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
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    10 months ago

    Well since we are at anecdotal evidence. I am in the academics bubble, where quite a few of my friends also got children and they love it. You don’t like kids, so you see all the problems that come with having children. You are looking for confirmation bias. There are more than enough people that do not hate children. I mean, we are kinda biologically programmed to procreate.