These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.

In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.

    • Sodis@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      No, it’s actually bad for everyone, because few young people have to support loads of old people. Politics will cater to the old people, because they have more voting power in numbers and will cut budgets for young people (education, social security and so on).

      • hpca01@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        As opposed to now? That’s literally what happens here, no one wants any of these old fucks’ laws. They were born when the first plane was taking off and haven’t kept to date with anything in the modern world. We have no choice because the only people who seem to have any time to do anything in this country are the old people. Therefore we get shit on for simply trying to exist.

    • It’s bad for capitalism and the 1%.

      It’s bad for the Old who will have their Pensions cut and bad for the young who have to pay for more Pensions.

      It’s not bad because we’re such a capitalist Society but exactly because we’re not. Because we expect to pay Welfare to older People to retire. And that whole Concept lies on the Assumption, that there will always be more People paying for the Welfare than People receiving it.

    • Nobsi@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s bad for humanity too. You can’t replace all the old people that cannot create what we desire for living without having kids.