There is the question if the birthrates just dropped because the market now expects both people in a relationship to be working, making it impossible for the parents to care for their kids by reducing hours and childcare costs being more or close to what one person earns, especially in lower paying jobs. The effects on lifetime income for a mother are still devastating, and domestic work is still VERY undervalued. Fix this, and I am sure that birth rates will go up. But that would mean that our corporate overlords will make less.

Maybe if the population numbers in the US crash hard there will be a rethinking of priorities. The combination of xenophobia and economic pressure to keep working without having kids will take care of that in the next decade or two.

But none of the low income / high birth rate countries are mostly white and Protestant 😭😭

Then why do people like Elon Musk, Trump and so many other rich/upper class people usually have 4 or more children? I don’t think technology, things becoming easier or more comfortable lower birthrates, if anything, they increase it as we saw in the baby boomer era, which had a fertility rate similar to those in medieval times 2000 years ago, so. I am sure people said the same thing as you every 100 years whenever there was a downward trend in the fertility rate, no? "It's because people are happier, more comfortable now, more educated too". But imo, those things make you want to have more children, not less.

I think this is a common observation because most societies that become big start to get ran by greedy evil oligarchs and leaders who stagnate the economy for the working class. It does still talk a lot about humanity’s nature as a whole, but not the individual, because, we all can see how our baby boomer grandparents had so many children when their living standards were higher than ours. They’d have 7+ children in average, a home at 19 years old, economic stability, more social lives, physical human contact, not isolation in front of a machine online, all without a college degree like my grandpa, who had 10 children like that. He lived really happy. I wish having children was easier, I'd like to have 1 or 2, teach them how to play videogames like me someday, but it won't happen, because it's insanely expensive, I am 28 and still cannot afford a home even after working for 3 years as a software engineer who graduated from ITESM, the "top #1 college in all Latin America" a college a lot of Americans and people from other countries send their children to, has a very hgih reputation. I was a good student too, I was the dude of that meme that says every group has these 3 teammates: the dude that does 91% of the work (that was always me because I had to maintain a scholarship that paid 80% of my debt and I am poor asf so), the dude that helps the first guy by doing the other 9%, the third guy who does nothing but is motivated asking questions and willing to do the presentation, and the 4th guy, the one we all didn't even know was part of the group, but he showed up in the presentation day. I noticed so, so many people procrastinate and don't work or try hard in school at all. They are so lazy, and I guess I can't blame them as I used to anymore, it is not worth working for this world and system.

You also see people like Elon Musk, having more than 10 children. Trump has a lot too. A lot of rich people have so many children, like both of my grandparents, or the politicians and doctors with no free time I know in the family, most have at least 3 children and so on, and they'd have more if they had the same wealth as my grandparents, but they never achieved it either. Not even by being the co-founder of an hospital, like my uncle, who has 2 children, but also has fun collecting motorcycles, built a gaming room for his son, a room with 6 high-end computers for his friends to join him in videogames right there, a LAN party room. He had the entire Disney Infinity or Skylanders figurines collection to play with, forgot which. Those you place on a console, like Amiboos in a Nintendo Switch or UB Funkeys... I don't think technology or becoming educated are the problem, it's the lack of money/resources 100%. The only reason my uncle, who is crazy rich, he has gifted my mom 2 of his SUVs because instead of repairing them he buys a new one, only had 2 children because of time. He got his wealth gradually, he probably struggled at first unlike our grandparents who could make it young, and he's also a gynecologist who'd be busy all the time. My other grandpa was also a gynecologist, and he had 7 children, a house with a pool and enough bedrooms for the children, etc.

I don’t think the existence of the Internet, smartphones, videogames, or whatever you want to name that our grandparents didn’t have back then, are the issue. It’s the lack of money, and that’s thanks to Reagan who convinced and influenced multiple countries, including mine, Mexico, of adopting his Trickle Down Economics theory, of lowering taxes to the rich, who used to pay about 70%, some say 91% in rare cases, of taxes back then; today, they pay near 0% and they are not creating jobs as we were promised they would, they are instead replacing us with AI. People today are unhappier than our baby boomer grandparents as much as they talk about how hard it was to live back then. There is no point in having so many commodities when you are still not happy, and one important thing to be happy is human contact. There are clearly way more virgins and incels today than before. People staying inside homes, doomscrolling memes and posts that don't make them laugh or smile anymore, but make them feel like crap, depressed, jealous of what others have and display in their instagram. People are also slowly being informed of how fucking crap their lives truly are, the moment they see and explore others' lives online. Remember than about 50% of humanity is not in the Internet yet. That 50% of humanity are most likely the poorest in the entire world, the people starving to death in the streets, or the boney children you see in TV. No way they can afford a phone of any brand or kind, not even the cheapest one. Just wait until those people join and chime in with their opinions, life experiences and cultures. They will be the wildest stories and posts you might ever see, I bet.

So I think it’s simpler: When people have a lot of resources, birthrates rise. If they don’t have enough resources, birthrates drop. It’s not about how easy, how comfortable technology has made us or whatever, that’s a lie, and that’d be something the government, those greedy rich assholes would try to convince us of it being the problem so we stop blaming them and continue fighting sideways like they want us to. No, it is the rich the cause people are not having children; they are creating an artificial difficult living standard, which is having to work 5x times LONGER than your grandparents to get even a quarter of what they had at your age. It was so easy for them to do that. Just own both the home, the land it is on, and the jobs. Imagine a rich CEO who owns all the jobs in a small city; he decides the wages and the costs of living so easily. He can dictate the mental state of his people; he can control their sanity, their anger, their fertility rate. They are getting angrier and protesting? Increase wages a little, but also increase the cost of food and housing by a lot in silence, on the side. As we can see, wages are never adapted with inflation. Inflation rises, but wages have been the same since decades ago.

No one here has donated more than 100$ USD in total to politicians or candidates they wish got elected. You NEVER, and still DO NOT have a real democracy. You NEVER had democracy or true freedom. We have all been forced to elect either politician A which appeals to empathy, or politician B which appeals to sympathy, both with a touch of apathy for the other, both ready to answer for the interests of the rich, not ours. You will never be able to compete against the millions, if not billions of dollars the richest 1% have. They get to decide who rules us, not us. However, this is the only place where I have hope for humanity. Zohran Mandami proved that you can defeat the rich with words, no matter how much money they spend to attack you. Young people today trust content creators and influencers more than traditional media, and that is a good thing. Traditional media has proven to be against us, not for us. They are owned by the rich, just like Jeff Bezos owns the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times, forgot which one was it, I don't care. I rather listen to people who are more relatable and honest and humane. It's so easy to verify and confirm the things they're saying are true or not, or the right thing or not. Just boil everything down to the question "Is this the best choice for humanity in the long-term?".

After you turn 30, your chances of having children with disabilities increase significantly too. So, time is ticking.

The ideal society, in my opinion, would be that one that is highly educated and capable and motivated of adapting to the fertility rate, to what humanity can currently afford. That’d be jumping between having 1 child or 3. A fertility rate under 2.1 means the population is declining, which could be a good thing if overpopulation is being problematic like it happened in China during the early 2000s and their 1-child policy which I am not very well-informed about (I remember believing they'd kill your children if you had twins or more when I was a kid, lol. Anti-China propaganda was so much more effective back then), we need time to build more houses, we need time to prepare more jobs too, people would have only 1 child, which is still better than 0. If society needs to keep the population constant, people would be recommended to have no more than 2 children, which is still better than 0. If we need to grow and expand, we could have 3 or more children, whatever the experts recommend at the time. Still better than 0.

As the standard of living rises, the birthrate initially increases. This was the boomer years.

Then birthrate falls because an industrialized society requires more resources per child. Eventually you reach a period of stagnation when the resources available match the number of children born.

Then in all capatilist societies, the standard of living declines which triggers the birthrate to free fall.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/japan/birth-rate

Japan peaked in the 1940's, stagnanted in the '60-'70s and has been in free fall ever since.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/birth-rate

South Korea peaked in the 1950's, stagnated in the '80s and 90's and has been in free fall since.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

The United States peaked in the 40's-50's. Stagnanted from the 1970's to early 2000's (bouyed by 1st generation immigration) and is now in free fall (due to immigration idiocracy).

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/france/birth-rate

France followed the U.S. due with an extended period of stagnation due to 1st generation immigrants. It also has had a much slower decline in the standard of living versus the other countries which has bouyed up the birthrate.