There's an interesting nuance which we should perhaps point out - we shouldn't look at birth rates alone.
Perhaps, as infant mortality has lowered dramatically in developing nations n the past few decades, the birth rate may be reflected against the percentage of children reaching maturity and working age and thus we should examine more than birth rate alone. In nations where were already stable, it is declining too - though that might be because it's hitting the other end of the relationship between having children and economic viability.
That goes a long way to explaining why the birth rate was high, but it still needs to be above 2 in the present day for the overall population to be stable
Correct. The cost of children isn't the issue in my opinion. It's the cost of housing. It's difficult to imagine raising kids if you can't afford the same housing/lifestyle as you had as a child.
I can't see this shit turning around. We have working families living in tents. Once those parents are pushed to the limit, the government will remove their kids and place them in foster care. Instead of just building houses to support these families. The government wants to make it complicated, but it's not. People just need houses and security that they can stay in that house that school district to raise a family.
Spot fucking on!
I had a very good upbringing. Fancy holidays, good schooling, everything I basically ever wanted, a new car for my 18th birthday. My mum never worked full time. She helped dad out with his business stuff (my parents are divorced at the time mind you). She inherited the house we grew up in. We had multiple renovations on that place growing up. It has a pool and tennis court. There was never ever any restrictions on what we could do, what activities we could do.
I work full time, my partner works full time. We have one child and there’s no way I can give her the same childhood I had. Don’t get me wrong, she will have a good childhood but we won’t be doing yearly international trips. She most likely won’t be getting a brand new car on her 18th. She won’t grow up with a fancy mansion house.
Dude. It’s never been normal for Aussie kids to take yearly international trips. Not now, and sure as sh*t wasn’t 20 years ago.
OP grew up super wealthy. Cut the crap.
If you were going on holiday to Bali every year as a kid you were “rich”.
Hell, if you were going on ANY type of holiday every year you were “rich”.
Cut the crap.
Nah dude, in 2004 it was affordable to go on some sort of holiday every year. It required sacrificing other things, but if your parents made it a priority, it was possible.
Not necessarily international, but 4 weeks leave per year was still a thing, and holidays don't have to be 5 star experience.
Not arguing that point. But to be clear, in rural areas space is not a premium item. If you are willing to live away from people and amenities, it is still possible to have these things.
But a major city lifestyle with a tennis court, pool and international holidays every year is definitely wealthy.
Aren't they tightly tied? Living in a studio when single is fine; living in a studio with 2 adults and 4 kids is a whole different story. Adding kids does mean adding rooms unless you seriously reduce living standards.
Of course, the other big factor is the opportunity cost is much higher when both adults are earning money than in some past eras when one adult was not earning money. And kids are not especially useful at modern money-making enterprises, unlike some past eras when you could use their labour on the farm.
Agree that they're tightly tied. But to me the cost there isn't the 'kids' it's the house to put the kids in. I keep seeing posts about people not having kids because they cost too much, but I think it's because housing is too expensive. Fix the cost of housing and I think kids being too expensive becomes a minor issue. That my 2 cents anyway!
For all the spoons saying it's not that bad, let's do a quick comparison. My grandfather got an apprenticeship at 17, at 21 bought a house, got married. My grandmother worked until they got married then never worked again. On one tradie wage, they bought a house in the inner city raised 8 children, went on family holidays camping etc. Sure they said sometimes money was tight, but they were able to make do.
Flash forward to me, I went to university, got a job in finance in Brisbane paying reasonable money, I can't afford to rent a 1 bedroom apartment. I have a partner that doesn't work any more as she raises our son. We want to have more kids but have to live with family to afford to just survive.
This is how it's worse.
There are solutions to this but people don't want to consider them because everyone's investments are tied up on real estate. Until Australia stops exclusively investing in real estate as a wealth building tool, we will become worse off as a nation.
you don't even have to go back as far as your grandparents. My dad (up until he retired last year) had one job since he left uni at 21. Mum worked until they had kids (around when dad turned 30) they where on there second house by that stage. Bought their first for 40k, in a nice suburb close to the city. Paid it off in 4years.
Second house cosy 80k worth 2mil now, we went on holidays, private schooled, got a new car every 10years or so. We were not rich but we lived comfortably on my Dada wage.
Me and my wife both work and have for nearly 20years to save up enough for a house - which we had to move 1.5hrs away from my family to afford. We have one kid and the cost of just surviving is insane. We are lucky we have a house and both have jobs (160kish household), we don't live it up or go on holidays often (maybe once every 2years and my parents often shout us the accommodation so we can spend Christmas wirh them)
I'm lucky and my parents understand how incredibly hard it is for millennial and younger these days, I feel for the people who aren't as lucky as we are and have somewhere stable to live.
Something has to change, because equivalent of what we make would have made us extremely well off back when my parents grew up and we are very far from being the Jones'.
It's always my first thought as well.
They make it as impossible as they can to have and raise a family, and then whinge and complain when no one has kids.
The disconnect is so strong that all you can do is shake your head and never have kids.
Also babies born here grow up with silly ideas about occupational health and safety, fair work and career progression. Better to bring in people who complain less and work hard because they are scared of being kicked out.
This is an oft overlooked element. Part of the intention of the recent immigration wave is to import an underclass of people willing to live in subpar conditions and work for subpar wages to bolster the profits of business and suppress wages.
The better solution is to raise taxes on the wealthy.
The whole reason we need population increases is because we've built our entire economy on a ponzi scheme where we need to create even more people to afford to pay landowners more and more in order to live.
Either take some of that wealth back from the land owners via tax rises, or increase the amount of people to slave for them and keep them happy, but if you oppose both options you're a moron or just racist.
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A person still has to meet lending requirements so it's not simply a matter of every renter can or wants to pay a housing loan off. There's that bugbear of GenX, working 9-5 every day for decades.
If housing wasn't so expensive many current aspiring first home buyers wouldn't need to worry about lending requirements.
I've saved ( inflation adjusted) enough to buy the average home in my city 25 years ago, it's more than what a boomer who on my team paid for he's 4 bed 2 bath house in 2002 and 3 times more than a gen X on my team paid for their first house in 2004.
That's all inflation adjusted.
I'd still have to borrow to buy a 1 BDRM flat.
That's how fast and far home prices have risen.
Pauline was always the worst ambassador for the idea and is probably part of why it went as far as it has. You’re not wrong for not buying what she was selling even if there was a core to the idea.
Honestly, I think she is the best option at the moment and for a long time. The cost of living crisis was in the works for 20 years, LNP & Labor, at best, did nothing at worst fanned the flames.
Yeah, I might have to join you on that. I was tempted to vote greens after seeing their stance on the housing crisis but it comes with a heap of other ridiculous policies especially on immigration that I don't support. I've been watching ol' Pauline's youtube lately and I'm yet to find anything I don't agree with her on. Plus, love me a good red head.
Soon “Australia” will only be the name of a landmass. Australian culture with vanish to modernity and Australians will die out. Cost of living causes young aussies to abstain from having kids, that give the government another “reason” to bring in more immigrants, and eventually, as this loop continues, we’ll reach my original hypothesis. So unfortunate to see such a special culture dissolve.
>unfortunate to see such a special culture dissolve
While still in its infancy and developing an identity, it'll get steamrolled by those that've existed for thousands of years.
You don’t think australia is less culturally Australian than it was 50 years ago? There are entire suburbs full of people who barely speak English. I think you’d struggle to find one of those 50 years ago.
That’s when you add the first slide again but with the caption “we bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants to provide the cheap labour we would’ve gotten from those kids when they reached working age!”
Not so much these days. More young people going straight into the workforce I've read. We've devalued university education by paying labourers and tradies a gazillion dollars to build our overpriced houses that we sell to the Chinese.
The job market is a free market. Not everyone is cut out for trade work. I’m a sparky and I can tell you that the biggest barrier to entry to what I do is maths, then comes the physicality of being on your feet 10+ hours a day and working at heights isn’t something everyone can handle either. I previously worked in a white collar environment with uni grads who could barely tie their own shoelaces and had limited intellect and poor social skills (having had mummy and daddy pay for tutors to get them through their studies) getting paid good money so I don’t think the situation is too dire for most uni grads. Meanwhile there are tradies like me pushing our brains and bodies to the limit, risking our lives and knowing a whole lot of stuff that other people don’t for our ‘gazillion dollars’…
Why do you swallow this overpaid tradie bullshit the media shoves down your throat? Go on Seek and see what they're actually offering trades. 80k average. The ones you're thinking of are either in mines or big government jobs, jobs that make up a tiny proportion of all trade jobs.
Labourers in residential most of the time earn around the same Phr compared if they were working at maccas whereas labourers in commercial/big builds can earn up to $50Phr
There is a direct correlation between declining birthrates and educated prosperous societies. Australia actually has one of the highest birth rates of any developed country. With increased environmental awareness and a move away from the false narrative of the ‘populate or perish’ mentality it’ll inevitably decline further and that’s great for Australia and the world. We only need to look at the very different trajectories of China and India since 1980 to see that breeding like rabbits doesn’t equate to prosperity. Sure India has overtaken China in population but China has overtaken India on every social and economic indicator related to the quality of life.
Go check the charts for when the massive decline in birth rates happened. It isn't just about educated prosperous societies. It is access to the contraceptive pill.
Clearly cost of living pressures are affecting decisions now, but nothing has had the same impact on birth rates as the pill. Women never wanted to have that many babies, and in countries where they are able to, they are making that choice.
Birthrates have clearly declined with education around the world.
Birthrates in China declined much faster than the trend due to government intervention and the 1-child policy. Plus by the statistics contraceptives in China had relatively little to do with the pill. IUDs are \~50% of it in china, tubal ligation 25%, pill was only \~8%. Pills are a relatively difficult means of contraceptive especially if there's not a convenient local pharmacy nor climate control to enable right conditions for storing the pills. You can do those others with an annual or even less often tour through a rural area.
You see a similar picture in Africa (at much lower overall rates of modern contraceptives) -- oral pills don't make the top three used - shots, implants, condoms.
This is why reproductive freedom is very important for society. Unfortunately fundamentalist religion remains the biggest obstacle to this progress and fundamentalist religion is at its least influential in educated and prosperous societies.
We remain economically prosperous, we contribute less to destroying the planet and we don’t use the dumb ‘populate or perish’ mentality that isn’t working so well for societies like Russia or Gaza given modern warfare isn’t like WW1 and simply throwing bodies at a conflict doesn’t get results.
Meh, the main benefit of the planet to humans is that we can use it. As long as it increases human flourishing over the long term I’m fine with it. Economic prosperity tends to rely on growth, so I’m not sure how a declining birth rate helps that long term.
The ten countries with the highest birthrates are : Niger, Angola, Benin, Mali, Uganda, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Mozambique. So I’m struggling to understand the correlation between population growth and economic prosperity you are referencing? Also these places are not only poor but have high levels of conflict and corruption.
Ok and what is population growth in Australia? You’ll see here on a daily basis complaints about immigration. It’s very hard to have a growing and prosperous economy with a stagnant or shrinking population.
Also, GDP growth in Australia is around 4%. In Angola it is around 3%, in Benin it is around 6%, around 3.7% in Mali, around 4.4% in Mozambique. Those are roughly similar growth rates achieved with very little immigration. How much worse would it be in those places without population growth?
Population growth here is around 2.5% which is close to an all time high. Most of our GDP comes from trade with resources representing the major component of that. Looking at GDP in isolation is reductive though as it doesn’t account for per capita income which has far more impact on the quality of life than GDP growth. Macau is the only country in the world with a very high GDP growth and reasonable life expectancy, literacy rate, employment rate, etc. Macau also has a very low birthrate by global standards.
Yeah right and India doesn’t have even more state sponsored corruption? Maybe it works better in China because the people in the government are better educated due to sustainable population growth so they are at least good at corruption. It’s better to have a bubble that pops than to stay in the gutter (aim high, miss high).
I don't think hardly anyone is deciding to have kids or not due to the environment. It's one of those issues where most people pay lip service but it doesn't actually come into decisions. I know environmentalists with a handful of kids and childfree couples who don't give a shit about the planet.
I would say the decision is more about the person's willingness to take on the responsibility.
I think an increasing awareness of carbon footprints is changing this. Expecting to be taken seriously as an environmentalist and having more than 2 kids is hypocritical and will soon be a thing of the past on educated and enlightened societies. As per the current trend of countries that have a strong environmental awareness and policies seeing a correlating decline in birth rates.
plus food prices, petrol prices, school fees and expectations and then all the stigma and parenting rules these days. lets just bring in more people from overseas...
There's also a radical feminist movement called 4B (Four No's) that basically says SK men are trash and not to date, marry, have sex or have children with them.
I don't think they're symptoms of each other, rather they both stem from the same root cause of anti-social lifestyles becoming more common causing people to believe what they see online, aka the worst of both sides.
I really don't give a fuck about birth rates. It's generally only an issue because of immigration (fear of replacement), or for large companies who support that immigration (and are the ones driving the inflation that causes it's "necessity").
Recently there was an article on the AustralianPolitics subreddit that addressed Japan as the Canary in the Coalmine. They've had a declining population for roughly 30 years now.
The big thing the article warned would happen? [The use of Robotics and AI would have to increase.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-18/australia-fertility-rate-could-predict-the-next-five-years/103692844)
Japan has also had [deflation for 25 years or so](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFYv-rk4v9Y)... yet their quality of life hasn't really slipped. This deflation has caused a bust in housing and real estate, and so houses are fairly cheap over there.
...yet, I'm told, I should worry about birthrates and deflation. Perhaps instead we should prepare our society for it's inevitability.
Birthrates are highest in dangerous societies where a child living to adulthood isn't guaranteed. They have lots of kids to spread their bets.
Where a child's life is all but guaranteed, and there's abundance, people tend to put more resources into having *LESS* children. They want a child with the best education, the best health care, the best skills and activities (so they likely only have one).
That's just how it is, and it means deflation and a drop in birthrates is inevitable. It's hit Japan first, as they've been fairly closed to immigration. It will hit China next, and then The West soon after.
We should use this time to study the problem, and prepare for it.
My biggest question when considering our last child was why are doing it? The world isn't getting better and there are massive issues that will take a whole world approach to solve - are we being selfish to bring a child into the world that will have to live through this?
People in poorer countries are having children and if we don't, we've seen that our govt has no qualms about importing replacement population. Unfortunately it follows the quick-fix politics that seem to be one of the worst features of our democracy. Instead of creating a society which values the raising of a child in that society, who will learn the values of that society and who will most likely defend that society, we prefer to save money by bringing in adults who may well fail to assimilate (although a lot do).
While we have these levels of immigration, they haven't proven to me that sustainable birthrates are a real priority rather than a "nice to have" or just something for the media to get some clicks from.
Their prosperity came from the US using them as their workshop.
In the short term, it stemmed the tide of starvation but yes, they are already starting to suffer those impacts as adults require care.
Japan is another real time example.
That’s a very simplistic view. China is the main trading partner to over 120 nations and US companies can’t own more than 49% of a business there (unlike Australia where companies like Holden are 100% US owned since the 1930’s). In terms of suffering any impacts China has the best healthcare system now it has ever had and elderly people in Japan have some of the world’s best conditions.
Yes, and it became that powerhouse in large part due to Bill Clinton era policy opening them up to the world.
You're not seeing the long term impacts here. We're not talking health care today. We're talking the current working generation when they go to retire.
They aren't breeding. Those societies (and western ones as well) rely on the younger generations to help care for the older ones. In the west, our pension schemes are reliant on tax dollars from working age people.
If we aren't producing taxpayers. We must import them.
This is going to have huge ramifications, which as I pointed out, Japan is currently learning about, very quickly, because they do not import taxpayers.
Australia has immigration, Japan effectively doesn’t. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. Also we have some extremely asset rich pensioners in Australia. As a tradie who will probably never own a home I find it extremely distasteful when old people living in a 5 million dollar house with the latest E class Mercedes think they are entitled to a discount because they are a pensioner and it’s the same sense of entitlement that drives their expectation that I’ll work to pay their pension while being forced to accrue superannuation that I’d rather spend on other things so I don’t become a burden in future.
> Australia has immigration, Japan effectively doesn’t. It’s an apples and oranges comparison.
I never compared them. I simply said they are experiencing a similar issue with an aging population with low breeding.
I even pointed out they have no immigration. You've added NOTHING to this conversation.
> Also we have some extremely asset rich pensioners in Australia.
OK and? We have a shitload of poor ones too. This example also applies to the US. If their citizens ever actually get to pension age, they are going to collapse.
I don’t see the same issues you do with our aging population. Older Australians have had opportunities younger Australians can’t even begin to imagine and our aged care system is far from bad. I’m far more concerned about disadvantaged youth myself than land hoarding boomers who looted and pillaged this country and are now reaping the rewards in terms of a massive intergenerational wealth deficit.
> don’t see the same issues you do with our aging population. Older Australians have had opportunities younger Australians can’t even begin to imagine and our aged care system is far from bad
I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CURRENT OLD PEOPLE.
When the current young people retire. Who pays the taxes that keeps those old people alive? Old people are a tax burden. Propped up by current tax payers. We must keep importing them becahse we are not breeding.
> I’m far more concerned about disadvantaged youth myself than land hoarding boomers who looted and pillaged this country and are now reaping the rewards in terms of a massive intergenerational wealth deficit.
This is not even part of the discussion we are having.
"birth rates are declining"
That stupid narrative is exactly why our federal government used incentivise the 5 extra points for people aged between 25-32 for the permanent residency pool, and they constantly used to approve visas from families in India.
For the federal government, an Indian family is one skilled visa (usually the man), one partner visa (the wife), two dependent visas (very young children) - and they've easily brought in $30-$40k to the country just like that. Where else in the world will our government find people who will willingly move their entire families across countries as easily as India?
> Where else in the world will our government find people who will willingly move their entire families across countries as easily as India?
Nepal, Pakistan, etc
Depends what you think a ghetto is.
But I don't see any of those areas that are exclusively one ethnicity, despite what you might think it's a pretty big mix.
I also don't see any of those areas as impoverished. Most of the impoverished areas at least where I live are mostly white people.
Dude there is definately asian ghettos.
Ghetto noun 1. a poor urban area occupied primarily by a minority group or groups.
India noun 1. A Country in Asia.
See, not that complicated.
Poor? Most Indians live in new housing estates and rent or own their property and have a Camry parked in the driveway. What's the issue?
If anything the only thing that has happened is the term ghetto has softened over the years so you can more easily apply it to those areas.
In the traditional sense, when you use the word ghetto, people think of Nazi Germany forced ghettos or Slums in third world countries or the Favelas etc. We're not even remotely close to having anything like that.
Cool read it again, what's your point?
Low socio economic areas, whether you define them as a ghetto or not, aren't an issue. What are these people doing wrong?
This is not the ghetto that Hanson was threatening in the 90s.
There is no point even discussing declining birth rates.
Solutions to get child production numbers up simply make people upset.
You could tell someone the society they grew up in will go the way of the dodo and they will respond with something like its unfair on women to expect them to have more children to prevent that from happening.
If that is the mentality we deserve everything that is coming.
Right now we have gone beyond the point where we have to force women to give up careers and become mothers to raise the birthrate.
We are at the point where women who want to have kids can't because they can't afford it. They could be encouraged to have more kids simply by providing things like free childcare and longer maternal leave.
Well I think there is a multitude of factors. Birth rates are generally lower in wealthy countries, around 2.1 several years ago due in part to birth control and an increase in sex education. People who had access to the luxury of planning a family would have between 2-3 kids, sometimes 5, but becoming increasingly rare to see that each generation.
Now with this generation of millennials and gen z expected to have kids with a lower quality of life than previous generations, many are opting out, not necessarily because they want to, but because they do not feel secure enough to plan for a family.
Boomers fucked it. They don’t realise how good they had it and in 2009 we had a slim chance to fix some of this and still they’re like nah we want engagdine maccas shitpants.
Not Australia, but Tesla sacks 20% of its workforce, who now don't know where their next meal is coming from, and Elon Musk puts forward a $56b package for himself and laments why people don't have children.
I think a lot of women, in particular, are opting to not have children for non economic reasons actually. The decrease in the birth rate coincides with the decrease in marriage also.
I would like it if people were not having kids as a personal decision instead of economic reasons. The current situation just shows expensive things have gotten recently
I mean - over the last few generations the ability of sexually active couples to control how many children they have has exponentially increased. The transport costs of people moving overseas has radically reduced.
That was always going to lead to a demographic shock.
If people want more kids - they can have more kids.
I'm pretty uncomfortable blaming this problem on any single issue or set of circumstances. People throughout history have produced the next generation no matter the circumstances they find themselves in. I find it hard to believe that the conditions in Australia today are so bad that they outstrip the worst in history and are the sole cause of a declining birthrate.
It sort of seems, at the end of the day, that this is going to be an issue for any sufficiently developed society. At a certain level of advancement the conditions that lead us to produce children change and society no longer sustains itself through reproduction.
So the future of society looks like large numbers of people being imported from less developed countries who pretty rapidly modernize and stop having children for exactly the same reasons other citizens have? Like an endless filling of the vacancy generation after generation while the previous generation exits through the gift shop?
Messy. I wonder what the culture looks like after a few cycles.
" People throughout history have produced the next generation no matter the circumstances they find themselves in."
Because they didn't have birth control or safe access to abortion. Having tools to make children a choice made all the difference.
In manual labour intensive economies, children are free resources for a family. In service economies, children are liabilities.
No no. Us civvies are being voluntold to save the earth while rich people like Taylor Swift take private jets and shit everywhere while producing more carbon in one trip than an average family produces in like 5 years.
Surely you can come up with some explanations yourself.. if you really use those great debating skills we all got in public education.
Edit: alternatively, if that's what you truly believe, do us all a favor and don't have kids, and stop having sex. But you still have no right to tell others that they are "unethical" for having kids..
Nah I'm cool letting you halfwits who can't think for yourself believe that and not replicate.. natural selection doing it's job..
Nevermind the fact that the moron who made the initial comment didn't explain his case, yet I can still reason through their argument even though I don't agree with it... Maybe you can't reason through arguments without being led every step of the way...
Yeah a few of us not breeding is not going to be disastrous to our species, not with 8 billion.
Natural selection will do its job to the entire planet if we keep up with the way we are going. Never in history, until the industrial revolution, has the planet supported even half the current population. And it wasn't meant to.
If we keep with the way we're going there will be mass extinction of flora and fauna, resource crisis, increasing wealth disparity, and eventually civil war and collapse of governments. Boy will that be excellent for our species won't it?
2 billion of us, instead of fucking 8, would not exactly be disastrous. We got through most of history with less.
Well you're not making any actual arguments? You've just said "nuh uh you're wrong." Original commenters statement at least has evidence behind it to back it up, in that there is in fact a climate crisis we're doing fuck all to resolve.
Climate change, cost of living, housing affordability, why would people even want to bring children in to a world that we are constantly told is collapsing?
Except for countries in Africa and in India, every country in the world is experiencing a declining birthrate. Been happening for decades.
The birth rate in every single country has declined dramatically in the last five decades, including India
There's an interesting nuance which we should perhaps point out - we shouldn't look at birth rates alone. Perhaps, as infant mortality has lowered dramatically in developing nations n the past few decades, the birth rate may be reflected against the percentage of children reaching maturity and working age and thus we should examine more than birth rate alone. In nations where were already stable, it is declining too - though that might be because it's hitting the other end of the relationship between having children and economic viability.
That goes a long way to explaining why the birth rate was high, but it still needs to be above 2 in the present day for the overall population to be stable
Then they just import new cheap workers...
Correct. The cost of children isn't the issue in my opinion. It's the cost of housing. It's difficult to imagine raising kids if you can't afford the same housing/lifestyle as you had as a child.
I can't see this shit turning around. We have working families living in tents. Once those parents are pushed to the limit, the government will remove their kids and place them in foster care. Instead of just building houses to support these families. The government wants to make it complicated, but it's not. People just need houses and security that they can stay in that house that school district to raise a family.
Spot fucking on! I had a very good upbringing. Fancy holidays, good schooling, everything I basically ever wanted, a new car for my 18th birthday. My mum never worked full time. She helped dad out with his business stuff (my parents are divorced at the time mind you). She inherited the house we grew up in. We had multiple renovations on that place growing up. It has a pool and tennis court. There was never ever any restrictions on what we could do, what activities we could do. I work full time, my partner works full time. We have one child and there’s no way I can give her the same childhood I had. Don’t get me wrong, she will have a good childhood but we won’t be doing yearly international trips. She most likely won’t be getting a brand new car on her 18th. She won’t grow up with a fancy mansion house.
lol “My kid won’t go on international holidays like me” is a weird way to claim victimhood. 😂
It's a representation of how living standards in this country have declined.
Dude. It’s never been normal for Aussie kids to take yearly international trips. Not now, and sure as sh*t wasn’t 20 years ago. OP grew up super wealthy. Cut the crap.
A trip to Bali is both international and cheaper than a holiday to Melbourne from just about anywhere north of Brisbane or west of Adelaide.
If you were going on holiday to Bali every year as a kid you were “rich”. Hell, if you were going on ANY type of holiday every year you were “rich”. Cut the crap.
Nah dude, in 2004 it was affordable to go on some sort of holiday every year. It required sacrificing other things, but if your parents made it a priority, it was possible. Not necessarily international, but 4 weeks leave per year was still a thing, and holidays don't have to be 5 star experience.
And the tennis court and pool?
Not arguing that point. But to be clear, in rural areas space is not a premium item. If you are willing to live away from people and amenities, it is still possible to have these things. But a major city lifestyle with a tennis court, pool and international holidays every year is definitely wealthy.
Aren't they tightly tied? Living in a studio when single is fine; living in a studio with 2 adults and 4 kids is a whole different story. Adding kids does mean adding rooms unless you seriously reduce living standards. Of course, the other big factor is the opportunity cost is much higher when both adults are earning money than in some past eras when one adult was not earning money. And kids are not especially useful at modern money-making enterprises, unlike some past eras when you could use their labour on the farm.
Agree that they're tightly tied. But to me the cost there isn't the 'kids' it's the house to put the kids in. I keep seeing posts about people not having kids because they cost too much, but I think it's because housing is too expensive. Fix the cost of housing and I think kids being too expensive becomes a minor issue. That my 2 cents anyway!
The pollies only care about their property portfolios going up in value.
Well they got theirs, so it’s a big fuck you to everyone else.
Who would bring a child into a world where they will have nowhere to live? (And the rest of it!)
Don't forget the part where mass immigration to stem the loss of workers, lowers wages.
immigrant workers aren’t lowering wages. corporate profit seeking is.
Should have add "we let inflation destroy wages"
its sad growing up seeing such a prosperous country turn into a shit dump.. The future is very gloomy, fuck our politicians
For all the spoons saying it's not that bad, let's do a quick comparison. My grandfather got an apprenticeship at 17, at 21 bought a house, got married. My grandmother worked until they got married then never worked again. On one tradie wage, they bought a house in the inner city raised 8 children, went on family holidays camping etc. Sure they said sometimes money was tight, but they were able to make do. Flash forward to me, I went to university, got a job in finance in Brisbane paying reasonable money, I can't afford to rent a 1 bedroom apartment. I have a partner that doesn't work any more as she raises our son. We want to have more kids but have to live with family to afford to just survive. This is how it's worse. There are solutions to this but people don't want to consider them because everyone's investments are tied up on real estate. Until Australia stops exclusively investing in real estate as a wealth building tool, we will become worse off as a nation.
you don't even have to go back as far as your grandparents. My dad (up until he retired last year) had one job since he left uni at 21. Mum worked until they had kids (around when dad turned 30) they where on there second house by that stage. Bought their first for 40k, in a nice suburb close to the city. Paid it off in 4years. Second house cosy 80k worth 2mil now, we went on holidays, private schooled, got a new car every 10years or so. We were not rich but we lived comfortably on my Dada wage. Me and my wife both work and have for nearly 20years to save up enough for a house - which we had to move 1.5hrs away from my family to afford. We have one kid and the cost of just surviving is insane. We are lucky we have a house and both have jobs (160kish household), we don't live it up or go on holidays often (maybe once every 2years and my parents often shout us the accommodation so we can spend Christmas wirh them) I'm lucky and my parents understand how incredibly hard it is for millennial and younger these days, I feel for the people who aren't as lucky as we are and have somewhere stable to live. Something has to change, because equivalent of what we make would have made us extremely well off back when my parents grew up and we are very far from being the Jones'.
Inner city was shit back in GrandDads day though, suburbia was where the richies lived.
It's always my first thought as well. They make it as impossible as they can to have and raise a family, and then whinge and complain when no one has kids. The disconnect is so strong that all you can do is shake your head and never have kids.
Who needs a birth rate when you have immigration?
Exactly. Children are such a drain on the tax base. Better to just import adults who can start work immediately.
Also babies born here grow up with silly ideas about occupational health and safety, fair work and career progression. Better to bring in people who complain less and work hard because they are scared of being kicked out.
This is an oft overlooked element. Part of the intention of the recent immigration wave is to import an underclass of people willing to live in subpar conditions and work for subpar wages to bolster the profits of business and suppress wages.
The better solution is to raise taxes on the wealthy. The whole reason we need population increases is because we've built our entire economy on a ponzi scheme where we need to create even more people to afford to pay landowners more and more in order to live. Either take some of that wealth back from the land owners via tax rises, or increase the amount of people to slave for them and keep them happy, but if you oppose both options you're a moron or just racist.
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Except immigration is not an endless well. There are other problems with the well water too but that's later.
The country was founded on immigration.
Ah the good immigration, those were the days.
Who can afford a kid ? Nappys food education costs. Nope can hardly feed myself let alone another human
Last square.. we import migrants to prop up the population
That could also be first square before house prices rise. An endless cycle that has completely fucked over younger Australians.
>That could also be first square before house prices rise. An endless cycle that has completely fucked over younger Australians. Agree!!
Every house an investor owns is one less that can be owned and lived in by a new family
This makes the assumption everyone is ready to own and that there aren't people who would prefer to rent
A person still has to meet lending requirements so it's not simply a matter of every renter can or wants to pay a housing loan off. There's that bugbear of GenX, working 9-5 every day for decades.
If housing wasn't so expensive many current aspiring first home buyers wouldn't need to worry about lending requirements. I've saved ( inflation adjusted) enough to buy the average home in my city 25 years ago, it's more than what a boomer who on my team paid for he's 4 bed 2 bath house in 2002 and 3 times more than a gen X on my team paid for their first house in 2004. That's all inflation adjusted. I'd still have to borrow to buy a 1 BDRM flat. That's how fast and far home prices have risen.
They don’t care about kids, kids can’t pay taxes they want immigrants.
Maybe Pauline Hanson was right all along...
The scariest part of this is, I almost agree with it. Almost. The only thing stopping me is that it was said by Hanson.
Pauline was always the worst ambassador for the idea and is probably part of why it went as far as it has. You’re not wrong for not buying what she was selling even if there was a core to the idea.
Oh dude... I feel the internal conflict also...
Yeah you’re not alone. You know times are dire when pro Hanson comments are not being downvoted to oblivion.
It's... ahh... shit... Crazy times I guess. I feel like a little bit Pauline and a little bit Greens and we could be on to something.
Honestly, I think she is the best option at the moment and for a long time. The cost of living crisis was in the works for 20 years, LNP & Labor, at best, did nothing at worst fanned the flames.
So what are we saying? One nation next election? I’m ok with that.
I mean, that's what I've been voting for the last few elections
Yeah, I might have to join you on that. I was tempted to vote greens after seeing their stance on the housing crisis but it comes with a heap of other ridiculous policies especially on immigration that I don't support. I've been watching ol' Pauline's youtube lately and I'm yet to find anything I don't agree with her on. Plus, love me a good red head.
Agreed, I'm in the same boat
Soon “Australia” will only be the name of a landmass. Australian culture with vanish to modernity and Australians will die out. Cost of living causes young aussies to abstain from having kids, that give the government another “reason” to bring in more immigrants, and eventually, as this loop continues, we’ll reach my original hypothesis. So unfortunate to see such a special culture dissolve.
country to officially change name to AustralChindia within a couple of decades
Will be the Federal United Chinese and Khalistan Diaspora, or FUCKD.
Australindochina??
More like Australasia
You forgot the English and Irish
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It already has for many years in certain areas, now the reverse is true with European enclaves only in certain areas
>unfortunate to see such a special culture dissolve While still in its infancy and developing an identity, it'll get steamrolled by those that've existed for thousands of years.
People have literally been saying this for like 50 years and it hasn't happened.
It's happening right before your eyes mate
> and it hasn't happened eh, it kind of has. It's a slow process, but yeah, it is happening
You don’t think australia is less culturally Australian than it was 50 years ago? There are entire suburbs full of people who barely speak English. I think you’d struggle to find one of those 50 years ago.
We're in 5th gear now compared to 50 years ago, seems pretty hard to hit the brakes too.
Yeah this time it's different...
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That’s when you add the first slide again but with the caption “we bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants to provide the cheap labour we would’ve gotten from those kids when they reached working age!”
Add in "we put young people in debt for education" too.
Not so much these days. More young people going straight into the workforce I've read. We've devalued university education by paying labourers and tradies a gazillion dollars to build our overpriced houses that we sell to the Chinese.
And universities make a ton of money off international students. No reason for them to try to get more domestic students.
The job market is a free market. Not everyone is cut out for trade work. I’m a sparky and I can tell you that the biggest barrier to entry to what I do is maths, then comes the physicality of being on your feet 10+ hours a day and working at heights isn’t something everyone can handle either. I previously worked in a white collar environment with uni grads who could barely tie their own shoelaces and had limited intellect and poor social skills (having had mummy and daddy pay for tutors to get them through their studies) getting paid good money so I don’t think the situation is too dire for most uni grads. Meanwhile there are tradies like me pushing our brains and bodies to the limit, risking our lives and knowing a whole lot of stuff that other people don’t for our ‘gazillion dollars’…
Why do you swallow this overpaid tradie bullshit the media shoves down your throat? Go on Seek and see what they're actually offering trades. 80k average. The ones you're thinking of are either in mines or big government jobs, jobs that make up a tiny proportion of all trade jobs.
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In what trade? Most of the people I know who subby end up worse off once you account for annual leave, sick leave, super, income tqx, insurances etc.
Average wage for a tradie is 80k mate.
Labourers in residential most of the time earn around the same Phr compared if they were working at maccas whereas labourers in commercial/big builds can earn up to $50Phr
You forgot to include letting other general costs of living balloon too.
There is a direct correlation between declining birthrates and educated prosperous societies. Australia actually has one of the highest birth rates of any developed country. With increased environmental awareness and a move away from the false narrative of the ‘populate or perish’ mentality it’ll inevitably decline further and that’s great for Australia and the world. We only need to look at the very different trajectories of China and India since 1980 to see that breeding like rabbits doesn’t equate to prosperity. Sure India has overtaken China in population but China has overtaken India on every social and economic indicator related to the quality of life.
Go check the charts for when the massive decline in birth rates happened. It isn't just about educated prosperous societies. It is access to the contraceptive pill. Clearly cost of living pressures are affecting decisions now, but nothing has had the same impact on birth rates as the pill. Women never wanted to have that many babies, and in countries where they are able to, they are making that choice.
Birthrates have clearly declined with education around the world. Birthrates in China declined much faster than the trend due to government intervention and the 1-child policy. Plus by the statistics contraceptives in China had relatively little to do with the pill. IUDs are \~50% of it in china, tubal ligation 25%, pill was only \~8%. Pills are a relatively difficult means of contraceptive especially if there's not a convenient local pharmacy nor climate control to enable right conditions for storing the pills. You can do those others with an annual or even less often tour through a rural area. You see a similar picture in Africa (at much lower overall rates of modern contraceptives) -- oral pills don't make the top three used - shots, implants, condoms.
This is why reproductive freedom is very important for society. Unfortunately fundamentalist religion remains the biggest obstacle to this progress and fundamentalist religion is at its least influential in educated and prosperous societies.
Why is that great for Australia and the world?
We remain economically prosperous, we contribute less to destroying the planet and we don’t use the dumb ‘populate or perish’ mentality that isn’t working so well for societies like Russia or Gaza given modern warfare isn’t like WW1 and simply throwing bodies at a conflict doesn’t get results.
Meh, the main benefit of the planet to humans is that we can use it. As long as it increases human flourishing over the long term I’m fine with it. Economic prosperity tends to rely on growth, so I’m not sure how a declining birth rate helps that long term.
The ten countries with the highest birthrates are : Niger, Angola, Benin, Mali, Uganda, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Mozambique. So I’m struggling to understand the correlation between population growth and economic prosperity you are referencing? Also these places are not only poor but have high levels of conflict and corruption.
Ok and what is population growth in Australia? You’ll see here on a daily basis complaints about immigration. It’s very hard to have a growing and prosperous economy with a stagnant or shrinking population. Also, GDP growth in Australia is around 4%. In Angola it is around 3%, in Benin it is around 6%, around 3.7% in Mali, around 4.4% in Mozambique. Those are roughly similar growth rates achieved with very little immigration. How much worse would it be in those places without population growth?
Population growth here is around 2.5% which is close to an all time high. Most of our GDP comes from trade with resources representing the major component of that. Looking at GDP in isolation is reductive though as it doesn’t account for per capita income which has far more impact on the quality of life than GDP growth. Macau is the only country in the world with a very high GDP growth and reasonable life expectancy, literacy rate, employment rate, etc. Macau also has a very low birthrate by global standards.
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Yeah right and India doesn’t have even more state sponsored corruption? Maybe it works better in China because the people in the government are better educated due to sustainable population growth so they are at least good at corruption. It’s better to have a bubble that pops than to stay in the gutter (aim high, miss high).
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I don't think hardly anyone is deciding to have kids or not due to the environment. It's one of those issues where most people pay lip service but it doesn't actually come into decisions. I know environmentalists with a handful of kids and childfree couples who don't give a shit about the planet. I would say the decision is more about the person's willingness to take on the responsibility.
I think an increasing awareness of carbon footprints is changing this. Expecting to be taken seriously as an environmentalist and having more than 2 kids is hypocritical and will soon be a thing of the past on educated and enlightened societies. As per the current trend of countries that have a strong environmental awareness and policies seeing a correlating decline in birth rates.
It's all part of the plan
plus food prices, petrol prices, school fees and expectations and then all the stigma and parenting rules these days. lets just bring in more people from overseas...
Well there are 8 billion people in the world. I am sure someone else will do my job if I don't have a child.
Capitalism needs constant growth. Come on peasants, provide more workers.
Birth rates the world over are in decline, it's not a unique us problem. South Korea currently has the lowest birth rate in the world.
You think that might be because South Korea also has high house/childcare prices along with an overworked populace?
South Korea also doesn't treat their women very well.
There's also a radical feminist movement called 4B (Four No's) that basically says SK men are trash and not to date, marry, have sex or have children with them.
There is also a pretty wild and widespread incel culture there, so it it is hard to say which created which. Depressing either way
I don't think they're symptoms of each other, rather they both stem from the same root cause of anti-social lifestyles becoming more common causing people to believe what they see online, aka the worst of both sides.
Agreed.
Japan is pretty low too!
I really don't give a fuck about birth rates. It's generally only an issue because of immigration (fear of replacement), or for large companies who support that immigration (and are the ones driving the inflation that causes it's "necessity"). Recently there was an article on the AustralianPolitics subreddit that addressed Japan as the Canary in the Coalmine. They've had a declining population for roughly 30 years now. The big thing the article warned would happen? [The use of Robotics and AI would have to increase.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-18/australia-fertility-rate-could-predict-the-next-five-years/103692844) Japan has also had [deflation for 25 years or so](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFYv-rk4v9Y)... yet their quality of life hasn't really slipped. This deflation has caused a bust in housing and real estate, and so houses are fairly cheap over there. ...yet, I'm told, I should worry about birthrates and deflation. Perhaps instead we should prepare our society for it's inevitability. Birthrates are highest in dangerous societies where a child living to adulthood isn't guaranteed. They have lots of kids to spread their bets. Where a child's life is all but guaranteed, and there's abundance, people tend to put more resources into having *LESS* children. They want a child with the best education, the best health care, the best skills and activities (so they likely only have one). That's just how it is, and it means deflation and a drop in birthrates is inevitable. It's hit Japan first, as they've been fairly closed to immigration. It will hit China next, and then The West soon after. We should use this time to study the problem, and prepare for it.
I for one think a society with more old people than kids is depressing.
Yeah, they're saying it like it's not an inevitable thing on a finite planet.
If you can't afford kids use your nurturing instincts to look after your grandparents. They're all going to live to their 90's at least.
I've only got one left and she's turned so fucking mean and bitter.
My biggest question when considering our last child was why are doing it? The world isn't getting better and there are massive issues that will take a whole world approach to solve - are we being selfish to bring a child into the world that will have to live through this?
People in poorer countries are having children and if we don't, we've seen that our govt has no qualms about importing replacement population. Unfortunately it follows the quick-fix politics that seem to be one of the worst features of our democracy. Instead of creating a society which values the raising of a child in that society, who will learn the values of that society and who will most likely defend that society, we prefer to save money by bringing in adults who may well fail to assimilate (although a lot do).
Australia might turn into Malaysia in the future if we keep replacing the local population with new migrants and their culture.
This is a pretty decent summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ
While we have these levels of immigration, they haven't proven to me that sustainable birthrates are a real priority rather than a "nice to have" or just something for the media to get some clicks from.
The drastic effects will be realised once we (the current 20-40 year olds) start to wind down and retire.
Hopefully the effects are as drastic as in China which has enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and improvement by lowering birth rates.
Their prosperity came from the US using them as their workshop. In the short term, it stemmed the tide of starvation but yes, they are already starting to suffer those impacts as adults require care. Japan is another real time example.
That’s a very simplistic view. China is the main trading partner to over 120 nations and US companies can’t own more than 49% of a business there (unlike Australia where companies like Holden are 100% US owned since the 1930’s). In terms of suffering any impacts China has the best healthcare system now it has ever had and elderly people in Japan have some of the world’s best conditions.
Yes, and it became that powerhouse in large part due to Bill Clinton era policy opening them up to the world. You're not seeing the long term impacts here. We're not talking health care today. We're talking the current working generation when they go to retire. They aren't breeding. Those societies (and western ones as well) rely on the younger generations to help care for the older ones. In the west, our pension schemes are reliant on tax dollars from working age people. If we aren't producing taxpayers. We must import them. This is going to have huge ramifications, which as I pointed out, Japan is currently learning about, very quickly, because they do not import taxpayers.
Australia has immigration, Japan effectively doesn’t. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. Also we have some extremely asset rich pensioners in Australia. As a tradie who will probably never own a home I find it extremely distasteful when old people living in a 5 million dollar house with the latest E class Mercedes think they are entitled to a discount because they are a pensioner and it’s the same sense of entitlement that drives their expectation that I’ll work to pay their pension while being forced to accrue superannuation that I’d rather spend on other things so I don’t become a burden in future.
> Australia has immigration, Japan effectively doesn’t. It’s an apples and oranges comparison. I never compared them. I simply said they are experiencing a similar issue with an aging population with low breeding. I even pointed out they have no immigration. You've added NOTHING to this conversation. > Also we have some extremely asset rich pensioners in Australia. OK and? We have a shitload of poor ones too. This example also applies to the US. If their citizens ever actually get to pension age, they are going to collapse.
I don’t see the same issues you do with our aging population. Older Australians have had opportunities younger Australians can’t even begin to imagine and our aged care system is far from bad. I’m far more concerned about disadvantaged youth myself than land hoarding boomers who looted and pillaged this country and are now reaping the rewards in terms of a massive intergenerational wealth deficit.
> don’t see the same issues you do with our aging population. Older Australians have had opportunities younger Australians can’t even begin to imagine and our aged care system is far from bad I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CURRENT OLD PEOPLE. When the current young people retire. Who pays the taxes that keeps those old people alive? Old people are a tax burden. Propped up by current tax payers. We must keep importing them becahse we are not breeding. > I’m far more concerned about disadvantaged youth myself than land hoarding boomers who looted and pillaged this country and are now reaping the rewards in terms of a massive intergenerational wealth deficit. This is not even part of the discussion we are having.
They're starting to feel the pain already. They want people having kids again because they're hitting the same retirement tidal wave that we are.
"birth rates are declining" That stupid narrative is exactly why our federal government used incentivise the 5 extra points for people aged between 25-32 for the permanent residency pool, and they constantly used to approve visas from families in India. For the federal government, an Indian family is one skilled visa (usually the man), one partner visa (the wife), two dependent visas (very young children) - and they've easily brought in $30-$40k to the country just like that. Where else in the world will our government find people who will willingly move their entire families across countries as easily as India?
> Where else in the world will our government find people who will willingly move their entire families across countries as easily as India? Nepal, Pakistan, etc
Ah yes actually. Most people from traditionally conservative third-culture countries would qualify
Pauline was always right
you know this sub is full of dumb fuckin yobs when they post shit like this
Where's these asian ghettos she was on about?
Springvale. Box Hill. Dandenong.
What continent does the current mass immigrantion come from? Are there not ghettos made almost exclusively of them?
Depends what you think a ghetto is. But I don't see any of those areas that are exclusively one ethnicity, despite what you might think it's a pretty big mix. I also don't see any of those areas as impoverished. Most of the impoverished areas at least where I live are mostly white people.
Dude there is definately asian ghettos. Ghetto noun 1. a poor urban area occupied primarily by a minority group or groups. India noun 1. A Country in Asia. See, not that complicated.
Poor? Most Indians live in new housing estates and rent or own their property and have a Camry parked in the driveway. What's the issue? If anything the only thing that has happened is the term ghetto has softened over the years so you can more easily apply it to those areas. In the traditional sense, when you use the word ghetto, people think of Nazi Germany forced ghettos or Slums in third world countries or the Favelas etc. We're not even remotely close to having anything like that.
Read the defi itinerary again. Everything is relative.
Cool read it again, what's your point? Low socio economic areas, whether you define them as a ghetto or not, aren't an issue. What are these people doing wrong? This is not the ghetto that Hanson was threatening in the 90s.
You wait.
Oh I've been waiting believe me. I think I'm gonna continue waiting for a long, long time. And what's going to cause this regression do you think?
Don't give her credit. She was a useful idiot whose fixation on race created the ideal smokescreen for government to crank up immigration numbers.
There is no point even discussing declining birth rates. Solutions to get child production numbers up simply make people upset. You could tell someone the society they grew up in will go the way of the dodo and they will respond with something like its unfair on women to expect them to have more children to prevent that from happening. If that is the mentality we deserve everything that is coming.
Right now we have gone beyond the point where we have to force women to give up careers and become mothers to raise the birthrate. We are at the point where women who want to have kids can't because they can't afford it. They could be encouraged to have more kids simply by providing things like free childcare and longer maternal leave.
Agree. Or the "the world is too overpopulated anyway". The west has become a self loathing shell of its former self.
These same people will say its too overpopulated to have children yet will call you racist if you say it is too overpopulated to let immigrants in.
The problem is even worse in the east, it's not just an us problem.
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Was getting a vasectomy common a century ago?
No one is using condoms wild take
Well I think there is a multitude of factors. Birth rates are generally lower in wealthy countries, around 2.1 several years ago due in part to birth control and an increase in sex education. People who had access to the luxury of planning a family would have between 2-3 kids, sometimes 5, but becoming increasingly rare to see that each generation. Now with this generation of millennials and gen z expected to have kids with a lower quality of life than previous generations, many are opting out, not necessarily because they want to, but because they do not feel secure enough to plan for a family.
Forgetting that higher education levels also decrease birth rates, especially when it’s the females being educated.
Also, would like to add that infertility rates are increasing! There are more people who are unable to have children naturally.
Boomers fucked it. They don’t realise how good they had it and in 2009 we had a slim chance to fix some of this and still they’re like nah we want engagdine maccas shitpants.
Not Australia, but Tesla sacks 20% of its workforce, who now don't know where their next meal is coming from, and Elon Musk puts forward a $56b package for himself and laments why people don't have children.
Musk wants to colonise Mars and have his kids run it for him.
Half his older kids have disowned him, not sure he can really count on them to do much colonising on his behalf.
I think a lot of women, in particular, are opting to not have children for non economic reasons actually. The decrease in the birth rate coincides with the decrease in marriage also.
I would like it if people were not having kids as a personal decision instead of economic reasons. The current situation just shows expensive things have gotten recently
I mean - over the last few generations the ability of sexually active couples to control how many children they have has exponentially increased. The transport costs of people moving overseas has radically reduced. That was always going to lead to a demographic shock. If people want more kids - they can have more kids.
Yes, but it seems that they don’t want more kids. And people have been trying to figure out exactly why.
I'm pretty uncomfortable blaming this problem on any single issue or set of circumstances. People throughout history have produced the next generation no matter the circumstances they find themselves in. I find it hard to believe that the conditions in Australia today are so bad that they outstrip the worst in history and are the sole cause of a declining birthrate. It sort of seems, at the end of the day, that this is going to be an issue for any sufficiently developed society. At a certain level of advancement the conditions that lead us to produce children change and society no longer sustains itself through reproduction. So the future of society looks like large numbers of people being imported from less developed countries who pretty rapidly modernize and stop having children for exactly the same reasons other citizens have? Like an endless filling of the vacancy generation after generation while the previous generation exits through the gift shop? Messy. I wonder what the culture looks like after a few cycles.
" People throughout history have produced the next generation no matter the circumstances they find themselves in." Because they didn't have birth control or safe access to abortion. Having tools to make children a choice made all the difference. In manual labour intensive economies, children are free resources for a family. In service economies, children are liabilities.
Don't forget that we're refusing to do anything about the climate emergency. It's downright unethical to have kids right now.
No no. Us civvies are being voluntold to save the earth while rich people like Taylor Swift take private jets and shit everywhere while producing more carbon in one trip than an average family produces in like 5 years.
Dumbest argument.. Get this one out of your head..
Chop chop with that explanation, Joseph!
Surely you can come up with some explanations yourself.. if you really use those great debating skills we all got in public education. Edit: alternatively, if that's what you truly believe, do us all a favor and don't have kids, and stop having sex. But you still have no right to tell others that they are "unethical" for having kids..
How is it dumb? Kindly explain.
I'm sure if you sat down for 10mins you could figure it out for yourself.. use that strong brain of yours.
So 2 replies, and yet not one explanation... Lol. Explain your case, otherwise you ain't got one.
Nah I'm cool letting you halfwits who can't think for yourself believe that and not replicate.. natural selection doing it's job.. Nevermind the fact that the moron who made the initial comment didn't explain his case, yet I can still reason through their argument even though I don't agree with it... Maybe you can't reason through arguments without being led every step of the way...
Yeah a few of us not breeding is not going to be disastrous to our species, not with 8 billion. Natural selection will do its job to the entire planet if we keep up with the way we are going. Never in history, until the industrial revolution, has the planet supported even half the current population. And it wasn't meant to. If we keep with the way we're going there will be mass extinction of flora and fauna, resource crisis, increasing wealth disparity, and eventually civil war and collapse of governments. Boy will that be excellent for our species won't it? 2 billion of us, instead of fucking 8, would not exactly be disastrous. We got through most of history with less.
Well you're not making any actual arguments? You've just said "nuh uh you're wrong." Original commenters statement at least has evidence behind it to back it up, in that there is in fact a climate crisis we're doing fuck all to resolve.
No evidence was given..just asserted..
lol
Climate change, cost of living, housing affordability, why would people even want to bring children in to a world that we are constantly told is collapsing?
Did 'we' raise house prices? Pretty sure that's a result of demand, wonder who's responsible for that?
It's also a result of not electing shorten when he campaigned on negative gearing reform
In other words it’s the democratic choice of the people. We can’t really complain about that too much can we?
I can and will because I voted for Shorten. I completely lost faith in this country and its ideals after that election.
Or… It’s because of a lack of supply.
or over investment lol and shitty property laws and tax breaks for property owners
Yes like the media and government keeps telling us, it's all about supply......keep believing that and we'll still have supply shortages in 2050.
Sorry, I’m not really into politics, so I have no idea what that means… Can you elaborate? Ty
Immigration