> Why aren't millennials having kids? Look at the devastation around you. Will they be born into a world careening towards mass-famine and war? What will be lef

> Why aren't millennials having kids? Look at the devastation around you. Will they be born into a world careening towards mass-famine and war? What will be left of the earth in the coming years? What do they stand to inherit? If you were instead having children between 1950 and 1991, when the world was literally teetering on the brink of nuclear armageddon, would you not have reached the same conclusion? What about during the 1940s during World War II? Or 1930s, during the Great Depression? World War I and its aftermath is not ideal either, with a global pandemic killing a large percentage of the world's population, and many experts rightly predicting the resumption of hostilities in the coming years. 1871 to 1914 was great if you happened to be in a wealthy European country, of the right social class and ethnicity, and avoided dying of the many diseases (it was appropriately called "The Gilded Age" in the United States after all). Of course the past appears more certain with the benefit of hindsight, but individuals still had children despite the circumstances and possible futures at the time appearing far worse than those of the present. The world did go through large numbers of mass famines, warfare, pandemics and societal upheavals, but humanity kept on reproducing, surviving and innovating, and now we have much better tools to deal with our problems than ever before.