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.
Look, if you didn’t want to be price gouged, you shouldn’t have paid those high prices! Vote with your wallet!
(For those who think I might be serious, I’m not. Voting with your wallet isn’t democratic, it’s literally plutocratic.)
Kidding aside, there’s a clip of some grocery store chain CEO talking about how they will raise their prices as high as the market will bear - it’s chilling, but, like, in the USA, it’s the law - it would literally be illegal if they didn’t.
Christ, it’s too expensive to be alive right now… fucking suffering.