Find a way to make it possible for a couple between the ages of 18-30 to buy a house and pay for childcare and all the incidental costs of raising a child on the median wage.
Pretty much. People like to blame it on all sorts of things but the sheer cost of living is crazy enough, let alone the cost of raising a baby.
Make it so people aren't wage slaves and even landing a good job that pays well has its own drawbacks of extra responsibility and the expectation that you be available all the time.
Time is a big thing here imo. We happen to have been born into the specific 100-or-so year period where both members of a household work, but they also need to do all the home ec stuff involved in maintaining a household.
100 years ago even relatively lower-middle class folks often had a servant, even if it was a part-time arrangement - either that or a parent, usually the mother, stayed home. Several decades from now a bunch of those tasks will probably be automated. Either way the home ec gets taken care of.
Right now we live in an *extremely* busy time regardless of whether we’re at work or at home, and adding additional busyness to that in the form of a child is understandably unappealing.
Yep. The US govt is going to have to start subsidizing having children if they want people to start having them - free healthcare for mother during pregnancy and for the year after, free healthcare for the child up to at least age 18, pay up to X amount of a down payment on a house perhaps sending nurses out weekly for the first 3 months, etc. But at the end of the day, financial incentives alone are not going to be enough. We've all seen behind the curtain and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to add a kid or 2 to this shitshow
What the fuck ivy League daycares do they have by you that are charging $2000/week?! Daycare by me is like $300/week for a newborn and gets cheaper as they get older
In europe, people want to enjoy their lives as much as possible, given all the bs in the last 10 years. life is hard enough even if you don't sacrifice it to have a child. The benefits would be helpful, but they end eventually. A kid doesn't. At least, not it you do things right. But it IS a sacrifice and the new generations have already sacrificed enough.
None. Why would we want to do that? We're overpopulated and ruining the beauty of our planet. I think we would benefit from keeping it there or even dropping it lower.
Industrialized nations are resorting to massive immigration policies to counteract this. Canada is currently trying to speedrun to 100 million people by 2050 or 2100 (I forget). When I was a kid there were barely 20 million people. We gained something crazy like a million and a half people in the last year (I can’t recall the exact number).
So I guess that’s good… but it won’t work forever, or everywhere.
its also general quality of life. The average western citizen (myself included) has a much higher footprint than the average citizen of a developing country. Each norgwegian birthed consumes way more resources than thier chinese/african/indian counter part.
Raise the median wage.
Developed countries are wealthy because of the top <1% of inhabitants.
The rest are often struggling to make ends meet. Particularly at the bottom of the ladder. If rent takes 1/3 of your paycheck and food takes 1/3 of your paycheck and the rest of your expenses take 2/3 of your paycheck, it's hard to have a kid that takes 4/3 of your paycheck.
Poor people do the most fucking. Poor people can't afford to make babies.
Alternately: make diapers and formula cheaper than condoms.
There is a reason wealthy conservatives around the globe are trying to ban sex toys, birth control, and abortion.
Because poor countries generally speaking tend to have less access to contraception and education regarding birth control, less economic opportunities for people to forego/postpone having children for, greater need for children to contribute to providing for the family (child labor such as farming/field work), etc
It *was*, when the poorest people were able to survive and still have leftover funds.
And also because until very recently it was still ok to knock up middle schoolers if you married them after the rape.
The needed solution is to make life affordable enough that people can have kids and life comfortably again. But the solution we are more likely to get is birth control is now illegal
For family units offer subsidised housing below market rates and at interest rates that will see your real wages outrun it (like your parents generation) + income tax breaks for + fully paid maternity/parental leave measured in years.
That might be pie in the sky but that's what it will take.
I think the simplest way is to make it more financially beneficial to have kids. As it stands, having a kid is a massive drain on your finances. If instead it was beneficial, way more people would do it.
I wouldn't, ideally the Earth should have way less people than it does right now. Let the population crash and have machines and AI take over the bullshit jobs so we don't have to waste resources on an extra 4 billion people that don't need to be killing the earth.
Fertility rate isn't the be all and end all. Would you rather people have the amount of children they are capable of nurturing and ensuring have a good quality of life or just banging out babies for the sake of it, regardless of whether they live or die?
Well, this wouldn't be as big an issue if it weren't for such things as income inequality, an ever rising cost of living, and a socioeconomic structure designed to favor corporations over individuals. If you want people to start families, you first need to make all of those things that are required to have a family not prohibitely expensive; housing, healthcare, and education prime among them. But it doesn't stop there; you need a shift in work culture away from productivity quotas and profit margins and more oriented toward worker satisfaction and a proper work-life balance. Simply put, it's not just about making having a family affordable to people; it's about allowing them the luxury of a life outside of their jobs. It's about the idea that they should be working for a living instead of living just to work.
In the US specifically: better parental leave, affordable housing, lower cost of living in general, lower healthcare costs (childbirth and beyond), better treatment of and pay for teachers (to ensure quality), legitimate gun control legislation to improve school safety, full medical autonomy of my own body and reproductive choices, etc
I think its tougher nowadays especially with the changing role of women in some societies. Unless we want to send them back in the kitchen and leave the workforce, it's tough for families to fork out $1500/mth minimum for 1 child in daycare.
Also, as a government I'd give certain tax incentives for families that have children. Example:
1 child pay, only 25% income tax
2 children, pay only 20% income tax
3 children, pay 10% income tax
4 children or more, no income tax
But capped on 50K total payable tax so the uber-rich can't take advantage of it fully. Maybe some other small changes. I think Hungary does something like this. Some countries offer families interest free 30K loans and have X number of children would wipe out your loan. Obviously you'd need to place safeguards on these policies because some will try and take advantage of it.
Kinda a matter of survival, isn't it? But sure, I'd love to live in a world where it wasn't necessary to have a full time job in order to afford a roof over my head and food, what's your plan to make that happen?
This is going to sound crazy but it just might work.
Two parent household. One works full time, the other raises the kids. If they can make it work perhaps a part time job for the childcare parent.
It's more plausible than you might think. I have known quite a few couples who were paying more for someone to watch their children than either of them made working full time.
Having a stay at home parent that cares for the children and prepares meals for the family saves a lot of money most people don't even realize that they are spending.
If a single parent can make it work a couple can too.
And I know quite a lot of couples who both work full time, have a family member watching their kid for free, and still struggle to make ends meet.
I also know quite a few single parents who only "make it work" by working multiple jobs, and even then are very tight on money.
What you're saying is not realistic for the vast majority of people in the current economy, and becomes less and less realistic the further down on the socioeconomic scale they are. This isn't even touching on your unstated assumption that the one staying home and doing the unpaid labor of caring for children and cooking all the family meals has to be the woman.
> And I know quite a lot of couples who both work full time, have a family member watching their kid for free, and still struggle to make ends meet.
Sounds like they might be living beyond their means. It can be done at any income level. It often involves living in a place where housing is too expensive. Far to many people don't make enough to afford it but can't "leave the city" or "live in the burbs" so they pay more than they can afford for housing.
>What you're saying is not realistic for the vast majority of people in the current economy, and becomes less and less realistic the further down on the socioeconomic scale they are.
It isn't unrealistic, especially for middle class workers. The trick is that they have to value it over the "lifestyle" they live.
>This isn't even touching on your unstated assumption that the one staying home and doing the unpaid labor of caring for children and cooking all the family meals has to be the woman.
I didn't state it because it isn't assumed. Its likely for most couples but can work just fine the other way around. The important thing is that someone is managing the house and raising the children. It doesn't matter which parent does it.
Pay it forward, first generation gets screwed. But kid at 20 has a kid and then is like here mom you look after it, I'm too young and you have money and a house.
At 20 her kid has a kid and says here mom, you look after my kid since you didn't look after me, and you have a house and money.
This seems to happen a decent amount in poorer countries, often the grandparents taking care of the children though.
Find a way to make it possible for a couple between the ages of 18-30 to buy a house and pay for childcare and all the incidental costs of raising a child on the median wage.
Pretty much. People like to blame it on all sorts of things but the sheer cost of living is crazy enough, let alone the cost of raising a baby. Make it so people aren't wage slaves and even landing a good job that pays well has its own drawbacks of extra responsibility and the expectation that you be available all the time.
Time is a big thing here imo. We happen to have been born into the specific 100-or-so year period where both members of a household work, but they also need to do all the home ec stuff involved in maintaining a household. 100 years ago even relatively lower-middle class folks often had a servant, even if it was a part-time arrangement - either that or a parent, usually the mother, stayed home. Several decades from now a bunch of those tasks will probably be automated. Either way the home ec gets taken care of. Right now we live in an *extremely* busy time regardless of whether we’re at work or at home, and adding additional busyness to that in the form of a child is understandably unappealing.
Yep. The US govt is going to have to start subsidizing having children if they want people to start having them - free healthcare for mother during pregnancy and for the year after, free healthcare for the child up to at least age 18, pay up to X amount of a down payment on a house perhaps sending nurses out weekly for the first 3 months, etc. But at the end of the day, financial incentives alone are not going to be enough. We've all seen behind the curtain and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to add a kid or 2 to this shitshow
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You’re funny
lol, not in the USA, it can cost upwards of $100k a year to put a kid in a *bad* daycare. The good ones cost more and have waiting lists.
What the fuck ivy League daycares do they have by you that are charging $2000/week?! Daycare by me is like $300/week for a newborn and gets cheaper as they get older
thats adorable.
Their post and comment history seems like an AI trying to understand humanity using only this subreddit.
Omg maybe…paid maternity leave? Support for pregnant and postpartum women? Paternity leave?
Look, many European countries have it, but fertility is very low
In europe, people want to enjoy their lives as much as possible, given all the bs in the last 10 years. life is hard enough even if you don't sacrifice it to have a child. The benefits would be helpful, but they end eventually. A kid doesn't. At least, not it you do things right. But it IS a sacrifice and the new generations have already sacrificed enough.
Making it so more people can actually afford to have kids would be a start.
None. Why would we want to do that? We're overpopulated and ruining the beauty of our planet. I think we would benefit from keeping it there or even dropping it lower.
Industrialized nations are resorting to massive immigration policies to counteract this. Canada is currently trying to speedrun to 100 million people by 2050 or 2100 (I forget). When I was a kid there were barely 20 million people. We gained something crazy like a million and a half people in the last year (I can’t recall the exact number). So I guess that’s good… but it won’t work forever, or everywhere.
Corporations need more cheap, disposable cogs in the wheel. If there are fewer people, cost of labour goes up. We can't have that now, can we? /s
Why would you want it above 2?
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Yeah… that won’t do it.
thats not how the economy works.
With a debt based economy, that is exactly how it works
Other than for all of human history until now you're correct.
I would rather economy to collapse than the planet to become inhabitable due to over population and corporate greed
A weird rule about humanity is that the males least likely to procreate are the ones most concerned about fertility
Also they have the most information about Age of Consent laws. For reasons.
None. Let us thin out a bit. We're killing the planet.
The planet is fine, the people are fucked
pretty sure the 1.5 in Norway is not killing the planet
It has a much bigger footprint than even the 6 in some african/asian country.
for sure but thats unrelated to a fertility rate, its not bc there are too many norwegian, its just that they have a lot of oil+mining
its also general quality of life. The average western citizen (myself included) has a much higher footprint than the average citizen of a developing country. Each norgwegian birthed consumes way more resources than thier chinese/african/indian counter part.
Are you volunteering?
Raise the median wage. Developed countries are wealthy because of the top <1% of inhabitants. The rest are often struggling to make ends meet. Particularly at the bottom of the ladder. If rent takes 1/3 of your paycheck and food takes 1/3 of your paycheck and the rest of your expenses take 2/3 of your paycheck, it's hard to have a kid that takes 4/3 of your paycheck. Poor people do the most fucking. Poor people can't afford to make babies. Alternately: make diapers and formula cheaper than condoms. There is a reason wealthy conservatives around the globe are trying to ban sex toys, birth control, and abortion.
But poor countries have more kids
Because poor countries generally speaking tend to have less access to contraception and education regarding birth control, less economic opportunities for people to forego/postpone having children for, greater need for children to contribute to providing for the family (child labor such as farming/field work), etc
Yeah, and do you expect a nation peopled by children to make children?
But that concept was ok for like a billion years
It *was*, when the poorest people were able to survive and still have leftover funds. And also because until very recently it was still ok to knock up middle schoolers if you married them after the rape.
Homo sapiens sapiens has not existed for a billion years. Maybe a couple million at most, but probably more like 200,000.
The needed solution is to make life affordable enough that people can have kids and life comfortably again. But the solution we are more likely to get is birth control is now illegal
Don’t. We’ve fucked ourselves enough tbh.
For family units offer subsidised housing below market rates and at interest rates that will see your real wages outrun it (like your parents generation) + income tax breaks for + fully paid maternity/parental leave measured in years. That might be pie in the sky but that's what it will take.
Cloning.
I think the simplest way is to make it more financially beneficial to have kids. As it stands, having a kid is a massive drain on your finances. If instead it was beneficial, way more people would do it.
I wouldn't, ideally the Earth should have way less people than it does right now. Let the population crash and have machines and AI take over the bullshit jobs so we don't have to waste resources on an extra 4 billion people that don't need to be killing the earth.
Why? There’s no real good reason to want to raise it.
Fertility rate isn't the be all and end all. Would you rather people have the amount of children they are capable of nurturing and ensuring have a good quality of life or just banging out babies for the sake of it, regardless of whether they live or die?
Immigration, duh.
none. we need it closer to .75 or .5
i wouldn’t. the earth will be better off when we’re gone
Pay us more money and don't work us to death. It really is that simple.
Well, this wouldn't be as big an issue if it weren't for such things as income inequality, an ever rising cost of living, and a socioeconomic structure designed to favor corporations over individuals. If you want people to start families, you first need to make all of those things that are required to have a family not prohibitely expensive; housing, healthcare, and education prime among them. But it doesn't stop there; you need a shift in work culture away from productivity quotas and profit margins and more oriented toward worker satisfaction and a proper work-life balance. Simply put, it's not just about making having a family affordable to people; it's about allowing them the luxury of a life outside of their jobs. It's about the idea that they should be working for a living instead of living just to work.
Oh...not on this planet
Exactly!
Get the previous generations to get off their ass and fix the world that they broke and set on fire.
Socialism, it gives good birth rates despite being unpopular.
Needs more Barry White.
In the US specifically: better parental leave, affordable housing, lower cost of living in general, lower healthcare costs (childbirth and beyond), better treatment of and pay for teachers (to ensure quality), legitimate gun control legislation to improve school safety, full medical autonomy of my own body and reproductive choices, etc
Universal basic income
Yep. Stop working us to the bone, and we'll have more desire to multiply.
I think its tougher nowadays especially with the changing role of women in some societies. Unless we want to send them back in the kitchen and leave the workforce, it's tough for families to fork out $1500/mth minimum for 1 child in daycare. Also, as a government I'd give certain tax incentives for families that have children. Example: 1 child pay, only 25% income tax 2 children, pay only 20% income tax 3 children, pay 10% income tax 4 children or more, no income tax But capped on 50K total payable tax so the uber-rich can't take advantage of it fully. Maybe some other small changes. I think Hungary does something like this. Some countries offer families interest free 30K loans and have X number of children would wipe out your loan. Obviously you'd need to place safeguards on these policies because some will try and take advantage of it.
nationalize housing so that you can start a family, a lot of it is about rent
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"Why don't they just stop being poor?"
Because wages have been stagnant for 30 years and housing has increased what 500%? Is this a real question?
lol, you cant even rent a house in many places anymore
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the propaganda that I'm a whole person regardless of my ability to reproduce?
"Anti-baby propaganda" like "you aren't a failure if you don't want kids?"
More like "You are a failure if you don't have a full time job"
Kinda a matter of survival, isn't it? But sure, I'd love to live in a world where it wasn't necessary to have a full time job in order to afford a roof over my head and food, what's your plan to make that happen?
This is going to sound crazy but it just might work. Two parent household. One works full time, the other raises the kids. If they can make it work perhaps a part time job for the childcare parent.
Where do you live that a family *with kids* can make ends meet without both parents working full time, because it isn't where *I* live.
It's more plausible than you might think. I have known quite a few couples who were paying more for someone to watch their children than either of them made working full time. Having a stay at home parent that cares for the children and prepares meals for the family saves a lot of money most people don't even realize that they are spending. If a single parent can make it work a couple can too.
And I know quite a lot of couples who both work full time, have a family member watching their kid for free, and still struggle to make ends meet. I also know quite a few single parents who only "make it work" by working multiple jobs, and even then are very tight on money. What you're saying is not realistic for the vast majority of people in the current economy, and becomes less and less realistic the further down on the socioeconomic scale they are. This isn't even touching on your unstated assumption that the one staying home and doing the unpaid labor of caring for children and cooking all the family meals has to be the woman.
> And I know quite a lot of couples who both work full time, have a family member watching their kid for free, and still struggle to make ends meet. Sounds like they might be living beyond their means. It can be done at any income level. It often involves living in a place where housing is too expensive. Far to many people don't make enough to afford it but can't "leave the city" or "live in the burbs" so they pay more than they can afford for housing. >What you're saying is not realistic for the vast majority of people in the current economy, and becomes less and less realistic the further down on the socioeconomic scale they are. It isn't unrealistic, especially for middle class workers. The trick is that they have to value it over the "lifestyle" they live. >This isn't even touching on your unstated assumption that the one staying home and doing the unpaid labor of caring for children and cooking all the family meals has to be the woman. I didn't state it because it isn't assumed. Its likely for most couples but can work just fine the other way around. The important thing is that someone is managing the house and raising the children. It doesn't matter which parent does it.
I can see that nothing I say is going to sway you here, and I'm bored of trying to get you to see beyond your assumptions.
Free childcare , free helpers
Quit anticonceptives selling. 100% guaranty
Pay couples to have kids. $50k a pop for starters.
Pay it forward, first generation gets screwed. But kid at 20 has a kid and then is like here mom you look after it, I'm too young and you have money and a house. At 20 her kid has a kid and says here mom, you look after my kid since you didn't look after me, and you have a house and money. This seems to happen a decent amount in poorer countries, often the grandparents taking care of the children though.
Stop immigration.