Every comment I read about this is how low housing, low income, no time, etc is the cause of a global fertility drop, but I don't buy. Humans have been having boatloads of kids in horrible horrible times and they haven't been stopped until now.
It's also purely anecdotal, but anti-natalist sentiment is very much on the rise in my community. I meet more and more people concerned that bringing a child into the world now means condemning them to suffer the worst consequences of climate change. No idea if this is represented at all on a global scale, but it's very present in my area.
is this really true? With the exception of the covid lockdown causing issues, i've found that i've been able to acquire all my necessary material needs, and more.
It is true that my purchasing power is being clawed away via inflation, but this is counteracted by wage increases and investment returns (on average).
I earn about $175K as a software engineer, which easily puts me into the top 1% of income earners in my generation. Just because life is good to me does not mean that I reflect the average lifestyle in America.
0: https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/ameri...
That is a measure of income inequality... not poverty.
Here is a measure of inflation adjusted household income over time for to address the original point[1].
People are not getting poorer
Same thing? What is a measure of poverty if not a measure of income inequality? The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society. How are these different?
no, the concept of poverty is one where a person is dying due to a lack of basic necessities such as food, shelter. Everything else is not required, such as luxuries etc. It's just that as a country gets richer, what some people consider as basic necessities seems to expand - it has now become a basic necessity to have electricity, internet, transport - things that a hundred years ago, would've been considered the realms of the aristocracy.
The distance to median income is not a measure of poverty, but a measure of how far you are from the typical person in said country - a relative measure. An absolute measure of poverty is caloric intake, access to water and shelter.
A country in which 100% of people earn exactly $1 a day is not somehow less poor than the United States
Now, kids are almost all cost, as the government / society itself captures their economic output, and doesn’t give enough back to the family that did the work to raise them.
So now you have kids because you want to, and its no longer rational act, more emotional one.
In the western world we compare ourselves to our parents who bought their 1st houses when they were in their twenties.. something we are less likely to achieve even with the same status job until much later on.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of younger people would prefer to have financial security "setup" first, before embarking on the journey of child raising (but unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and fraught with uncertainty).
Not sure how seriously I take this. :)