That is demonstrably false though. Richer countries have WAY fewer kids than poorer ones, and even in developed countries, richer households have fewer kids than poorer ones.
Here's a whole ass Wikipedia page dedicated to your ignorance on a well known worldwide phenomenon. Jesus Christ, please be one of the people that does not have kids because we do not need more people like you.
Because data is concrete and verifiable whereas your "vibes" are not. Here's a whole ass Wikipedia page dedicated to this very well known worldwide phenomenon.
Cool man, good luck with the data for a blanket explanation across all of society. I’ll keep using my eyes and common sense if you wanna call that “vibes”
Poorer countries dont have strict rules about child labour, they can be used for work there. This is not the case in rich countries where a child is a bigger liability.
There are African countries where this is true for a much larger part of the population. In fact, while being the poorest continent in the world, most African countries have fertility rates over 3 and only Tunisia is lower than replacement rate(1.9)
Having high fertility rates is easy to achieve when your standard of living is have at least 1 meal a day, sleep in a shack with no electricity and maybe go to school til 3rd grade (optional).
Lack of standard of living increase is what I believe to be one of the biggest factors in this, if you can’t provide at least as much for your kids as your parents provided for you, chances are you are not going to have kids(at least in a society where having kids is commodity rather than necessity). But again blaming a system that has consistently led to improvements in standards of living for hundreds of years in different countries and regions for not improving standards of living is a weak take at best. There are a lot of factors unrelated or weakly related to capitalism that affect this.
Seeing as society can’t exist without children, children can never be a commodity. Our leaders are failing us at the most fundamental level by ignoring and gaslighting us about the CoL crisis that is one of the primary causes for our decrease in birthrates.
That's a non sequitur. Many things are essential for mere existence (IE food, water and labor). But we regularly treat them as commodities in an economic sense. Morally and philosophically speaking, children SHOULDN'T be treated as a commodity, but to present that as a logical deduction to your point does not make sense. The necessity of something does not logically prevent its commodification.
A society can’t, but an individual in a society can. And since society consists of individuals, the situation where children are a commodity can arise, even if it threatens the existence of society itself. Pretty much every developed country is like this, as an individual you don’t need children to survive, pension system, own savings and investments provide a much better safety net for the old age than having children. Which for an individual means that having children is optional. Cost of living crisis is mainly centered around housing prices and taxation which are also affected by a lot of societal issues like centralisation where everyone from rural areas wants to live in a city and everyone from a city wants to live in a city centre because it gives better access to education, work and services, which are the basis for a chance at better standard of living than your parents in developed countries. Or increase in life expectancy where total population keeps increasing despite declining birthrates. I wont deny the impact of big fuckup of 2008 here, but right now the aftermath of COVID recession plays a way bigger role. Heavy taxation also comes from the fact that new generations must support social programs for more and more people and pay out pensions for more retirees and service the debt which was taken to allow the existence of those programs in the first place.
Because children are a big investment (monetarily, physically and emotionally) that rich people don't want to deal with. If it can't help them get richer, they don't want it.
You know what WOULD help that? Kids not being a massive monetary investment. Poorer countries have lesser access to education, contraception and abortion, which naturally means more kids getting made.
And that's the conundrum we're in. The people who want to have children can't afford them, the people who can afford them don't WANT to afford them, and the, and the people who either don't know how bad things are, or couldn't afford a condom, a pill or an abortion are having children.
You keep making it about money but it's not and never has been. There is no data that indicates it is. Denmark and Germany are rich countries with tons of protections for pregnant women and children in terms of healthcare and education and their natality is abysmal. The USA, which has less of all of this, has a higher birthrate, because the reality is the opposite of what people here claim: having people poor and keeping them poor makes more babies.
If you want to argue otherwise then provide some proof.
It's cultural, people in developed countries are focused on hedonism, consumerism, and hyper individualism over the traditional family. It is what it is.
You do know Africa is also one of the countries with the largest number of starving and malnutritioned children right? It's not about fertility
Edit: to those saying africa isn't a country, yes it isn't but I used it as an umbrella term since more than 30 of the 54 countries in Africa are under the international poverty line
The actual answer is that they just aren’t as developed leading to worse access to healthcare and higher infant mortality rates. Fertility rates and infant mortality rates go hand in hand. So while yes in more underdeveloped parts of the world the fertility rates are higher, in more developed parts of the world capitalism is a very large part of why birth rates are declining.
Because there's a threshold in any society when it comes to fertility.
If you can’t keep all your children alive past a certain age, the logic would be to have multiples so at least one woule survive. This then become a cultural thing more than anything else.
When you're certain your kids won’t starve to death, you begin as a population to have fewer and fewer, until all your needs are met.
But then you have depression, hopelessness, lack of funds, etc... all because of capitalism, that prevents people from having children. Why have a child when you don’t know how your life will go in 2 years ?
And this is not something new, a similar fashion appeared during the cold war, because people were scared and depressed.
This is the "red wine cures cancer" thing again. It's not the poverty, it's the lack of education that goes with it. Among well educated people one of the most common reasons for not wanting children is financial burden.
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u/BigJSteal 1d ago
blame capitalism