Birth Rate Decline!

NOTE: 1. NEW LOCATION AND TIME FOR THE SUMMER.
2. If you want to bring some extra cash perhaps we will order pizza. Bring your favorite beverage.
3. Dress for the weather as if we can sit in the garden we will (barring rain or bugs).

Birth rate decline
What’s going on? Here are some developments and questions.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint that has forecast much of Mr. Trump’s agenda so far, discusses family issues before anything else, opening its first chapter with a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” People on the right — conservatives — are more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future. Many Christian conservatives, as project 2025 notes, sees declining birth and marriage rates as a cultural crisis brought on by forces (equality between the sexes) in politics and the media(woke and secular) that they say belittle the traditional family, encouraging women to prioritize work over children. Once you have a more egalitarian society**, women** understandably are less likely to choose to have kids and this is where we end up. Alice Evans a sociologist from Kings College London tells us: If you talk to people on the political left, for a long time they would insist that it’s just a problem of the provision of public services. And they would say the developed world just needs to become more like Scandinavia in terms of paid leave and parental support. You also have people who focus, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say: Oh, the young people don’t want to have kids because they’re afraid of the human future. In the end some people argue that it is simply about women’s (and men’s) choices.
Here is the current state of affairs and some of the general issues that affect birth rate; the cultural promotion and acceptance of singlehood, tech’s contribution to this cultural change, economics and many successes of women’s fight for equity. Below are some brief details of the items listed above: There are more people living in single-occupier households. And this reflects a global trend. In the US Over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married. They’re single. And it’s not just being single — there is a retreating into a digital solitude. That’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. Tech is outcompeting personal interactions. Furthermore, this isn’t just a gender issue, it’s a solitude issue of people losing their social capacity to charm and make friends. And if you don’t have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one else is. So it’s all reinforcing. Another reinforcing factor is that women are increasingly entering the labor force and getting higher skills, which makes them more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. Men meanwhile are losing status and economic power resulting in being less interested and able to support a family – some are outright angry at women.
Consider what has been tried. Free child care, paid maternity leave, as well as required paternity leave (480 shared days in Sweden?), flexible leave, cash bonus for larger families and money for 3 car seat cars... all don't seem to work. By the end of the century, 70 percent of developed countries and 65 percent of less developed countries will have shrinking populations. South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. That means that over the course of two generations, the population goes from 50 million to 20-odd million. Only African countries are still having large families (but much less than the past and dropping/slowly). Recently, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tweeted, “women who become mothers before turning 30 will be exempt from paying personal income tax!” That’s on top of a raft of other initiatives meant to boost the number of Hungarian babies, including allowing mothers of four or more children to be permanently exempt from paying taxes, a mortgage repayment plan for families with two or more children, a subsidy program for larger families buying seven-passenger cars and allowing grandparents to be eligible for payment for caring for their grandchildren. The Hungarian government is spending over 5 percent of its gross domestic product on family support; it is spending three times the amount on family as it is on its military (until recently). With all this massive support its birth rate only rose from1.3 to 1.6! These supports are not working. It seems clear that what we have come to think of as “late capitalism” — that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities — has become hostile to reproduction. Around the world, economic, social and environmental conditions function as a diffuse, barely perceptible contraceptive. Our current version of global capitalism has generated shocking wealth for some, and precarity for many more. These economic conditions generate social conditions inimical to starting families: Our workweeks are longer and our wages lower, leaving us less time and money to meet, court and fall in love. Our increasingly winner-take-all economies require that children get intensive parenting and costly educations, creating rising anxiety around what sort of life a would-be parent might provide. A lifetime of messaging directs us toward other pursuits instead: education, work, travel. Ironically, only economically distressed strata make more kids!
QUESTIONS:
Should proto - natalism (having more children) be promoted? If so what more can be done? What happened to our concerns about overpopulation and using up the Earth’s resources such as we cheer a lower human population? Yet can our economic structure function with lower birth rates? Can we adapt? What other repercussions for society might result in either scenario – more kids or not? Is the traditional family (or any configuration of a stable reproducing unit) the basic building block of society and if so, can we function without it?