Economic worries are prompting young Europeans to delay or forgo parenthood
Economic worries are prompting young Europeans to delay or forgo parenthood
When demography expert Daniele Vignoli asked young couples for their thoughts about having children, a theme emerged: uncertainty about the future. In an experiment that Vignoli conducted in Italy and Norway in 2019, he showed a total of 800 couples in their 20s and 30s newspaper headlines about the...
Whereas previous economic shocks such as the oil crisis of 1973 caused a temporary dip in fertility, the 2007-2008 banking meltdown was different because birth rates continued to decline even after the economy started growing again, says to Daniele Vignoli, professor of demography at the University of Florence in Italy. He believes the turbulence a decade and a half ago marks the point at which people’s uncertainty about the future began to take hold.
Because the economy growing didn't mean people got wealthier. This time the capitol owners took all the benefits for themselves driving mass inequality and the end result is most people getting much poorer.
Economy growth without more equal benefits isn't useful to most people. The people are still in recession.
Yep. We’re in the actual late stage capitalism — the majority of politicians are full-blown corporate sociopaths bought and paid for by the wealthy; so much so that most of them don’t even attempt to act competent anymore. “competition” is 1/10th what is was decades ago due to corporate expansion and consolidation/acquisition. Greedflation is extracting whatever value remains from the collapse of the middle class. Economic mobility has been destroyed across the developed world from decades of neoliberalism. Wealth inequality is higher than it was during the Great Depression, and the opportunity to own a home or provide for a family is non-viable without a significant reduction in quality of life/standard of living for the first time in at least a century. Automation and AI are rapidly advancing to completely devalue/replace human labor. There is a near scientific certainty that climate change will cause ecosystems and agriculture to collapse around the world, and billions to starve, sometime in the next 20-50 years.
If anyone wonders why people are not having in kids in 2023, I auto-assume they’re a complete simpleton dumb cunt or suffering dementia.
Capitol owners is quite a good pun.
The world is burning, wars are raging, microplastics in our bodies, fascist are gaining power, depression is a staple for internet culture.
I don't know what it could be. /s
You know that passing wish for the future to come as a kid when you first saw a cyberpunk movie or show?
The cyberpunk future is here
The cyberpunk future is here
The term "boring dystopia" is a very apt description.
All of thr dystopia, none of the cool tech or aesthetics. Where's the bands of cyborg augmented jacked-in cyberpunks on hoverbikes? Where's the holograms and cyberdecks and the Net? Where's the robotic power armor and edgy neon and sleek titanium and carbon fiber? If we're gonna go full dystopia at least give us the aestherics for crying out loud!
Fascists are gaining power because the left could not offer a viable response to the majority concerns. And it sounds like what's left of it is just giving up unfortunately.
Fascists are gaining power because they are put there by radicalizing conservatives and businesses in particular media businesses consolidating their power and happily pushing fascist propaganda to sow divide among poor people. Also it distracts from the perpetuators of problems, by giving scapegoats.
The left has plenty viable responses. It is just that they cannot lie about the world changing and requiring to adapt. Something fascists and their conservative enablers happily lie about and the worse it gets the more they brainwash people into blaming the left, the green, the immigrants, the jews, anybody but the businesses and politicians destroying the world for some more profit.
I see this society as a pyramid scheme and as a young worker, I‘m somewhere near the bottom. I‘m supposed to be grateful cause others are further down and I‘m supposed to bring in more bottom dwellers to serve those above, but I refuse. Let it collapse for all I care.
Good enough of an explanation, or do I need to go into detail how much these too small apartments and mediocre food products cost?
I'm pretty torn on this. On one hand you are right, the current demographics mean, fewer yougn people have to provide for a lot of older people, at least realtively speaking. Te ratio between these groups has seldomly (never?) been this bad. This does mean we do not have the money to build out or even maintain the infrastructure, education, basically everything the generation after us will badly need.
On the other hand by not having enough children to at least have a better ratio, the generation after us will be in the exact same situation as we are, or even a worse one. So they are pretty much fucked anyways, but by at least maintaining population the generation after that might be able to do better?
That‘s why I call it a pyramid scheme lmao, you need to recruit more people into it to keep it going basically. That or take money and resources from the top of the pyramid, which I doubt will happen and if it does probably not without a lot of violence like in communist revolutions, which usually comes along with more fascism too, bad times. So I won‘t recruit anyone to this mess myself, but if you want to do that to your descendants to help out the system, go ahead.
Maybe the lack of my descendants can make the labour of others worth a bit more overall, or they get screwed by climate change anyway, since this pyramid can‘t grow forever without exhausting the planet‘s resources. Either way, I sleep well knowing I won‘t drag any more people into it.
Who did the economy recover for?
Yeah, even if inflation stays steady at 2.5 percent, the value of your money halves in the span of 25 years. Wages are locked in harder than my phone to my WiFi when I leave the house and politicians be like: "Why won't people procreate anymore?" If any if them had an experience outside the 10% of which they are part, they'd be signing a UBI law over night
All over the world we are seeing what happens after the boom
No more meat for the machine.
there's ten billion people in the world. If you haven't noticed, we're kinda ok, cancer-inspired natalists.
But think of the economy. Where will we be if we do not have more people than open positions in companies? Then companies can no longer pick the highest talent for low pay and they will loose money. And given the trickle down effect, you will also have less!
I really hope I do not need to add /s
But those people are being born in other countries. If we want to have more people here, we would have to allow foreigners to come here!
/s
So like Japan?
We got bread and circuses for cheap by way of chinese workers who reduced inflation for consumer items that made us feel like we were still properous, when in fact the opposite was happening.