Australia faces 'major problem' of falling birth rates
We can’t afford homes, our jobs don’t cover the cost of living and the rich are getting stupidly wealthy while the youth are fucked.
Then there are the increased fertility issues that come with having children later when you can afford them and IVF is stupidly expensive here.
No one talks about it from a logical perspective so instead we get our treasurer look like a bumbling bogan asking for what he will not provide the country.
Gonna have to get in line.
Maybe if our gov't made conditions such that our economy would allow people the expense of parenthood without it making us homeless, the birthrate wouldn't be declining so drastically.
You know, by taxing mining companies appropriately, curving rates of foriegn nationals buying properties (maybe not ban it, but limiting ownership of many properties), instantiating a vacancy tax for homeowners with more then 2 properties, dismantling companies that are property empires driving the problem, and use evidence based tracking of artificial inflation of the cost of food (as there is a lot of price gouging going on). Also we need reform around morgages. This whole 'you can't afford this morgage' thing despite it being a lot less then the rent means that people can't even buy their way into lower running costs.
The reason the rates are lower is that most people can't afford kids.... and often, a comfortable life even without kids. Rents keep going up beyond what people can afford, property prices keep going way higher then it will ever be possible to buy almost anywhere, and even food is hard to afford.
Countries that have tried economic incentives haven't raised their birth rate. It's much more than economics.
It's a very broad cultural shift that is moving faster than our biology can adapt to
Insane drought and fires and it's a "problem" that people won't create more pressure on environmental systems?
A small grocery run will run upto $100, everyone's rent seems to be going up to like $900 a fucking week. The only time we seem not to get fucked over by greedy capitalist pigs is when we visit our local bakery
The cost of living is making it difficult to keep ourselves alive and fed, who the fuck thinks about the future of a country that could care less about us?
Im going to go ahead and say that population decline (worldwide) is good for technology. It forces remaining people to automate more production. They HAVE to innovate in tech to keep everything going. AI & robots innovation will be on a non-human level, literally.
Everybody acts like AI is gonna take over the world like AI is the solution to things and don't get me wrong, I f****** love AI. I love the different variations from it from language bots to actual learning models and other things. It's fascinating. It's amazing it's definitely needed in today's society. I honestly don't think restaurants and fast food places should honestly even have cooks for the most part. I think it should be automated and roboticized. But that's just because of the way people treat those who work in the field and the Is miserable awful pay and conditions?A lot of people work in in those fields.
But. We simply do not have the infrastructure to support a I. Like literally, we're about the max of our current electrical infrastructure.A lot of places already have brown outs and blackouts just to help the cities and all that keep up with the electrical demand let alone.How old are electrical grid is. Then you get into the issues of the products.It takes to make the chips and processors and everything that it takes to actually run the AI.And where all Of that comes from and the cost of it all and how often it'll need to be replaced just for security.
That's just the most basic issues on a broad stroke ai has a lot of issues that will make it hard to implement it on mass scale and many issues are very much massive structural things that will cost a great deal to improve and redo. Kinda like we are having issues being able to use satellites because new ones with new hardware need to go up amd the trash circling the Earth right now (seriously there is a shitton of metal trash just floating around just out of out atmosphere). There are tons of issues people don't see in the fields.
That is not to say that ai is not getting better or more effective it will only get better but there are major weaknesses that will not get solved anytime soon sadly.
It's a world trend.
Italy is trying to enforce women to have childs
France is taking action to "demographic reweaponizing"
Germany is facing same stuff
It's how it is. First, population see how the world around is unsafe and unsure, but also, pyramid of primal needs, we discussed it with my wife two days ago :
It's surely not a "falling" birth rates, it's a readjustment. Most women (and thus, men) of 25-30 years old are now trying to stabilize their own life, and many women I know are starting to try getting children around 40 (36-41). Birth rate is falling because last generation, pregnancy was around 23yo, now it seems to move toward 30-35+. It's a full generational "gap". Of course it makes people, especially the elders who relies on young people to "get their status".
I don't think birth rates are actually falling. Birth rates are just "transfered" to a time where a couple is stable, money wise, couple wise, work wise. Life is much harder "for us" than it was for our parents and grand parents, yet we are looking for the same kind of stability they had much younger than them (My mom and dad got their first house at 21 & 24 respectively. Me and my wife got ours at 30, it's already much later)
A collapsing birth rate is going to be tough for a lot of countries. We've been conditioned to be scared of over population, but a collapse of births in the space of a generation will offer a slew of terrible problems if it's own
"Collapsing". You mean women are taking advantage of their right to choose?
We've been conditioned to celebrate, and sometimes even worship, natalism. But some are finally starting to reject that societal indoctrination.
I'm not putting a value judgement on individuals' personal choices. I'm happy that more people have more freedom to chart out their own life than they did historically.
And at a macro level, a collapse (not a gradual reduction) of the birth rate in a generation is going to generate a lot of pain and suffering at the population level.
No one had to be conditioned to celebrate natalism. It is the biological default. Much of human culture was developed to control the exercise of fertility in various ways. It's possible that we will navigate an inverted demographic pyramid well, we may find technological solutions to avoid the most stressful aspects of it. But the threat to the wellbeing and comfort of young children alive today is real
Capitalism very much conditions us to celebrate natalism. If we were truly tuned to biology, we wouldn't be overshooting and destroying our environment that we depend on for life.
The very earliest evidence of human culture is symbolic celebrations of natalism. Capitalism and the dissociation from nature that technology affords us makes the destruction of nature so easy for us to engage in and ignore.
The rise of capitalism has contributed to the cultural shift that is reducing birth rates and many of the cultural tropes of the anti natalist movement are products of capitalism
Yeah back when it wasn't making anyone money. Now our entire financial model rests on perpetual growth.
And yet, nothing about our modern economic system encourages child rearing. If you ask people who don't have children why they don't the most common answers are about the demands and restrictions of our existing financial/economic system.
Feudalism did more to support natalism than capitalism does
Good job guys! Don't feed the system!
all the chooms always talking about failing birth rates
if living is unlivable, it makes sense to never have kids
overpopulated anyways
rich people have means of no end, means supply is never satisfying in any conclusion
AI took the jobs, yet they are still whining because the narrative changed
always expected everybody to be mindless drones and make more drones
nobody is having it, it's so useless to even see headlines about failing birthrates
where are the articles about price gouging rent, food,
useless smucks run the world, let it all crash down
Why are people saying this like it's a bad thing?
One minute people are like 'Climate change will kill us all! There's too much traffic! We have housing shortages!" and then 10 minutes later 'Oh no, we're going to have fewer people!'.
It's almost like nobody can afford those kids we're supposed to care about.
Or worse - nobody can afford any better entertainment in the worst extreme poverty, so kids just happen, and they happen a LOT. Also so we can ensure someone in the family survives a crisis as best as possible.
In the middle, we find an average replacement rate of enough kids to maintain current population - but that requires having our needs met. And the ability to reliably predict that will stay the case. And that's not our world.
It really is that simple. Safeguard all of humanity from the volatility of Capitalism, or we will have one end or another of population crisis.