These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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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.
Not sure why you interpreted my post as accusatory. I agree we’re all along for the ride and there isn’t much we can do. As far as what I’m ‘bringing to the party’, I guess I would say that we should opt out of their broken system as much as possible. Reject blind consumerism and reject the extreme polarization the media is constantly trying to instill in us. Create value for others and store your economic energy in a system they can’t control (Bitcoin). Try to raise awareness in others of the unfairness of the system, and its inevitable doom due to the inherrent requirement of infinite growth with finite resources (the logic of a cancer cell). It’s not much on an individual scale, and probably won’t affect the ultimate outcome, but hopefully we and the people we love can be somewhat insulated from the system as it exists and the chaos that will come when it falls.