These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.

In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.

  • Sodis@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    No, it’s actually bad for everyone, because few young people have to support loads of old people. Politics will cater to the old people, because they have more voting power in numbers and will cut budgets for young people (education, social security and so on).

    • hpca01@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      As opposed to now? That’s literally what happens here, no one wants any of these old fucks’ laws. They were born when the first plane was taking off and haven’t kept to date with anything in the modern world. We have no choice because the only people who seem to have any time to do anything in this country are the old people. Therefore we get shit on for simply trying to exist.