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- cross-posted to:
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The world’s demographics have already been transformed. Europe is shrinking. China is shrinking, with India, a much younger country, overtaking it this year as the world’s most populous nation.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/DfTgV
Interestingly, the richer a country gets, the fewer kids it gives birth to. When there’s a good chance you’re going to lose 3 to 4 children before they reach adulthood to hunger, war, disease, or general violence you hedge your bets by having 5-12 kids. Also historically, you need more kids to work your land/trade to support the family.
In an advanced economy you don’t need to have kids for either one of those reasons. Further, life is pretty good without raising kids so yet another group decide not to become parents. The big drop of fertility rate in the US happened in the early 70s likely before most people reading and posting here were born.
Its not all that kids are too expensive to raise in modern economies. Its partly sure, but not even the largest part.
I’m not even talking about cost. I’m talking about the fact that the world is literally burning down around us. We had 50 years warning and we did nothing meaningful about it. I’m not raising a kid just so he can be forced to go fight in the water wars of 2050.
At least in the USA, the various world crises in the 1960s were quite a bit worse for the prospects of your new born children. We just had the Cuban Missile Crisis where we got closer to global thermal nuclear war than ever in history. The war was raging in Vietnam where young men were dying. The Soviet Union was flexing its power in Eastern Europe where they had just rolled tanks into Czechoslovakia. China had detonated their first Hydrogen bomb.
Frankly it looked pretty bleak then where there was a chance you and your entire family would die in nuclear hellfire potentially any day.
Not to mention kids require an investment of time and care that a lot of people just don’t want to make. Given the actual ability to not have kids, some couples choose not to. And it’s good that they don’t have to, I mean, how many shitty, abusive parents were there in the past before birth control? People in rich countries are making the mature choice not to have children. People in poor countries would also make that choice, if they had the same access to reproductive care.