These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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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.
Is a declining birth rate a bad thing? 50 million people live in a country (South Korea) the size of Indiana. Maybe, just maybe the economy should just take a hit for a change so there can be fewer people here. I know rich people don’t want that, but I bet the country would be a better place for it.
I mean, in the short term (50-100 years), yes it is. Unless people start dying at a younger age, there’s going to be a lot of orphaned seniors, which isn’t good. We won’t really see the benefits of a declining birthrate in our lifetimes, but we will see numerous negatives.
In the long term, it’s probably more nessecary then “not bad,” but again, you don’t want to be the one of the people living during the population collapse.
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It’s bad for capitalism and the 1%. You can’t have infinite growth with falling population numbers.
Edit: A lot of people claiming it’s also bad for the young and old people. It depends on how you’re social services are structured. Where I live the system is set up so that everyone only gets back the money they put into the system. That’s what the EU recommendations are and where all the EU countries are moving. Yes, the retirements will be lower in the future but that’s the only way to make the system sustainable without major cuts to everything else. IMHO it’s better than the idea of infinite growth.
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).
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.
Yeah, that’s getting even worse.
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.
Lol. What pensions?
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Maybe the chaebols should stop constantly putting up new apartment blocks now.
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