9 ms·

No Babies? Blame Capitalism

36 points by thisislife2 4mo ago

wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
It irrelevant - babies are not needed for population growth - there's plenty of countries that are overpopulated all that is required is redistribution of the people we have rather than making more. If we look at these issues globally rather than on a per country basis it looks easier to resolve/different.
- pfdietz 4mo ago
  > babies are not needed for population growth Of course they are, on a global scale. There is no other process than birth that can increase global population.
  - wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
    That's being pedantic - of course I mean babies from other countries as well as adults - when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment.
    - noosphr 4mo ago
      This is a loss for everyone expecting to become anything but soyoent in their reteriment. An inverted population either kills the old or enslaves the young. We reached peak baby 5 years ago. There is a still a path to steady state population but that is closing fast.
      - wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
        Governments need population growth to maintain economic growth - steady state population is very much against economic growth - the population must grow for the good of the economy and therefore the country.
        apothegm 4mo ago
        Why must the economy grow? What’s wrong with a steady state economy?
    - palmotea 4mo ago
      > ...when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment. Your idea is dumb. The world fertility rate is barely above replacement and dropping (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN). Do the math, it doesn't work.
    - wolvesechoes 4mo ago
      > this is a win for everyone Everyone that belongs to 0.1% of richest people in the society. All others get to win increased crime rates, salary stagnation and other benefits.
- WorkerBee28474 4mo ago
  Congratulations you just reinvented eugenics.
faangguyindia 4mo ago
funny thing is india, it's not about money. I know tech bros here who make really good income, have good residential properties and cars, they aren't complaining about not having enough money to marry, they just don't find any woman who is willing to marry them. Most people who are having kids in india are lower income people. so i just don't understand when people say it's because of money issue, when people with comfy jobs fail to have babies, it's not about money.
- readthenotes1 4mo ago
  Highest birth rate is in sub Saharan Africa iirc. Money matters but is not the primary.
- SanjayMehta 4mo ago
  What you're saying mostly applies to general category people. If you spend any time listening to middle class families it all comes down to the cost of getting a good education if the kids didn't get a "government seat." As an example, a medical degree in a private college can cost 1cr for tuition fees alone. The kids pick up on this lament consciously or unconsciously and realise that the more kids they will have, the worse the problem. The "poor" people get subsidies and freebies, and the more children they have, the more sops state governments throw away at them. I'm also told, but can't confirm it, another factor is social media pushing fancy vacations abroad spending their entire income.
- thisislife2 4mo ago
  In India, from what I have personally observed it is mostly a mental health issue (anxiety disorders / depression): 1. Many men and women fear to commit to a relationship today and are increasingly remaining single, or marrying late (in their late 30's or 40's). Thus, even those who marry can't have a large family as the older you get the more fertility issues you have (along with additional anxieties of how to manage young kids when you are old). 2. For indian women in particular, it is also anxiety about loss of freedom if they can't work. Thus, even those who marry young, try to avoid having a large family as they fear it will be an impediment to their career (which means less financial freedom, and the fear of being under the "control" of a male spouse). 3. And finally there's the western capitalistic consumerism , where even spouse or a kid can be seen as an impediment to enjoying a consumerist lifestyle by the individual in their "pursuit of happiness".
pclowes 4mo ago
Honestly we are doing articles from Jacobin on the front page now? Whats next Newsmax and OANN? Some flat-earther blog?
- groan 4mo ago
  You’re being downvoted but for those of us not in the know, what’s wrong with Jacobin? (Keep in mind not all of us are from US/the West), the obvious may be lost on us.
  - jbboehr 4mo ago
    For starters, they named themselves after a murderous left-wing terrorist organization: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins > the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".
  - pclowes 4mo ago
    Nothing crazy just more highly biased opinion pieces masquerading as journalism just on the far left instead of the right. They have a narrative and they pick stories and “facts” to fit it. Just expect better on hacker news.
    - zzgo 4mo ago
      > far left > Jacobin Oh, you can go way further to the left of Jacobin.
      - pclowes 4mo ago
        You can also shave off some IQ points by hitting yourself in the head… not sure _why_ you would do that though.
        zzgo 4mo ago
sbuttgereit 4mo ago
Unless you are seeing the population decline issues in China... then blame socialism and it's long time one child policy. A system predicated on the socialists in power having a sort of "paternalistic wisdom" that it can enforce on society regardless of the individual interests of any set potential parents in having a larger family than their socialist masters wish.
andsoitis 4mo ago
> an economic system predicated on individual autonomy and naked self-interest whose incentives run counter to child-rearing. It's not just rich places that are becoming less fertile. "Demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions." - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise-baby-bust-is-a-warning-to-the-world https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise...
- surgical_fire 4mo ago
  Poor places also run on Capitalism. They just got the short end of the stick.
  - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
    Capitalism runs on surplus labor, which was only able to work for the last several decades because of a population boom because women were not educated empowered (this is referred to as a (“demographic dividend”). Now that women are educated and empowered, fertility rates are rapidly falling, and labor surplus is falling. What comes next when you run out of labor to squeeze for profits? I don’t know, but I think it’ll be interesting to observe, and the fertility rate globally is likely to continue to fall well into the future (~40% of pregnancies annually are unintended; as systems improve to further prevent unintended pregnancy, this will lead to lower fertility rates). Any efforts to improve socioeconomic systems to make having children a more attractive economic proposition (and thereby increasing the fertility rate) will take years to implement, perhaps longer, if at all. Like a furnace warming a room, it’s getting colder faster than the thermostat can ever raise the temperature back up. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demography?indicator=Population&Sex=Both+sexes&Age=Total&Projection+scenario=Medium&country=CHN~IND~USA~IDN~PAK~NGA~BRA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp... Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
colechristensen 4mo ago
Ugh, it's considerably simpler. Blame capitalism, but the real estate part. Real estate: there's not enough of it, new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit. Young people without families optimize for themselves and continually are willing to compromise for less space for the same money but minimum_space(single) << minimum_space(family+kids) So new construction, particularly large apartment building have few to no units that anyone could actually raise a family in and trend towards "studio" concrete cylinders. Places with more space are zoned for exclusive residential and are thus tremendously boring. Mixed use places are full of vacant commercial space because lowering the rent would trigger property revaluation and the places that aren't vacant are tremendously expensive because of the large amount that has to go to paying the rent ... or paying their low-to-middle income employees who spent half their income on rent. All of this money is getting sucked out of the economy into A) people who want real estate income without working and B) the financial system giving them loans. Nobody wants kids because they have to chose between expensive housing where it's boring and extremely expensive housing where it's not. Just furthering the generation on generation the young paying for the previous generations real estate "investment" growth.
- orangecat 4mo ago
  Blame capitalism, but the real estate part. Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism. new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    >Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service. And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.
jemmyw 4mo ago
People who want to have kids have kids. There have been worse economic conditions, and far worse living conditions for folks in the not very distant past and they still had large families. There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much. I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.
- api 4mo ago
  My take for a while is that if the low birth rates persist and do become a critical problem, we might just have to do a boring thing that we do for other areas where the unregulated market or society doesn’t produce enough of something or doesn’t solve a problem. We might just have to subsidize it and basically pay people to have kids.
saltyoldman 4mo ago
Yeah, sorry. This narrative is over now that the fraud has been exposed.
- zzgo 4mo ago
  Which fraud is that?
  - saltyoldman 4mo ago
    The 100B+ of hospice/daycare/and multiple other medicare related fraud schemes that is happening every year. Perpetrated by the people that keep saying things like "communism was never implemented right" or "make the rich pay their fair share". But the reality is, if all the excess tax money that is collected does not go to where the problems are, and is just being boarded onto a plane in a bag with 2M dollars headed to Mogadishu - then you can't blame capitalism for the mess we're in.
    - zzgo 4mo ago
      I don't understand how this is a counterargument to the article's claim that capitalism is to blame for the declining birthrate around the world. Could you connect the fraud to the birthrate for me?
      - saltyoldman 4mo ago
        The opposite of capitalism is some form of socialism or communism. We know that it CAN'T work (at least in America) because all of the extra money to help people is stolen. So Capitalism is better than any other form of getting money in people's pockets. More money in pockets means more chances for babies. The reality is we need to fix all the jobs being sent to people from other countries. The stat just came out that in the last 5 years 90% of the jobs went to foreign born people. We also need to reverse the climate doomerism that's pushing people to lose faith in life in general. Can you ask both your questions at once instead? Also please argue in good faith, the 3rd or 4th most hit topic in the last 5 months has been the amount of Fraud we've been enveloped in. To ask your original question like that reeks of disingenuity.
lousclues 4mo ago
I would not say it’s capitalism but rather industrialization. Children are assets when they can help with farm work but become an expense when work moves to a factory/office setting.
- tuatoru 4mo ago
  Industrial market economies. The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion). Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households. Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
  - palmotea 4mo ago
    > The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion). > Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households. This. It's not some bargain-bin homo economicus thinking like the GP proposes ("Children are assets when they can help with farm work..."). It's that capitalism has evolved to squeeze the life out of everything in order to maximize short-term profits for the shareholders, and it's corrupted almost everything that stands in its way. And with AI, there's hope that capitalism can continue unabated even after literally squeezing the population to death. Truly the best economic system, amirite?
fittingopposite 4mo ago
Or size of cars? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
amriksohata 4mo ago
Or birth control pill?
cykros 4mo ago
The amount of people who can't see the difference between a monetary system captured by central planners who stand in the way of the free market at every turn and who, in their continuous debasement, perpetuate a K-shaped economy, and capitalism, is quite alarming. But I suppose that we can't expect much when they've been educated by government employees.
- wolvesechoes 4mo ago
  The amount of people that still believe in the free market fantasy is even more alarming. There was never a free market, and there will never be one, as markets as such are by necessity created by central authorities.
- functionmouse 4mo ago
  show me non-K shaped capitalism

36 points by thisislife2 4mo ago

It irrelevant - babies are not needed for population growth - there's plenty of countries that are overpopulated all that is required is redistribution of the people we have rather than making more. If we look at these issues globally rather than on a per country basis it looks easier to resolve/different.

pfdietz 4mo ago
> babies are not needed for population growth Of course they are, on a global scale. There is no other process than birth that can increase global population.
- wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
  That's being pedantic - of course I mean babies from other countries as well as adults - when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment.
  - noosphr 4mo ago
    This is a loss for everyone expecting to become anything but soyoent in their reteriment. An inverted population either kills the old or enslaves the young. We reached peak baby 5 years ago. There is a still a path to steady state population but that is closing fast.
    - wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
      Governments need population growth to maintain economic growth - steady state population is very much against economic growth - the population must grow for the good of the economy and therefore the country.
      - apothegm 4mo ago
        Why must the economy grow? What’s wrong with a steady state economy?
  - palmotea 4mo ago
    > ...when birth rates drop in a country its easy to grow population with entire families including babies from countries that are overpopulated - this is a win for everyone including the environment. Your idea is dumb. The world fertility rate is barely above replacement and dropping (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN). Do the math, it doesn't work.
  - wolvesechoes 4mo ago
    > this is a win for everyone Everyone that belongs to 0.1% of richest people in the society. All others get to win increased crime rates, salary stagnation and other benefits.
WorkerBee28474 4mo ago
Congratulations you just reinvented eugenics.

faangguyindia 4mo ago

funny thing is india, it's not about money. I know tech bros here who make really good income, have good residential properties and cars, they aren't complaining about not having enough money to marry, they just don't find any woman who is willing to marry them. Most people who are having kids in india are lower income people. so i just don't understand when people say it's because of money issue, when people with comfy jobs fail to have babies, it's not about money.

readthenotes1 4mo ago
Highest birth rate is in sub Saharan Africa iirc. Money matters but is not the primary.
SanjayMehta 4mo ago
What you're saying mostly applies to general category people. If you spend any time listening to middle class families it all comes down to the cost of getting a good education if the kids didn't get a "government seat." As an example, a medical degree in a private college can cost 1cr for tuition fees alone. The kids pick up on this lament consciously or unconsciously and realise that the more kids they will have, the worse the problem. The "poor" people get subsidies and freebies, and the more children they have, the more sops state governments throw away at them. I'm also told, but can't confirm it, another factor is social media pushing fancy vacations abroad spending their entire income.
thisislife2 4mo ago
In India, from what I have personally observed it is mostly a mental health issue (anxiety disorders / depression): 1. Many men and women fear to commit to a relationship today and are increasingly remaining single, or marrying late (in their late 30's or 40's). Thus, even those who marry can't have a large family as the older you get the more fertility issues you have (along with additional anxieties of how to manage young kids when you are old). 2. For indian women in particular, it is also anxiety about loss of freedom if they can't work. Thus, even those who marry young, try to avoid having a large family as they fear it will be an impediment to their career (which means less financial freedom, and the fear of being under the "control" of a male spouse). 3. And finally there's the western capitalistic consumerism , where even spouse or a kid can be seen as an impediment to enjoying a consumerist lifestyle by the individual in their "pursuit of happiness".

pclowes 4mo ago

Honestly we are doing articles from Jacobin on the front page now? Whats next Newsmax and OANN? Some flat-earther blog?

groan 4mo ago
You’re being downvoted but for those of us not in the know, what’s wrong with Jacobin? (Keep in mind not all of us are from US/the West), the obvious may be lost on us.
- jbboehr 4mo ago
  For starters, they named themselves after a murderous left-wing terrorist organization: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins > the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".
- pclowes 4mo ago
  Nothing crazy just more highly biased opinion pieces masquerading as journalism just on the far left instead of the right. They have a narrative and they pick stories and “facts” to fit it. Just expect better on hacker news.
  - zzgo 4mo ago
    > far left > Jacobin Oh, you can go way further to the left of Jacobin.
    - pclowes 4mo ago
      You can also shave off some IQ points by hitting yourself in the head… not sure _why_ you would do that though.
      - zzgo 4mo ago

sbuttgereit 4mo ago

Unless you are seeing the population decline issues in China... then blame socialism and it's long time one child policy. A system predicated on the socialists in power having a sort of "paternalistic wisdom" that it can enforce on society regardless of the individual interests of any set potential parents in having a larger family than their socialist masters wish.

andsoitis 4mo ago

> an economic system predicated on individual autonomy and naked self-interest whose incentives run counter to child-rearing. It's not just rich places that are becoming less fertile. "Demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions." - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise-baby-bust-is-a-warning-to-the-world https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise...

surgical_fire 4mo ago
Poor places also run on Capitalism. They just got the short end of the stick.
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  Capitalism runs on surplus labor, which was only able to work for the last several decades because of a population boom because women were not educated empowered (this is referred to as a (“demographic dividend”). Now that women are educated and empowered, fertility rates are rapidly falling, and labor surplus is falling. What comes next when you run out of labor to squeeze for profits? I don’t know, but I think it’ll be interesting to observe, and the fertility rate globally is likely to continue to fall well into the future (~40% of pregnancies annually are unintended; as systems improve to further prevent unintended pregnancy, this will lead to lower fertility rates). Any efforts to improve socioeconomic systems to make having children a more attractive economic proposition (and thereby increasing the fertility rate) will take years to implement, perhaps longer, if at all. Like a furnace warming a room, it’s getting colder faster than the thermostat can ever raise the temperature back up. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demography?indicator=Population&Sex=Both+sexes&Age=Total&Projection+scenario=Medium&country=CHN~IND~USA~IDN~PAK~NGA~BRA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp... Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

colechristensen 4mo ago

Ugh, it's considerably simpler. Blame capitalism, but the real estate part. Real estate: there's not enough of it, new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit. Young people without families optimize for themselves and continually are willing to compromise for less space for the same money but minimum_space(single) << minimum_space(family+kids) So new construction, particularly large apartment building have few to no units that anyone could actually raise a family in and trend towards "studio" concrete cylinders. Places with more space are zoned for exclusive residential and are thus tremendously boring. Mixed use places are full of vacant commercial space because lowering the rent would trigger property revaluation and the places that aren't vacant are tremendously expensive because of the large amount that has to go to paying the rent ... or paying their low-to-middle income employees who spent half their income on rent. All of this money is getting sucked out of the economy into A) people who want real estate income without working and B) the financial system giving them loans. Nobody wants kids because they have to chose between expensive housing where it's boring and extremely expensive housing where it's not. Just furthering the generation on generation the young paying for the previous generations real estate "investment" growth.

orangecat 4mo ago
Blame capitalism, but the real estate part. Housing is absolutely a large reason for the fertility decline, but the main issue is governments forbidding housing from being built which is pretty much the opposite of capitalism. new construction targets young unmarried people and successively makes smaller units while gradually raising the price per unit Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. When supply is heavily restricted, prices predictably rise.
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  >Developers don't get to unilaterally set prices, they're determined by supply and demand. Eh. Apartment rents are driven by cartel behavior, single management companies own vast swaths of real estate and almost everybody uses a small number of services which calculate the rent they should charge which is more or less price fixing as a service. And cities which should be SHAPING the supply with zoning are instead allowing an extremely heavily biased supply of homes designed for single occupancy. If there were a lot more 3BR units in attractive areas it would reshape the whole market, they couldn't afford to have a whole mess of empty large apartments and forcing the prices lower on those would have a cascading effect on smaller apartments.

jemmyw 4mo ago

People who want to have kids have kids. There have been worse economic conditions, and far worse living conditions for folks in the not very distant past and they still had large families. There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much. I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.

api 4mo ago
My take for a while is that if the low birth rates persist and do become a critical problem, we might just have to do a boring thing that we do for other areas where the unregulated market or society doesn’t produce enough of something or doesn’t solve a problem. We might just have to subsidize it and basically pay people to have kids.

saltyoldman 4mo ago

Yeah, sorry. This narrative is over now that the fraud has been exposed.

zzgo 4mo ago
Which fraud is that?
- saltyoldman 4mo ago
  The 100B+ of hospice/daycare/and multiple other medicare related fraud schemes that is happening every year. Perpetrated by the people that keep saying things like "communism was never implemented right" or "make the rich pay their fair share". But the reality is, if all the excess tax money that is collected does not go to where the problems are, and is just being boarded onto a plane in a bag with 2M dollars headed to Mogadishu - then you can't blame capitalism for the mess we're in.
  - zzgo 4mo ago
    I don't understand how this is a counterargument to the article's claim that capitalism is to blame for the declining birthrate around the world. Could you connect the fraud to the birthrate for me?
    - saltyoldman 4mo ago
      The opposite of capitalism is some form of socialism or communism. We know that it CAN'T work (at least in America) because all of the extra money to help people is stolen. So Capitalism is better than any other form of getting money in people's pockets. More money in pockets means more chances for babies. The reality is we need to fix all the jobs being sent to people from other countries. The stat just came out that in the last 5 years 90% of the jobs went to foreign born people. We also need to reverse the climate doomerism that's pushing people to lose faith in life in general. Can you ask both your questions at once instead? Also please argue in good faith, the 3rd or 4th most hit topic in the last 5 months has been the amount of Fraud we've been enveloped in. To ask your original question like that reeks of disingenuity.

lousclues 4mo ago

I would not say it’s capitalism but rather industrialization. Children are assets when they can help with farm work but become an expense when work moves to a factory/office setting.

tuatoru 4mo ago
Industrial market economies. The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion). Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households. Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
- palmotea 4mo ago
  > The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion). > Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households. This. It's not some bargain-bin homo economicus thinking like the GP proposes ("Children are assets when they can help with farm work..."). It's that capitalism has evolved to squeeze the life out of everything in order to maximize short-term profits for the shareholders, and it's corrupted almost everything that stands in its way. And with AI, there's hope that capitalism can continue unabated even after literally squeezing the population to death. Truly the best economic system, amirite?

fittingopposite 4mo ago

Or size of cars? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812

aaron695 4mo ago

[dead]

amriksohata 4mo ago

Or birth control pill?

cykros 4mo ago

The amount of people who can't see the difference between a monetary system captured by central planners who stand in the way of the free market at every turn and who, in their continuous debasement, perpetuate a K-shaped economy, and capitalism, is quite alarming. But I suppose that we can't expect much when they've been educated by government employees.

wolvesechoes 4mo ago
The amount of people that still believe in the free market fantasy is even more alarming. There was never a free market, and there will never be one, as markets as such are by necessity created by central authorities.
functionmouse 4mo ago
show me non-K shaped capitalism