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by faeriechangling
1117 days ago
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I don’t buy the hypothesis that it’s simply lack of means driving the lack of fertility. Poorer countries and poorer times both came hand in hand with higher fertility than we see today. My hypothesis isn’t that it’s not affordable, it’s that people don’t stand to personally benefit from having kids, and birth control is available, so they don’t. If you‘re willing to tolerate any quality of life, well you might just be able to afford kids. I also think our attitude towards education specifically is a key driver of low fertility. We have invented a system where we literally take the horniest most fertile members of the population and we have them compete in a boundless contest to accumulate more and more prestigious, time consuming, and necessarily more irrelevant accreditations. |
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Take a modern young couple in a place like NYC. Having to work incredibly hard in an uncertain job - both of them - never too far from being unable to pay rent (or mortgage, although that now tends to come later in life). Meanwhile bombarded by ads of all kinds (and people they see around, both in real life and online) to have consumption of a certain level just to maintain the status quo of their social standing.
Add to that a complete lack of positive vision for the 'developed' world but plenty of negative ones. A complete lack of any sort of utopian thinking. Including the fact that whoever does end up having children will end up with those children later having to support all the pensioners.
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So in a way, the poor are more secure in their poverty than the young people in the middle, and therefore they procreate. So do the more wealthy that are secure in their wealth.