> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves.
High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.
Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.
I have been thinking about this a lot. Its quite easy to find arguments to having kids that bring benefits to parents and / or the parent generation in general.
I dont have a philosophy background, so I would be really interested to hear arguments for what benefits an unconceived child receives from being conceived in todays world.
Even when assuming that not all outcomes are necessarily going to be bad, there is a real risk that they will experience a really troubled world. What justifies exposing someone intentionally without their consent to that (any?) risk of suffering?
I've noticed that very few of the pronatalist ideologues focus on the lived experience of the children after they're born. They consider it very important for people to have lots of babies but absolutely no concern for the babies after they become people. Thus the massive effort to ban abortion in the US but absolutely no concern for the life of the mother. She's already been born, after all.
When we brought women into the formal economy, we didn't reduce men's hours and meet in the middle, we just doubled the labor supply. Of course the proceeds went to capital. The market-induced-labor-quota (cost of living / hourly wage) now says a married couple has to devote 80 hours per week instead of 40 to the formal economy in order to afford the same house and suddenly nobody has the time/money to afford kids. How could it be?
The solution isn't to go back to oppressing women, the solution is to put downwards pressure on formal economy hours/week until people have time to raise their own kids again. This can be done in a gradual and non-sexist way with overtime policy.
Health care and education are important sidekicks in this drama. Our policies to individualize and increase the costs (and yes, that's policy: everyone knows what happens if you train too few doctors, everyone knows who loses if John Smith, BCBS North Dakota, and Canada are bargaining against each other for drug prices, and everyone knows what happens if you flood a competitive market with debt) also provide steep disincentives to raising children. Start fixing these problems, you start fixing the birth rate.
Of course, you should expect to be fought tooth and nail at every turn by those who profit from the problem, but what else is new?
High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.
Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.
[1]https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili...