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.
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.
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u/Azustorm 2d ago
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).