World News

I never thought about it like that before. Having children is an unpaid job. So true.

In Russia, people with children get benefits that scale really quickly with the number of kids you have. This is, of course, balanced by the fact that Russia is miserable and people seldom wish to stay.

My wife and I are thinking about babies, she would love to stay at home and take care of them but it's just not that easy to make ends meet.

it should start paying for it.

How much whiny shit I have seen on the internet over the years about the child income tax credit. Oh yes that tiny reduction that comes no where near the actual cost of raising a child. I can't see people who bitch and moan about this voting for even more money. Then you got the other side that cries about having to pay for schools.

Sorry I can't see any situation where we roll out something like this. We are way too short thinking and "fuck you I got mine". Which is fine since global warming is going to kill us one day and we will deserve it.

I'd imagine a lot of people who were affected negatively by 1 child policy being absolutely pissed at seeing the government suddenly go "we miscalculated, pls start breeding like rabbits"

There's a lot of crazy things in China that are related to this. Not just one child policy. There's a whole crisis of sexuality in China.

I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.

Except that's not what's happening if you read the article, on either count.

Women aren't resisting childbirth as an act of rebellion or as an exercise of their rights, there's just too many competing pressures in their lives to table in having kids. Coupled with declining rates of attachment and a distraction-based economy, this isn't a 'win' for anyone.

And population decline is a crisis we don't know how to deal with. Old people have little economic output, but use up a lot of resources. It means the kids who are still born end up carrying a huge burden paying for and caring for older generations, they end up tax serfs in an aged care-based economy, and if older generations aren't cared for you end up with human atrocities on a massive scale.

...

Most of these comments are problematic. You don't have to have children, but for most people it has been a pretty consistent and natural inclination. Now a whole generation are convincing themselves they don't want children when they really just can't, and rather than holding those responsible to account and improving all our circumstances, they're treating it as some personal victory.

There is also the fact that the economy is collapsing in on itself since companies are pulling out of China in droves. It is a toxic business environment, ever since Trump's presidency has ignited this whole nationalism tend among world politics things have been going downhill for younger generations it is like being a US citizen, and graduating in 2008 Imagine graduating with a degree, and there are no jobs available.

DINK life is fantastic!

Wrong? I see people deciding not to have kids as fundamentally a good thing. Coercion into having kids due to government pressure or social norms seems a whole lot more wrong to me. It's ok to not want kids, it's not some sort of disorder that needs fixing.

I would absolutely love to see the population go down, even for like a single day, within my lifetime. But considering we've added over 2 billion people to the population since I was a kid...I don't have high hopes.

Humanity has always taken an idea and ran with it to the breaking point and beyond, having it fall apart, take the pieces that worked and cobble together a few new idea to run with usually accompanied with a new batch of religions and cultures. But living in that falling apart time isn't the greatest experience.

The Taiwan government is literally giving money to have kids. The more kids you have, the more monthly cash they give you.

South Korea has a similar strategy, although I think it comes as housing benefit and paid time-off.

The problem is that these economic incentives are relatively small. And they all come with the caveat that you have to... get married and take up a subservient role in child care and produce babies (the last bit in particular being extremely unpleasant and not something you can easily pay people to do).

By contrast, private employment in the professional sector offers a significantly better deal. Get more money than the miserly state stipend. Keep your independence. Don't tear your vagina in half producing a new baby. Enjoy your fucking life in an economy that is built to produce luxury consumerist experiences.

If China wants more babies, it needs to start giving the people things that promote having kids.

The article is paywalled, so its hard to say exactly what Chinese social policy isn't doing. But the country worked very hard to curb its population towards sustainability and to improve the outlaying regions of the country that was shedding peasant farmers in droves. Compare the population distribution of China to neighboring Japan, where a full 12% of the population lives in the capital city. Tapei is nearly as bad.

At some point, people are responding entirely to social pressures. I'm not going to try and have kids if I'm living in a closet on a peasant wage. Neither are folks in Europe or North America. We're all in the same boat in this regard. Post-industrial countries are all seeing a population shortfall, in no small part because they've compressed populations into these tiny spaces and given them barely enough to live on.

Add in the cultural shaming of "teen pregnancy" and what you're left with is asking a bunch of career-professional thirty-somethings to get off the career elevator so they can fuck like horny adolescents.

That's not going to work anywhere you try it.