[y-curious]

I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.

I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.

[JumpCrisscross]

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.

Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.

If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.

[mitthrowaway2]

I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.

At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.

This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.

(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").

[wat10000]

That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.

[mitthrowaway2]

It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.

Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.

[nostrademons]

I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.

I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.

I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)

When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...

[programjames]

Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.

[ativzzz]

Why not a childfree tax instead? It's not going to be popular, but for societies with low birth rates - contribute to the next generation either via human bodies or via cash. But I doubt society's ability to put this tax towards the next generation.

[chlorodose]

I believe childfree tax is an really bad idea as there are so many examples shows how cruel parents can become when they have no intention of taking responsibility for their children. Enacting strict laws against abuse can prevent some extreme cases, but do we really want child to grow up in an hostile family?

[programjames]

Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.

[lotsofpulp]

A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.

[Qem]

It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.

One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.

There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...

[nostrademons]

More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.

This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.

My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.

[nathan_compton]

A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

[lotsofpulp]

Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.

People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.

[JumpCrisscross]

> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years

Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

[lotsofpulp]

>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.

The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.

[programjames]

Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.

[nathan_compton]

It isn't so much a problem with democracy as it is with human beings. I think of democracy as averaging out things so the swings related to specific types of evil, shortsightedness, good, bad, aren't as big.

More authoritarian systems have higher variance, even if specific instances might be "better". I use scare quotes around "better" because I would argue giving people democratic power is valuable even if they do dumb shit with it, so you can't just compare democracy to authoritarianism. The latter simply lacks one key thing that democracy gives: some self determination.

This is not a defense of any particular contemporary realization of democracy.

[mschuster91]

> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).

You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.

[programjames]

You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.

[stereolambda]

There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.

[lotsofpulp]

Wouldn't that reward raising them in a way that increases the likelihood of them supporting you? And/or raising more of them so that the odds are at least 1 supports you?

The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today.

As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws

[vidarh]

I agree with everything you've written.

But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:

In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].

So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).

And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.

When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...

[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger

[TheOtherHobbes]

It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.

When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.

It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.

Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.

The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.

I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.

Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.

But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.

It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.(Or fatherhood for that matter).

[forgotaccount3]

People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.

Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.

[Balgair]

Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them)

What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.

[vidarh]

High in absolute terms, but lowered significantly by monthly child support payments and heavily subsidised nursery costs. As such, the total cost relative to the also relatively high incomes are better than in most developed countries.

Your right it doesn't offset opportunity cost. The point is that even providing assistance a high multiple of most other countries has been insufficient to get above replacement.

I'm sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway, and even scaling for cost of living differences very few countries are near Norwegian child benefit levels, so it seems likely it will be exceedingly expensive.

[JumpCrisscross]

> sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway

There are three cost buckets: cost of birth, opportunity cost of birth, cost of child rearing and opportunity cost of parenting.

Norway is solving the first and probably the second while subsidizing the third. That leaves the opportunity costs untouched and direct costs, still, a net negative. Norway would need raise its annual payment to parents to completely cover the actual cost of raising a child, and then something for the career hit. I don’t know what those numbers are, but given it would directly increase the tax base, it’s almost precisely what one should borrow for.

[wolfhumble]

Two things I’d think about here:

1. Maybe this isn’t mainly a money problem?

2. And if it is a money problem, there might still be trade-offs. If you give people enough support, some may decide it makes more sense to stay home with their kids. That could mean fewer people working, less tax income, and then less money available to solve the problem long term.

(And yes, I know Norway has the wealth fund, around $400k per inhabitant or something like that. But I’m keeping that out of it here, because otherwise it becomes harder to compare Norway with other countries.)

There are also other things to think about.

For example: Do we want a system where one part of society has more kids and stays more at home, while another part has fewer kids and focuses more on careers?

I’m saying this because earlier in Norway, families had more freedom to choose between staying home with kids with financial support, or sending kids to kindergarten. Some political parties didn’t like that model because:

a) They saw it as bad for gender equality.

b) Immigrant women were more likely to stay home than Norwegian women, which could make integration harder.

So I think there’s probably more going on here than just money, even though money obviously matters too.

[vidarh]

Yes, but again, the point is to illustrate just how high a multiple of current benefits elsewhere you can reach without it being sufficient.

[modo_mario]

So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?

I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.

[vidarh]

The issue is how many places can afford that. Norway can afford what it does now in large part because of an enormous sovereign wealth fund that owns more than a percent of all publicly listed companies by market cap worldwide, on top of other assets. Despite that, Norway also has some of the higher tax levels.

Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve an extremely sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.

Unless we find other means of driving up the fertility rate, it's not clear most places will stomach the financial adjustments it will take.

[modo_mario]

You can get that from the rich as the other person said but that kind of redistribution should be considered on it's own regardless of this matter.

What i'm advocating for is simply internal child related distribution. You don't take it from the states coffers. You for example simply carefully raise the taxes of the childless and lower the taxes of those with kids (probably not directly proportionally to the number of kids) in the process retaining your original government revenue.

You don't have to go overboard with it because realistically any effect drags drastically but you do slowly keep upping the difference in benefits untill you reach either replacement rate or something slightly below replacement in a way that doesn't constitute an outright crisis.

[mschuster91]

> Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve a very sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.

The answer is wealth redistribution. The rich simply hoard too much for society to keep working.

[newphone733]

Wait, is that supposed to be a lot? Sounds just like a paid maternity leave, so mother can spend some time with her children without worrying about having a roof and food. 111k is the cap, but in practice this is just a long paid leave.

In my (much poorer than Norway) country we have that, and also women can't be fired for that duration and I think two years more and employer can't refuse then remote work if it's technically possible and parents get some money directly (~around 1/10 of average monthly salary per month is automatic, but also there are other programs for example for women who decide to return to work). And, as a young parent, this is still nowhere near the cost of takes to actually raise a child.

On the other hand, all those programs are still not enough to raise number of children significantly, so your main point stands.

[ghssds]

Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.

[Qem]

If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.

[chlorodose]

I believe it's the natural result of PAYG pension system. Let's be honest, they choose PAYG just to get votes immediately. (Or stabilize the society immediately in non-democratic countries, like china)

[regenschutz]

A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.

In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.

If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.

This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.

[ryandrake]

It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.

[traderj0e]

They don't need the population to increase, just stay the same or not decrease too fast.

[regenschutz]

Or like the US solves it, through immigration. In the US, the fertility rate is at roughly 1.6 children per woman (which is below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population), and yet the US population is steadily increasing thanks to immigration. One can talk all day about pros and cons of immigration, but it is ultimately the only solution we have to a falling fertility rate (other than trying to increase it, of course).

[Qem]

Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.

[alexey-salmin]

What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?

[toast0]

What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.

But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.

[yoyohello13]

You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.

[alexey-salmin]

I think think fertility rates will rebound once the current culture of self-destruction gets, well, self-destructed. But incidentally this means that people who value sustainable water sources over having kids won't be there anymore.

So it's kind of pointless in my opinion, to maintain a strategy that can't achieve its stated goals because all it can do long-term is to give way to other strategies with other goals.

[traderj0e]

It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.

[yoyohello13]

Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.

[imtringued]

The reason why women stop having children in wealthy nations is that the pension system is based around forced collectivism of parental investment.

When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken.

Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty.

Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism.

The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.

[neofrog]

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

[y-curious]

Nature vs nurture though. I don’t think these fertile people choosing to not reproduce/failing to find a mate are genetically predisposed to not reproduce. I think it’s very much society-based. I argue this with the extreme: if they were put in a Handmaids Tale situation, I don’t think they’d have any problem producing enough children. I think in many ways society has failed them by making it appealing not to reproduce.

[chlorodose]

* Gene who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

You as a man will only live for ~70 years(~75 if you are a woman) no matter how you eager for continuity.

[zozbot234]

I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.

[vidarh]

Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.

It is by no means an issue just in the West.

You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.

[chlorodose]

That's not an good example. China has even higher real estate prices(due to land grant fees).

[y-curious]

Well, real estate pricing doesn’t help but the reason there used to be high birth rates in India, China and SS Africa is because of child mortality. Even still, the replacement rate in poor countries is >3, not the 2.3 I quoted for the West.

[jjk166]

> Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children.

I mean that's the point. We don't want people who have no interest in being parents to become parents for a paycheck. What we want is for people to have the financial freedom to live as they wish to live. In the US 46% of parents of young children report they have fewer children than they'd like due to financial constraints, and 23% of gen-Z report financial concerns as a primary motivator for not having kids. We don't need to go from 0 to 2.3, we need to go from 1.6 to 2.1. That extra half child is gonna come from tipping the scale for someone who is already on the fence, not paying people to be incubators.

[cloudie78]

I think it’s a cultural thing - society seems to value careers above all else and I don’t understand why

[y-curious]

Well, because we now need 2 people in a relationship to be working. I do not mean this to be sexist, but women entering the workforce has been a huge culprit to lowering birth rates.

Most people don’t see a problem with not reproducing because 1. “It’s not their responsibility to save society” and 2. The effects on the pension system are long-term. It’s like eating burgers and smoking every day, you don’t see the fatality of your decision right away.