If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can't have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
If only there were people in this world who would want to come to our country . Heck, we could set up a system where employers can post jobs that they have trouble filling and we could match up people outside country who can fill that need. Then, if those people turn out to be decent and moral, we can let them stay in the country permanently.
It is too bad that everyone outside of the country is a foreigner who wants to steal jobs.
The part I don't understand is why it's important to hit the "replacement level". Wouldn't it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
It's like a bully kicking and beating you blue then complaining you won't just tell the teacher you're fine.
Like no shit. Multiple "once in a generation" recessions, rent pricing people out of places to live, inflation out the ass on basically everything, all the while wages stay stagnant as fuck. That's not even accounting for the absolute climate disaster we're inheriting.
Of course people are both less able to have kids and less inclined to have kids to put through the grinder of life. The very people complaining about this are the ones who helped create and continue on this scenario!
Replacement level shouldn't be a goal when the population increases every year. At the very least house prices should be neutral or decreasing relative to wages, if you want more people than you're already getting.
Me and my gf make ends meet ( sometimes not) just by being alive and eat, we go super rarely out and didn't had vacation the last 10 years.
Doesn't help that I got I'll and need to hold now a special food diet till I die which makes mostly everything I can eat like 2x as expensive and it was rough for us before my illness.
Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can't even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it's expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it's not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise...
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It's a dangerous game.
Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they'll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there's rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.
I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I'm sure many people here know such people as well, so it's more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it's nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.
The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I'd imagine that living with me through the years when they're developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.
Maybe I'll regret that decision when it's already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.
Hasn't the fertility rate in the US been going down from the 1960s? With immigrations covering the shortfall?
Actually looking at the data. It went down significantly in the 60 and 70s. Then picked up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. Then started dropping again from 2010.
But one thing to note to seem to be that it never went past replacement rate after 1972. 2.1 is considered to the global number for replacement. So for the last 60 years or so immigration has kept the population growing in absolute terms.
Not making a political statement, I find it weird when people club a huge group of people into one bucket and brand them.
I do not like the terms but sticking to the terms here. It looks like the young boomers had a similar number of children to today and the older boomers were already dropping the number of children they were having.
It's not just millennials. I was born 5 years after the end of the Baby Boomers and by the time I was 20 everything was becoming out of reach. Add a energy crisis or two, 40 years of Republican austerity for anyone but themselves, and a few financial crashes We the People ended-up bailing out, and I never got anywhere enough traction to do more than just get by without a mountain of debt. We never outran the entitlement of the Boomer generation.
Good luck Millennials - and I mean it - but the only way out is to get out of the US while you can.
I'm 33 and me and my so are not having children. Cope you capitalist pigs. I'm living my one life the way I want and you can fk off with your credit cards and apple pies.
I know xers that kids but, at least from the ones I know, im pretty sure its not replacement level. Many have zero, some have1, and 2+ ones are crazy or first generation in the country.
I absolutely hate the inter-generational blame game. Probably because I don't even feel like I belong to any generation as I was born right at the end of 1980, so I'd be a young genXer or something. I don't even know how these generations are decided upon, but in particular I'm sick of hearing everything getting blamed on Millennials all the time, since it really feels like it's mostly a bunch of old rich conservatives doing all the moaning, and is largely the same kind of people as those moaning about bicycle lanes and wind turbines.
I just did a quick search to find a random list of 40 things Millennials are frequently blamed for. Some of the things in the list are absolutely stupid as fuck, but I'm sure we've all seen such articles. I guess it's easier to generate clicks with headlines blaming Millennials for the downfall of Western civilisation instead of maybe writing a thoughtful article on why there are fewer people having kids, that perhaps investigates issues the commenter mentions.
My family basically adopted a kid that was in need. We aren’t having our own kids. It’s too expensive and we both don’t want to pass on our own mental health traits.