
Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.
3. Myth: Women working is the cause.
Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.
4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.
Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.
e: moved TL;DR to the top.
This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.
You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.
Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)
> Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
That doesn't address the "myth". You can keep bringing more migrants and eventually replace the population.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
Don't agree with the supporting statements though.
Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.
I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.
If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.
The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal value?
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-tr...
I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
The politicians have made it seem like there is a lot of there is so much threat but realistically normal people just exist. Stop filling for fox news and maga hate messaging.
Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.
Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.
The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
Don't have kids myself, but this aspect seems incredibly obvious just reflecting on my childhood in suburbs of Chicago through the 80s-90s.
But the causes for what's keeping the kids indoors now instead of literally running the neighborhood are manifold. In the 80s there were far fewer indoor forms of entertainment to occupy the kids without driving mom batshit insane and making a mess of the place. Now the kids have tablets and gaming consoles, the outdoors is such a scary place when it's not full of gangs of children who know all the backyards better than the parents ostensibly owning them.
It's all rather depressing and the longer I live the more convinced I am that not adding my own kids to this state of affairs was the right move.
Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, because they need to put kids to sleep. So, they have to try much harder to have any social contact.
I work at faang and have no friends from that. I’m surrounded by thousands of people every day I’m at work. Everyone is there to work - not be social or hangout or be friends. People show up to social events to grab food and take it back to their desk.
The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
> The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Same. As long as you don’t literally stay at home, being a parent with kids is such an easy way to meet more people.
So...don't do that? Let the parent who works in the office come home and spend time with the kid, and go out for drinks (or hiking or the gym or whatever) with other friends. Do all the chores beforehand during the day, so that the working parent only has kid duty.
If both are working, both have chores and kid duty after work.
Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.
It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness.
So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.
There are plenty of volunteers at community events in my area that have prestigious jobs, and the strivers working to maximize opportunities for themselves actually seek these out as another opportunity for accolades and networking.
You just need to find people who actually have an interest in their community. You know who those people often are? Parents. I suspect the decline in birth rates, especially in urban areas, amplifies this in both directions.
Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.
A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.
It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
Last week I arrived by car right near the beginning of dropoff time. Pulling in right in front of me was the mom of one of my kid's classmates, carpooling with another kid who lives in the same apartment complex. The three of them met up as soon as they got out of the car, and then another one of their friends (who lives across the street from the school and usually walks) joined them from his driveway. They met up with a 5th friend before they crossed the street.
Then I walked - well, more like ran - with the 5 of them down the 111 steps that take us from the street level to the schoolyard. When they reached the bottom, they met up with 3 more friends who had just been let out of the drop-off zone in front of the school itself. Said a quick goodbye to my kid, but he wasn't really paying attention, he was already ensconced in his pack of 8.
I've gotten there with my kid before drop-off time, walked down the stairs with him, and there's been a pack of about 20-30 kids and 2-3 parents usually milling around before the school gates open.
I realize that this is somewhat atypical in 21st-century America, and we specifically chose this community because, well, it actually has a sense of community, but it's not unique. In preschool I'd take my son over to his preschool bestie's house (she lived about 2 cities away), and there'd be a whole pack of kids roaming the neighborhood going over unannounced to each other's houses.
I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).
Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.
We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.
Rewind the clock a few decades and there were a lot more reasons to go outside.
My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.
Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
Perhaps.
GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.
And I live in a place single digit blocks from multiple places where ICE agent behavior has made national headlines. I have no financial reservations.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.)
Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.
you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).
It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest...
As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...
These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.
My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.
I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
Why would you expect income increases to track productivity gains?
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
The key is always internal, personal, once you right yourself, the world starts feeling much better.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
The attorney representing ICE to the courts in MN admitted it directly, admitted that ICE does not believe it needs to honor orders of the federal court system, and that they do not comply with orders to release legal residents of the united states.
You should educate yourself. Here's commentary that directly references the lawyer's responses and judge's commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o-_2thaI8
Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate". For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law. But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
> And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
There's nothing bizarre about workers being angry at a system that is being abused to drive down wages. The reality is that there are segments of workforce in the USA that will only hire H1Bs workers because they know they can treat them illegally. This happens all over the place but is particularly prevalent at larger orgs (both in tech and finance). The behavior is implicitly authorized by the companies as they outsource the "being the jerk" to those managers.
The non-H1B workers rightfully feel angered by this because it directly lowers their wages. It's like scabs flooding a union shop. Only worse as the scabs are scared of not only losing their jobs, but their visas.
> And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
Ok, let me make you aware of it and then you'll be unable to continue to use this excuse.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26871634-19-ts-of-02...
> Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country.
Quit burying your head in the sand of what is happening around you. I urge you to actually read the reality in the court records of what is actually happening.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
You are wilfully unaware.
> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.
The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.
Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.
Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.
When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.
> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.
The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.
> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.
ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.
How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.
What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.
I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....
State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."
"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."
"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.
The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away.
What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone else.
They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.
Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.
In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.
One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.
[Surface - The Town Square]
The transporter beam hums and fades. Riker, Spock, and Counselor Troi materialize in the middle of a bustling intersection.
Riker immediately reaches for his phaser, expecting a reaction. A panic. A scream. Nothing.
A native walks straight through the space where Riker’s arm is raised, correcting their path by mere millimeters at the last second, eyes never leaving the blue glow of their palm.
"Captain," Riker taps his combadge, voice tense. "We've landed. We are... invisible."
Spock raises an eyebrow, scanning a nearby human with his tricorder. "Incorrect, Commander. We are simply irrelevant. Their optical sensors are registering our presence, but their visual cortex is filtering us out as 'non-content'. We are pop-up ads in a physical reality they have deprecated."
Suddenly, Troi gasps. She stumbles, clutching her temples. Her knees hit the pavement hard.
"Counselor!" Riker is at her side instantly.
"It’s... it’s too loud, Will," she whispers, her face pale, sweat beading instantly on her forehead. "It’s not voices. It’s not emotions. It’s... flashes."
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears leak out. "A billion images of felines. Dancing figures. Arguments without context. Tragedy mixed with absurdity. It’s a scream, Spock, but it’s a scream about nothing."
"Motion sickness of the mind," Spock observes, looking at his readings. "A precise description. You are attempting to find a focal point, Counselor, but there is none. The signal is not radiating from a central broadcast tower. It is a mesh network of pure dopamine."
He turns his tricorder to the crowd. "Fascinating. They utilize a tight-beam UHF protocol—what the archives call 'Bluetooth 17'. It ensures that no signal ever touches an unintended recipient. They have achieved perfect privacy, and in doing so, created perfect isolation."
"They could have warp drive," Riker mutters, looking at a mag-lev train passing silently overhead, filled with slumped, blue-lit figures. "Look at this infrastructure. The power efficiency alone..."
"They do not want warp drive, Commander," Spock says, closing his tricorder with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet street. No one flinches. "Space travel requires looking up. Warp drive requires a destination. This species has already arrived."
Troi looks up, her eyes bloodshot, trembling. "We have to leave, Will. Please. It’s... sticky. The thoughts... they want to be thought. They’re hungry."
Riker taps his badge. "Enterprise, three to beam up. Now! Lock on to my signal, not the ambient noise."
[The Bridge]
Back on the ship, Troi is in sickbay, sedated. Spock stands at the science station.
"Status on the planet, Mr. Spock?" Picard asks, looking at the viewscreen. The planet is beautiful, blue and green, peaceful.
"It is a tomb, Captain," Spock replies, his voice devoid of judgment but heavy with implication. "They have not been conquered. They have been optimized. They have traded the chaotic inefficiency of exploration for the streamlined certainty of simulation."
"The Great Filter," Picard murmurs.
"Indeed," Spock turns. "We often theorized that advanced civilizations destroy themselves with fire. It appears, Captain, that it is just as likely they destroy themselves with a warm bath."
Picard stares at the screen for a long moment. "Helm, engage. Warp 1. Get us away from here."
"Course, sir?"
"Anywhere," Picard says, adjusting his uniform. "Just... outward."
The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.
He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.
He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.
I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.
This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.
And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate.
How do you square those facts with your view here?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival.
In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex.
They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Too late. We already have the eyes/muscle and nascent legal justifications; leadership will eventually force the issue.
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious.
Easy.
In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor.
Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.
Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.
The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo
Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Very different things
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards?
Thats kind of the point.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far.
For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
GiorgioG•2h ago
jleyank•1h ago
bombcar•1h ago
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
jleyank•1h ago
amanaplanacanal•1h ago
watwut•34m ago
cvoss•1h ago
myrmidon•1h ago
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
actionfromafar•1h ago
dh2022•1h ago
[0] https://governor.wa.gov/news/2025/washington-california-and-...
[1]https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-mdhhs/newsroom/2026/01...
actionfromafar•1h ago
llm_nerd•1h ago
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
bombcar•1h ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
amanaplanacanal•1h ago
dh2022•1h ago
mothballed•1h ago
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
bluGill•49m ago
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
myrmidon•1h ago
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
daymanstep•1h ago
gehwartzen•1h ago
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
tayo42•1h ago
dh2022•1h ago
hnuser123456•1h ago
pjc50•1h ago
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
daymanstep•57m ago
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
pjc50•16m ago
olalonde•1h ago
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
dh2022•1h ago
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
bluGill•53m ago
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
dh2022•17m ago
laffOr•51m ago
amanaplanacanal•1h ago
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
myrmidon•38m ago
cheema33•45m ago
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
indecisive_user•1h ago
jeffbee•1h ago
whynotminot•1h ago
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
stackskipton•1h ago
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
dbspin•1h ago
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
bombcar•1h ago
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
bombcar•1h ago
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
daymanstep•1h ago
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
sinnsro•1h ago
[/s just in case it goes over someone's head]
2OEH8eoCRo0•1h ago
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
bnjms•1h ago
neogodless•1h ago
Median family income $87k
Cost-of-living ~$36k excluding housing
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/RI/LFE046224
https://livingcost.org/cost/united-states/ri
acheron•50m ago
2OEH8eoCRo0•44m ago
postflopclarity•20m ago
postflopclarity•39m ago
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
supertrope•35m ago
-Good job market
-Not high cost of living
-Good quality of life (commute, amenities, etc.)
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
scottious•37m ago
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
Buttons840•1h ago
wcoenen•1h ago
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
[1] https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/hungary-to-spend-6-2-o...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hun...
pjc50•1h ago